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Lottomatica Roma 81
Brose Baskets 57
November 15, 2007 CET: 20:30
Local time: 20:30 PALAZZO DELLO SPORT
Lottomatica Roma thrashing Brose Baskets Bamberg 81-57
Lottomatica Roma registered its first win in Group C by thrashing Brose Baskets Bamberg 81-57 in the Italian capital on Thursday night in the winners' first home game of the season. Lottomatica improved to 1-3 and now matches Chorale Roanne for sixth place in the standings. Bamberg dropped to 0-4 and is one of just three winless teams left in the competition. Roko Ukic paced the winners with 15 points. Jon Stefansson added 14, Erazem Lorbek posted a double-double of 12 points and 11 rebounds while Gregor Fucka and Allan Ray each had 10 points for Lottomatica. Demond Greene had 16 points for Brose Baskets while Predrag Suput and Ademola Okulaja each added 11 for the guests. A 7-0 run that Roberto Gabini capped with a triple allowed Lottomatica to get a 17-10 lead after 10 minutes. Fucka and an unstoppable Stefansson allowed the hosts to boost their margin to 41-25 at halftime. Okulaja and Steffen Hamann tried to get Brose Baskets back in the game, but strong defense and a patient offense orchestrated by Ukic allowed Lottomatica to keep a double-digit lead all the way until the final buzzer.
With the home crowd behind them in a battle of winless teams, Roma began well with Lorbek scoring 4 of the hosts' first 6 points. As Bamberg struggled to find any rhythm on offense, Roma roared as Roberto Gabini's three-ball gave the home side a 16-7 lead after 7 minutes. Bamberg went 4 minutes without scoring before Greene ended the drought with a shot from behind the arc, only for Roma to reply immediately with a Fucka three-point play, giving the hosts a 19-10 advantage after 10 minutes.
Stefansson started the second quarter by reeling off 5 consecutive points as Roma opened up a huge 24-10 breach and threatened to run away from the German visitors. Pedrag Suput stopped Bamberg's slide with a three-pointer. The visitors proceeded to cut the deficit to 29-20 but Roma responded by going on a 12-5 run over the next 3 minutes behind Stefansson and Fucka . The hosts took a 41-25 lead in to the break.
Okulaja's three-point play got things started in the third quarter for Bamberg but Lorbek went to the other end and dunked. However, Roma soon lost their way, turning the ball three times over the next 3 minutes. Steffen Hamann punished the mistakes, scoring 5 of Bamberg's next 7 points to cut the deficit to 45-35. Roma needed a hot hand, and found one in Allan, who kept the hosts in front until a pair of three-pointers with less than 2 minutes left to play in the quarter, boosted the lead all the way back to 64-49 with 10 minutes remaining.
Okulaja's three-pointer at the start of the fourth quarter gave Bamberg some hope but they suffered a blow when Mark Dickel was called for an unsportmanslike foul on Stefansson. Roma took full advantage and extended the lead 68-52.Suput ended a three-minute scoring drought for the visitors with a free throw, but the deal was practically done anyway. Stefansson's three-pointer after a Bamberg turnover saw Roma take a 71-53 lead with 5 minutes remaining and forced coach Dirk Bauermann to call a timeout. As his players came to the bench, he kicked the drawing board out of frustration. Nonetheless, Roma outscored Bamberg 10-4 over the next 5 minutes to ease to a first victory in Group C.
Cindy Garcia, Rome
Referees: MARTIN, JOSE; KOLAR, ROMAN; BOLTAUZER, MATEJ
Lottomatica Roma 19 22 23 17
Brose Baskets 10 15 24 8
Brose Baskets 10 25 49 57
Lottomatica Roma
5 GIACHETTI, JACOPO 12:49 3 0/1 1/1 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 5
7 FUCKA, GREGOR 11:58 10 4/6 2/3 4 3 7 1 1 1 3 3 15
8 TONOLLI, ALESSANDRO 12:40 3 1/1 1 1 1 1 2 2
9 STEFANSSON, JON 27:02 14 1/4 3/7 3/4 2 2 4 2 2 2 4 14
12 LORBEK, ERAZEM 28:02 12 4/7 1/3 1/2 2 9 11 1 2 1 1 1 19
15 RAY, ALLAN 22:46 10 1/5 1/4 5/6 1 1 2 2 2 1 4 5 4
20 UKIC, ROKO 28:31 15 3/8 3/4 2 1 3 3 4 3 1 1 16
22 GABINI, ROBERTO 27:20 6 0/2 2/4 2 7 9 1 1 1 1 3 14
29 BAGNOLI, SIMONE DNP - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
34 HAWKINS, DAVID 28:52 8 2/4 0/1 4/5 2 1 3 3 2 1 4 2 9
Totals 200:00 81 15/37 12/25 15/20 14 26 40 14 15 13 2 1 19 19 98
40.5% 48% 75%
Brose Baskets
4 ENSMINGER, CHRIS 10:48 5 1/2 3/6 1 1 1 2 3 2
6 HAMANN, STEFFEN 26:51 9 3/5 0/2 3/3 3 3 5 4 1 2 3 17
7 GREENE, DEMOND 31:41 16 1/2 4/11 2/2 2 2 1 2 2 1 8
8 SUPUT, PREDRAG 31:39 11 1/4 2/3 3/6 1 2 3 1 1 3 7 11
9 TADDA, KARSTEN DNP - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
10 FENN, DARREN 14:34 0/2 0/2 2 2 1 2 1 1 3 2 -4
11 PAVIC, IVAN DNP - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
12 GARRETT, ROBERT 21:50 2 0/1 0/3 2/2 2 2 1 2 3 1 -3
13 OKULAJA, ADEMOLA 22:43 11 2/5 2/4 1/1 4 6 10 3 2 1 1 17
14 OHLBRECHT, TIM 23:14 3 1/2 1/2 3 3 6 1 1 3 1 5
24 DICKEL, MARK 16:40 0/2 2 2 1 3 1 -3
Totals 200:00 57 9/23 8/27 15/22 10 22 32 6 12 15 1 2 19 19 51
Head coach: BAUERMANN, DIRK
"It was very important for us to win this game after having conceded three straight defeats on the road. Fortunately, we have succeeded but we haven't played well. We still have a lot of room for improvement on defense and offense. But the will of my players was there and that is positive for our next games. Considering we won by a 24 point-margin I can only be satisfied. Now we have to focus on our game against Armani Jeans Milano before we can think of Partizan Igokea."
BAUERMANN, DIRK
"I think we never had any rhythm and whenever they needed a big play Roma made it. They shot the ball really well and when we had easy opportunities like lay-ins, free throws, we didn't convert. We didn't rebound the basketball. This was definitely our worst game so far and Roma deserved to win. They were 24 points better than us tonight. This result leaves us with no wins so far. But this is going to change, as long as we keep working and be getting better we will be just fine."
STEFANSSON, JON
"If we were to have a chance to go to the Top 16 we had to win tonight. After three very hard games away from home, we were happy to play at home in Rome and get a good win. I think it is very important for us. We now have to be ready just to try to play, try to control the tempo, play very aggressive on defense and that is the key."
DICKEL, MARK
"We are very disappointed with our performance here tonight. We had hoped to play a better game but we lacked rhythm and we weren't able to get in the game."
2020-21 2019-20 2018-19 2017-18 2016-17 2015-16 2014-15 2013-14 2012-13 2011-12 2010-11 2009-10 2008-09 2007-08 2006-07 2005-06 2004-05 2003-04 2002-03 2001-02 2000-01
REGULAR SEASON TOP 16 PLAYOFFS FINAL FOUR
November 14 18:15 CET LIVE FINAL
Virtus VidiVici 75
Prokom Trefl Sopot 87
Tau Ceramica Vitoria-Gasteiz 76
Cibona 100
AJ Milano 91
Lietuvos Rytas 77
Aris TT Bank 70
Maccabi Elite Tel Aviv 70
Chorale Roanne 90
Fenerbahce Ulker 97
Partizan Igokea 64
AXA FC Barcelona 66
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The state of dysfunction in the Indian Congress Party
Thu 10 September 2020 politics | democracy | India
A series of news items appeared recently in relation to the Congress party of India. While the news reporting went largely without comment (or with usual snark from their political opponents), to me, they brought to sharp focus the extent of dysfunction and rot within the party.
First, leading up to a Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting, some senior party members wrote to the “interim” Congress President, Sonia Gandhi. (Remember, she became interim President after her son, Rahul Gandhi, resigned from the post. Before Rahul, the very same Sonia was President.) Here is the gist of the demands in the letter, including the following:
It calls for a “full time and effective leadership” which is both “visible” and “active” in the field; elections to the CWC; and the urgent establishment of an “institutional leadership mechanism” to “collectively” guide the party’s revival.
OK, so this is in effect a serious criticism, from senior members of the party, that some changes are required going forward. So, what happened next? Rahul Gandhi’s response was to criticize the timing of the letter, since this is a time of weakness for Congress and his mother was in hospital:
Early in the Congress Working Committee meeting that went on for seven hours, Rahul Gandhi questioned why the 23 top leaders had written a letter attacking the Congress when it was at its weakest, when it was battling crises in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and when the Congress president (his mother Sonia Gandhi) was in hospital.
If you’re wondering about the seriousness of this critique, it was serious enough for the conversation to completely pivot:
The veteran leader [senior Congress member Ghulam Nabi Azad], a Rajya Sabha member, said he had called and checked with Sonia Gandhi’s private secretary twice before sending the letter. “I was told that she is in hospital for a routine check-up. Still, we waited till she was back home before sending the letter,” Mr Azad told NDTV.
Sonia Gandhi, who was admitted to hospital late last month, was discharged in the beginning of August.
He [Azad] said the Congress chief called a few days later and said she could not respond to the letter because of her poor health.
“I told Soniaji, your health is paramount, all else can wait,” said Mr Azad. He claimed that Rahul Gandhi heard him out and was “satisfied” with the response.
Two things. First, is Rahul suggesting that Sonia is too ill to discharge her duties as President? Then why is she still holding the post?! This is a professional organization, where office-holders have duties and responsibilities… such as dealing with grievances of senior members of the organization! Second, if Sonia’s illness was a temporary matter, why is there not a chain of command in place?! It is perfectly natural for any single individual to occasionally be “off-duty”, so to say, due to either illness, or personal commitments, or vacations, or myriad other reasons. Any coherent organization should have a command structure where such absences are planned for! If Sonia is ill and unavailable, that should NOT mean that normal operations cease; it should only mean that someone else accepts the letter and follows an established protocol.
Next, at the CWC meeting itself, this was quoted to Sonia Gandhi regarding the ‘dissenters’:
Sonia Gandhi reportedly said in her closing remarks that she held “no ill-will” towards anyone in the party, a remark intended at the dissent-letter writers. “I am hurt but they are my colleagues, bygones are bygones, let us work together,” she said, ending the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on a note of conciliation.
Does this seem to come from an organization of equals? Or does this seem to originate from a king/queen ruling over his/her subjects? How does it matter if Sonia Gandhi holds ill-will for the letter? Why does it matter? Again, this is a professional organization, where senior members are suggesting changes going forward for what they think is the benefit of the party. Why is Sonia Gandhi “hurt”? Because she was criticized? Does she consider herself above criticism? “Let us work together? Bygones are bygones?” YOU, Sonia Gandhi, and your son, are the ones throwing a tantrum! Your senior members were the reasonable adults coming to you with proposed changes going forward that might benefit the party!
You know what I think the problem was? Maybe Sonia and Rahul were not entirely convinced that ‘benefit of the party’ and ‘benefit of the power dynamics of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’ were well aligned. At the CWC, it was decided that elections for the next “full time” president would be held within six months. Remember that the last president, Rahul Gandhi, resigned after the last election where their political opponents basically humiliated them. Already, quotes like this:
The Congress” Assam unit on Monday said that it wants senior leader Rahul Gandhi as the party”s national president as soon as the interim chief Sonia Gandhi demits the office.
[I]t is imperative that the party should be led by Gandhi family. I humbly request you to continue as the President of All India Congress Committee, and if you feel that your health may not permit for full-fledged dedication, I urge you to convince Shri Rahul Gandhi to take up the position.
have started to appear. Would you take a bet on Rahul Gandhi not being the next Congress President, again? I wouldn’t.
What I wrote in my post on India’s Independence Day, in criticism of the current government of India, applies equally well to the party in government opposition. If, instead of performing their duty of providing strong, thoughtful rebuttal of the government’s policies, the main opposition is worried about controlling their internal power dynamics, and especially about keeping power within a dynastic family, then that bodes terribly for the country as a whole.
Where are the Congress’ ideas for India? For all that we criticize the Indian government, if an election were to be held today, who is providing an alternative narrative that citizens can latch on to and organize around? What does Congress think India should do in the next 10, or 20, or 50 years? Does it have any opinion as an organization? The current Indian government came to power on the heels of 10 years of Congress led government— after massive corruption and malfeasance, but also with BJP fanning the flames of criticism, and equally importantly, providing an alternative vision and path forward. (This was, of course, in 2014. The 2019 campaign was a different matter.)
It seems to me like Congress today is missing vision, missing organization— and perhaps even missing a pulse. It seems to me like the senior Congress members are very, very right.
Sat 15 August 2020 politics | democracy | India
Happy Independence Day, India. In addition to celebrating, maybe it’s time for some introspection too! Let’s not forget where we came from, but let’s focus on where we want to be going.
We are a relatively young democracy, still in our growing years. As such, let’s not allow the selfish, petulant adolescents amongst us to dictate our lives and our future. If we let the misguided and sinister make our decisions, we risk letting them destabilize a fine balance.
“I am choosing to do X because some people I dislike did Y some time ago, and X will hurt those people” is middle school mentality, and should not be the basis for a government’s decision making. The answer to “why are we doing this?” has to be “this is how it helps us in the next 30 years”, not “this is what our opponents did in the last 30 years”. (Yes, people outside the government will engage in all manner of shenanigans. That’s the privilege of not being in power.)
It is petulant, selfish behavior to pursue short term gratification at the cost of harm to self and others, even more so in times of a pandemic. It cannot be acceptable for the leader of the central and a state government to ignore social distancing and in fact hold an event with people all around. If that’s the example they set, what message do they send to their constituents looking for leadership? This is callous and outrageous.
It is also outrageous for the head of a government to participate in any religious ceremony in their official capacity. Of course, if they want to take a day off, and pursue their religion as private citizens, that is agreeable, whatever religion they want to pursue. As official government representatives, they can and should attend all manner of ceremonies, from all communities, not just their own.
Comic by @SanitaryPanels.
We are as yet a young democracy. It hasn’t been long enough for us as a country to forget what it took to gain independence. It hasn’t been long enough for us to forget, or worse—ignore, the principles and ideas on which India was founded. We are a unique, complex, multi-cultural, blended pool of humanity, requiring active effort to build and keep harmony. If we are to be united, we have to refrain from being communal, we have to resist our entrenched judgments of our neighbors, we have to rise up in support of those who cannot speak for themselves.
Usually, we are supposed to look to our government, as our representatives, to uphold these values, and hold us together as a nation. If — when — they fail to do so, it is up to us to unite, resist, and rise up against the government too.
☛ Indian banks contemplate ‘face reading’ to spot doubtful loan seekers
Fri 29 June 2018 technology | banking | fraud | crazy town | India
From the Times of India:
Private banks in the western coastal state [Gujarat] have approached the Gujarat Forensics Science University to prepare a facial micro-expressions manual, to train its employees in recognising doubtful high net-worth customers like fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya demanding loans.
This is straight out of the American TV series Lie to Me (IMDB Link):
In the show, Dr. Cal Lightman (Tim Roth) and his colleagues in The Lightman Group accept assignments from third parties (commonly local and federal law enforcement), and assist in investigations, reaching the truth through applied psychology: interpreting microexpressions, through the Facial Action Coding System, and body language.
Have the Indian bankers in question seriously been watching too much TV reruns? In the show, the protagonists use micro expressions to evaluate suspects and their testimony to solve crimes. That’s slightly different from the real world case of deciding whether to give out large loans, no? (For context, India has had a slew of recent large loan frauds.)
I am completely bewildered by this. If there have been some large loan frauds, shouldn’t the most important step be a complete overhaul and re-evaluation of how credit-worthiness of prospective clients is determined? In a financial sense? In a risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis sense? In an available collateral sense? Especially given that investigations have been called for on bank employees, it has been alleged that a bank CEO “failed to initiate steps” to prevent the fraud after there were red-flags, and bank officials have been charged?
Do the bankers really believe that there is nothing to improve on their financial evaluations side and in their employee honesty side? Or is this a case of putting their head in the sand and going ‘la-la-la’? Are the bankers too entrenched in their current practices and workflows, don’t want to go through the trouble — and the expense — of actually re-evaluating their own businesses, and are looking for guises to exculpate themselves?
I mean, seriously, if the banks want to go for next generation methods, artificial intelligence and machine learning would be an actual avenue to explore. Examples to be found here and here. There are even courses and available computer code(here and here) to get people started!
Come now, bankers in question: get real and find real solutions to your real problems, and stop with the hand waving TV-show inspirations.
☛ Indian Railways decides to enforce baggage limits
Wed 06 June 2018 travel | railways | india
The Times of India reports:
As a result of numerous complaints regarding excess baggage being towed into train compartments, the Indian Railways has decided to strictly enforce its over-three-decades-old baggage allowance rules, which will see passengers paying up to six times the stipulated amount as penalty, if caught travelling with overweight luggage, an official said today.
I never even knew that these baggage rules existed. All these years, I’ve simply assumed that there were no formal baggage limits; that space constraints and being reasonable to fellow passengers is all that stops people from carrying waaay too much stuff with them on to trains. Unfortunately, people often do carry too much stuff with them, and to the level of straining and breaking limits of reason.
Which is why the rule enforcement itself, to me, is entirely justified. Even in the little travel that I have done via Indian Railways in the recent past, people carrying way too much luggage, both in quantity and physical size, is way too common for comfort.
The important question, though, is how much luggage is allowed? After all, the railways is used in a vast majority by people for whom expense is a major factor.
According to the prescribed norms, a sleeper class and a second class passenger can carry luggage weighing 40 kg and 35 kg respectively without paying any extra money and a maximum of 80 kg and 70 kg respectively by paying for the excess luggage at the parcel office. The excess luggage would have to be put in the luggage van.
For example, if a passenger is travelling 500 km with luggage weighing 80 kg in the sleeper class, he can book his excess baggage of 40 kg for Rs 109 in the luggage van.
Similarly, an AC first class passenger can carry 70 kg of luggage for free and a maximum of 150 kg, after paying a fee for the excess 80 kg.
An AC two-tier passenger can carry 50 kg of luggage for free and a maximum of 100 kg by paying a fee for the excess 50 kg.
Only 35-40kg for the second class passenger? That seems a little on the lower side. Barely a couple of suitcases, perhaps? In our international travel to and from the USA we’re allowed 46kg in two checked in suitcases, along with additional cabin baggage; surely a railway compartment should be able to accommodate more per passenger? The limits for the AC classes seem a little more reasonable, but still low considering that fewer passengers occupy the same compartment area.
The cost for extra baggage doesn’t seem too bad either. About Rs. 100 for essentially doubling the baggage allowance is hopefully okay, considering prices of other commodities, although I hope the baggage charges increase with the class of tickets. The cheapest tickets should really also have the cheapest excess baggage charges, considering the budget conscious traveler.
I’m most concerned, though, with two things. One, the excess luggage is to be placed in a separate luggage van. (Come to think of it, I’ve always known these luggage vans exist on trains. I always assumed they were for freight or oversized luggage. Huh.) I’m guessing the luggage van is perfectly safe with no fear of theft, but I’m also certain many, many passengers will take a long time to be comfortable with the idea of their bags not being right next to them. (Although, side benefit: if the bags aren’t just lying around in the compartment, they’re safer from theft.)
Two, they say they will “enforce” the law by random checks. This is bad, especially in India, where: (a) this situation is ripe with bribing opportunities, and (b) random checking introduces the concept of fairness between travelers who got caught and who didn’t. I really hope they figure out a more robust way of executing this.
In concept, the baggage allowance idea seems reasonable, but I hope they do a good job of the current idea, and I really hope they revisit the current ideas and update them based on feedback and usage data. The Indian Railways is a lifeline in India, and things like this can have a major effect either way.
Tue 12 December 2017 astronomy | space | science | space travel
A couple of months ago, 15 September to be precise, marked the end of an era in the human exploration of our solar system. The Cassini spacecraft was programmed to crash into Saturn’s upper atmosphere and burn up, thus ending an almost two-decade journey and exploration of Saturn and its moons. I was in middle school when this mission launched in 1997, and at that point, even reaching Saturn in 2004 seemed eons away. Twenty years later, perhaps it’s time to look back at some of the amazing insights we’ve gained.
Cassini is actually a shortened name for the Cassini-Huygens mission, and comprises the main spacecraft — Cassini — designed to travel as a satellite in the Saturn planetary system, and a small lander — Huygens — designed to actually land on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
Giovanni Cassini was an Italian mathematician and astronomer, and discovered four of Saturn’s moons — Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione. The Cassini spacecraft was the first to observe all four of these moons. Christiaan Huygens was, of course, a famous Dutch astronomer and scientist, and discovered — but of course — Titan, then the first known moon of Saturn. (He also invented the pendulum clock, was mentor to Gottfried Leibniz, studied optics and the wave nature of light, and derived the modern formula for centripetal force.)
Saturn by Cassini (via Wikipedia).
Of the many discoveries made by Cassini, I’ll focus on just two stories: those of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, and Saturn’s hexagon. Both of these fascinate me to no end, and I think reflect the best of Cassini’s contributions.
Saturn's Polar Hexagon
Jupiter is famous for its Great Red Spot; Saturn has its own atmospheric phenomenon that’s equally fascinating. Saturn’s Hexagon was first discovered by the Voyager missions, but now Cassini has had the chance to see it from up close.
Technically, the Hexagon is a persisting cloud pattern formed by jet streams around Saturn’s north pole, but its sheer size and perfect symmetry make it unique. Each side of the hexagon is about 13800km long (to compare, Earth’s diameter is about 12700km), and its winds travel at around 300km/h. It’s been there since the Voyager missions in the 1980s, so we know its long-lived.
Saturn - North polar hexagon and vortex as well as rings (April 2, 2014) (via Wikipedia).
On Earth, our jet streams are forced to bend and move in response to Earth’s surface features such as mountains. Saturn is much larger than Earth (Saturn diameter is about 116000km) but has a rocky core that’s similar in size to Earth, and so its jet streams have no such problems, and can keep flowing in their own orderly and symmetrical fashion.
The hexagon is essentially a quirk of fluid mechanics. Here on Earth, scientists have been able to create (here, and here) such regular shapes by rotating a circular tank of liquid at different speeds at its center and outer edge. Due to the difference in speeds, a turbulent region is created where such regular shapes can be observed. The regular shape is not always a hexagon (shapes with three to eight sides, i.e. from a triangle to an octagon, are produced) but a hexagon is the most commonly occurring. However, the phenomenon only occurs when the speed differential and fluid properties fall under certain small margins, and therefore the hexagon phenomenon is not observed everywhere where its possible (such as Jupiter, or even the south pole of Saturn).
At the center of the Hexagon, right at the north pole, is a humongous storm, with a definite and easily observed eye wall. The south pole has such a storm as well, although it doesn’t display a Hexagon. In each case, the eye of the storm is about 50 times wider than a hurricane would be on Earth.
As much as the Hexagon is an atmospheric and scientific phenomenon, explained and replicated under lab conditions, it’s one of our solar system’s most beautiful sights, and something I’ll keep looking for in photos of Saturn, now that I know it’s there.
False color image of storms at Saturn’s north pole (via JPL/NASA).
Titan is Saturn’s largest moon, and of special interest to us: Titan is the only known moon with an atmosphere, and the only one other than Earth whose atmosphere is majority nitrogen. Moreover, its atmosphere is denser and more massive than ours, and is opaque at many wavelengths of light. This means that, like Venus, we had no idea of what the surface of Titan looks like until we had a probe that could land on the surface of Titan. Thanks to Cassini and Huygens, we know a lot more today about Titan than we did in 2004.
Titan, we know now, has an active weather system, including wind and liquid rain, just like on Earth. Of course, the liquid that rains is different from Earth: it rains liquid methane on Titan. Nevertheless, its nitrogen atmosphere and presence of liquids means that Titan’s methane cycle is analogous to Earth’s water cycle. Titan’s upper atmosphere is also affected by ultraviolet light from the Sun, whereby atmospheric methane is broken down and reconstituted into a diverse mix of complex hydrocarbons.
We’re not done yet with the comparisons with Earth! Titan has lakes and oceans, comprised of methane, ethane, and dissolved nitrogen; this makes Titan only the second object in the Solar System (after Earth) to have stable liquids present at ambient temperatures. It most likely also has volcanoes, and is affected by tidal effects from Saturn’s massive gravity. Titan’s surface, specifically where Huygens landed, looks uncannily like Earth, with ‘globules’ about 10-15cm in size, made probably of water ice.
Huygens’ view of Titan’s surface (via Wikipedia).
It’s almost as if Titan is an analogue of Earth— only much colder. In fact, in very specific ways it’s not even colder by much thanks to Titan’s greenhouse effect and tidal heating from Saturn. Cassini has performed numerous gravity measurements of Titan, which reveal that there is a hidden, internal, ocean of liquid water and ammonia beneath Titan’s surface.
So, to summarize, Titan has: an active weather system, large quantities of complex hydrocarbons (Titan is much, much richer in hydrocarbons than Earth), tidal effects from Saturn, and interaction of its atmospheric methane with ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and even and underground ocean of liquid water and ammonia. A question is begging to be asked at this point: what are the chances of life (past, present or future) on Titan?
Scientists think Titan definitely has the potential to contain habitable environments. Similar to Earth in its infancy, Titan today has the pieces needed for new life to possibly form. Whether it already has, or the extent of future possibility, can only be understood with even better exploration. Indeed, quite a few ideas for future missions dedicated to Titan have been proposed, but none have really gotten off the ground (pun intended) yet.
The most promising of them all is a design to send a submarine to Titan that can explore the seas of Titan, but even this idea is in relatively early stages.
So Much More...
I’ve really just scratched the surface here of how much the Cassini mission gleaned from the Saturn system. There’s so much more: Saturn’s rings and their composition; the moon Enceladus and its jets of icy particles and subsurface ocean of salty water; the moon Iapetus and its equatorial ridge; the moon Mimas and its crater that gives it the Death Star look… trust me, if you don’t take an interest yet, you will once you start reading.
The Cassini-Huygens mission really gave us glimpses into a planetary system that provides great opportunities for scientific discovery, amazing new and diverse worlds, and even — dare we dream? — possibilities of places that can harbor life.
It’s time to say adios to Cassini, but of course, we humans have a long way to go before we can say we know our own solar system.
Saturn’s moon Mimas, with the crater Herschel visible prominently (via Wikipedia).
(This piece first appeared in the 2017 edition of Sharod Sombhar, an annual magazine from the Bengali Students’ Association at Virginia Tech.)
I am an Engineering Research Scientist based in the Washington, D.C metro area. I am an alumnus of Virginia Tech and Jadavpur University, and have previously worked at VTTI.
I develop novel technology for sensing, diagnosis, and prediction for diverse applications. Some of my application areas are additive manufacturing, sensor fusion and multi-modal sensing, and ultrasonics and wave propagation based monitoring.
I am also a photographer, technology enthusiast, and a keen cricket fan.
More details can be found in the About page.
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Trio Khnopff Plays Weinberg
September 8, 2019 The Art Music Lounge Leave a comment
WEINBERG: Piano Trio. Cello Sonata No. 1. 2 Songs Without Words. Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes, Op. 47 no. 3 / Trio Khnopff: Sadie Fields, vln; Roman Dhainaut, cel; Stéphanie Salmin, pno / Pavane ADW7590
This is the latest entry of those CDs issued to celebrate Mieczysław Weinberg’s 100th anniversary, an anniversary, sadly, not shared by the commercial classical world at large. No, they’re too busy whooping it up about Leonard Bernstein and probably some tired old 17th or 18th-century composer whose music goes in one ear and out the other, rather than celebrate one of the most original and creative musical minds of the 20th century. But hey, that’s life in the classical music biz, right?
The Cello Sonata No. 1 and the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes are, ironically, two of his pieces that have sort of stuck in the repertoire of many chamber musicians, thus they’d had a few other recordings, but the large Piano Trio of 1945 is still a virtual rarity and this is the first-ever recording of his Songs Without Words. What struck me immediately about the Piano Trio was not how much it sounded like other early scores of his but, rather, how much it sounds like mature Weinberg, particularly the first-movement “Prelude and Aria” with its sad but not treacly theme, redolent of the pain he felt inside from the destruction of his family in the recently-concluded World War. And in the second movement, Weinberg almost explodes with rage at the senselessness of it all—but please note, young composers, he knew how to construct music logically. Like Debussy, he just broke some of the rules in creating entirely new forms around the basic structure; he wasn’t just throwing out aimless, noisy shards of notes.
Fernand Khnopff, “The Supreme Vice,” 1885
The young Trio Khnopff, named after Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, have apparently made a specialty of this piece. In the liner notes, the trio’s musicians make it very clear that this work has been a staple of their repertoire since its founding: “The huge emotional spectrum, the quality and originality of the writing, the instrumental challenge…all comes together in this Trio to create a work that resonates deeply with us and has been something of a constant companion.” And you can tell that it is. Their performance is as deep and touching as the notes on the page themselves, much like Mirga Gražinyté-Tyla’s stupendous performance of Weinberg’s Symphony No. 22 which I reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The slowly arching melody and gradual crescendo in the long third movement is so deeply and intensely played that it will bring you to tears. It did so for me. This is clearly one of Weinberg’s great masterpieces, created when he was only 26 years old. Absolutely amazing.
As is so often the case in Weinberg’s music, he undermines our expectations of what a “finale” should sound like. Although this one is indeed taken at a quick pace, its Eastern European harmonies and minor-key bias make it sound like a resignation of the world, as if he is just so hurt by it all that he needs to get some of his negative feelings out in music. But again, there is no whining, no bathos, no breast-beating, and he does not forget how to write fugues and canons in this finale. He just had a different way of looking at music. Violinist Sadie Fields, in particular, tears into this music as if her very life depended on it, her instrument screaming in protest against the injustice of broken and prematurely ended lives. If this performance doesn’t move you, you have no soul. At the 6:15 mark the music suddenly pulls back from the abyss, giving us slow, quiet, sad themes which take us to the end—another way of upsetting our expectations.
The group’s cellist, Roman Dhainaut, plays the first Cello Sonata with as deep feeling as the group as a whole played the trio. I like this performance even better than that of Andrew Yee on the Calliope label, though that is a good one as well. Cut from the same cloth as the Trio, it was written in one week during April 1945 but not given its first public performance until 1962. I would be remiss if I did not also praise pianist Stéphanie Salmin, whose rich, deep-in-the-keys tone and equally deep feeling acts as an under-cushion for the music on this CD. It’s difficult to describe Weinberg’s music as “modern” despite his use of whole tone scales and chromatic harmonies; a better description would simply be “unusual and timeless.” It seems to inhabit a sound world entirely of its own. His scores don’t even resemble those of his close friend Shostakovich, but it is exactly this “unusualness” that kept them out of the Soviet repertoire as a rule and also keeps them from being appreciated by the wider public today. He was the Berlioz or the Mahler of the late 20th century, a man whose music was too unusual for its time. It exerts a strange and almost indescribable emotional strain on the listener. You can’t always describe or even “follow” his music in conventional terms, yet it affects you so deeply that you can’t pull away from it.
The Songs Without Words are among Weinberg’s unpublished pieces from the same period, only recently resurfacing in the archives, thus this is its first recording. The first is a lyrical “Andantino” written in the manner of Prokofiev while the second, a “Larghetto,” is a transcription of his 1942 Aria for String Quartet. This latter piece, say the notes, is “a Slavonic cousin to Fauré’s famous Aprês un rêve.” They are gently pastoral pieces, lacking the angst of much of Weinberg’s other music from this time.
We end with the famous Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes, written in 1949 in order to comply with Stalin’s dictum against “formalism” in music, demanding that composers write music based on folk tunes that could appeal to The People.
All in all, then, a truly great CD, particularly in the case of the Piano Trio and the rare Songs Without Words.
→ The Pleyel Ensemble Revisits Cooke
← Lisa Rich on the Highwire
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Posted in FATHERS of the Church, MARTYRS, QUOTES of the SAINTS, SAINT of the DAY
Saint of the Day – 5 June – St Boniface -Martyr
Posted on June 5, 2017 June 3, 2018 by AnaStpaul
Saint of the Day – 5 June – St Boniface – Martyr – born Winfrid, Wynfrith, or Wynfryth – (c.673-680 at Crediton, Devonshire, England – martyred 5 June 754 at Dokkum, Freisland (modern Nederlands) – relics interred at monastery at Fulda, Germany). Bishop/Archbishop, Martyr, Missionary and Evangelist, Teacher, Writer, Preacher, Theologian, Founder of Schools, Convents, Monasteries and Churches – known as “The Apostle of Germany”. Patron of brewers, file cutters, tailors, Germany, archdiocese of Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, Canada, diocese of Fulda, Germany. Attributes book, fountain, fox, oak tree, raven, scourge, spring of water, sword, with axe in hand at the foot of an oak tree, book stabbed with a sword, cutting down a tree.
St Boniface was killed in Frisia in 754, along with 52 others. His remains were returned to Fulda, where they rest in a sarcophagus which became a site of pilgrimage. Facts about Boniface’s life and death as well as his work became widely known, since there is a wealth of material available—a number of vitae, especially the near-contemporary Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldi and legal documents, possibly some sermons, and above all his correspondence.
Norman F. Cantor (Historian) notes the three roles Boniface played that made him “one of the truly outstanding creators of the first Europe, as the apostle of Germania, the reformer of the Frankish church and the chief fomentor of the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian family.” Through his efforts to reorganise and regulate the church of the Franks, he helped shape Western Christianity and many of the dioceses he proposed remain today. After his martyrdom, he was quickly hailed as a saint in Fulda and other areas in Germania and in England. His cult is still notably strong today. Boniface is celebrated as a missionary; he is regarded as a unifier of Europe and he is seen by Catholics as a Germanic national figure.
Born and named Winfrith in Devonshire, England, Boniface grew up in a noble family of some wealth. As a boy Boniface begged his parents to allow him to enter the nearby monastery at Exeter following a visit by some local monks. So impressed with their life, Boniface joined the community, learning all he could and proving himself to be an apt and scholarly student. After a short time, he transferred to a larger monastery, in Nursling and there became a well-respected teacher.
He spent the next ten years teaching and was so well respected that students traveled great distances to attend his lectures, circulating their notes throughout the whole of England. At age thirty, Boniface was ordained a priest and began preaching, as well as teaching, with great impact. His life, while diligent and obedient, was comfortable and he was assured continued success in the English church. However, Winfrith felt called to missionary work. He petitioned his abbot several times, until was finally granted leave to travel to modern-day Netherlands, to assist a missionary there, Willibrord, struggling to bring the Gospel to those there who continued to practice paganism. Upon arriving in Friesland, Winfrith discovered that the ruler of those parts, Duke Radbold, had virtually declared war on Christianity and without support, their mission would not succeed. Prudently, Winfrith returned to England where his community welcomed him back, attempting to elect him abbot. He refused and instead traveled to Rome for a personal audience with the pope, hoping to secure a Papal Commission to return to Friesland.
Pope Gregory II welcomed the adventurous and obedient servant that Winfrith had become, renaming him Boniface and providing him with a general Papal Commission to bring the Word of God “to the heathen.” Saint Boniface set off with zeal, traveling through modern-day Germany and Bavaria, locating and working with the missionary Willibrord (who by this time was well advanced in years). Willibrord wished for Boniface to assume his work but Boniface felt called to continue traveling deeper into non-Christian territories, asserting that his commission led him not just to one dioceses, but to all “the heathen.”
St Boniface had amazing success, converting two local chieftains who became zealous Christians, leading to the conversion of their tribes. He was granted a plot of land, upon which he founded the monastery at Amoeneburg. His preaching style was direct and easy to understand and he took care to incorporate local traditions—whenever possible—into his teachings. For example, there was a local game in which they sticks called kegels were thrown at smaller sticks called heides. Boniface bought religion to the game, having the heides represent demons and knocking them down showing purity of spirit. However, Saint Boniface was also extremely orthodox in his teaching and would quickly point out any discrepant or pagan practices that crept into the worship of the people. Such was his success that he was summoned by Pope Gregory II back to Rome. There, Boniface was consecrated a bishop and granted general jurisdiction over “the races in the parts of Germany and east of the Rhine who live in error, in the shadow of death.” Gregory II also provided Boniface with a Papal Letter to Charles Martel, the duke who ruled Bavaria and had earned himself the nickname “Hammer” due to his swift and authoritarian rule and retribution. Boniface delivered the letter on his return trip to, and was granted civil protection. Between the commission of the pope and the support of the duke, Boniface was free to increase his efforts. He decided to drive the pagan beliefs from the region by attacking their source.
Many in the area continued to worship Norse gods, including Thor, who were believed to reside in the forms of large stately trees. After announcing his intentions to the tribes, who watched, awaiting the retribution of Thor, Boniface walked up to the tree, removed his shirt, took up an axe and without a word he hacked down the six foot wide wooden god. The tree fell, splintering into four parts, upon one of which Boniface climbed, addressing the crowd that had gathered. “How stands your mighty god? My God is stronger than he.” From his perspective, the saint could see that the fallen tree landed in the shape of the cross. Also, the only tree spared in the area was a small fir tree, which many consider the origin of the Christmas tree. The crowd’s reaction was amazement and confusion and conversions began. Using the oak wood from the tree, Boniface had a chapel built on the spot, dedicated to Saint Peter.
Boniface continued his mission across Bavaria, Germany, and Holland, encountered previous missionaries who had not remained true to the teachings of the Church. He undertook significant Church reform, instructing the missionaries, priests, and brothers, and re-establishing obedience to the authority of the Church. In many cases, Boniface worked with the individuals in question, not to defrock them and remove them from service—citing the increased damage that would do to the faithful—but to reform, renew and reconsecrate them to the Lord. He was both practical and obedient, seeking the will of the Lord, the counsel of respected bishops, and the success of the growth of the one, true Church. Following successful re-establishment of discipline and communication between these misguided missions and the Church, as well as establishing several new monastic communities, was consecrated Archbishop of the entire region. Nearing seventy years old but no less zealous in his desire for conversion, Boniface returned to Friesland—the first place of his work in Bavaria—to minister to his first congregation who were slipping back into paganism. He gave up his archbishopric, dressed again in the simple robes of the monk and carried with him only what he needed, including the text written by Saint Ambrose, “The Advantage of Death”.
Upon arrival at Friesland, he arranged for a group of recent converts to join him, that he might teach and Confirm them. While waiting in his tent, reading the Bible, a group of pagans appeared in the encampment with intent to harm Boniface and his companions. His companions would have opposed them but he said, “My children, cease your resistance; Spill no useless blood. The long-expected day is come at last. Scripture forbids us to resist evil with evil. Let us put our hope in God: He will save our souls.” He and 52 of his followers were killed. In the moment of his death, Saint Boniface raised the Bible he was reading above his head. The sword of his slayer passed through the Book before cleaving the blessed saint.
Following the departure of the pagan barbarians, a small group of Christians came to the campsite. They carried the relics and body of Saint Boniface to the cathedral at Fulda for burial, where it remains today. The Bible that Boniface was reading can also be found at the cathedral at Fulda.
St. Mary’s Michigan City IN
A stained glass window depicting Saint Boniface, Parish Church of St Mary, Luxborough, Somerset
Author: AnaStpaul
Passionate Catholic. Being Catholic is a way of life - a love affair both with God and Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, our most Blessed and Beloved Virgin Mother Mary and the Church. "Religion must be like the air we breathe..."- St John Bosco With the Saints, we "serve the Lord with one consent and serve the Lord with one pure language, not indeed to draw them forth from their secure dwelling-places, not superstitiously to honour them, or wilfully to rely on the, ... but silently to contemplate them for edification, thereby encouraging our faith, enlivening our patience..." Blessed John Henry Newman Prayer is what the world needs combined with the example of our lives which testify to the Light of Christ. This site will mainly concentrate on Daily Prayers, Novenas and the Memorials and Feast Days of our friends in Heaven, the Saints who went before us and the great blessings the Church provides in our Catholic Monthly Devotions. "For the saints are sent to us by God as so many sermons. We do not use them, it is they who move us and lead us, to where we had not expected to go.” Charles Cardinal Journet (1891-1975) This site adheres to the Catholic Church and all her teachings but rejects the Second Vatican Council as heretical and, therefore, all that followed it. View All Posts
Tagged: stboniface
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4 thoughts on “Saint of the Day – 5 June – St Boniface -Martyr”
Linda Klein says:
He didn’t go to “Bursling”, he went to Nursling, in Hampshire, where I worship at St Boniface church today.
Thanks for the info Linda – I am immensely grateful and will correct it. How wonderful to be able to be to a part of his parish, one of his children.
Pingback: Saint of the Day – 5 June – St Boniface (672-754) Martyr “The Apostle of Germany” – AnaStpaul
Pingback: Memorials of the Saints – 5 June – AnaStpaul
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Home /FETE DELA MUSIQUE 2016 – A Celebration of the Best that Philippine Music has to Offer
FETE DELA MUSIQUE 2016 – A Celebration of the Best that Philippine Music has to Offer
Fete Dela Musique – known as World Music Day is an annual music festival that is being held all over the world. This festival started in Paris in 1982 by the French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, and has now became a celebration of music world wide.
On it’s 22nd year here in Manila, the last day of the festival was held in a very historical location inside Intramuros which is called Puerta Real Gardens. This is a very famous venue for outdoor weddings and other activities, just like Fete Dela Musique.
Alliance Francaise de Manille, Tourism Promotions Board of the Philippines, Embassy of France to the Philippines, in partnership with B-Side production organized a simultaneous 2 days ( June 18 and 23 ) music festival that highlights the Original Pilipino Music (OPM) in different pocket venues around Makati last June 18 and Intramuros last June 23.
I was invited by the Tourism Promotions Board of the Philippines to attend the 2nd day of the Festival which was held at Puerta Real Gardens in Intramuros. It was an exciting moment for me as this was my first time to attend a music festival and first time to listen to live Filipino bands’ performances.
The program started from 4:00 pm onwards. It had been overcast the whole day but luckily, weather got better later in the day. Since Intramuros is surrounded by different colleges, hotels, and offices; students, tourists, and other people from all walks of life came in to support the event and cheer for their favorite local bands.
In addition, I was very excited to see the performances of some of the finest and emerging Filipino bands such as Square One, Banna Harbera, Hoochie Coochie Mikkie, Absulte Play, Save Me Hollywood, Jensen & the Flips, Yolanda Moon, Giniling Festival and Up Dharma Down to cap the evening.
I saw these kids on Youtube and they were really good and I couldn’t believe I would see them performing live. They were amazing and I see a great future for Square One!
Another emerging band performing was the Giniling Festival. I like their music and how they relate their songs to different social trends and issues of the country. Aside from that, it is no doubt that they are one of the most humorous bands I’ve seen. They are so cool and funny!
Another band that really is getting a lot attention is Jensen and the Flips. His soulful voice and their genre of music really captivated the heart of the people. They are that good! I am a new fan!
The whole ambiance was just chill during Fete Dele Musique. You can just see the people were just having having a great time. And most of all, you could feel that there was a great appreciation of the Original Pilipino Music (OPM). I am one of them!
Aside from listening to good Filipino music during the festival, Magners Irish Ciders was there to add more fun to the festival. Their ciders come in different flavors and berry flavor is my personal favorite.
Together with the Tourism Promotion Board of the Philippines Joma and Abigail, I was also joined by fellow bloggers Sabu, Jerny, Ed who were having a ball at Fete Dela Musique.
One of the most awaited bands to perform that evening was UP DHARMA DOWN. With their famous hit single TADHANA, they are now considered as one of the best bands in the Philippines.
I was very privileged to be able to have a picture taken with them along with other bloggers back stage before their performance.
People stood up from their seats and started cheering when they saw Up Dharma Down on stage. Even foreign tourists were seen dancing and loving their music.
Up Dharma Down performed their famous songs and of course the “Tadhana” song which was my personal favorite (Because I can relate to it!). They really know how to put up a show with their great music. And they are just one of the many reasons why I always love Original Pilipino Music (OPM). Worth watching!
It was a fun filled evening with great music and great people. I cannot wait for next year’s event!
I would personally like to thank Alliance Francaise de Manille, Tourism Promotions Board of the Philippines for the invitation, and Embassy of France to the Philippines for showcasing the talent of the Filipinos through music with French ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood as the primary aim of the event.
A good reminder of the rich culture of the Filipinos through music and why IT’S MORE FUN IN THE PHILIPPINES!
TAGS: Fete Dela MusiqueMusic FestivalphilippinesWorld Music Day
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The Dietetics Monopoly’s Cozy Relationship with Big Food—Now in Australia Too
Category: Really Eat Right
Conflicts of interest are nothing new for dietetics associations, to the shame of many sincere and dedicated dieticians. An important report from Michele Simon shows massive problems with the Dietitians Association of Australia.
Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been researching and writing about the food industry and food politics since 1996. Her first book, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back, was published by Nation Books in 2006. New York University Professor Marion Nestle (who calls the book “brilliant”) has made it required reading for her nutrition students.
Simon’s new report, “And Now a Word from Our Sponsors: Is the Dietitians Association of Australia in the Pocket of Big Food?” examines the cozy relationship of the processed food industry with the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA).
Pulse of Natural Health readers will immediately recognize similarities between the DAA and its US affiliate, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND), which represents Registered Dietitians and works legislatively to entrench its monopoly as a provider of nutrition services in various US states. The AND, far from advocating truly nutritious approaches to one’s diet, seems to us more intent on fundraising by actively promoting the junk food industry and has offered continuing education courses sponsored by Coca-Cola. McDonald’s provided food to the California Dietetic Association’s annual conference, and some of the heads of state dietetics associations even appeared to shill for soda companies in opposition to a federal soda tax bill.
Some highlights from Simon’s report:
The DAA received $661,000 from corporate sponsors in 2013, and $70,000 in 2012. Corporate partners like Nestlé, Unilever, Campbell’s, Arnott’s (a producer of cookies and snack crackers), and Dairy Australia make up 15% of the organization’s annual budget.
Relationships with Big Food associations are influencing the DAA’s “healthy eating” programs. Meat and Livestock Australia, for example, which provides marketing and research to the meat industry, also funds Australia’s Healthy Weight Week through the DAA. The result? Recommendations for eating healthier do not include consuming less meat (and certainly not grass-fed free-range meat) or any meat alternatives.
The Nestlé Nutrition Institute funds the DAA’s “Emerging Researcher Award.” The Australian press criticized Nestlé’s controversial role in promoting infant formula and undermining breastfeeding as recently as 2013. The DAA happily takes their money and Nestlé proudly claims to be the biggest employer of dietitians in Australia. They say that they have worked with their dietitians to renovate 70% of their portfolio to meet new nutritional criteria—but fail to state what those new criteria are, beyond saying vaguely that their new system “assesses a product’s nutritional contribution.” In 2014, the DAA partnered with Nestlé in their “Nestlé Choose Wellness Roadshow,” which traveled across Australia allegedly promoting healthy eating. What they ended up promoting was that “Nestlé products are the ideal partners to help you invite more fresh food into your diet.” These products include MILO (a chocolate milk mix) and instant Maggi noodle soups (similar to Top Ramen).
There are serious conflicts of interest among the DAA “In the Spotlight” dietitians (featured on their website), showcasing twenty-one media-trained dietitians across Australia. One dietitian, who works for Kellogg’s, proudly points to a sodium reduction program and the addition of foods “with more fiber” as having “made a real difference while demonstrating economic value”; Kellogg’s sponsors a breakfast program that the DAA actively promotes. Another dietitian works for PepsiCo, the world’s second largest food company that makes money selling some of the least healthy products.* One of the DAA’s board members currently directs the Australian Breakfast Cereal Forum of the Australian Food and Grocers Council, which works to ensure the long-term success of the food and grocery sector.
Be sure to download and read Michele Simon’s report in full. You’ll see a disturbing pattern of activity from the dietetics industry—one that crosses international borders.
* The report refers to the two dietitians as DAA spokespeople. However, DAA features them under the “In the Spotlight” section on their website. This article has be revised accordingly. The critique regarding conflict of interest remains the same. 2/18/15
Apr 17, 2012 39
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by Anna | November 16, 2020 November 16, 2020
When our twins were five years old and on our local swim team, they were often put on the relay team. The likelihood that they would actually dive off the blocks and swim their one lap was very slim. It was so stressful to watch. The more coaches and parents encouraged them to get in the water, the more resistant they became. The last time we even let them try, one twin pointed to the other and said, “I only want to swim beside her.” We tried to explain, once again, that “that’s not how relays work,” but they weren’t buying it.
I get it: I prefer swimming beside people, too, but that’s not how relays work. That’s also not how our country works, especially during an election year. Elections are competitive races that are exhausting. At the end of the election cycle, though, we are all supposed to be on the same team.
For about half of my adult life, the person I voted for has been elected President. When my candidate wins, I feel hopeful and excited. The other years, when my candidate doesn’t win, I feel anxious and left behind. I believe deeply in democracy, but it’s a system that can leave us feeling deeply divided. It’s sometimes hard to remember that we are all in this together.
Last Saturday afternoon, when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were named the winners, the relief I felt was visceral. I’m familiar with not loving the person who is President of the United States, but I have been fearful of the Trump presidency. I finally felt like I could breath again. Once I felt like we were safe, I started to wonder about the 73 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump; that’s more people than I can write off as a fluke.
The county where we live went 65% for Trump. Statistically, that means that people who teach my kids, fellow church members, kind neighbors, parents that we sit beside at sporting events and theater shows: these are real people that I know who voted for Trump. So, I can’t simply dismiss them as uneducated or bigoted or fearful of change. At the same time, I totally understand why people whose civil rights are being threatened and the people who love them are deeply hurt that 73 million Americans didn’t stand up for them. I suspect that everyone feels a little bit betrayed; most of us are a bit disappointed in one another.
One of my favorite authors, Amy Bloom, wrote a fantastic short story called, “Love Is Not a Pie.” In the story, the mother is trying to explain her unusual marriage to her adult daughters and says, “Love is not a pie.” I understand this to mean that love isn’t meant to be divided up evenly. Sharing love in different ways doesn’t diminish the whole of love. There’s enough love to go around.
I want to believe that America is also not a pie. I’m convinced that under all of our strife is the incorrect assumption that there simply aren’t enough resources and rights and freedom to go around. This belief in scarcity over abundance makes us fearful and stingy: it divides us and makes us close-fisted. When we don’t believe in abundance, we find it hard to extend compassion and grace.
I truly believe that there is enough to go around. At the end of the day, protecting same-sex marriage doesn’t take away from heterosexual marriage. People of color being treated fairly by police doesn’t transfer police brutality to white people. Allowing immigrants into our country doesn’t diminish anyone else’s citizenship. None of these things take away the rights and freedoms that we already have.
So, if America is not a pie, then who are we as a country? I think we might be most like a marriage that is struggling.
I remember a seminary professor saying that the couples he could help the most in marriage counseling are the ones who are hurt and angry, the ones who came into his office crying and yelling. Being devastated at least means that the couple is still invested and engaged. The couples where one or both parties are disengaged and already emotionally done with the marriage are the toughest. You can’t really talk someone back into a relationship. Convincing someone that a marriage is worth salvaging is much harder than helping someone fight to keep something precious.
As a nation, our foundation has some major cracks in it; our origin story is flawed; our family is a mess; we’re worn out and money is tight. We’re all still actively engaged, though; there’s real love there. And love is always worth fighting for.
Leave a Reply to Allen McSween Cancel reply
Allen McSween says:
Wow,truly one your bests.
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The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract
Louis G. Portugal, Keith M. Wilson, Paul W. Biddinger, Jack L. Gluckman
Objectives: To determine the efficacy of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after removal of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. Design: A prospective study of 50 consecutive patients undergoing surgical resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract was performed during February 1 to December 1, 1993. After tumor resection, toluidine blue was applied directly to the remaining unresected mucosa. The staining characteristics of the mucosa were then compared with those of frozen-section biopsy specimens of the margins and with the permanent histologic findings of the resected tumor specimen. Results: In three cases, toluidine blue identified a positive margin, which was confirmed on frozen and permanent section. In six cases, false-positive staining was noted, which was most frequently related to traumatic handling of the mucosa during the resection. In no case was a positive margin found on histologic staining that failed to stain with toluidine blue. During routine staining of surrounding unresected mucosa, three cases of a second primary tumor that was not seen on routine evaluation before tumor removal were identified with toluidine blue. In one case, a second Tl oral cavity lesion was found, while in the other two cases, separate pharyngeal lesions were identified. Conclusions: Based on these findings, it appears that toluidine blue improved the ability to assess margin status at the time of resection, and we advocate its use after resection of tumors of the upper aerodigestive tract.
Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery
https://doi.org/10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
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Portugal, L. G., Wilson, K. M., Biddinger, P. W., & Gluckman, J. L. (1996). The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, 122(5), 517-519. https://doi.org/10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. / Portugal, Louis G.; Wilson, Keith M.; Biddinger, Paul W.; Gluckman, Jack L.
In: Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, Vol. 122, No. 5, 05.1996, p. 517-519.
Portugal, LG, Wilson, KM, Biddinger, PW & Gluckman, JL 1996, 'The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract', Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, vol. 122, no. 5, pp. 517-519. https://doi.org/10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
Portugal LG, Wilson KM, Biddinger PW, Gluckman JL. The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery. 1996 May;122(5):517-519. https://doi.org/10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
Portugal, Louis G. ; Wilson, Keith M. ; Biddinger, Paul W. ; Gluckman, Jack L. / The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. In: Archives of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery. 1996 ; Vol. 122, No. 5. pp. 517-519.
@article{2ffaebbcb34d4415a4040b70f5548966,
title = "The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract",
abstract = "Objectives: To determine the efficacy of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after removal of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. Design: A prospective study of 50 consecutive patients undergoing surgical resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract was performed during February 1 to December 1, 1993. After tumor resection, toluidine blue was applied directly to the remaining unresected mucosa. The staining characteristics of the mucosa were then compared with those of frozen-section biopsy specimens of the margins and with the permanent histologic findings of the resected tumor specimen. Results: In three cases, toluidine blue identified a positive margin, which was confirmed on frozen and permanent section. In six cases, false-positive staining was noted, which was most frequently related to traumatic handling of the mucosa during the resection. In no case was a positive margin found on histologic staining that failed to stain with toluidine blue. During routine staining of surrounding unresected mucosa, three cases of a second primary tumor that was not seen on routine evaluation before tumor removal were identified with toluidine blue. In one case, a second Tl oral cavity lesion was found, while in the other two cases, separate pharyngeal lesions were identified. Conclusions: Based on these findings, it appears that toluidine blue improved the ability to assess margin status at the time of resection, and we advocate its use after resection of tumors of the upper aerodigestive tract.",
author = "Portugal, {Louis G.} and Wilson, {Keith M.} and Biddinger, {Paul W.} and Gluckman, {Jack L.}",
doi = "10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010",
journal = "JAMA Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery",
publisher = "American Medical Association",
T1 - The role of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract
AU - Portugal, Louis G.
AU - Wilson, Keith M.
AU - Biddinger, Paul W.
AU - Gluckman, Jack L.
N2 - Objectives: To determine the efficacy of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after removal of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. Design: A prospective study of 50 consecutive patients undergoing surgical resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract was performed during February 1 to December 1, 1993. After tumor resection, toluidine blue was applied directly to the remaining unresected mucosa. The staining characteristics of the mucosa were then compared with those of frozen-section biopsy specimens of the margins and with the permanent histologic findings of the resected tumor specimen. Results: In three cases, toluidine blue identified a positive margin, which was confirmed on frozen and permanent section. In six cases, false-positive staining was noted, which was most frequently related to traumatic handling of the mucosa during the resection. In no case was a positive margin found on histologic staining that failed to stain with toluidine blue. During routine staining of surrounding unresected mucosa, three cases of a second primary tumor that was not seen on routine evaluation before tumor removal were identified with toluidine blue. In one case, a second Tl oral cavity lesion was found, while in the other two cases, separate pharyngeal lesions were identified. Conclusions: Based on these findings, it appears that toluidine blue improved the ability to assess margin status at the time of resection, and we advocate its use after resection of tumors of the upper aerodigestive tract.
AB - Objectives: To determine the efficacy of toluidine blue in assessing margin status after removal of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract. Design: A prospective study of 50 consecutive patients undergoing surgical resection of squamous cell carcinomas of the upper aerodigestive tract was performed during February 1 to December 1, 1993. After tumor resection, toluidine blue was applied directly to the remaining unresected mucosa. The staining characteristics of the mucosa were then compared with those of frozen-section biopsy specimens of the margins and with the permanent histologic findings of the resected tumor specimen. Results: In three cases, toluidine blue identified a positive margin, which was confirmed on frozen and permanent section. In six cases, false-positive staining was noted, which was most frequently related to traumatic handling of the mucosa during the resection. In no case was a positive margin found on histologic staining that failed to stain with toluidine blue. During routine staining of surrounding unresected mucosa, three cases of a second primary tumor that was not seen on routine evaluation before tumor removal were identified with toluidine blue. In one case, a second Tl oral cavity lesion was found, while in the other two cases, separate pharyngeal lesions were identified. Conclusions: Based on these findings, it appears that toluidine blue improved the ability to assess margin status at the time of resection, and we advocate its use after resection of tumors of the upper aerodigestive tract.
U2 - 10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
DO - 10.1001/archotol.1996.01890170051010
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The Science of News and Analysis
Nicaragua at the Barricades ... and at Crossroads
Nicaragua at the Barricades … and at Crossroads
On April 19th, university students in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, exploded onto the streets. Their initial demand? A more effective government response to wildfires burning out of control in the country’s most precious repository of biodiversity.
Soon, a social wildfire took hold in Managua and then spread across the country. Thousands of Nicaraguans added a second demand to the first: for President Daniel Ortega to revoke his recent changes to the country’s social security law, which had simultaneously raised social security taxes (upsetting private enterprise) and cut benefits to seniors (angering many ordinary people). In the ensuing clashes, close to 200 Nicaraguans have died, hundreds have been arrested, and thousands have been injured, almost all at the hands of anti-riot police, unidentified snipers, or gangs of pro-government thugs on motorcycles. Today, this movement of auto-convocados (self-conveners) articulates two key demands: justice and democracy — justice for those who have died at the government’s hand and a return to democratic governance for Nicaragua.
Why should we care? In a world where the U.S. president proclaims his desire to see his people “sit up and pay attention” to him the way North Koreans do for Kim Jung-Un; where his attorney general tore children from their parents’ arms; where the United States plans to initiate the militarization of space (despite our endorsement of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws exactly that) — in such a world, why should people care what happens in an impoverished Central American nation thousands of miles from the centers of power?
Because there was a time when Nicaragua’s imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a people might shuck off the bonds of U.S. dominance and try to build a democratic country devoted to human well-being. I know, because I saw a little of that example during the six months I spent in Nicaragua’s war zones in 1984, working with an organization called Witness for Peace. My job there was to report on the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary (Contra) military campaign to overthrow the Sandinista government, which had replaced a vicious dictator in 1984. The Contras employed an intentional terrorist strategy of torture, kidnapping, and murder, targeting civilians in their homes and fields and workers in rural schools and clinics.
Some (Abbreviated) History
Nicaragua sits dead center on any map of the Americas and, in the 1980s, small as it was, it also occupied the center of the political imaginations of many people. In that country lay the hopes of millions living beyond its borders, hopes that a people really could become the protagonists of their own nation’s story or, in the words of the Sandinista anthem, “dueño de su historia, arquitecto de su liberación” — directors of their own history, architects of their own liberation.
Before the fall of its Washington-supported dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, very few people outside Central America had given a thought to Nicaragua. It was the poorest, most illiterate nation in the region. Indeed, Somoza is reported to have said, “I don’t need educated people. I need oxen!” (Or, as our own president put it during his 2016 campaign, “I love the poorly educated!”) In the years following the dictator’s ouster, Nicaragua became a symbol of hope for people on the left globally.
Somoza had treated Nicaragua like his own private hacienda, leasing out its hillsides for clear-cutting to U.S. and Canadian lumber companies and, along with an oligarchic class of landowners and businessmen, squeezing every dollar out of the people he ruled. He maintained his power thanks to a regime of intimidation, torture, and assassination. His National Guard functioned like a private army (and would eventually form the nucleus of the Contras after many of its members fled to neighboring Honduras when the Sandinistas came to power).
In 1979, however, after a year-long insurrection fought in the mountainous areas of the country by a guerrilla force armed with AK-47s and in the cities by ordinary citizens wielding homemade bombs thrown from behind barricades, the Somoza regime collapsed. By the time he fled, after a brutal final round of aerial bombardment, no sector of the country backed him. Erstwhile allies like the big landowners, private industry, and the Catholic Church, along with the press of all stripes, had all turned on him. So had the majority of Nicaraguans, the rural campesinos (a word inadequately translated as “peasants”), and the country’s tiny urban working class. In the end, even his patrons in Washington abandoned Somoza as a hopeless cause.
A group called the Frente Sandinista (the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN) stepped into the vacuum he left. Founded in 1961, it took its name from Augusto César Sandino, a guerrilla leader who had fought against a U.S. occupation of Nicaragua decades earlier. In 1978, despite internal disagreements, the group united around four basic principles of governance: political pluralism; the formation of a mixed economy, including private ownership, state-owned enterprises, and collectives; popular mobilization through a variety of mass organizations; and a foreign policy of nonalignment.
In July 1979, when Somoza resigned and fled the country, the FSLN assumed power with long-established plans to improve the lives of the rural and urban poor. The party established health clinics, promoted free public education, and offered a “canasta básica” (basic food basket) of affordable staple foods, quickly reducing the endemic malnutrition in the country. Through a national vaccination campaign, it eliminated polio in 1981. It also brought in laws that protected poor farmers from losing their land to banks and instituted agrarian reform, transferring land titles to thousands of previously landless campesinos.
In 1980, 90,000 people, two-thirds of them middle-class high school students from the cities, took part in a national literacy campaign. In the process, those young students spent five months living with campesino families, learning about the hardships (and joys) of subsistence farming. In return for such hospitality, those students taught their host families to read. Today, my partner sits on the board of a Nicaraguan development NGO, several of whose organizers began their lives of community engagement as teenage participants in that literacy campaign.
Of course, the Sandinista government was not perfect. Some of its worst policies reflected the country’s endemic racism against indigenous groups and English-speaking Nicaraguans of African descent. Existing conflict between the Sandinistas and Miskito Indians was further exacerbated by the government’s imposition of a military draft in response to the Contra war. Many Miskitos were members of the pacifist Moravian church, but the Sandinistas interpreted their resistance to the draft as complicity with the enemy, and so opened the way for successful CIA infiltration of the group.
The military draft became deeply unpopular throughout the country and its enforcement was sometimes heavy-handed. More than once, I sat on a bus stopped at a Sandinista roadblock, waiting for soldiers to check the papers of all the young men on board to be sure none of them were draft dodgers.
The Sandinistas also created and consolidated government structures, including a presidency and national assembly. When the party swept the 1984 elections with 67% of the vote, and Daniel Ortega became president, no one doubted that the result represented the will of the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans.
In 1986, the National Constitutional Assembly approved a new constitution, which granted abundant rights to Nicaraguans, including women and LGBT people. One of its articles even called for absolute equality between men and women and the full sharing of housework and childcare. (Let’s pause here to remember that the U.S. Constitution has yet to include any kind of Equal Rights Amendment, let alone an article requiring men to share equally in domestic labor!)
Among the new constitution’s provisions was a six-year fixed term for the presidency.
However, Nicaraguans were not stupid. They knew that, as long as the Sandinistas ran the government, the U.S. would continue its Contra war. So, in 1990, Nicaraguans replaced the FSLN with the UNO party run by Violeta Chamorro in a result that shocked many people outside Nicaragua, including the Sandistas’ U.S. polling firm. The people had spoken, and the Sandinistas accepted their verdict.
And that was momentous in itself. For the first time in history, a victorious revolutionary party allowed itself to be voted out of office, relinquishing many of its hopes, but preserving the democratic structures so many Nicaraguans had died to create and maintain.
Nicaragua in U.S. Hearts and Minds
While Nicaragua was having its revolution, back in the United States we were enduring our own: the Reagan Revolution. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory marked the beginning of the Republican Party’s successful attack on the New Deal structures still embedded in American life. The Reagan administration undermined unions, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated vital industries from banking to health care (with disastrous results still felt today), attacked social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Medicaid, and turned perfectly respectable words like “welfare” and “entitlement” into code for African American moral turpitude. AIDS was ravaging gay communities, but the president refused to even say the word in public until the first year of his second term. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration escalated Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs” into a full-scale assault on poor communities. In 1986, the president signed a drug law requiring guaranteed — and long — prison sentences even for minor, non-violent drug offenses.
In other words, things in the U.S. were pretty grim. That made it tempting indeed to adopt someone else’s ready-made revolution, especially one that had already achieved so much and had such a great soundtrack: the music of the brothers Luis and Carlos Mejía Godoy, including the Sandinista anthem mentioned above and the beloved “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita,” with its final line, “Pero ahora que ya sos libre, Nicaragüita, yo te quiero mucho más.” (“But now that you are free, little Nicaragua, I love you so much more.”)
And Nicaragua was indeed free, although also under attack. The United States had always been its biggest trading partner. In 1985, however, President Reagan embargoed all trade with the country and cut off air and sea transport to and from the U.S. Other nations, including Soviet bloc countries, Cuba, and the European Union, along with many thousands of American individuals and organizations, stepped in to offer material aid, technical assistance, and in the case of Witness for Peace, accompaniment in the war zones. Such volunteers risked their lives — young engineer Ben Linder actually lost his — for the privilege of being part of this experiment in liberation.
In my six months there, I met Nicaraguans who had never been more than 50 kilometers from the tiny villages in which they were born, but had a vision of change that would spread across Central America, Latin America, and — as in my case — even reach the United States. Over and over, people told me, “Americans can stop Congress from voting for aid to the Contras this year; you can stop it next year, but until you make a revolution in your own country, nothing will really change. We will always be confronted by U.S. power.”
Heady stuff. And it turned a lot of heads, not always in the most helpful ways. Some visiting Americans became ever more convinced that their own left-wing party back home was destined to become the vanguard that would bring revolution to North America. Some became more rojinegro (red and black, the colors of the FSLN’s flag) than the Sandinistas themselves and would hear no criticism of the party or its leaders. Others simply lived for the day when they could abandon the United States, with its hopeless, politically backward population, and make the permanent move to Nicaragua, and its highly conscious (or in today’s language, “woke”) people.
And some of us reluctantly acknowledged that, much as we loved Nicaragua’s brilliant green mountains, our real work lay in our own country. We came home believing that if we could not find a way to love the United States, despite its maddening intransigence, we would never find a way to change it.
Like everything in Nicaragua, its post-1990 history has proven complicated indeed. As a start, some of the elements in the FSLN most committed to popular democracy left to form smaller Sandinista-style parties, but without significant success at the ballot box. Meanwhile, in the months between the election and the transfer of power, many Sandinistas took part in the Piñata — a wholesale appropriation of state-owned property, companies, vehicles, and cash. In the process, Daniel Ortega, his wife Rosario Murillo, and other high-ranking party members began amassing personal fortunes and rebuilding their political power. The couple even underwent a well-publicized conversion to a charismatic form of Roman Catholicism (which helps explain why Nicaragua today has one of the world’s harshest anti-abortion laws).
By 1999, Ortega had made a pact with the notorious right-wing politician and then-president, Arnoldo Alemán. He and his PLC party, which drew its support from the oligarchic class that once supported Samoza, had beaten Violeta Chamorro in the 1996 election. Alemán was later convicted of corruption on a grand scale and sentenced to years of house arrest.
In 2006, with his wife Murillo as his running mate, Daniel Ortega was again elected president. Having himself weathered a number of personal scandals, including his stepdaughter Zoilamerica’s credible accusations of years of sexual abuse, he would gradually grant Alemán complete clemency.
In the 12 years since his second election, Ortega has consolidated his own power, placed family members in important (and lucrative) positions, and achieved full control of the FSLN party apparatus. He engineered constitutional changes that now permit him to serve an unlimited number of terms; that is, he granted himself a potential presidency for life.
In spite of the increasingly autocratic nature of his rule, Nicaragua has seen substantial economic development in the last decade, from which many have benefitted. Ortega’s is an authoritarian government that has nonetheless provided real material benefits to Nicaraguans. Furthermore, whether because of a lingering esprit de corps in the police and army or thanks to Ortega’s mano dura (harsh hand), or a combination of the two, the country is not suffering the plague of drugs and government-by-cartel that has terrorized the peoples of much of the rest of Central America and Mexico.
Today, the United States is once again Nicaragua’s largest trading partner and the Ortega government is on good terms with international lending agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In towns and urban neighborhoods across the country, people have once again built barricades, as Sandinista supporters did in the 1979 insurrection against Somoza. Once again, they are pulling up the concrete paving blocks once produced in Somoza’s own factory — this time to prevent the Sandinista police from entering their towns and neighborhoods.
Envío, a digital magazine put out by the University of Central America in Managua, calls this uprising an unarmed revolution. “Unarmed” is a modest exaggeration, since defenders at many of the barricades have used homemade mortars (steel tubes which hold hemp fuses attached to bags of gunpowder), but the demonstrators are massively outgunned by the government’s regular army and the police, as well as the turbas — organized gangs of thugs.
For longtime Nicaragua-watchers, it has been strange to see COSEP, the country’s private industry council and inveterate Sandinista opponent, joining with university students and campesinos to create a Civil Alliance for Justice and Democracy. In late May, leaders of the Alliance agreed to a dialogue with the government, mediated by the country’s council of Catholic bishops. The talks have been on-again, off-again ever since.
Although leftists around the world hailed Ortega’s return to power, his is not the revolutionary government of the 1980s. Perhaps because they wish it were, some Ortega supporters here and elsewhere are treating the present uprisings as if they were a reprise of the Contra war, a right-wing coup attempt orchestrated in Washington. I don’t think that’s true, although I have Nicaraguan friends who disagree with me.
To blame everything that happens in the country on puppet masters in Washington denies Nicaraguans their own agency. As student leader Madelaine Caracas told the German news network Deutsche Welle:
“It’s us Nicaraguans who are in the streets. Not a political party, not liberals, not conservatives, not the CIA. It’s an awakening, an exhaustion with seeing our brothers murdered.”
Y Ahora, Qué? (Now What?)
When Somoza left power, the FSLN was waiting, ready to govern. As far as I can tell, today there is no such organized force on the left that could fill the vacuum left by Ortega, for example, by successfully campaigning in any new elections. If, however, Ortega refuses to leave office, the alternatives are at least as painful to consider: his successful repression of a genuine uprising of popular anger through yet more killings, beatings, and jailings (with the continuation of an autocratic government into the unknown future), or a turn from a largely unarmed and, when armed, defensive, resistance to a full-scale civil war, with all the horrors that entails.
The only thing I am sure of is that Nicaragua always does better when the United States is looking elsewhere. So let’s hope Trump keeps his focus on infuriating his allies and courting his enemies in other parts of the world.
Many years ago, I sat in a hotel room — really more of a cot in a shed — in the tiny town of San Juan de Bocay, talking with my Witness for Peace travelling companion and a young Sandinista soldier. The soldier’s pet chipmunk sat on the windowsill chewing sunflower seeds. We discussed what the revolution meant to him and his country, and his hopes as well as ours that Nicaragua’s seeds of liberation would spread through the Americas. In that warm, dim light, revolution almost seemed possible.
Maybe I should have paid more attention to the chipmunk’s name. It was Napoleon.
By Rebecca Gordon
Source: Tom Dispatch
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Shell to further power progress on the Global Vehicle Trust OX: the inventive flat-pack truck
Press Releases Energy, Oil, Shell
Apr 11, 2018 – Shell has announced that it will commission a pre-production prototype of the world’s first flat-pack truck and it will take this truck to India, which is home to almost 18% of the world’s population1.
The ‘OX to India’ mission will showcase the capabilities of the vehicle for bringing low-cost all-terrain mobility to rural communities in developing countries.
The ‘OX to India’ mission is a partnership between Shell and Gordon Murray Design (GMD), working in close alignment with the Global Vehicle Trust (GVT). This represents a crucial development stage of the vehicle, which was officially launched in 2016.
Shell will fund a bespoke prototype OX to take to India and will set up an outreach programme once the vehicle is in India. The vehicle will be re-engineered and built by GMD, and flat-packed for shipment to India in the later part of 2018.
The OX, based on GMD’s flexible iStream® technology, will run exclusively on Shell fluids including Shell Rimula, a hard-working and high-performing diesel engine oil designed to help heavy duty and light duty engines to run efficiently in demanding conditions.
“Shell is eager to play a role alongside others in developing and promoting mobility solutions in developing regions. The OX to India demonstration will see the concept validated and discussed on the ground in a real world setting. We know limited mobility in hard-to-reach communities in developing economies can restrict access to basic services, and can limit the effectiveness of efforts to improve the quality of life. The OX has the potential to broaden access to transport possibilities and all the resulting benefits that come with this,” said Huibert Vigeveno, Executive Vice President, Shell Global Commercial.
The OX is designed to carry a payload of 1,900kg (approximately twice the capacity of most current pick-ups), which could include everyday necessities, medical supplies, building and agriculture materials. It can seat up to 13 people. The vehicle was envisioned by entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Torquil Norman and designed by renowned automotive engineer Professor Gordon Murray.
Other innovative features of the OX include:
Lightweight, rugged and durable design to maximise payload for goods and people
Low cost, simple maintenance through accessible components and fewer parts
Designed for self-assembly, supplied fully assembled or flat-packed for easy shipping and local assembly
Sir Torquil Norman, founder of GVT said: “I’m so pleased to welcome Shell aboard the OX project and for sharing GVT’s vision that this remarkable and versatile vehicle will provide a transformation in affordable mobility for so many people where the need is most acute. With Shell taking the OX to India we can demonstrate its capability in a key market, which will help attract long-term production partners.”
Professor Gordan Murray, Executive Chairman, GMD said: “After our highly successful co-engineering Shell Concept Car programme with Shell, it is exciting to be once again working with Shell on the next phase of this extremely important and ground-breaking project. The OX is one of our most important engineering designs and it is certainly the vehicle of which I am most proud of, as its disruptive design has the potential to change the current mobility model and with Shell’s vision this vehicle could go on to improve so many people’s lives.”
Recognising the need for sustainable, cleaner and more energy efficient transportation solutions, Shell is collaborating and co-engineering a number of projects. In 2016, Shell partnered with Gordon Murray to co-engineer the Shell Concept Car – an ultra-efficient city vehicle that, compared to a typical city car, uses 34% less primary energy over its entire lifetime. Shell is also partnering with AirFlow Truck Company to develop a new hyper-fuel mileage Class 8 truck known as the Starship. Its aerodynamic design will seek to demonstrate improvements in fuel economy for while lowering CO2 emissions.
1Source: United Nations, World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision
The OX’s revolutionary nature extends beyond the vehicle design because, uniquely, it is capable of being flat-packed within itself, enabling it to be transported more efficiently around the world. It takes three people less than six hours to create the flat pack in the UK prior to shipping, and six of these flat packs can be shipped within a 40ft high-cube container. Assembly labour is transferred to the importing country, where local professional companies will be employed to assemble and maintain the finished vehicles. Three skilled people can put an OX together in approximately 12 hours.
The overall vehicle length is far shorter than a large SUV, and yet it can carry a payload of 1900kg (approximately twice the capacity of most current pick-ups) with a load volume of 9.0 m3. Based on EU size guidelines, it can seat up to 13 people or carry eight 44-gallon drums or three Euro-pallets. Figures are based upon production targets.
For more information visit: http://oxgvt.com/
Royal Dutch Shell plc
Royal Dutch Shell plc is incorporated in England and Wales, has its headquarters in The Hague and is listed on the London, Amsterdam, and New York stock exchanges. Shell companies have operations in more than 70 countries and territories with businesses including oil and gas exploration and production; production and marketing of liquefied natural gas and gas to liquids; manufacturing, marketing and shipping of oil products and chemicals and renewable energy projects. For further information, visit www.shell.com.
About Gordon Murray Design Limited
Gordon Murray Design Limited is a British company operating from Shalford, Surrey. The Company is recognised as a world leader in automotive design and reverses the current industry trend for sub-contracting by having a complete in-house capability for design, engineering, prototyping and development. The Company is compact and focused and undertakes automotive and other engineering programmes in an efficient and innovative way. For more information please visit www.gordonmurraydesign.com.
The iStream® technology is a complete rethink and redesign of the traditional automotive manufacturing process and could potentially be the biggest revolution in high volume manufacture since the Model T. Development. The process began over 15 years ago and it has already won the prestigious ‘Idea of the Year’ award from Autocar who were given privileged access in order to make their assessment. The simplified assembly process means that the manufacturing plant can be designed to be 20% of the size of a conventional factory. This could reduce capital investment in the assembly plant by approximately 80%. Yet the flexibility of this assembly process means that the same factory could be used to manufacture different variants. The iStream® design process is a complete re-think on high volume materials, as well as the manufacturing process and will lead to a significant reduction in full lifecycle CO2. For more information please visit www.istreamtechnology.co.uk
About the Global Vehicle Trust
In 2010, Sir Torquil Norman founded the Global Vehicle Trust (GVT) to pursue his ambition to help people in the developing world by providing cost-effective mobility for all. The GVT subsequently briefed renowned automotive designer Professor Gordon Murray on a unique humanitarian programme to create a revolutionary lightweight truck. As part of an aid programme, the Global Vehicle Trust OX could provide an essential element of infrastructure to enable the local population to raise the community’s standard of living, and to assert its independence by gaining control of its transportation needs and costs.
Sir Torquil Norman is a former pilot, banker, company executive and toy manufacturing entrepreneur. He is a passionate philanthropist, and is chiefly responsible for the rescue and renovation of The Roundhouse in Camden, north London.
The companies in which Royal Dutch Shell plc directly and indirectly owns investments are separate legal entities. In this press release “Shell”, “Shell group” and “Royal Dutch Shell” are sometimes used for convenience where references are made to Royal Dutch Shell plc and its subsidiaries in general. Likewise, the words “we”, “us” and “our” are also used to refer to Royal Dutch Shell plc and subsidiaries in general or to those who work for them. These terms are also used where no useful purpose is served by identifying the particular entity or entities. ‘‘Subsidiaries’’, “Shell subsidiaries” and “Shell companies” as used in this press release refer to entities over which Royal Dutch Shell plc either directly or indirectly has control. Entities and unincorporated arrangements over which Shell has joint control are generally referred to as “joint ventures” and “joint operations”, respectively. Entities over which Shell has significant influence but neither control nor joint control are referred to as “associates”. The term “Shell interest” is used for convenience to indicate the direct and/or indirect ownership interest held by Shell in an entity or unincorporated joint arrangement, after exclusion of all third-party interest.
This press release contains forward-looking statements (within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) concerning the financial condition, results of operations and businesses of Royal Dutch Shell. All statements other than statements of historical fact are, or may be deemed to be, forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements of future expectations that are based on management’s current expectations and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Forward-looking statements include, among other things, statements concerning the potential exposure of Royal Dutch Shell to market risks and statements expressing management’s expectations, beliefs, estimates, forecasts, projections and assumptions. These forward-looking statements are identified by their use of terms and phrases such as “aim”, “ambition’, ‘‘anticipate’’, ‘‘believe’’, ‘‘could’’, ‘‘estimate’’, ‘‘expect’’, ‘‘goals’’, ‘‘intend’’, ‘‘may’’, ‘‘objectives’’, ‘‘outlook’’, ‘‘plan’’, ‘‘probably’’, ‘‘project’’, ‘‘risks’’, “schedule”, ‘‘seek’’, ‘‘should’’, ‘‘target’’, ‘‘will’’ and similar terms and phrases. There are a number of factors that could affect the future operations of Royal Dutch Shell and could cause those results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements included in this press release, including (without limitation): (a) price fluctuations in crude oil and natural gas; (b) changes in demand for Shell’s products; (c) currency fluctuations; (d) drilling and production results; (e) reserves estimates; (f) loss of market share and industry competition; (g) environmental and physical risks; (h) risks associated with the identification of suitable potential acquisition properties and targets, and successful negotiation and completion of such transactions; (i) the risk of doing business in developing countries and countries subject to international sanctions; (j) legislative, fiscal and regulatory developments including regulatory measures addressing climate change; (k) economic and financial market conditions in various countries and regions; (l) political risks, including the risks of expropriation and renegotiation of the terms of contracts with governmental entities, delays or advancements in the approval of projects and delays in the reimbursement for shared costs; and (m) changes in trading conditions. No assurance is provided that future dividend payments will match or exceed previous dividend payments. All forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements contained or referred to in this section. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Additional risk factors that may affect future results are contained in Royal Dutch Shell’s 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2017 (available at www.shell.com/investor and www.sec.gov). These risk factors also expressly qualify all forward looking statements contained in this press release and should be considered by the reader. Each forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this press release, 11 April 2018. Neither Royal Dutch Shell plc nor any of its subsidiaries undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or other information. In light of these risks, results could differ materially from those stated, implied or inferred from the forward-looking statements contained in this press release.
We may have used certain terms, such as resources, in this press release that United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) strictly prohibits us from including in our filings with the SEC. U.S. Investors are urged to consider closely the disclosure in our Form 20-F, File No 1-32575, available on the SEC website www.sec.gov.
SOURCE: Royal Dutch Shell plc
BP completes purchase of BHP assets in US onshore
ExxonMobil Supports New Singapore Energy Center Partnership with US$10 Million Commitment
ExxonMobil Starts New Unit at Antwerp Refinery to Produce High-Value Transportation Fuels
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Itema005579 - Forest Products, 1966; a man in a lab coat standing at the bottom of a stair case in a forest product warehouse ; man working in background [1 of 2]
Itema005581 - Forest Products, 1966; part from equipment [1 of 3]
Itema005584 - BCIT Forestry conference display, December 1965
Itema005585 - Forestry, Wood fiber BCIT tour, November 26, 1965; men in hard hats in a factory
Itema005586 - Forestry, Wood fiber BCIT tour, November 26, 1965; men in hard hats walking
Itema005587 - Forestry, Wood fiber BCIT tour, November 26, 1965; group of men listening to a tour guide
Item a005583 - Forest Products, 1966; part from equipment [3 of 3]
Forest Products, 1966; part from equipment [3 of 3]
1966-03-14 (Creation)
1 photograph : b&w, negative, acetate ; 12 x 9.5 cm
The British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) officially opened October 4, 1964. Areas of study available were: Engineering, Health and Business.
On January 17th, 1958, the Minister of Education for the Province of British Columbia, the Hon. L. R. Petersen announced the appointment of the Royal Commission on Education for the Province of British Columbia for the “purpose of reviewing and assessing the educational system with he aim of improving its effectiveness in the light of world conditions and providing guidance for its future development.” Concurrent with the Commissions inquiry the Provincial Curriculum Advisory Board of the Department of Education appointed a committee directed by Mr. D. E. Bridge of the Vocational Training Branch of the Department of Labour, Ottawa to survey “The Need for Advanced Technical and Vocational Training in British Columbia.” As a result of the Royal Commission on Education, the Bridge Report and financial assistance from the Federal Government, an Advisory Council was formed early 1961 to begin planning what would become the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Dr. J. English, Deputy Minister and Superintendent of Education was appointed chairman and Mr. J. S. White, Director of Technical and Vocational Education, vice-chair.
Until 1974 BCIT was directly controlled and funded by the B.C. Department of Education, in partnership with an Advisory Council chosen from business and industry. The council appointed the Principal of BCIT as the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute. Two Vice-Principals were responsible for Administration and the growing Extension Division. The three divisions of Engineering, Business and Health were managed by three Directors reporting directly to the Principal. The Council formed seventeen advisory committees which met at least twice a year and advised Technology Heads at BCIT about the effectiveness of the programs being taught, opportunities for employment and updates in the industry. Recommendations went through the Principal who carried them to the main Advisory Council. In 1963, the Department of Education took a radical departure from existing government policy and allowed the BC Civil Service Commission to delegate responsibility for selecting teaching staff to the Institute, via the Advisory Council and Principal.
In 1972, the Minister of Education established a task force to recommend future directions for BCIT. A more autonomous relationship developed between the provincial government and BCIT with the passage of the British Columbia Institute of Technology Act on July 4, 1974. The Act established a new system of governance for BCIT under a fifteen–person Board of Governors. Under Section 11 (3) of the BCIT Act the Principal was required to submit an Annual Report to the Board of Governors for the educational year. The position of Principal was expanded to encompass linking functions both between the Board of Governors and BCIT, and between BCIT and the external community. The Principal assumed the responsibility of implementing Board policy and administering the budget; she also served as the chief means of mobilizing the institute’s resources in recognizing and clarifying issues and expediting decision making. At the same time, three Executive Director positions were created in the areas of Technical Education; Administration; and Personnel and Information Services and Student Services, in order that BCIT could effectively carry on day-to-day operations while implementing a variety of administrative systems. With the Directors of the five Educational Divisions, the Bursar, the Registrar, and the Coordinator of Planning Services, the Executive Directors were members of an Executive Committee, a consultative body which advised the Principal and served as a channel of communication between the Chief Executive Officer and the institutes staff, students and faculty.
In 1978 the Boards of the Pacific Vocational Institute (PVI) and BCIT established a Joint Boards Committee, enhancing the relationship of the neighbours and providing a forum for cooperation between the institutions in matters of mutual interest. On May 31, 1985, the Honourable John H. Heinrich, then Minister of Education announced the decision to amalgamate the Pacific Vocational Institute (PVI) and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. The merger culminated in a new organizational structure, a mission statement and a set of corporate objectives for BCIT. The expanded mandate for the new institution included:
• A centre of excellence for the trades
• The development of new technology programs
• The development of post diploma programs
• The development of bridging programs from trades to technology
The official merger took place on April 1, 1986. In July 1985, the President and the Board of Governors appointed Drug Svetic Vice President, Education; Duncan McPherson Vice President, Finance; Len McNeely Vice President, Administration; and Peter Jones Vice President, Student Services and Educational Support. The reorganization of BCIT’s educational division resulted five schools, adding an Executive Director of Trades Training and the introduction of an associate dean structure.
In 2004, BCIT's governing legislation became the College and Institute Act, RSBC 1996, ch. 5 (2). Under this Act, the President is defined as BCIT's Chief Executive Office, with the duty to “supervise and direct subject to bylaws, the instructional, administrative and other staff of the institution and exercise powers and perform duties assigned to the president by the board.” The President is to report to the Board annually on the progress of the Institute, make recommendations, and advise the Board on all matters concerning the operation of the Institute.
BCIT legacy ID
Digital object (External URI) rights area
British Columbia Institute of Technology (Creator)
Shelf: Bay 19, shelf B, box 4b
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Tag: unconscious
What the Law of Attraction doesn’t tell you, that you really need to know to make it work
A bluish-white spiral galaxy hangs delicately in the cold vacuum of space. Known as NGC 1376, this snowflake-shaped beauty was observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. Concentrated along the spiral arms of NGC 1376, bright blue knots of glowing gas highlight areas of active star formation. These regions show an excess of light at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths because they contain brilliant clusters of hot, newborn stars that are emitting UV light. The less intense, red areas near the core and between the arms consist mainly of older stars. The reddish dust lanes delineate cooler, denser regions where interstellar clouds may collapse to form new stars. Visually intermingled between the spiral arms is a sprinkling of reddish background galaxies. NGC 1376 resides over 180 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. This galaxy belongs to a class of spirals that are seen nearly face on from our line of sight. Its orientation aids astronomers in studying details and features of the galaxy from a relatively unobscured vantage point. One such feature is represented by stars that vary in brightness over time. In 1990, NGC 1376 was home to a supernova explosion (SN 1990go) that rivaled the brightness of the entire nucleus (as seen from ground-based telescopes) for several weeks. The story of how this galaxy came to be photographed by Hubble is somewhat unique. During the November 2006 observations of a nearby dwarf galaxy with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) detector, careful planning allowed for NGC 1376 to be visible in the field of view of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) at the same time. Thus, Hubble was able to get two galaxies for the price of one. Although the use of parallel instruments onboard Hubble is not uncommon, capturing two interesting targets is rather rare. Initial ground-based observations of NGC 1376 and its nearby dwarf companion implied that the two might be interacting with each other, b
The Law of Attraction has risen in popularity over the past couple decades, similar to the philosophy as I learned: Thoughts are Creative. This is a beautiful, powerful, direct way of working with energy. What you focus on, you attract. What you think about, you create. Sounds simple, right? It’s true – partially. Having high anxiety? You… Continue reading What the Law of Attraction doesn’t tell you, that you really need to know to make it work
Categorized as Energywork, Paths of Spirit, Shadow, Soul work, SoulCentric Breathwork Tagged dark matter, law of attraction, manifesting, shamanic work, soul loss, subconscious, thought is creative, unconscious
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Mike Fisher Reacts to Carrie Underwood’s Historic ACM Entertainer of the Year Win
Michael Loccisano, Getty Images
Mike Fisher turned to social media on Wednesday night (Sept. 16) to congratulate his wife, Carrie Underwood, after she won Entertainer of the Year in the 2020 ACM Awards.
Fisher posted a picture of his country superstar wife to Instagram holding her trophy while giving her acceptance speech, writing, "Wow what a night! Congrats @carrieunderwood I’m so proud of you for working so hard and using your gift for His glory!"
"Wish I could’ve been there with you tonight!!" he adds, finishing with the hashtag #acmentertaineroftheyear.
Underwood set two records by winning ACM Entertainer of the Year in a tie with Thomas Rhett on Wednesday night, marking the first time that's ever happened in the history of the awards show. Underwood also won the honor for the third time in 2020, breaking the old record she held in conjunction with Taylor Swift. The two were previously tied for the most times a female had won ACM Entertainer of the Year, with two wins apiece. Underwood also won Entertainer of the Year in 2009 and 2010.
The flustered superstar forgot to thank her husband and their two kids in her acceptance speech after Wednesday's win, a situation she corrected immediately afterward when she addressed journalists in a virtual press room.
"First, I wanna say that I'm a dummy for not mentioning my husband or children in my acceptance speech," Underwood said sheepishly backstage.
"You would think after this many years and seeing other people do speeches and giving some of my own, I would think of people that are important to me. So, I'm sorry but I do love my children and my husband."
The 2020 ACM Awards Made History in More Ways Than One:
See Pictures from the 2020 ACM Awards Red Carpet:
Source: Mike Fisher Reacts to Carrie Underwood’s Historic ACM Entertainer of the Year Win
Filed Under: ACM Awards, carrie underwood
Categories: Celebrity News, Music News
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Battle over Nigeria’s “Child-Witches”
Child-witch stigmatisation continues in Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria:
…The Akwa Ibom State government has concluded plans to rehabilitate 21 abandoned children who were discovered taking refuge at two locations in Eket local government Area.
The commissioner for Women Affairs and Social welfare, Mrs. Eunice Thomas disclosed this when she visited the children at the premises of the Eket Sports Stadium and the moribund Qua River Hotel.
…Interacting with the commissioner, the some of the children said they were chased out by their parents and relatives who alleged that they were witches, while some of them said they were forced out on allegations of pilfering and truancy.
Most of them alleged that their ordeals were caused by their step mothers. Master Godswill Felix Okon said he was about taking his Common Entrance Examination when her aunt took her to a church where the pastor alleged that he was a witch, culminating in his being sent out of the house by his aunt.
Back in September, state governor Godswill Akpabio had assured CNN that the problem of children being accused of witchcraft was “under control”.
The Akwa Ibom authorities have been quick to find someone else to blame for the children’s plight: some of the children had been receiving support from Stepping Stones Nigeria Child Empowerment Foundation, an affiliate of the UK-based charity Stepping Stones Nigeria. Back in March I noted that SSN, which brought the problem of “child-witches” in Nigeria to international attention in 2008, was recently forced to terminate its link to CRARN, a hostel for stigmatised children in Akwa Ibom, over a child protection issue. According to Thomas and to Aniakan Umanah (Commissioner of Information and Social Reorientation), this means that SSN, rather than the government, is responsible for the abandoned children:
… Umanah… described the activities of Stepping Stones Nigeria as a scam. “All the money they have used Akwa Ibom children to make is not commensurate with what they claimed to do for the children; they have nothing to show for it. £2m is not a small amount of money. Stepping Stones Nigeria and its team of blackmailers should not use tar brush to paint Akwa Ibom black in the eyes of the world. They should stop advertising our children to the global media to make money. It’s a ruse; and we are tired of them.”
I dealt with accusations against SSN here, and SSN’s accounts and reports can be seen on the website of the UK Charity Commission here (total income since 2007 in fact comes to less than £1 million). I should also add that last week I attended a public event organised by SSN in London, and I have confidence in the organisation’s probity and competence.
Sadly, the politically-motivated attacks on SSN appear to have the support of CRARN, which was angered by the termination of the relationship. Last month, it was reported that:
A High Court Judge in Akwa Ibom State, Justice Joy Unwana has commended the Child’s Right and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN) for initiating the campaign against branding, torturing or killing of children as witches and wizards in the State. Justice Unwana made the commendation while answering questions in the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Accusation and Child Abuse having submitted a memorandum to the commission.
…”I have children and know what it takes to maintain them. I have been to CRARN several times even when UNICEF commissioned a complex recently. I have been talking to the Director, Sam Itauma, to know what is happening there. If people like these decide to shoulder the responsibility of others and the society, I think they should be encouraged. I learnt in the news that the UK organisation, Stepping Stones pulled out their support with phoney excuses after using CRARN and Akwa Ibom children to make a lot of money. Government should really check the recurrence of this and avoid unnecessary touting by such foreign NGOs.”
However, Unwara’s recommendation for CRARN appears to have been at least partly unheeded, and Thomas has recently removed a number of children from CRARN to a “Security Village”. This site says 200 children were removed, although other sources give a much lower figure. One of those involved in the removal, Ata Ikiddeh, had previously worked with CRARN and has left a comment on this critical article (link added):
I am Ata Ikiddeh. I am the one who has been accused in an earlier article by Sahara Reporters of kidnapping and abducting these children from CRARN center in Esit Eket to Uyo. If you feel i abducted these children, you can walk into a police station and ask for a warrant for my arrest.
Listen, no child was coerced or forced. I negotiated and spoke to the children, knowing that any form of duress or coercion would have been a scandal both in the national and the international press. We have captured the whole process on video.
In the end 19 children willingly agreed to come with us and about 70 children chose to stay behind.
The Honorable Commissioner has done a lot to rescue abandoned children in the State…
In contrast, CRARN’s counsel, James Ibor, claims that 100 children were taken, and that the “Security Village” is unsuitable:
On May 16, 2011, a mere six days later, Mrs. Eunice Thomas, Akwa Ibom State’s infamous Commissioner for Women Affairs, together with her team, stormed the premises of Child’s Rights and Rehabilitation Network (CRARN), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), with a centre at Esit Eket, abducted over one hundred of its children, forced them into Akwa Ibom Transport Company (AKTC) coaster buses and drove them to Akwa Ibom State Special Children Centre, Uyo.
Interestingly, the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Accusations and Child Rights Abuses made a finding on the said centre to the effect that it is understaffed and lacks adequate facilities to cater for as few as fifty children. Moreover, even its few staffers are ill-trained; and they freely profess belief in witchcraft, and that the children under their charge are indeed witches as charged.
The National Mirror, meanwhile, raises a question about the removal team’s authority:
The team claimed to be executing an order made by the Witchcraft Panel currently investigating the “Child Witch syndrome” in the state which alledgedly ordered that the centre be closed down. But, investigations carried out by National Mirror at the Judicial Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice Abraham showed that the commission is yet to submit its report to the government, neither did it make any such order as claimed.
« Abstinence Group to Advise UK Government on Sexual Health Not Supporting Greater Israel Explains Unfortunate Events: Tornado Edition »
spacelizardlaw, on June 13, 2011 at 2:35 am said:
Well our non-superstitious well governed civilised Western Christian gods certainly delivered the concept of divine mercy to the less evolved races on ‘OUR’ planet when we brought our civil non-superstitious religious civilisation to these uncivilised non-Christian Satanic heathen pagans didn’t we… Of course ‘WE’ got over ÓUR’ particular problem of needing to burn men women & probably even children too to their deaths at the stake for being witches a long time ago & if memory serves me it was just exactly around about the exact same time we first brought civilisation to these jungle bunnies & crushed their own nature religions & Shaman priests…
We did good Huh…
The Child ‘Witches’ of Nigeria | The Watchman – Illuminating lives through the light of His Word, on June 30, 2011 at 9:31 am said:
[…] Battle over Nigeria’s “Child-Witches” (barthsnotes.com) […]
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Has The French Revolution Gotten A Bad Rap?
July 15, 2008 Burt Likko 4 Comments
The French celebrate the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille as their equivalent of our Independence Day, the day that their history of free self-government began. Unlike America, however, France’s history of free self-government has not run uninterrupted since then. More on that below, but for now it’s probably more important to realize that July 14, 1789 was not so much the beginning of liberty in France as the end of the Ancien Régime.
What happened on July 14, 1789, was that the revolutionaries who had taken control of the Estates-General grew frustrated with dilatory tactics and intractable demands of the King, and for the first time presented themselves in public and with arms, making good on the implied threat of a popular uprising against the King. In a form better-organized than a mob but not as well-organized as a military unit, armed commoners took control of the Bastille, a combination military depot and prison in the southeastern portion of Paris left over from the medieval period. There, they seized a large stockpile of small arms and some cannon from a munitions depot, and freed seven inmates (including two noblemen) who they deemed to be “political prisoners” of His Most Christian Majesty. Contrary to popular myth, the infamous Marquis de Sade was not one of them — he had been transferred to an insane asylum only ten days before.
So that’s what happened on Bastille Day. The French people, for the first time, stood up and asserted themselves against their King and won a decisive victory. The military significance of the action itself was probably not all that much, but the political impact was immense — Louis XVI lost more support that day from demoralization of his own troops than anything else and at that point it was really only a matter of time until some kind of republican government took real power in France.
Of course, how that happened is a complex and deeply depressing story. For we Americans, the French Revolution conjures up images of eighteenth-century urban violence, social chaos, lurid public executions accomplished by guillotine, and political paranoia. And the Reign of Terror did in fact have all of those things, in surplus, so much so that even Robespierre himself fell victim to the violent, insane world of political radicalism he more than anyone else helped create.
The French are well aware of that part of their past as well, which may help explain why none of them seem to care that the Bastille is now gone, torn down within a year of the original storming of the fortress. If you go to Place de la Bastille in Paris today, you will see a column commemorating the events of a subsequent revolution which took place in 1830. The only place where the actual structure survives (allegedly) is a few foundation stones which make up the wall of a tunnel leaving the metro station. Supposedly, it’s marked with a plaque, but when I visited Paris I stayed at a hotel very near Place de la Bastille and used that metro station quite a bit, and I never saw any such plaque.
But while we Americans tend to dwell on the bloody, lurid aspects of the Revolution, we ignore two important facts about it. First, we ignore the fact that our own war for independence was a primary precipitating cause of the Revolution in France. Second, we ignore that the French Revolution was motivated by the same high-minded Enlightenment ideals that were the foundation of our own successful rebellion against an oppressive monarchy.
Our own role in causing the Revolution had a great deal to do with the fact that for nearly ten years, we had sent ambassadors and ministers to Versailles begging Louis XVI to underwrite our revolution against Britain — and His Most Christian Majesty eventually agreed to do it. Tens of millions of livres — in many cases, hard specie of gold and silver — found their way back to America to buy weapons, gunpowder, cannon, ships, and to pay for the soldiers and sailors who would use them. Louis did this in the hopes of tearing away Britain’s most populous and (then) largest colonies away from it as an indirect front of an undeclared extension of the Seven Years’ War (what we call the French and Indian War). And America could not pay its debts back all at once. To make up for the depletion of the French Crown’s treasury, high levels of taxes had to be imposed and after two bad harvests in a row, the heavy foot of the burden of taxation got to be too much and starvation broke out across the country. Other crops may have been available for import, but the average Frenchman had no food, no money, and no apparent means to get any.
So we didn’t have anything to do with the weather, of course, but we had everything to do with the fact that the King was broke. France’s treasure had been spent on too many guns, and not enough butter. And that’s why the King had to call the Estates-General, to work out a way to replenish the treasury until we Americans could get our act together and start paying back our debts.
But we also forget that the basic ideas of both Revolutions were fundamentally the same. No taxation without meaningful representation in the government. Popular sovereignty. Subordination of the government to the popular will and to sacrosanct liberties of the individual. The rule of law and independent courts to protect and enforce individual rights. A rejection of the concepts of rule by divine right and the comingling of political power with religious authority. The fundamental equality of all people and the emerging nationalism of a people. These were the ideological causes of both revolutions, radical for the time but are shamefully taken for granted by Americans today.
France’s tricolor flag represents the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity — a citizen of France is a free individual, equal to any other citizen, and part of a greater whole that is the nation of France. It is hard to think of a better sort of national ideal; those are ideals that we (and the French) continue to try to improve ourselves towards, both as individuals and as nations.
The French have, like we Americans, fallen short of the ideals of their revolution at many times in their history. Unfortunately for them, their failings have caused them greater turmoil than ours. Our greatest failure as a nation to live up to our ideals came to tremendous and protracted violence for nearly four years in our Civil War. Nearly as many Americans died in our Civil War as in all of our other wars and military actions combined. But while I do not wish to minimize the horror and brutality, and the tremendous moral urgency, of that conflict, the price we have paid in blood does not compare to the price paid in both blood and turmoil by the French.
The First Republic, established in la grande révolution, produced an initially moderate but increasingly radical government, which degenerated into near-anarchy. by 1804. In 1804 In 1799, Napoléon Bonaparte became the First Consul and later Emperor of the First French Republic. He ruled a generally wartime nation for ten years, until the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814. With the exception of the Hundred Days of 1815 when Napoléon broke out of his exile on Elba and effected a brief coup, four Bourbon kings (Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis XIX, and Henri V) ruled in a constitutional monarchy in a period called la Restoration until 1830.
Urban violence plagued France during the reign of the unpopular Charles X. When barricades were erected by radical republicans and people got shot in the street by both revolutionaries and the gendarmes, Charles X abdicated to keep the peace. His son Louis XIX likely holds the record for the shortest reign of any legitimate monarch of any throne in history, having “ruled” France for about twenty minutes, which he spent mainly listening to his father crying.
Charles’ grandson, Henri, was proclaimed by some to be Henri V, King of France, but was only a small child at the time. He “reigned” for seven days and then the National Assembly declared a regency headed by his cousin, Louis-Phillipe Bourbon-Orleans, who was quickly named “King of the French.” During all of this time, real political power was gravitating back towards the National Assembly, with the king serving as a British-style constitutional monarch. Louis-Phillipe, however, ceded even more power to the National Assembly. Problem was, the National Assembly at this point limited its membership to land-owning or significant tax-paying citizens. So disenfranchised citizens took to the streets and erected barricades again, and finally in 1848 another revolution took place, with still more death and violence that echoed across Europe, and which ended the Kingdom of the French.
In the place of the Kingdom of the French came the Second Republic, which had a near-universal franchise but the result of more than a generation of inexperience with widespread democracy resulted in clumsy political maneuverings and Louis-Napoléon, a second cousin of the great Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected President in 1848, and spent the next three years of his four year term securing the loyalty of the military. He staged a coup in 1851, held a referendum to legitimize his actions, and when he won, he dissolved the National Assembly and declared himself Emperor Napoléon III. Thus the Second Republic became the Second Empire.
Although the Second Empire was an overt military dictatorship, Napoléon III turned out to be a competent and generally benevolent dictator. But in 1870, three significant reverses hit France. Napoléon III himself had to surrender to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan, losing the Franco-Prussian War, and then a mob stormed the National Assembly after another bloody urban riot. A brief government called the Government of National Defense uneasily shared power with a group called the Paris Commune for two months, and conducted a treaty with the Prussians, while a Third Republic was organized and more political violence within France kept the nation crippled. The Third Republic was thought by most to be a stopgap form of government until a constitutional monarchy could be restored; the problem was that there were by now two claimants to the French throne.
One group thought that Henri, the Comte de Chambord, the grandson of the former Charles X, should be King Henri V; contending that when his father Louis XIX had also abdicated, he was the next in line for the throne and conveniently, he was still alive and had technically been king for seven days back in 1830. Henri had become an impetuous young man and he did not want to be a figurehead king but rather wanted to exercise real political power as France’s head of state. So he would not accept the limitations on royal power that had bound his cousin, Louis-Phillipe; insisting on a change of the national flag to return the fleur-de-lis of the old nobility. Louis-Phillipe, in the meantime, had died and his claim to the throne was held by his grandson, the Comte de Paris, who would have been Louis-Phillipe II, but the would-be king could not muster enough popular support to back his claim to the throne, and the National Assembly was unwilling to offer the throne to Henri V because of his monarchical ambitions. This younger Louis-Phillipe made a bid to be named Henri’s designated heir-claimant to the throne but would not pledge loyalty to the fleur-de-lis flag, and so was passed over and had to be content with calling himself le Duc de France, and the possibility of a return to a British-style constitutional monarchy was stalemated.
So, instead of being a stepping-stone back to a constitutional monarchy, the Third Republic was formalized in 1875 and lasted until the Nazis invaded France in 1940. The national government of France was then replaced with the fascist Vichy Regime, or as it called itself, L’etat Francais, the French State. The Vichy Regime was quite simple the wartime puppet of Nazi Germany, and when the Allies invaded in 1944, it was overthrown and many of its leaders subsequently tried and executed for treason.
A provisional government was in place until 1946, when the Fourth Republic was enacted under wartime resistance leader Charles de Gaulle. The Fourth Republic tried to incorporate Algeria into the political unity of France but was not resilient enough to handle the tensions of the Algerian independence movement. When there were signs of the government giving in to Algerian revolutionaries, the military seized power in Algeria and threatened a coup in France itself, and the government collapsed. Thanks to the personal charisma of the still-living de Gaulle, the military, separatists, and nationalists all agreed to form a new Fifth Republic with a stronger executive branch which took effect in January of 1959, and that is the government that rules in France today.
It seems amazing that the French have gone through so many permutations of government since 1789, but the fact is that the trend of their government has been towards realizing the Enlightenment’s ideals of universal franchise, equality, individual liberties, and the collective well-being of the French as a people and as a nation. And they shouldn’t take it for granted, either; there are three pretenders to the throne of France alive today. Which in its own way, is even more amazing to me.
There are still people who want a Napoléon to rule France. For them, the rightful ruler would likely be the Prince Jean-Christophe Louis Ferdinand Albéric Napoléon, who would be styled Emperor Napoléon VIII. His father, Charles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon, is a banker and real estate developer and has been a largely unsuccessful politician. But the senior Napoléon was disinherited from the succession by his father (the would-have-been Napoléon-Bonaparte VI), in a fit of pique over changing his last name from Napoléon-Bonaparte to just Napoléon after a nasty divorce. Jean-Christophe Napoléon is twenty-two years old and is apparently working as a management consultant. How would you like that — to have a management consultant named Napoléon telling you how to run your company?
The “Legitimist” claims follow those of Henri V, and contend that his removal from office (and the abdications of Charles X and Louis XIX) were illegal. The current holder of this claim to the throne is a Spanish citizen and a cousin to the reigning King of Spain, one Luis Alfonso Gonzalo Víctor Emanuel Marco de Borbón y Martínez-Bordiú, le Duc de Anjou et le Duc de Bourbon, who would be Louis XX, King of France, Navarre, and Jerusalem. Seeing as his cousin is King of Spain, he might have to renounce his claim to the throne of Navarre were to become even a figurehead king, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was conquered in 1291 and, um, distinctly unlikely to be reinstated in the foreseeable future, but if there were such a kingdom, he’d be its King. So his likeliest claim to royalty would be in France, where he would have to beat out an actual French citizen for the throne. But for the time being, the would-be Louis XX is thirty-four years old and works as a commercial banker in Venezuela, where in the finest tradition of all would-be monarchs, he scored himself a wealthy wife. Their daughter was born in Miami and is therefore a U.S. citizen by birth, but because of the Salic Law, she could not become Queen of France in the event of a Bourbon restoration.
The “Orléanist” claims follow those of Louis-Phillipe, and are considered by those who care about such things to be the stronger claims today. The Orléanist pretender is the 75-year-old Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d’Orléans, Comte de Paris et Duc de France, who is the direct descendant of King Louis-Phillipe, who served honorably in the French military during the Algerian conflict and has written a number of respectable works of French history. On the royalist side of things, he has pursued litigation since the 1960’s to restore and consolidate his family’s wealth from those who have held it. Well, someone had to do it and he’s managed to recapture several millions of dollars of his family’s assets and rebuilt a respectable residential and commercial real estate venture out of it. He has also sued the Duke of Anjou (the would-be Louis XX’s father) to resolve the claims to the French throne, but in 1989 the French courts held that they had no jurisdiction over such matters and since it didn’t look like there would be kings again any time soon, it didn’t much matter anyway.
After all, the French neither want nor need a monarch, which is what Bastille Day is all about. While I’m sure all three claimants to the French throne are perfectly nice guys (you know, for old money), and this guy seems like he’s not all that bad, either, competing claims to the throne of France in the modern era have brought the French little but misery, civil strife, and bloodshed interrupted by periods of prosperity and peace that have prevailed generally only during the times of republican government. It all started on July 14, 1789 and it changed the course of history.
France, History, Insomnia
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Catherine Delors
Great post! As lawyers, we should also remember that the American Bill of Rights was directly inspired by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and that the Revolution abolished slavery in 1794 (it was reinstated by Bonaparte in 1802.)Speaking of Bonaparte, he did crown himself Emperor in 1804, but he has seized power in a coup in 1799.
“… the French neither want nor need a monarch …”In recent opinion polls, 17 percent of the French said they want a Monarch.http://www.alliance-royale.com/spip.php?article423And if they don’t “need a Monarch”, well, considering the unpopularity of Nicolas Sarkozy and the failings of the republican system, I wonder how many French would disagree with that statement.
Transplanted Lawyer
COOL! A real monarchist! Welcome, RR, and I hope you keep coming back!I glanced at your blog and it looks like you have a particular interest in the British monarchy but I’m impressed with your ecumenical zeal for hereditary rule in all sorts of places.This post was about France — do you believe the Legitimist, Orleanist, or Bonapartist claims to the French monarchy enjoy the most legitimacy?
zzi
Now I’m convinced. These posts are essays you had to write in school. Keep them coming . . .
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7 rules of basketball every fan should know
October 28, 2020 September 29, 2020 by BB Nerd
1 The player structure
2 The goal of the game
3 The playing time
4 The time violations
5 The rules of fouls
6 The punitive consequences
Basketball is a very popular sport that has garnered many fans over the past few decades. You only need three things to play basketball. It is enough to organize a simple playing field.
This can consist of paving stones, wood, concrete, or rubber. The second most important piece of equipment includes either one or two basketball hoops and of course the basketball. Last but not least, two teams are needed. These are the simple requirements of any basketball game. It should also be noted that there are usually two different variations of a basketball game.
The “normal” basketball (such as indoor basketball) and streetball. In streetball, fouls are usually not penalized as severely as in basketball and it is also possible to play on just one basket. We have now put together seven rules for a normal basketball game so that everything runs smoothly for your next game!
The player structure
As mentioned above, two teams face each other in a basketball game. Each team consists of five players who are on the field at the same time. These five players are called the Starting Five.
They are divided into a center, two forwards, and two guards. Since basketball is a flexible game, other constellations can also arise. In principle, however, it is possible for a team to have up to seven substitute players who can be substituted as often as required.
The goal of the game
The goal of a basketball game is to throw the basketball into the opponent’s basketball hoop. This basket is positioned on the edge of the field at a height of 3.05 meters. The number of points varies depending on the position from which the ball is thrown into the basket.
You can easily remember the rules of points. The team receives one point for a free throw and two for a normal throw. If the player is behind the three-point line, you get three points. The ultimate goal of the game is to score higher than the generic team.
The playing time
A basketball game is divided into four quarters at FIBA. Each quarter has a playing time of ten minutes. At the NBA, however, things are different, here a quarter takes a full twelve minutes. If both teams have the same number of points after the end of normal playing time, each team is extended by five minutes. This goes on until a winner is determined.
The time violations
In a basketball game, you will find different time rules that you have to adhere to, as they dictate exactly how long a player or team has time for their actions. The 24-second clock is of fundamental importance for attacks, as a team’s attack can only last a maximum of 24 seconds after the ball has been thrown in. If the ball touches the basket ring, the time is reset if the opponent catches the ball. If the own team wins the ball again (offensive rebound), the attack is set to 14 seconds.
The eight-second rule states that after receiving the ball, a team must play it into the generic half within eight seconds. The five-second rule states that a player may only hold his ball for up to five seconds when throwing in. If a player is now guarded by another, he has three options. Either he continues dribbling the ball, or makes a pass, or tries to throw a basket.
If this rule is broken, the ball must be given to the opposing team. With the three-second rule, the defenders are given a maximum of three seconds in the opponent’s zone, regardless of whether they have the ball. However, this rule is rarely used in professional games.
The rules of fouls
There are four types of fouls in basketball. These are, for example, personal fouls in which there is actual contact. These are defensive and offensive fouls. The second penalty point is technical fouls. These deal with disciplinary and technical errors, such as disregarding referees or slight verbal provocations.
Afterward, there are disqualifying fouls in the case of gross assault or strong insults. Furthermore, there are unsportsmanlike fouls, which are reflected, for example, in too hard contact without, for example, playing the ball. There is another variant, the so-called team fouls.
Here, after the 4th team foul in a quarter, the other player fouls are punished with two free throws, unless the foul committed was punished more severely. In general, however, the fouled player has the right to take the free throws.
The punitive consequences
If a player or team commits a foul, this will be scored differently depending on the severity of the offense. If a player receives five personal or technical fouls, they will be excluded from the game.
If a player commits a disqualifying foul, e.g. physically assaulting the player, or if two unsportsmanlike fouls are committed during the game, the player will also be disqualified. That also means that he has to spend the rest of the game in the team dressing room.
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Home » TV & Movies » Tom Cruise Returns to 'Mission: Impossible 7' Set After COVID-19 Rant
Tom Cruise Returns to 'Mission: Impossible 7' Set After COVID-19 Rant
Tom Cruise is back to work!
ET has learned that the 58-year-old actor has returned to the United Kingdom to finish up filming Mission: Impossible 7 at Longcross Film Studios, which has been scheduled all along.
Cruise is back on set just a few weeks after a recording surfaced where he was heard yelling at the film crew about the importance of following the safety rules implemented amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
In audio released by The Sun, Cruise, who also serves as the film’s producer, reportedly goes off on 50 staff members at Warner Bros. Studios in Hertfordshire, England, after “spotting two crew [members] standing within two meters of each other.”
“If I see you do it again, you’re f**king gone. And if anyone on this crew does it, that’s it — and you too and you too. And you, don’t you ever f***ing do it again,” he reportedly yelled. “That’s it. No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their f**king homes because our industry is shut down.”
Back in February, the film’s production was put on hold amid the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
“Out of an abundance of caution for the safety and well-being of our cast and crew, and efforts of the local Venetian government to halt public gatherings in response to the threat of coronavirus, we are altering the production plan for our three-week shoot in Venice, the scheduled first leg of an extensive production for Mission: Impossible 7,” a spokesperson from Paramount Pictures told ET at the time. “During this hiatus, we want to be mindful of the concerns of the crew and are allowing them to return home until production starts. We will continue to monitor this situation, and work alongside health and government officials as it evolves.”
Production restarted in September. However, in October, The Sun noted that Cruise held crisis talks with the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, days after 12 people on set in Italy were said to have tested positive.
Mission: Impossible 7 is scheduled to be released in November 2021.
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Seven classic albums (CD)
Seven classic albums
Joe Bushkin (performer)
I've got a crush on you
They say it's wonderful
Portrait of Tallulah
Here in my arms
If I had you
California here I come
They can't take that away from me
At sundown
Ol man river
I can't get started
It's the talk of the town
Above all you
Blue turning grey over you
Serenade in blue
Under a blanket of blue
I gotta right to sing the blues
Beyond the blue horizon
Where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day
Blue prélude
My blue heaven
Blue and sentimental
Blue angel blues
I get a kick out of you
I've got you under my skin
Get out of town
In the still of the night
Where have you been
What is this thing called love
Just one of those things
You got to my head
There's a small hotel
Listen to the quiet
Two sleepy people
Three o'clock in the morning
Sleepy time gal
Party's over
Put your dreams away
Let's put out the lights and go to sleep
Good night sweetheart
Real Gone Jazz, 2017
Remastered ed.
JDX4911
73 - Jazz (NBLC) J1 - Jazz (Flemish music schema)
About Joe Bushkin
Joe Bushkin (November 7, 1916 – November 3, 2004) was an American jazz pianist. He was Jewish.
Born in New York City, Bushkin began his career by playing trumpet and piano with New York City dance bands, including Frank LaMare's Band at the Roseland Ballroom in Brooklyn. He joined Bunny Berigan's band in 1935, played with Eddie Condon from 1936–37, and with Max Kaminsky and Joe Marsala, before rejoining Berigan in 1938. He then left to join Muggsy Spanier's Ragtime Band in 1939. From the late 1930s through to the late 1940s he also worked with Tommy Dorsey & Eddie Condon on records, radio and television. He worked with Dorsey for Bing Crosby in 1940 on the Road to Morocco soundtrack and several commercial sessions. Wartime United States army air corp turned him back into a trumpeter; he also recorded with Lester Young on piano and directed music for Moss Hart’s morale-booster Winged Victory on Broadway for six months before serving in the South Pacifi…Read more on Wikipedia
Work of Joe Bushkin in the library
Night in Manhattan ; Sings Vincent Youmans & Irving Berlin
Lee Wiley
The road to Oslo & play it again Joe
In concert Town Hall
The history of piano jazz : 1906-1952
L'histoire du piano jazz
More ingredients 1938-1960
Bobby Hackett
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Home NEWS Science News Biology
Faces of biology: AIBS selects winners of 2020 photo contest
in Biology
Credit: Carlos Ruiz
Three winners have been selected in the 2020 Faces of Biology Photo Contest, sponsored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS).
“Art and science are inextricably linked to effective communication,” said Scott Glisson, CEO of AIBS. “This contest provides a forum for expression, inspiration, and technical skill. The creativity involved is magnificent.”
The AIBS Faces of Biology contest showcases biological research in its many forms and settings. The photos are used to help the public and policymakers better understand the value of biological research and education.
Carlos Ruiz won first place with a photograph showing Cleopatra Pimienta, a biologist and doctoral candidate at Florida International University, working on her photographic record of insect-pollinated flowers in the Pine Rocklands habitat, deep in the Everglades in South Florida. Pimienta is seen taking a picture of the flaxleaf false foxglove (Agalinis linifolia). The flaxleaf false foxglove is a wetland plant that is frequently visited by native bees and serves as a host for caterpillars of a species of butterfly common in the area, making it a keystone species in this habitat.
Nicholas Freymueller, a master’s student at the University of New Mexico, won second place. In the photograph, Freymueller measures the lower carnassial length of the late Pleistocene-age scimitar cat (Homotherium serum) at the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin. Molar lengths allow paleoecologists to determine the body size of extinct species, which is crucial in understanding how they interacted with each other in ancient ecosystems.
Mike Hamilton, third-place winner, captured a photograph of field researchers from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, conducting aquatic sampling of amphibians and their parasites at the University of California Blue Oak Ranch Reserve as part of a study to explore how multi-host, multi-pathogen interactions drive infection dynamics in complex communities and landscapes.
A forthcoming issue of the journal BioScience will feature the first-place photograph on the cover and the second- and third-place photos in an article. All of the winners receive a one-year subscription to BioScience. Carlos Ruiz will also receive $250.
Jyotsna Pandey
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THOMAS, DYLAN MARLAIS (1914-1953), poet and prose writer
Name: Dylan Marlais Thomas
Spouse: Caitlin Thomas (née Macnamara)
Child: Aeronwy Bryn Thomas
Child: Colm Garan Hart Thomas
Child: Llewelyn Edouard Thomas
Parent: Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams)
Parent: David John Thomas
Occupation: poet and prose writer
Area of activity: Literature and Writing; Poetry
Author: Walford Davies
Dylan Thomas was born at 5, Cwmdonkin Drive in Swansea, on 27 October 1914. He was the son of David John Thomas (1876-1952) and his wife Florence Hannah (née Williams, 1882-1958), who came from rural Welsh-speaking families in north and south west Carmarthenshire respectively. The parents spoke Welsh to each other, but the father (a First Class Honours English graduate of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth) decided against raising Dylan and his older sister Nancy (1906-1953) to be Welsh-speakers, in the belief that English was the way to 'get on' in the world. He also paid for them to have elocution lessons, a middle-class fashion in Swansea at the time, designed to avoid even a Welsh accent. The loss of Welsh in a still considerably bilingual Swansea, especially in what could have been a naturally bilingual home, produced a creative tension in the poet. Explaining later to an English poet friend what he called his 'cut-glass' accent, Thomas added revealingly '…and I can't speak Welsh either!' After all, his father was the nephew of William Thomas, the renowned radical preacher-poet Gwilym Marles (hence Dylan's middle name Marlais and that of his sister, Nancy Marles). A few weeks before Thomas's birth, his father served on a committee to welcome Lord Howard de Walden's embryonic Welsh National Theatre to Swansea, when de Walden's opera, Dylan, Son of the Wave, was being performed at Covent Garden: hence 'Dylan' - from one of the medieval Welsh tales, Y Mabinogi.
The father was Senior English master at Swansea Grammar School, which Thomas attended from 1925 to 1931. From 1929 Thomas was a precocious co-editor (then editor) of the Swansea Grammar School Magazine, having been a contributing mainstay from his first year. His immediate post-school prominence in Swansea's Little Theatre (1931-1934) also began at school - in its Reading Circle and Dramatic and Debating societies. It was Thomas's only period of formal education, followed by fifteen months as a junior reporter on the South Wales Daily Post in Swansea.
By then, his widening interest in English poetry - the father's positive influence this time - had borne fruit in four school-type exercise books (the kind with mathematical tables and 'Danger-Donts' on the back), now known as 'The Notebooks'. In these, between 1930 and 1934, he entered quickly-maturing poems (a fifth 'Red' Notebook was kept for short stories). The sixteen-year-old schoolboy sent some poems to Robert Graves, who blandly deemed them 'unexceptionable'. But their publication in London periodicals led quickly to his first volume 18 Poems in December 1934. William Empson recalled that 'What hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing [in October 1933] “The force that through the green fuse” as a prize poem in the Sunday Referee, and from that day he was a famous poet; I think the incident does some credit to the town, making it look less clumsy than you would think.'
Just before the publication of 18 Poems, the twenty-year-old moved to London to share rooms with two Swansea friends, the artists Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy. They were two of many gifted Swansea friends who in the early 1930s used to meet in the Kardomah Café across the road from the Evening Post offices in Castle Street. Others were the poet Charles Fisher, the musician and teacher Tom Warner, the broadcaster Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, the composer Daniel Jones and, later, the poet Vernon Watkins. Up to 1938, London alternated with Swansea as Thomas's main base. Cosmopolitan artistic life in London was celebrating Surrealism and Picasso in art, 'Modernist' Eliot, Pound and Joyce in literature, and Stravinsky in music. But in a decade scarred by the Depression and fears of a second world war, what more directly challenged Thomas was the politically 'committed' poetry of the Auden circle. His own socialist politics were no different from Auden's, but he had the advantage of returning to the unusually rich store of the 1930-34 Notebooks - to poems that gave voice to an elemental, pre-political, often prenatal, view of experience. The Notebooks saved him from being absorbed by any particular 1930s poetic 'fashion'.
Two 1930s volumes followed quickly - Twenty-five Poems (1936) and The Map of Love (1939), the latter accompanied by seven short stories. Alternation between literary/media life in London and more productive periods back home in Wales set a lifetime's pattern. An important correspondence from 1935 with his Swansea friend the poet Vernon Watkins strengthened a creative anchorage in Wales. He always stressed that poetry is primarily a matter of craft - that a poet works 'out of words' (creating meaning), not 'towards words' (to create atmosphere) - suggesting again something instinctually Welsh in his poetic temperament. As Mallarmé said, 'poetry is not written with ideas but with words'. Throughout the 1930s, Thomas's fame grew steadily, increased by his numerous book reviews of modern writers in leading London periodicals. A major London editor described him as 'a swell reviewer'.
In April 1936, in London, he met Caitlin Macnamara (1913-1994). Of Irish Protestant gentry descent, Caitlin was brought up in Hampshire and of decidedly bohemian energies, encouraged under the influence of Augustus John. They were married in Penzance in July 1937. In May 1938 they moved for the first time to live in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, the village now most closely associated with Thomas, and a profound influence on his later work. That year, he was awarded the Blumenthal Poetry Prize of Poetry (Chicago), for whose special 'English Number' W. H. Auden and Michael Roberts had chosen 'We lying by seasand' - Thomas's first American publication. In Laugharne in 1938 he started writing his greatest prose work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), which he used to call 'stories towards a Provincial Autobiography'. Though only quasi realistic, these moved away from the surrealist/ mythic flavour of his earlier stories, and also from Caradoc Evans's harsh satiric view of Wales. From 1938, an autobiographical emphasis continued. The last story in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog marked the point at which the teenage Thomas left Swansea for London. An attempt at a sequel in the form of a sub-Dickensian novel, Adventures in the Skin Trade (1955), about his early life in London, was abandoned. But from 1944, a subtler autobiographical vein emerged, in poems (and lyrical prose pieces) that set the poet in recognizable Welsh landscapes.
From 1941 (the year in which he sold his Notebooks) to the end of the war, Thomas had been writing filmscripts for Strand Films, and later for Gryphon Films, under the monopolising aegis of the Ministry of Information. A good example of his success in marrying literary effects to the technical (often propaganda) requirements of wartime film is The Doctor and the Devils (1966). At the same time, he was also writing radio scripts and features and taking part in talks and readings for B.B.C. Radio. His natural strengths on radio - wide knowledge, quick inventiveness and a memorable voice - made him a household name. An outstanding radio work, second only to the posthumously broadcast Under Milk Wood, is 'Return Journey' (1947), in which Thomas retraces his vanished youth through a vanished, war-demolished Swansea. In the meantime, wartime had slowed down the writing of poems, yet major elegies such as 'There was a saviour', 'Deaths and Entrances', 'Ceremony After a Fire Raid' and 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London' are among the finest poems to emerge from that war.
Towards the war's end, Wales again became his home. At Llan-gain and New Quay in 1944-45 a new phase of poetic creativity occurred. Along with the 1938-40 period in Laugharne, it was the most productive since the incomparably prolific period of the 1930-1934 Notebooks in Swansea. Thomas's greatest single poetry volume, Deaths and Entrances (1946) increased the attention of America. But as a husband, and father of Llewelyn Edouard (1939-2000) and Aeronwy Bryn (1943-2009), his hope was to earn a living at home in Wales. The wartime work for film and radio had helped in that respect, but had also meant his living within easy reach of London. Between 1946 and 1949, the family lived in or near Oxford, with visits to Ireland, Italy and Prague. But wherever he was, Thomas never stopped working on poems started at home in Wales. It was in Rapallo and Florence that he completed the Welsh-landscaped poem 'In Country Sleep'.
His solo visit to Prague was as guest of the government, to attend the founding of the Czech Writers' Union. Though perfectly at ease meeting Czech writers and mixing with the Czech people, he disliked the stiffness of bureaucratic Soviet proceedings and interviews. His real grit was shown when he complained about the painful literal-mindedness of the official translator he'd been assigned. He had quickly sensed - another bilingual gulf - that important nuances were being lost between the translator's two languages. But in order to make a serious point comically - one of his still underrated talents as a writer - he climbed onto the Charles Bridge, melodramatically embraced one of its famous statues, and threatened to jump into the Charles River if this particular Official Translator were not replaced.
Back in Wales in May 1949, he moved (thanks to the financial generosity of Margaret Taylor, wife of the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor) to live in the now iconic Boat House in Laugharne. It was the village in which he had long hoped to settle: he had already rented a house for his parents there, and it was there that his third child Colm Garan Hart (1949-2012) was born. In early 1951 he undertook a five-week visit to Iran to write a filmscript for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But the inspiration for his own writing was now Laugharne. He acknowledged it as the 'setting of a radio play I am writing' - that is, Under Milk Wood. Inspired by a short wartime radio essay about New Quay in 1944, it developed its full form as a radio play via the larger dramatis personae provided by Laugharne, and in the different, nuclear, atmosphere of the Cold War.
Thomas's work had been widely published in America from as early as 1939. His first American tour in February-June 1950 was followed by three more in 1952 and 1953. During the second tour in 1952, his last individual poetry volume In Country Sleep was published - in America only. This completed the five volumes that then made up his Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952). His prefatory 'Note' to that important volume said that these were 'most of the poems I have written, and all, up to the present year, that I wish to preserve'. The volume represented barely a quarter of the poems he'd written, but his point was that these were the ones he wanted his reputation to rest on. It's a point that deserves respect. He knew where to draw a line, not only this side of juvenilia but between poetry and mere verse. In the 1930-1934 Notebooks, he had unerringly recognized those items that were potentially fine poems. He chose these for his first four volumes. These volumes then, along with the poems in In Country Sleep, comprised his Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952), confirming that volume's authorial integrity. It won the Foyle's Poetry Prize, to international acclaim.
But an untidy life, and naivety in the matter of money, meant that not even four profitable American visits made things easier back home in Wales. Yet even then, it was in New York in May 1953, and then in November that year (a matter of days before his death), that he completed Under Milk Wood, and gave the definitive performance as narrator in its first public readings. At the same time, the Opera Workshop of Boston University invited him to write a libretto for a new Stravinsky opera - at the suggestion of Stravinsky himself. But on his arrival for the last tour Thomas was clearly tired and ill, the result of an increasing tendency towards heavy drinking. The huge inter-state programme of engagements for all four American tours was itself unnaturally heavy, and the culpability of those who had professional responsibility for his welfare (primarily his agent for the tours, John Malcolm Brinnin) went even further. Thomas's death aged only 39 was by no means inevitable. It was precipitated by the prescription of morphine sulphate by a maverick American doctor. Even for final pain, the correct dose would have been one-sixth of a grain. Thomas's discomfort was treated with three times that amount. It exacerbated breathing difficulties, depriving his brain of oxygen.
Dylan Thomas died in the Catholic St Vincent's Charity Hospital in New York City on 9 November 1953. He was buried at St Martin's Church in Laugharne on 24 November 1953. On St David's Day 1982 a memorial stone was unveiled at Westminster Abbey, set between those to Byron and George Eliot.
Professor Walford Davies
(Chronological within sections):
Personal research - including conversations and correspondence with Vernon Watkins, Glyn Jones, Aneirin Talfan Davies, William Empson, Paul Ferris, Aeronwy Thomas, John Malcolm Brinnin and Llewelyn Thomas.
The three main bibliographies:
J. Alexander Rolph, Dylan Thomas a bibliography (London 1956)
Ralph Maud, Dylan Thomas in Print: A Bibliographical History, with an updating appendix by Walford Davies (London 1972)
John Goodby, Dylan Thomas, Oxford Bibliographies Online .
The three main biographies:
Constantine FitzGibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (London 1965)
Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas: The Biography (London 1999)
Andrew Lycett, Dylan Thomas: A New Life (London 2003)
Other works of biographical interest:
John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal (London 1956)
Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill (London 1957)
Dylan Thomas, ed. Vernon Watkins, Letters to Vernon Watkins (London 1957)
Andrew Sinclair, Dylan Thomas: Poet of His People (London 1975)
Daniel Jones, My Friend Dylan Thomas (London 1977)
Gwen Watkins, Portrait of a Friend (Llandysul 1983)
Caitlin Thomas, with George Tremlett, Caitlin: A Warring Absence (London 1986)
John Ackerman, A Dylan Thomas Companion: Life, Poetry and Prose (Basingstoke 1991)
John Ackerman, Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work (Basingstoke 1991)
George Tremlett, Dylan Thomas: In the Mercy of His Means (London 1991)
Paul Ferris, Caitlin: The Life of Caitlin Thomas (London 1993)
Walford Davies, ysgrif, 'Bright Fields, Loud Hills and the Glimpsed Good Place: R. S. Thomas and Dylan Thomas' yn M. Wynn Thomas (ed.), The Page's Drift: R. S. Thomas at Eighty (Bridgend 1993)
Caitlin Thomas, Double Drink Story: My Life With Dylan Thomas (1997)
John Ackerman, Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomas's Life, Writing and His Wales (Bridgend 1998)
James A. Davies, A Reference Companion to Dylan Thomas (Westport Connecticut 1998)
Dylan Thomas, gol. Paul Ferris, Collected Letters (London 2000)
David N. Thomas, Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and a Bungalow (Bridgend 2000)
Heather Holt, Dylan Thomas the Actor (Swansea 2003)
Colin Edwards, ed. David N. Thomas, Dylan Remembered: Interviews by Colin Edwards (Bridgend 2003, 2004)
David N. Thomas, Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? (Bridgend 2008)
Aeronwy Thomas, My Father's Places: A Portrait of Childhood by Dylan Thomas' Daughter (London 2009)
M. Wynn Thomas, chapter on Dylan Thomas in In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (Cardiff 2010)
Hilly Janes, The Three Lives of Dylan Thomas (London 2014)
James A. Davies, Dylan Thomas's Swansea, Gower and Laugharne (Cardiff 2014)
Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas (Cardiff 2014)
Kate Crockett, Mwy na Bardd (2014)
Editions of the texts with material of biographical interest:
Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings (London 1971)
Daniel Jones (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Poems (London 1971)
Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (goln), Collected Poems 1934-53 (London 1988)
Ralph Maud (ed.), The Notebook Poems 1930-1934 (London 1990)
Ralph Maud, Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts (London 1991)
John Ackerman (ed.), Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts (London 1995)
Walford Davies (ed.), Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems (London 2000)
Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas: Selected Poems (London 2014)
Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas: Collected Stories (London 2014)
Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (eds), Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood (London 2014)
John Goodby (ed.), The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (London 2014)
Of photographic-biographical interest:
Bill Read, The Days of Dylan Thomas (London 1964)
Welsh Arts Council, Welsh Dylan (Cardiff 1973)
Rollie McKenna, Portrait of Dylan: A Photographer's Memoir (Maryland 1982)
Hilary Laurie, Dylan Thomas's Wales (London 1999)
The main library holdings of Dylan Thomas material:
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
The New York Public Library ('The 'Berg Collection')
The State University of New York, Buffalo
the universities of Harvard, Indiana and Ohio
The University of Victoria, Canada
The National Library of Wales.
Gareth Farmer, 'Loving Language with Dylan Thomas', Poetry Wales, Vol.49, no.4, Spring 2014, pp.11-16
NLW MS 23949E: Map of Llareggub
Wikipedia Article: Dylan Thomas
Sound and Film
Archif ITV Cymru/Wales Archive: Dylan Thomas - Fern Hill
NLW Archives: Dylan Thomas Trust Manuscripts
Wikidata: Q191023
Archived Article Back to top
THOMAS, DYLAN MARLAIS (1914 - 1953), poet and prose writer
Area of activity: Poetry; Literature and Writing
Born 27 October 1914 in Swansea, son of David John Thomas and his wife Florence Hannah (née Williams) who themselves came from rural, Welsh -speaking families in Cardiganshire, and Carmarthenshire. The father, a nephew of William Thomas ' Gwilym Marles ', was from 1899 to 1936 English master at Swansea grammar school, which Dylan Thomas attended from 1925 to 1931. That was his only period of formal education and was followed by some fifteen months as junior reporter on the South Wales Daily Post. His early interest in English poetry had already borne fruit in the four notebooks in which he entered his first mature poems between 1930 and 1933. These notebooks were to be the major source of poems for his first three published volumes: 18 Poems (London, 1934), Twenty-five poems (London, 1936), and The map of love (short stories and poems) (London, 1939). Publication of individual poems in London periodicals led to his first volume, and that in turn to his arrival in London in November 1934. During the 1930s his work received increasing American as well as British attention and brought invitations to review books for leading London periodicals. Alternation between literary-social life in London and periods of greater actual creativity in Wales was to remain the pattern throughout his career. A close friendship with the poet Vernon Watkins in Swansea started in 1935.
He met Caitlin Macnamara in 1936 and they were married the following year. In May 1938 they moved for the first time to live in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, the village now most intimately associated with his name, and a deep influence on his later work in verse and prose. He had been awarded the American Blumenthal Poetry Prize, and was writing the autobiographical short stories that were to be published as Portrait of the artist as a young dog (London, 1940). The comic realism of these stories was in marked contrast to the macabre and surrealistic element in his earlier tales, which can be read in A Prospect of the sea (London, 1955). Continuation of autobiographical material in the form of a novel remained unfinished, but was published as Adventures in the skin trade (London, 1955). After the outbreak of World War II he started to write radio scripts for the B.B.C. and to take part in broadcast talks and readings. His popularity as a broadcaster remained to the end of his life, and the quality of his work for radio is reflected in the volume Quite early one morning (London, 1954). From 1942 to the end of the war he was employed as a script-writer for Strand Films in London. An example of his work in this medium is The Doctor and the devils (London, 1953).
The period of war had interrupted his writing of poetry, though towards the end of the war Wales became increasingly his major home. At Llangain and New Quay in 1944-45 a new period of poetic creativity started, the most productive since the early days in Swansea, leading to the publication of Deaths and entrances (London, 1946). At the end of the war, however, he also started to show interest in visiting America, and the need to earn a living (mainly through work for films and radio) meant having to be within reach of London. From 1946 to 1949 therefore the poet and his family lived in or near Oxford. He visited Prague in 1949 as guest of the Czechoslovakian government.
He moved to live in the ' Boat House ' at Laugharne in May 1949, where his third child was born, and where Thomas hoped to establish a permanent home, helped possibly by visits to America where his reputation as a poet was now firm. The first of these visits was in February-June 1950 and was followed by three more in 1952 and 1953. The individual work which occupied most of his time from 1950 onwards was the radio play Under Milk Wood (London, 1954), the main inspiration for which were the atmosphere and inhabitants of Laugharne itself. During the second American tour his last individual volume of poems was published, in America only, as In country sleep (New York, 1952). This completed the range of volumes that were to make up his Collected poems 1934-1952 (London, 1952) and which won the award of the Foyle's Poetry Prize. The complications of heavy drinking and irresponsibility with money meant, however, that not even the profitable American visits were to remove the financial and personal insecurity which made the poet less and less productive of new work at home. He died in New York on 9 November 1953 and is buried at Laugharne.
Walford Davies, Dylan Thomas ( Cardiff 1972 )
J. Alexander Rolph, Dylan Thomas a bibliography ( London 1956 ), 1974
George M. A. Gaston, Dylan Thomas a reference guide ( Boston 1987 )
Ralph Maud, Dylan Thomas in print ( Pittsburgh 1970 )
John Ackerman, A Dylan Thomas Companion life, poetry and prose ( Basingstoke 1994 )
and see many biographies, including Paul Ferris (1977), John Ackerman (1964, 1991), G. S. Fraser (1964), Constantine FitzGibbon (1965), Daniel Jones (1977)
Walford Davies and Ralph Maud, Collected Poems 1934-53 ( 1994 )
Davies, W., (2014). THOMAS, DYLAN MARLAIS (1914-1953), poet and prose writer. Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Retrieved 17 Jan 2021, from https://biography.wales/article/s10-THOM-MAR-1914
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Girl on the Block: A True Story of Coming of Age Behind the Counter
Author: Wragg, Jessica
When 16-year-old Jessica Wragg applied for a job at the local farm shop in her hometown of Chesterfield, England, she never expected to land a position behind the all-male butchery counter. Young and enthusiastic, and fueled by a newfound fascination with the craft, Wragg quickly realized that she was an outcast in a world of middle-aged men who spoke a secret language to fool customers and were reluctant to share the tricks of their trade with a novice.
A decade later, against all odds, Wragg is pulling back the curtain on an industry that is still problematically set in its old-school ways. Like her female counterparts in the restaurant world, she has had to fight to establish herself in the meat industry, memorizing muscle and bone and tendon, while battling sexism and ageism.
Girl on the Block is a fish-out-of-water story that blends Wragg's personal journey with an exploration of the sanctity of her craft and an honest look at the modern meat industry. A tour through one of the oldest, dirtiest, and most fascinating professions, Girl on the Block is Wragg's tale of returning home with blood on her boots at the end of fourteen-hour days and finding her way in the end.
Publisher: Dey St.
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Aeronautics, Neighborhood: West End
Bridgeport, Connecticut The “Right” Flight
We Believe!
The recent article written in Jane’s All the World Aircraft that verifies Gustave Whitehead flew his plane on August 14, 1901.
We here at the Bridgeport Public Library’s History Center have scads of articles on file that support this.
We Believe in Gustave Whitehead!
Here is an article that was in this blog that celebrated the 110th anniversary of Gustave Whitehead an his miraculous flight. Miracles do happen!
Gustave Whitehead near plane
Bridgeport resident Gustave Whitehead made his first solo flight August 14, 1901. Why is he not known as the “Father of Flight?” This year marks the 110th anniversary of Gustave Whitehead’s historic flight.
One of the best articles on Whitehead’s flight appeared in Popular Aviation magazine in January 1934, with the headline, “Did Whitehead Precede Wrights in World’s First powered Flight?”
The article, written by researchers Stella Randolph and Harvey Phillips, tells the story of Bridgeport resident Gustave Whitehead and his flying machine, known as 21.
According to the 1934 article, the plane Whitehead used for his initial 1 1/2 mile was a mono plane with a four cylinder, two-cycle motor located in the forward motor located in the forward part of the flying device.
The plane’s ignition was of the make-and-break type, and Columbus dry batteries were used. The gravity-fed gas tank held two gallons of petrol.
The wings were the most amazing sight, covered with Japanese silk, and varnished and fastened onto bamboo struts.
Whitehead, a mechanic, was one of the few men pursuing powered flight who worked on both the motor and the actual plane. He poured all of his financial resources into constructing the plane.
He wanted his plane to be perfect, and kept wrestling with the motor and plane until he got it right.
Whitehead continued to work on his plane at his Pine Street home after the summer of 1901. In early 1902, he flew his plane on trips of two miles and seven miles over Long Island Sound.
In comparison, the Wright Brothers “first” flight in December 1903 in Kitty Hawk, N.C. was only 852 feet, and lasted only 59 seconds.
Why is Whitehead not better known for his invention?
Whitehead, a German immigrant, quietly conducted his experiments. While his friends and neighbors were familiar with his work, he flew his plane early in the morning and there were few observers.
According to the Popular Aviation article, the Wright Brothers had independent means,” the article said, “they had the encouragement of people in the same field, they belonged to organizations where there work would find reception and publicity, they spoke English fluently and their background was such that they knew how to use it skillfully to carry their audience with them.
Just as Ohio takes pride in their hometown boys, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Bridgeport,Connecticut should celebrate Gustave Whitehead. Note: The Wright brothers visited Whitehead and discussed his experiments.
Mary Witkowski
Bridgeport City Historian
Mary K. Witkowski is the former Bridgeport City Historian and the Department Head of the Bridgeport History Center, Emeritus. She is the author of Bridgeport at Work, and the co-author with Bruce Williams of Bridgeport on the Sound. Mary has had a newspaper column in the Bridgeport News, a blog for the Connecticut Post, and a weekly spot on WICC. She continues to be involved in many community based activities and initiatives on local history and historic preservation.
Fact #6: 1826: Bethel African-American Methodist Church established.
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International trade and regional integration
Private sector development, investment and competitiveness
Monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment
Management of framework contracts
bkp@bkp-advisors.com
BKP Economic Advisors (BKP) is an economic research and consulting firm owned and managed by its five partners, and with a core staff of about thirty experts. The company was established in 2006 and is based in Munich and Berlin (Germany) with associates in Canada, Ethiopia, and Ghana.
Advancing Gender Equality through Voluntary Standards for Trade
Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) have emerged as one of the main tools used to articulate, encourage and enforce sustainable and ethical practices in global value chains. With this study we explore the nature and evolution of VSS and assess their potential contribution to gender equality and women’s empowerment (SDG 5). The purpose of the study is to enable policymakers in developing and emerging economies to identify opportunities to engage with VSS initiatives as a means to deliver on gender commitments while also promoting trade and economic development.
Modernisation of the EU-Chile trade agreement - sustainability impact assessment
The final study assessing the impact of the modernisation of the EU-Chile trade agreement has now been published, along with the position paper prepared by the European Commission. The study analyses which economic, social, environmental, and human rights impact the agreement's modernisation could have, depending on the outcomes of the ongoing negotiations.
For more information, including executive summaries and other reports, visit the study website.
Guidance Note on Data Analysis for Gender and Trade Assessments
The first step in gender-aware economic analysis involves building the statistical picture of an economy as a gendered structure. Such a picture, if appropriately disaggregated in terms of production sectors, workers’ and households’ characteristics can provide a useful baseline from which to track the direct and indirect effects of trade changes by gender. By highlighting existing inequalities, it can help assess whether proposed trade reforms and agreements are likely to redress or intensify bottlenecks to women’s access to economic resources and opportunities. It can also guide the selection of relevant indicators for ex-post monitoring.
This guide offers an introduction to gender-aware data analysis for assessing distributional effects of international trade at the country level. It describes conceptual frameworks and data sources and shows how to use statistical data to understand the linkages between changes in trade policies and various dimensions of gender inequality. The guide is designed primarily for data analysts and policy advisers. It could also be of help to women’s organizations and other civil society stakeholders involved in trade consultations.
Assessment of European Fund for Sustainable Development (EFSD) and EFSD Guarantee Fund - Final Report
We have recently completed the Independent assessment of the European Fund for Sustainable Development (EFSD) and the EFSD Guarantee Fund. The final report produced by out team has now been published by the European Commission and can downloaded directly from the Commission website. The Commission has also prepared a press release related to the study with links to their own report, based on the study, to the European Parliament and the Council.
Research note: Covid-19 support to businesses risks leaving behind companies in developing countries
New study launched to prepare for the EU Generalised Scheme of Preferences after 2023
Project Completion - External Evaluation of the European Union’s Policy Coherence for Development (PCD)
Innovative Financing for Development - Options for the EU
© BKP Economic Advisors 2021. Legal Notice & Data Protection / Impressum & Datenschutz Powered by Astroid. Design by JoomDev
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Inside SIM USA – The International Mission Group Which Sent Out Missionary Nancy Writebol, Now Stricken With Ebola Virus
TABITHA PLUEDDEMANN – SIM
The SIM-run hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, where Nancy Writebol of Charlotte worked before contracting Ebola.
For nearly 30 years, Christian missionaries-to-be from evangelical Protestant churches in Charlotte and across the country have been coming to a 90-acre site near Carowinds in south Charlotte.
There, an international mission group called SIM USA has readied them for their overseas assignments, then sent them to spread the Gospel and help their neighbors in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.
In a city that’s home to high-profile megachurches, growing seminaries and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, SIM managed to go about its work with little publicity – “really flying under the radar,” in the words of the Rev. David Chadwick, senior pastor of Forest Hill, a Charlotte church that has provided a steady supply of SIM missionaries over the years.
But two weeks ago, SIM became international news when Charlotte’s Nancy Writebol, a SIM missionary in Liberia, contracted the deadly Ebola virus.
Since then, SIM officials have offered daily updates on Writebol’s condition and stayed in contact with her husband, David, who is still in Liberia and healthy, but waiting for an Ebola incubation period to pass before he joins his wife. SIM also worked with the U.S. State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Samaritan’s Purse, a Boone-based Christian charity, to evacuate the 59-year-old missionary to Emory Hospital in Atlanta for treatment in an isolation ward.
She was the second American with Ebola to be flown from Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, to Georgia, then transported to the hospital near the CDC. The first was Dr. Kent Brantly, who works for Samaritan’s Purse, which has a small army of public relations professionals.
SIM is new to this media glare. “It’s not been a priority to get ourselves known,” said Fred Ely, the group’s vice president. “We don’t have a PR department.”
What’s not new for this 121-year-old organization is sending its missionaries into dangerous terrain. Many of the more than 65 countries where it operates have been plagued by war, political turmoil, terrorism or disease.
Two of the three founders of SIM – both in their 20s – died of malaria a year after the missionary group was launched in 1893. In the 1920s and ’30s, some SIM missionaries were murdered in Ethiopia. Health workers affiliated with SIM were felled by Lassa fever – the Ebola of its time – in 1969. And in the past few weeks, a Liberian SIM staffer who worked at the hospital in Monrovia died after she was infected with the Ebola virus.
“This goes to the root of our mission: the calling of sacrifice,” said Bruce Johnson, SIM USA’s president for the past five years.
New SIM missionaries do get training in security protocols. They go through orientation before they leave the United States and when they arrive in their new homes. They have health and medical evacuation insurance. And SIM field leaders in each country are tied to the closest U.S. Embassy and to their national partners, offering them “layers of alerts, bulletins and evacuation recommendations,” Ely said.
“These people, when they go to these places, they have their eyes open,” Ely added. “That goes with the territory.”
Sometimes things get so serious that SIM will act. When the Ebola crisis reached Monrovia recently, Ely said, SIM told its missionaries that families with young children had to go.
But what happens frequently, Ely said, is that the missionaries don’t want to leave those they’ve come to help.
“They say, ‘These are our brothers and sisters; we don’t want to abandon them,’ ” Ely said. “Emotionally, it’s very difficult.”
When the Ebola virus broke out in West Africa earlier this year, Charlotte’s Calvary Church contacted Nancy and David Writebol – members since 1994 – and offered to bring them home.
“They said: ‘No, our place is to be here with the people God has called us to,’ ” said the Rev. Jim Cashwell, the church’s pastor of missions and evangelism. “And that’s been their spirit.”
In an interview with the Observer, David Writebol said one of the attractions of Liberia was that it was recovering from a long civil war. “We visited with missionaries who lived through that time (of war) and after,” he said. “We heard their concerns and pleas for the ministry there. And God just worked in our hearts: ‘This is where I want you to go.’ ”
What exactly is SIM?
It’s a nondenominational Christian group with about 3,000 missionaries and staffers all over the world.
When it was formed in the late 19th century, its founders’ aim was to Christianize the heart of Africa, so SIM originally stood for “Sudan Interior Mission.” Later, when it broadened its scope to additional continents, SIM was shorthand for “Serving in Mission.” Now it is simply SIM – akin to IBM.
In 1986, SIM USA moved its headquarters from the New York City area to Charlotte. The lure of the Queen City: less expensive real estate and cost of living, a growing airport on the Eastern Seaboard, and a strong Christian community.
“Charlotte was a welcoming place,” said Ely, one of about 100 employees who work at the SIM USA offices in south Charlotte.
Though SIM was not a household acronym to most of Charlotte, it has fostered sturdy relationships over the years with evangelical churches here that emphasize missionary work.
“They have been deeply embedded in Forest Hill for some time,” said Chadwick, whose nondenominational church will soon commission its latest SIM missionaries – two church staffers who are headed, with their children, to Japan, a country with relatively few Christian churches.
And many of the 91 missionaries commissioned by Calvary Church – including the Writebols – are affiliated with SIM.
“It’s big, it’s reputable, it’s committed to the Gospel, and it’s on our doorstep,” said Calvary Senior Pastor John Munro.
And, Munro said, SIM has allowed missionaries, including the Writebols, to do practical tasks, such as working in hospitals, while doing them openly in the name of Jesus.
“Both are demanded by Christ,” Munro said. “He told us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to make disciples of all nations.”
Ely said SIM’s primary goal is to preach the Gospel by starting Christian churches overseas. But “we do a lot of things,” he added, ticking off a list that included health care, education, community development and media ministries such as Christian radio. They also teach locals to read and translate Bibles into the native language.
The Writebols went to work at SIM’s compound in Monrovia in August 2013, after a total of 13 years of serving orphans and widows in Ecuador and Zambia for Rafiki – a Christian missionary group based in Florida.
In Liberia, Nancy Writebol, sent to be a personnel director, also mentored nurses and sterilized medical instruments at the Eternal Love Winning Africa, or ELWA, Hospital run by SIM. David Writebol is the services manager, responsible for managing electricity, water and sanitation for the 130-acre campus, which includes the hospital, an Ebola clinic, a radio station and a school. Photos of the compound show palm trees, an Atlantic Ocean beach and rudimentary houses and buildings.
In Liberia and around the world, SIM partners with other agencies. In Monrovia, for example, Samaritan’s Purse – with expenditures of more than $400 million in 2013 – is rebuilding the ELWA hospital, which was partially burned down during the Liberian civil war.
Samaritan’s Purse and SIM also work side by side on a hospital project in Nigeria.
Signing up missionaries
Bruce Johnson
Carowinds
David Writebol
Dr. Kent Brantly
Emory Hospital
Fred Ely
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Home » TV » "Fleabag": Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Original Stage Version Comes to US Movie Theatres in September
"Fleabag": Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Original Stage Version Comes to US Movie Theatres in September
Posted on August 29, 2019 | by Adi Tantimedh | Comments
We're all fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her breakthrough BBC show Fleabag around here. Uberfans know that Fleabag began life as a one-woman play Waller-Bridge wrote and performed at the Edinburgh Festival back in 2013.
Now Waller-Bridge is going back to perform the original play one last time in London's West End. Some fans are paying hundreds of pounds to scalpers just to see the original Rosetta Stone version of the story.
This will be the last time Waller-Bridge performs the play. There have been – and will be – productions where the heroine is played by someone else. I'm sure the play itself is being used as an audition piece by drama students and aspiring actresses by now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Uv6cb9YRs
Video can't be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: Fleabag Season 1 – Official Trailer | Prime Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Uv6cb9YRs)
If you're in the US, you're not out of luck. The National Theatre will be screening the play at select movie theatres in major cities throughout the US.
OG "Fleabag"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygWAY44SKYQ
Video can't be loaded because JavaScript is disabled: National Theatre Live: Fleabag | Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygWAY44SKYQ)
As the National Theatre site says,
See the hilarious, award-winning, one-woman show that inspired the BBC's hit TV series Fleabag, broadcast live to cinemas from London's West End.
Written and performed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, Killing Eve) and directed by Vicky Jones, Fleabag is a rip-roaring look at some sort of woman living her sort of life.
Fleabag may seem oversexed, emotionally unfiltered and self-obsessed, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. With family and friendships under strain and a guinea pig café struggling to keep afloat, Fleabag suddenly finds herself with nothing to lose.
Playing to sold-out audiences in New York and London, don't miss your chance to see this 'legitimately hilarious show' (New Yorker), broadcast live to a cinema near you.
How to See "Fleabag" the Play in the US
All you have to do is go on the NTLive site and use the locator to see if the play is being shown at a cinema in your city. You can pre-order tickets from the links there. The beauty of this is tickets are only around $20. That's a lot cheaper than a ticket to a play on Broadway.
This will be your last chance to see Waller-Bridge play the original character. She announced this is the swan song. The TV show is done. Returning to the play one last time is her way to achieve closure. Amazon Studios and the BBC would love another series. Waller-Bridge joked that she might wait till she's 50 years old to tell a story about an older Fleabag.
Slight spoiler: the play tells the same story as the first season of the TV series. It does not cover the story of the second season, so don't expect any Hot Priest in it.
Fleabag premieres in US cinemas on Thursday 19th September for one week. You can pre-order tickets through NT Live.
About Adi Tantimedh
Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist who just likes to writer. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
Posted in Amazon Studios, BBC, Preview, streaming, Trailer, TV | Tagged Amazon Prime, amazon studios, bbc, bleeding cool, broadway, fleabag, hot priest, london, movies, national theatre, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, television, tv, west end
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Going Above Above the Law: What to Take from Above the Law’s Law School Rankings
by Yuko Sin
The new Above the Law ranking of the top 50 law schools in the U.S. is out again. And so is a self-critical review of the ranking, which is very fair, though a bit too in love with Yale. Want to know whether these rankings are the definitive rankings of law schools? Whether you’ll be a slightly less accomplished person if you attend, say, UCLA Law School (ranked #25) as opposed to, say, University of Illinois Law School (ranked #22). Here’s my take.
Still my favorite ranking, despite some flaws
The ATL rankings improve upon the more widely referenced U.S. News & World Report rankings in a couple ways. For one, ATL’s methodology is simple enough to fit in one easy-to-understand image (unlike the Dickens novel you have to understand USNWR’s). Additionally, ATL places way more emphasis on things your average law school hopeful might care about—like how many grads get quality jobs and how much is law school going to cost—and less on things that the hopeful probably wouldn’t care about—like peer assessment rankings and the number of books in the library, two actual factors in USNWR’s rankings.
Here, check out how ATL’s sausage is made:
That said, the ATL law school rankings have their flaws. Put simply, they do some massaging to make sure Yale, Harvard, and Stanford are never too far below the top three. They do this by weighing the number of alums that are active federal judges and Supreme Court clerks as 10% of the school’s final score. And in a naked attempt to keep the rankings within their intellectual property, ATL adds an ATL alumni score that no one, not even ATL, takes seriously. But their whole focus-on-outcomes-rather-than-inputs thing is definitely laudable.
But it’s mostly just a rough measuring stick
Here’s how I imagine a well-adjusted, intelligent law-school hopeful would treat the ATL rankings. You decide you want to go to law school and you want to know which law schools should interest you. So you spend about 15 minutes browsing the ATL rankings and compiling a list of about 6 to 12 schools you’re interested in. Then you look up the NALP data for each school—this is the employment or outcome data that forms the heart of the ATL rankings—and any other data relevant to your interests. Finally, you compile your own ranking based on employment factors that matter to you.
For instance, if you worked as a litigation paralegal in New York and you know you want nothing to do with NYC litigation, but would love to work on deals there, you really don’t care about federal clerkships. If you know you want to do public interest law, then you mostly care about a school’s LRAP. If you don’t have the LSAT score to get into a top 50 law school but all you’ve ever wanted to do is work in a DA’s office, then you need to focus on law schools that have a reputation for sending a lot of graduates to DA’s offices.
These are the kind of data points you cannot get out of any ranking.
“Prestige” is real and it’s sticky
Finally, you should not come away from the ATL rankings thinking the University of Virginia is as prestigious—I know, I know it’s a dirty word—as Harvard. It just isn’t. Harvard will be better regarded than UVA no matter what ATL might say and especially what the rankings say year to year. Prestige is sticky—it doesn’t change year to year. So if you get into Harvard, barring a massive tuition break from UVA, you should go to Harvard.
Finally, Let’s praise UMich for being the most transparent
A very real and important beef ATL has with law schools is that almost all law schools refuse to further break out their employment stats so that we could, for example, tell the difference between legit JD advantage jobs and the Starbucks manager kind. This is where the University of Michigan Law School shines. Just check out their employment pages. ATL should heap praise on their efforts whenever possible.
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Category Archives: NLRB
NLRB Poster Rule Struck Down, Again
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) just can’t win for losing these days. First, the Supreme Court decided that a two-member “rump” (of the usual five-member Board) was not authorized to conduct NLRB business. This threw about 600 decisions into doubt, as they were issued after the terms of the other three members had expired. Next, federal courts held up the NLRB’s efforts to make rules that would require employers to post a notice of union rights and would speed up union elections. Then, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that President Obama’s effort to solve that two-member problem by making three recess appointments to the Board had failed, and that the Board still lacked the necessary quorum (at least three members) required to do any business.
The Obama administration recently appealed that last decision to the Supreme Court, but the D.C. Circuit wasn’t finished yet: Yesterday, that Court struck down the NLRB’s posting requirement as a violation of employer free speech rights. This requirement had been on hold while the Court heard arguments and made its decision, so the opinion hasn’t changed the status quo. It will take a Supreme Court opinion (in favor of the NLRB, quite unlikely) to get these posters up in the workplace.
The Court of Appeals opinion focused mainly on the Board’s methods of enforcing the posting requirement. The Court found that the Board didn’t have the authority to penalize the employer for failing or refusing to put up the poster (by, for example, making failure to post an unfair labor practice, creating a legal presumption that failure to post showed an anti-union bias, or extending the statute of limitations for employees to file a charge with the NLRB if their workplace had no poster informing them of their rights). The basis for this holding was employer free speech. The NLRB is not allowed to penalize employers for saying what they wish about unions, as long as no coercion or threats are involved. By the same token, the Court reasoned, the NLRB can’t force employers to “speak” by punishing them for failing to hang the poster.
It’s interesting to me how much firepower has been levied against the NLRB lately, especially about something so basic as a workplace rights poster. Employers are already required to hang posters about health and safety, discrimination laws, the minimum wage, and more, so I would have thought this type of requirement wouldn’t raise much employer ire. Because they are such a routine feature of the workplace landscape, most employees ignore them, in my experience. So why all the uproar about adding one more poster to the bulletin board?
Based on all of the recent activity against the NLRB, as well as the fights in the past couple of years over public employee unions, right to work laws, collective bargaining rights, and so on, it seems clear that the opposition to the NLRB is about more than posters. These lawsuits haven’t been brought by individual employers, but by large employer advocacy groups, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce. This agency — and the rights it enforces — are under sustained attack by business groups. The Board has been prevented from issuing regulations, issuing opinions, or stepping in to resolve disputes over elections. The recess appointments and two-member rump strategy were efforts to continue doing business despite Congress’s continued failure to confirm new Board members. President Obama has responded by nominating a bipartisan package of five members (the Board is bipartisan by design), but Congress still hasn’t taken action. With insufficient members and such fierce opposition, it’s unclear at this point what the Board can do to get back on its feet.
Posted in NLRB
Authority of the NLRB In Question . . . Again
Last week, the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided an appeal of an unfair labor practices case from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). (The case is Noel Canning v. NLRB.) The facts of the case are not complicated: An employer and a union had a dispute as to whether the two had reached an agreement, in their final negotiating session, about how much of a proposed pay raise would go into the pension fund. The employer claimed no agreement had been reached, and it rejected the union’s vote on the matter. The union claimed an agreement had been reached, and that the employer committed an unfair labor practice by refusing to treat it as a collective bargaining agreement.
As to those facts, the union won the appeal. But the rest of the opinion eclipsed the victory. The Court found that three of the NLRB’s five members were appointed in violation of the Constitution. If this interpretation is adopted by the Supreme Court, it means not only that the Board lacks a quorum and has no authority to do anything (the Supreme Court decided that two members won’t cut it in 2010); it probably also means the NLRB won’t have enough Board members to act any time soon — unless and until the Democrats get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Why? The Board has been extremely active in trying to enforce and expand employee rights of late — and one side of the Congressional aisle is not happy about it. As I’ve posted recently, the NRLB has made a recent priority of enforcing employee rights to speak to each other about the terms and conditions of employment, whether on social media sites or during workplace investigations that the employer would prefer to keep confidential. The NLRB also tried to issue a couple of regulations that would have benefited employees, one to require employers to post a notice of labor rights and the other to speed up union elections. Both regulations were stopped by lawsuits filed by pro-business groups. How do Congressional Republicans feel about the NLRB? Here’s John Boehner’s view: “The Obama administration has consistently used the NLRB to impose regulations that hurt our economy by fostering uncertainty in the workplace and telling businesses where they can and cannot create jobs.” In fact, most of the Republican Senators and Speaker Boehner filed briefs in last week’s lawsuit, on the side of the employer.
Republican opposition to President Obama’s nominees to the Board led to the case last week. Presumably because he felt his nominees would be subjected to a filibuster (and therefore, not confirmed), the President appointed them pursuant to the recess appointments clause of the Constitution, which doesn’t require Senate confirmation. (This has become common practice by frustrated presidents of late, both Democrat and Republican.) However, the Court of Appeals found that the President’s appointments didn’t meet the constitutional requirements. First of all, the Court found that such appointments may be made only during “the” recess — in other words, the break between Senate sessions — not during any recess in Senate business. Because the President appointed his nominees during an “intrasession” recess, those appointments were not truly recess appointments. Second, the Court found that the recess appointment power may be used only to fill vacancies that arise during that same recess, which was not the case for the three seats the nominees were appointed to fill. This second requirement will limit the recess appointment power to near extinction.
This is one Court of Appeals’ opinion. Notably, the Board itself has said that it “respectfully disagrees” with the decision, and will continue to perform its duties. It will take a Supreme Court decision to decide the issue once and for all. But if the Court upholds this decision, recess appointments will be much less common. Which means nominees will get to their posts only if confirmed by the Senate, where filibusters and threats of same have held up even routine appointments. If you were thinking the change to the Senate filibuster rules would solve this problem, it won’t: Despite being called “filibuster reform,” those rules don’t do much to the filibuster. They speed up debate on lower-level nominees, but the debate has to start before it can gain steam — and the rules still require a cloture vote (60 votes or more) for that.
Posted in NLRB, Uncategorized
Confidentiality of Workplace Investigations
Workplace complaints and investigations can polarize a workplace. If your company has to investigate sexual harassment, bullying, or other serious problems, chances are good that employees will be talking about it and choosing sides. Of course, some of this is inevitable: We’re only human, right? But employers often try to minimize the fallout — in lost productivity, damaged reputations, or even changed stories and manufactured evidence — by requiring confidentiality. Employees who are interviewed as part of an investigation are routinely told that they may not discuss the investigation with other employees and may not reveal the facts they learn during the interview.
In the past few months, however, a couple of government agencies have cautioned employers not to go too far in trying to stop employee discussions. First, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) weighed in. In the case of Banner Estrella Medical Center, an HR consultant asked employees who had made a complaint not to discuss the matter with coworkers while the investigation was ongoing. The NLRB found that this request violated employees’ rights to discuss the terms and conditions of employment with each other. Prohibiting employee discussions of an ongoing investigation is allowed only if the employer can show that it has a legitimate business justification outweighing the employees’ rights. For example, if a witness needed protection, evidence was in danger of being destroyed, testimony was in danger of being fabricated, or the employer needed to prevent a cover-up, the NLRB indicated that these facts could justify a confidentiality requirement. However, the requirement must be based on facts specific to the investigation, rather than a general, blanket approach to all investigations.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has also questioned broad confidentiality requirements. As Lorene Schaefer reports in a blog post, the Buffalo, New York, office of the EEOC sent an employer a letter about its confidentiality policy. The EEOC stated that threatening to discipline or fire employees who discussed a sexual harassment complaint with anyone was illegal retaliation. Discussing harassment complaints with others is a form of “protected opposition” to illegal practices under Title VII. The letter also indicated that employees subject to such a confidentiality rule might believe they could be disciplined or fired for discussing harassment with the EEOC.
So what should employers do, in light of these opinions? It appears that blanket “gag orders” might create some risk going forward. However, a more limited confidentiality rule (for example, one that asks employees not to discuss what is said in the actual investigative interviews, as opposed to the underlying facts) could still pass muster. And, if you have specific concerns, based on the facts of the case, about falsification of evidence or witnesses talking to each other to “get their stories straight,” the NLRB opinion would still allow a confidentiality requirement. However, there are still a lot of grey areas here.
What’s more clear: Employers should do what they can on their end to maintain confidentiality. This includes, for example, revealing only the facts necessary to conduct a thorough interview. The accused employee must be told all of the allegations, but not every witness will need to hear the details. Employers should also take this as yet another cue to be speedy in conducting the investigation. The quicker a complaint is investigated and laid to rest, the less time there is for workplace chatter to do damage.
Written on December 19, 2012 at 4:07 pm
Posted in Discrimination and Harassment, NLRB, Workplace Rules and Policies
Tags: confidentiality, EEOC, investigation, NLRB, protected activity, retaliation
Can an Arbitration Agreement Waive the Right to Bring a Class Action?
For at least two decades, employers nationwide have been requiring employees to sign arbitration agreements. In a typical arbitration agreement, the employee gives up the right to sue over employment-related claims, instead agreeing to have such disputes heard in an arbitration proceeding. (Twenty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Gilmer v. Interstate/Johnson Lane, in which it made clear that employees could be required to arbitrate claims protected by statute, such as discrimination claims. Many employers and their lawyers interpreted this case as a green light to impose arbitration agreements on employees.)
Advocates for employees have brought piles of cases challenging arbitration agreements, arguing that the rules by which these agreements are judged should be different when one party has all or most of the bargaining power, as is the case in the employment relationship — particularly when the employee is required to sign the agreement as a condition of employment. (Generally, employees would prefer to proceed publicly, before a jury of their peers, with all of the protections offered by the judicial system, rather than privately, before a professional arbitrator whose decision is largely unappealable and who has a much freer hand in deciding which evidence to admit, how long the proceeding will last, and so on.) For the most part, however, these cases have failed, and arbitration agreements have been upheld. Progressive members of Congress have introduced various versions of legislation (here’s a recent example) that would prohibit the enforcement of pre-dispute arbitration agreements in consumer, civil rights, and employment cases, but have had no success to date.
But the legal landscape is different in California, where state law is more protective of employees, consumers, and others who often find themselves at the mercy of more powerful adversaries. The California Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal have continually refused to enforce arbitration agreements that overreach in favor of the employer. In the case of Armendariz v. Foundation Health Psychcare Services, the California Supreme Court held that arbitration agreements may be enforced as to statutory claims (such as discrimination) only if they comply with five rules intended to ensure that the employee’s claims receive a fair hearing. These rules, called the Armendariz factors, are:
The agreement can’t limit the damages and other remedies available to employees. If, for example, an employee would be entitled to ask for punitive damages in court, such damages must also be available in arbitration.
The employee must be allowed to conduct sufficient discovery — the opportunity to seek documents and information regarding the dispute. The Court noted that employers typically hold most of the relevant information in an employment dispute, and limiting the employee’s ability to collect that evidence could unfairly affect the outcome of the case.
The arbitrator must issue a written decision that includes the essential findings and conclusions on which the award is based. The intent of this rule is to give employees sufficient information to appeal the decision, even though appeals of arbitration awards are quite limited.
The employer must pay all costs and fees that are unique to arbitration. In other words, an employer can’t make it more expensive for an employee to arbitrate than it would have cost to bring a claim in court.
The agreement must provide for neutral arbitrators.
Also unique to California is the state’s protection of an employee’s right to bring a class or collective action: a dispute brought on behalf of a group of similarly situated employees who have the same claim against the employer (for example, that the employer improperly failed to provide rest breaks or pay overtime). Many arbitration agreements preclude not only class actions in court, but also class or collective arbitration proceedings. Instead, employees agree to bring their disputes only on their own behalf as individuals.
In the case of Gentry v. Superior Court, the California Supreme Court laid out some more factors for courts to consider in deciding whether to enforce this type of agreement, including the size of the potential damages, the potential for retaliation against employees, the likelihood that employees who aren’t part of the proceedings may be ignorant of their rights, and other real-world facts that might pose an obstacle to employees seeking to vindicate their statutory rights through individual arbitration proceedings. Despite the language of an arbitration agreement, a court can order class arbitration of claims that cannot be waived under California law (such as the right to overtime) if it decides that a group proceeding would be significantly more effective at vindicating and enforcing employee rights.
California courts have continued to apply the Gentry case despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding, in AT&T v. Concepcion, that California courts may no longer prohibit the enforcement of class action waivers in arbitration agreements entered into by consumers. And last week, the National Labor Relations Board gave the state some support: The NLRB ruled that arbitration agreements prohibiting group actions violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), even at companies where employees are not represented by a union. The NLRA protects the rights of all employees to engage in concerted activity to try to improve the terms and conditions of their employment, whether through a union or otherwise. The NLRB found that prohibiting group proceedings in arbitration violates this right.
Written on January 9, 2012 at 5:05 pm
Posted in Employment Law, NLRB
Tags: arbitration agreement, Armendariz, class action, class arbitration, Concepcion, Federal Arbitration Act, Gentry, Gilmer
NLRB: Non-Union Employer Shouldn’t Have Fired Employees Over Facebook Posts
As I’ve discussed in a couple of previous posts, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been very active recently in the area of social media. Not only by creating its own accounts (like a Facebook page), but also by going after employers who discipline and fire employees over their online posts. Last week, an administrative law judge for the NLRB issued the Board’s first Facebook decision. (According to the NLRB’s press release about the case, this is the first Facebook case to go all the way through a hearing and a decision by a judge.) And here’s a red flag for the majority of employers whose employees aren’t unionized: The case was against a non-union employer.
In the case, brought against the nonprofit group Hispanics United of Buffalo (HUB), a group of employees had posted comments to a coworker’s personal Facebook page (the employees used their own computers and posted on their own time; there was no allegation that they used the employer’s resources). A HUB employee, Ms. Cruz-Moore, had apparently been criticizing the performance of her coworkers. Another employee, Ms. Cole-Rivera, posted this comment on her own Facebook page about it: “Lydia Cruz a coworker feels that we don’t help our clients enough at HUB I about had it! My fellow coworkers how do u feel?” A group of coworkers responded, mostly by saying that they worked hard and that clients who complained wanted services the group didn’t provide. At some point, Ms. Cruz-Moore chimed in, asking the original poster to “stop with ur lies about me.” A few days later, five of the posters were fired. They were told that their posts constituted bullying and harassment of Ms. Cruz-Moore. (In a sad and strange twist, they were also told that Ms. Cruz-Moore had suffered a heart attack after reading the posts.)
The administrative law judge found that the firings violated the employees’ rights, under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, to engage in concerted activity for the purpose of mutual aid or protection. These rights apply to union and non-union employees alike. The judge found that the Facebook discussion was “a first step towards taking group action to defend themselves” against Ms. Cruz-Moore’s criticisms, which they could reasonably have believed she was going to take to HUB management. By firing them, HUB precluded the employees from acting as a group in response to the complaints about their performance. The judge also found that HUB essentially admitted that it viewed the fired employees as a group engaged in concerted activity because it lumped them together in firing them.
According to a report issued last month by the NLRB’s General Counsel office, the NLRB has been involved recently in 14 cases involving social media. In four of the cases, the NLRB concluded that the employees’ Section 7 rights had been violated; in five cases, the NLRB found that the employees had not been engaged in protected activity, either because only one employee was involved (and therefore, there was no “concerted” activity) or because the employees were not trying to improve the terms and conditions of their employment (so their activity was not “protected”). In a handful of cases, the NLRB found that the employer’s social media policy was too broad, because employees could interpret it to prohibit protected activity, and in one case the Board found against a union that had posted a YouTube video of union organizers interrogating employees at a non-union workplace about their immigration status.
Written on September 14, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Tags: concerted activity, facebook, NLRB, protected activity, social media
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Why is this important:
With the ability to add custom information to specific locations on the map, command staff and analysts can provide officers with additional context to their patrol locations. You can even add hyperlinks to specific POI descriptions, allowing you to add live camera feeds if available for that location. This can provide command staff and officers out on patrol with real-time intelligence.
In addition to live camera feeds, you can link POIs to photographs, documents, or even other web sites or applications to provide richer levels of detail.
How to use POIs:
In addition to the map, POIs are also displayed in the Data View when it is open. By default, the Data View contains every POI that is displayed on the map, but it can be filtered more by entering a search term in the “Filter” box on the upper right side of the Data View, right below the blue bar.
Clicking "Edit" allows you to update fields in the POI.
Clicking any of the markers opens up a window displaying the information contained within a POI. The details view shows the title of the POI, its description, and any hyperlinks that are associated with it (for instance to a web-based camera feed).
Links can also be added from the details view by clicking the "Add Links" button.
Clicking "Add Topic" allows you to attach a topic to a POI. Topics and messages allow information to be shared between officers and command staff. Once a topic is added, it can be opened by clicking its title in the POI view. Messages can be added to it by anyone with permission to do so, by typing the new message in the text field and clicking "Save."
The search bar in the upper-right corner of the screen provides for flexible searching of POIs. The details of POI in the search results can be opened by clicking on the title of the result.
The entire set of POIs from a search can be added to the map by clicking the "Add Selected" button. By default all the results are added to the layer, but individual POIs can be hidden by unchecking them before adding the layer.
Multiple layers can be added at a time to help identify specific areas for attention. Once added, layers can be shown or hidden by toggling the button to the right of the search bar.
POIs can be added by clicking the crosshair icon on the left or the "Add a POI" button in the Data View. Once in add mode a POI can be added anywhere on the map by clicking. Once the location is chosen the POI edit view is displayed so that the title, description and icon can be added. Once saved the details view is shown so hyperlinks can be added.
If you are interested in learning more about this new feature or our patrol operations management solution as a whole, click the button below and we'll quickly get a demo call scheduled for you and your team.
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Politicssource
Bill Clinton says he signed unconstitutional DOMA
By Carolyn Lochhead on March 8, 2013 at 11:23 AM
Former President Bill Clinton
Former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat who signed into law and implemented a wave of anti-gay rules and legislation, including the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban on gays in the military, now repealed, and DOMA, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, now before the Supreme Court, issued an op-ed today repudiating, sort of, his action.
Clinton: “The justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution.”
He stops well short of an apology, saying only that “our laws may at times lag behind our best natures.”
In fact, he says he sought to soften DOMA’s effect, which took the full force of law with his signature, saying he included a signing statement, which has no force of law: :”When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that ‘enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.’”
His gay former aide Richard Socarides notes Richard Socarides that it is “extremely rare for former Presidents to admit mistakes made in office, and rarer still for one to disavow a major piece of legislation.”
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on DOMA March 27.
Clinton’s bungling of the gays in the military issue upon first taking office in 1993 not only led to codifying the ban but unsettled his first year in office. By 1996, Republicans had discovered same-sex marriage as a potent wedge issue. Clinton succumbed easily, as did an overwhelming majority of the Senate, with the quite notable exceptions of California’s two senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and the House.
Socarides captures the atmosphere at the time: “Inside the White House, there was a genuine belief that if the President vetoed the Defense of Marriage Act, his reëlection could be in jeopardy.”
Now it’s safe for Clinton to come out. Perhaps his actions have been weighing on his conscience.
Carolyn Lochhead
acne treatment on Presidential Debate 3: Soundbite lines coming fast and furious
acne treatment on Lost Opportunity? Obama doesn’t slam back on Pell Grants
acne on Lost Opportunity? Obama doesn’t slam back on Pell Grants
Preston Faris on Bad sign: Even David Axelrod can’t say that Obama won the debate (VIDEO)
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Reading Lists +
Home › Undocumented: A Worker's Fight
Undocumented: A Worker's Fight
by Duncan Tonatiuh
Harry N. Abrams
8/7/2018, hardcover
Undocumented is the story of immigrant workers who have come to the United States without papers. Every day, these men and women join the work force and contribute positively to society. The story is told via the ancient Mixtec codex--accordion fold--format. Juan grew up in Mexico working in the fields to help provide for his family. Struggling for money, Juan crosses over into the United States and becomes an undocumented worker, living in a poor neighborhood, working hard to survive. Though he is able to get a job as a busboy at a restaurant, he is severely undercompensated--he receives less than half of the minimum wage! Risking his boss reporting him to the authorities for not having proper resident papers, Juan risks everything and stands up for himself and the rest of the community.
"From the beginning, the format of this book shows its uniqueness with the codex form used by Mixteco."--The News & Observer
"By focusing on the narrative of one immigrant worker, Tonatiuh breaks the mammoth issues of immigration and workers rights into an easy-to-swallow bite, allowing the reader to easily engage with an often intimidating topic. The personal is again political. Highly recommended."--Kirkus Reviews
Duncan Tonatiuh was born in Mexico City and grew up in San Miguel de Allende. His books have received many awards over the years. He currently lives in San Miguel with his wife and children but travels to the US often.
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11th century Buddhist monastery values its traditional discipline in Ladakh
By Jigmet Wangchuk, ANI, Mar 30, 2010
Ladakh, India -- Lukhil Monastery in Ladakh region has continued to maintain its ancient practices of Buddhist culture to this date.
The ancient rituals of the three basic Pratimoksha or, personal liberation disciplines, which are the basic Buddhist teachings, are observed at the Lukhil Monastery in Jammu and Kashmir region, even today.
Founded in the later half of the 11th century, it belongs to the Yellow Hat Sect, founded by Tsongkhapa; a famous teacher of Tibetan Buddhism whose activities led to the formation of the Gelukpa School.
The monastery consists of a number of shrines inside its complex. Presently, it serves not just as a residence of approximately 120 Buddhist monks but also as a school, where there are almost 30 students.
"King Lhachen Gyalpo, the 5th King of Ladakh, converted his palace into monastery in the 11th century. In the 15th century, Lama Nawang Chosje a famous pupil of Tsongkhapa (founder of Gelugpa order) converted the lamas to reformed doctrines of the Gelugpa order, and thus founded the monastery afresh as a Gelugpa establishment," says Thupstan Stantar, Head Monk of Lukhil Monastery.
It is believed that the monastery has been served by the succeeding reincarnations of Naris Rinpoche.
The two Dukhangs, or assembly halls, contain numerous statues of Bodhisattva, Amitabha (Buddha of the West), Sakyamuni (the Historical Buddha), Maitreya (the Future Buddha or Buddha of Compassion) and Tsongkhapa (Founder of the yellow-hat sect).
The main image in one of the Dukhangs is that of Avalokiteshvara, a Bodhisattva who embodies the compassion of all Buddhas, who is represented with 1,000 arms and 11 heads.
Lobzang Tharchin, a monk at Lukhil Monastery, said: "The wall painting you have seen out here are not that much old, it may be not more than 30 years old, and the monastery has two main prayer halls where all the monks of the monastery gather during the annual ritual prayers twice a year."
Every year the monastery serves as the venue of Dosmoche, one of the most popular fairs and festivals of Leh. During the event, sacred dances are also performed at the monastery.
This event takes place from 27th day to 29th day of the 12th month of the Tibetan calendar, which often corresponds with the last week of February.
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Postdoctoral Fellow in Medical Physics
A postdoctoral position in the Medical Physics Division of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, is available immediately for an individual who has recently received a Ph.D in medical physics, biophysics, physics or engineering. The position will emphasize on research initially with the possibility of entering the Medical Physics Residency program for clinical training. In addition, a CAMPEP-accredited medical physics certificate can be earned by a candidate without formal medical physics graduate training. The research will be focused on developing technologies for adaptive radiotherapy. Knowledge in areas of radiation physics, medical imaging, machine learning and/or radiomics is helpful.
About Medical College of Wisconsin
Medical College of Wisconsin is a major private, academic institution dedicated to leadership and excellence in education, research and patient care. The Department of Radiation Oncology has full spectrum of radiation therapy equipment. Currently, there are 20 radiation oncologists, 17 faculty/staff physicists and over 10 postdocs/residents within the medical physics division. The departmental educational programs include CAMPEP accredited medical physics residency and certificate programs. The Medical College of Wisconsin has strong biophysics and medical imaging research programs available for collaboration.
Connections working at Medical College of Wisconsin
Tenure Track Position in Physics Pedagogy at the rank of Assistant Professor Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Ryerson University - Dept. of Physics 4 Days Ago
Physics Postdoctoral Research Position in Radiation Oncology focused on Light Ion Radiation Therapy Jacksonville, Florida
Mayo Clinic Florida 1 Week Ago
Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Scientist in Biomedical Imaging and Medical Physics Dallas, Texas
Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center 1 Month Ago
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Full info available on tabs to right of page for each service listed or by clicking on headings
Citizen information office :
The Citizens Information Board is the statutory body which supports the provision of information, advice and advocacy on a broad range of public and social services. It provides the Citizens Information website, www.citizensinformation.ie, and supports the voluntary network of Citizens Information Centres and the Citizens Information Phone Service 1890 777 121*. It also funds and supports the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS) 1890 283 438*.
The Citizens Information Board also provides a website aimed at people who are unemployed or facing an unemployment situation. This site is called www.losingyourjob.ie and a new website on mortgage and rent arrears in conjunction with the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS) called www.keepingyourhome.ie.
Carmelite CIC
email: carmelite@citinfo.ie
Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 9.30am to 1.00pm and 2.00pm to 4.30pm, FLAC: By appointment only contact 01 4005971, MABS: By appointment only contact 01 6706555, Mondays 2pm-4.00pm Refugee Information Service
Wheelchair-accessible: Yes
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
What our Counselling Service Offers:
The service is for adults and offers one to one non-directive counselling.
We all need support in times of distress difficult situations such as, Bereavement,Marital/Relationship Difficulties, Anxiety, Stress,low self esteem, Depression, Issues relation to emotional growth & personal development.
For Further information phone :4754673 or email info@carmelitecommunitycentre.com
CARE AFTER PRISON (CAP Project)
Information, referral & support
Recently released from prison and from the Dublin? Need some extra support to make your re-integration into the community more successful and crime free? Then Our service based in the Carmelite community centre maybe be what you need. The CAP project is a service which assists ex-offenders their families & victims of crime.We aim to help you set life goals while linking you into other services that best suit your needs.
you can make an appointment by contacting
Stephen 01-4720973
For more information on this service which is free
careafterprison@gmail.com
The centre has a large variety of meeting and activity rooms available to community and private groups. Capacity ranges from 20 to 100 people.
The centre boasts a full size sports hall, ideal for court based sports, drama groups. dance and for community recitals.
It can also be used for exam and study groups who need a larger space.
More info on available rooms and rates can be requested from info@carmelitecommunitycentre.com
If you wish to inquire about booking a room please fill out inquiry form and return by email or post.
Room Booking Inquiry Form
If you have received a reply to your inquiry and wish to confirm your booking, or you have definite dates and details and wish to go ahead with a booking, please fill out the booking form below or pick up a copy from the centre.
Booking-Application-Form
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Geochemical detectives use lab mimicry to look back in time
Washington, DC—New work from a research team led by Carnegie’s Anat Shahar contains some unexpected findings about iron chemistry under high-pressure conditions, such as those likely found in the Earth’s core, where iron predominates and creates our planet’s life-shielding magnetic field. Their results, published in Science, could shed light on Earth’s early days when the core was formed through a process called differentiation—when the denser materials, like iron, sunk inward toward the center, creating the layered composition the planet has today.
Earth formed from accreted matter surrounding the young Sun. Over time, the iron in this early planetary material moved inward, separating from the surrounding silicate. This process created the planet’s iron core and silicate upper mantle. But much about this how this differentiation process occurred is still poorly understood, due to the technological impossibility of taking samples from the Earth’s core to see which compounds exist there.
Seismic data show that in addition to iron, there are “lighter” elements present in the core, but which elements and in what concentrations they exist has been a matter of great debate. This is because as the iron moved inward toward the core, it interacted with various lighter elements to form different alloyed compounds, which were then carried along with the iron into the planet’s depths.
Which elements iron bonded with during this time would have been determined by the surrounding conditions, including pressure and temperature. As a result, working backward and determining which iron alloy compounds were created during differentiation could tell scientists about the conditions on early Earth and about the planet’s geochemical evolution.
The team—including Carnegie’s Jinfu Shu and Yuming Xiao—decided to investigate this subject by researching how pressures mimicking the Earth’s core would affect the composition of iron isotopes in various alloys of iron and light elements. Isotopes are versions of an element where the number of neutrons differs from the number of protons. (Each element contains a unique number of protons.)
Because of this accounting difference, isotopes’ masses are not the same, which can sometimes cause small variations in how different isotopes of the same element are partitioned in, or are “picked up” by, either silicate or iron metal. Some isotopes are preferred by certain reactions, which results in an imbalance in the proportion of each isotope incorporated into the end products of these reactions—a process that can leave behind trace isotopic signatures in rocks. This phenomenon is called isotope fractionation and is crucial to the team’s research.
Before now, pressure was not considered a critical variable affecting isotope fractionation. But Shahar and her team’s research demonstrated that for iron, extreme pressure conditions do affect isotope fractionation.
More importantly, the team discovered that due to this high-pressure fractionation, reactions between iron and two of the light elements often considered likely to be present in the core—hydrogen and carbon—would have left behind an isotopic signature in the mantle silicate as they reacted with iron and sunk to the core. But this isotopic signature has not been found in samples of mantle rock, so scientists can exclude them from the list of potential light elements in the core.
Oxygen, on the other hand, would not have left an isotopic signature behind in the mantle, so it is still on the table. Likewise, other potential core light elements still need to be investigated, including silicon and sulfur.
“What does this mean? It means we are gaining a better understanding of our planet’s chemical and physical history,” Shahar explained. “Although Earth is our home, there is still so much about its interior that we don’t understand. But evidence that extreme pressures affect how isotopes partition, in ways that we can see traces of in rock samples, is a huge step forward in learning about our planet’s geochemical evolution.”
Caption: An illustration of how laboratory techniques can tell scientists like Anat Shahar and her team about how elements such as iron behave under the extreme pressures found in the Earth’s core. Background image courtesy of Vadim Sadovski, additional imagery courtesy of Anat Shahar.
This work was supported by a Blaustein Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, CNRS PICS Carmelts, and eDARI/CINES.
Matter at Extreme States
Reference to Person:
High Pressure Physics
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Caseclosed2.com
This site is about personal experiences and comments about a variety of topics of the day
Image December 18, 2013 December 18, 2013 caseclosed2
R. Kelly Responds to Past Sexual Assault Case
R. Kelly Responds To Sexual Assault Accusations In Village Voice Article
by Yohance Kyles (@HUEYmixwitRILEY) December 18th, 2013 @ 9:25am
(AllHipHop News) R. Kelly probably felt he would be spending this time focusing on publicizing his latest album Black Panties, but thanks to a scathing article published in The Village Voice, the R&B star’s past has become the central story in the media. In the article, former Chicago Sun-Times journalist Jim DeRogatis recounted tales and reports he says proves Kelly had engaged in numerous sex acts with underaged girls.
[ALSO READ: R. Kelly Talks Black Panties, Lady Gaga, & Classic Songs In CRWN Interview]
R. Kelly was asked about The Village Voice piece during an interview with Atlanta’s V-103 radio station. Speaking with host Big Tigger, Kells makes an analogy between his life at the moment and the game of football, thanks his fans, and offers a message to his detractors.
Well, I feel like I got the football, man. I’m running towards the touchdown. Stopping and looking back, mess around and get tackled. And I also want my fans and everybody out there to know that I really appreciate everybody’s support from the very beginning of my career. But as you know, when you get on top of anything, it’s very windy up there. It’s not just about getting on top, it’s about holding your balance once you get up there. You have to be spiritually a climber. So I feel good about Black Panties… As long as I got my fans screaming my name around the world and buying my records, and supporting R. Kelly, everybody that doesn’t agree with it should listen to the last song on Black Panties.
The final track on Kelly’s Black Panties is “Shut Up.” The song opens with the lines, “This song goes out to all the people out there that be running they mouth/ And they don’t know what the hell they saying/Shut up.”
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CenLamar | Established 2006
The True Story of CenLamar
The Louisiana Republican Party: Suicide Bombers
by Lamar White, Jr
On Monday morning, the first full day of the Louisiana legislative special session, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne announced more bad news: The current year’s fiscal deficit wasn’t $940 million; it was actually $957 million, due to $17 million in FEMA money from Hurricane Gustav that is still outstanding. A few hours later, the president of the University of Louisiana system said that Nicholls State may have to close temporarily for two weeks during the spring semester, even under a “best case budget scenario.” And at the end of the day, the Plaquemines Parish Public Defenders Office announced it’d be closing its doors on Wednesday. “It’s run out of money,” Julia O’Donoghue of The Times-Picayune reported on Twitter.
We also learned on Monday, in a report by the legislative auditor, that, due to the accounting gimmicks of former Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Bond Commission (which is chaired by Treasurer John Kennedy), Louisiana will incur $71 million in interest from the use of bond premiums and $160 million in interest from the use of a short-term bond defeasance, both of which were completely avoidable. Quoting:
During fiscal years 2011 through 2016, the Commission used bond premiums and executed bond defeasances to help address and reduce General Fund deficits by $545 million. As a result of these measures, the state will have to pay $231 million more in interest over the next 20 years. These practices have also pushed the state closer to its debt limit, which will limit the state’s borrowing capacity for capital outlay projects in the near future and increases the risk that the state’s credit rating will be downgraded by ratings agencies.
I’ll try my best to put this in layman’s terms (with the caveat that I am not an accountant): Under Bobby Jindal, year after year, Louisiana faced a budget deficit, but the law says you can’t use one-time or non-recurring money to pay for operational expenses. Jindal, with an assist from Kennedy and the Bond Commission, found a way around it, though.
The state can issue bonds for capital projects, and it has the option of agreeing to pay a higher interest rate in order to immediately capture money up-front; that’s called a bond premium. We could and should have used that up-front money, $210 million on a $2.3 billion general obligation bond, on actual projects; after all, that’s what the bond was supposed to be for. Instead, Gov. Jindal used it to plug shortfalls in the budget. Now, we’re on the hook to repay both the $210 million in premiums and an additional $71 million in interest payments over the next twenty years, with nothing to show for it.
“Ordinarily, bond proceeds are used to invest in capital outlay projects that have long-term benefits for the public such as roads and bridges,” the legislative auditor notes. “Thus, in future years when the state has to repay what it borrowed with interest, the citizens of Louisiana have the benefit of long-lasting capital improvements. In contrast, using bond premiums to reduce General Fund deficits burdens the state with paying back the premiums with interest without the added benefit of long- lasting capital improvements.”
But that’s not all. Monday’s report (which was actually sent out last Thursday) also revealed that Louisiana taxpayers would be on the hook for an additional $160 million in interest payments, which was also completely avoidable. Last year and the year before, we took $335 million that had been identified as a non-recurring surpluses (remember, you can’t use non-recurring money for operational expenses) and enacted a short-term bond defeasance. The bond defeasance allowed the Jindal administration the ability to use that money, once again, to plug a general budget deficit. “Act 55 of 2014 ($210 million) and Act 56 of 2015 ($125 million),” the report notes. “Each defeasance, respectively, used non- recurring surpluses from fiscal years 2013 and 2014 to set money aside during fiscal years 2014 and 2015 to make debt payments due in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.”
In the immediate short-term, the use of bond defeasances helped Gov. Jindal maintain his anti-tax pledge and his talking points on the presidential campaign trail. But as the legislative auditor points out, the net result is that Louisiana is now on the hook, in the long-term, for $160 million in interest payments. Again, we have nothing to show for it.
Under Jindal’s administration, according to the report, the Bond Commission “approved new projects faster than it can sell bonds to pay for them. Consequently, the new administration and legislature will face a $3.7 billion backlog of approved spending on capital outlay projects resulting in a reduced capacity for new projects until fiscal year 2024.”
When critics accused Gov. Jindal of “kicking the can down the road,” this is precisely what they meant. He boasted about slashing taxes and providing incentives for businesses, arguing that it would bolster the state’s economy. When it proved to be a failure and when the state no longer collected the revenue necessary to pay its bills, he shouldered us with long-term debt with the hopes of covering his tracks on the way out of the door.
As I mentioned in a previous piece, Louisiana should no longer be considered a laboratory for disaster capitalism. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. We cannot build a sustainable economy or create an optimal climate for business investment if we’re too broke to pay for infrastructure, education, and health care for disabled children, the elderly, and the indigent.
Something else happened on Monday: The Louisiana Republican Party debuted a 30-second hit piece on Gov. John Bel Edwards, which apparently will soon air statewide. The ad strings together snippets of Edwards on the campaign trail last year.
“Tell Gov. Edwards to keep his word,” the narrator implores. “Don’t raise taxes.”
Of course, it is undeniably true that Gov. Edwards said he didn’t “have a plan to raise taxes” when he was campaigning, because he didn’t. It’s also undeniably true he said he supported “growing the economy,” which is sensible. And he said all of these things months ago, well before the true nature of the state’s budget crisis ever came into focus. Indeed, as we learned on Monday morning from Commissioner Dardenne, the crisis continues to grow bigger by the day.
In the midst of the largest budget crisis in the state’s history, the Louisiana Republican Party hopes to flood the airwaves with an attack ad against a governor who has been in office only a month. The LA GOP, the party whose leaders are responsible for steering the state on the verge of financial calamity, is willfully refusing to confront reality and is engaging, instead, in a propaganda campaign intended to derail the only legitimate chance the state has to save itself from fiscal disaster. They’re accusing the new governor of being a liar, conveniently leaving out the fact that his assumptions about the state’s budget were informed by misleading projections and false estimates produced by his Republican predecessor.
As President Bill Clinton noted in his 2012 speech at the Democratic National Convention: “Now people ask me all the time, how we go four surplus budgets in a row? What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one word answer: Arithmetic.”
Today, the Louisiana Republican Party is proving that it doesn’t care about arithmetic.
It is cynically hoping that it can win with the same message that has buoyed them in the past: No new taxes. It’s a rigid orthodoxy, and in times like these, it’s also dangerous. Because when they attempt to convince the public to believe there is a way to solve the state’s financial crisis without additional revenue (i.e. taxes), they aren’t just acting in bad faith.
They’re behaving like suicide bombers, ideologues who are willing to blow up the entire state government on the altar of sacrifice to their anti-tax beliefs.
Posted in Social Activism
Prev John Bel Edwards: “It’s Time For Fiscal Responsibility In This State”
Next LA Treasurer John Kennedy Accidentally Destroys His Own Argument
Fredster says:
I’m sitting here reading these words and I’m simply gobsmacked. And for Kennedy to be the titular head of the Bond Commission, apparently knowing what was done with the state bonds and to then go on television with his decades old studies, is beyond belief. If there was ever a person who committed “crimes against the state” it’s Jindal.
John Toliver says:
I agree with Fredster. What I don’t understand is why no one is investigating and prosecuting Jindal and those in his administration who concocted and implemented these crimes and illegal uses of our tax money. Is this impossible to do?
Charmaine mceachern says:
Great piece, should be flooding the internet with this one, I intend to pass it along. I took JBE statement, that he had no plans to raise taxes, at face value, because I felt insecure about the Jindal Administrations book keeping, and now we find out he was conning the people, with his screwed up accounting, it unfolds with more bad news every day…..then I read yesterday that Appel and Co, want Higher ED. officials to calm down they are scaring the people……Really, how dare he, he was one of the leges who allowed this to happen, and now they are feeling the heat, well, it is not nearly hot enough, yet! We the people must accept some responsibility also, for not being diligent in holding the politicians accountable…there are petitions to recall JBE and for the love of me I don’t know why.
Javance Jones says:
This is what we will face if the State of Louisiana remains in Republican Control. People of Louisiana need to wake up and see what these guys are doing and get Rid of these crooks.
Bruce Magee says:
We don’t need new taxes anyway. We need to rescind the Bobby Jindal tax giveaways.
John Kline says:
The entire Legislature should be replaced. Most of them aided and abetted Jindal as he brought our state to financial ruin. All this done for his presidential campaign which was as big a fiasco as his terms as Governor.
earthmother says:
2011 Louisiana Laws
TITLE 14 — Criminal law
RS 14:134 — Malfeasance in office
Universal Citation: LA Rev Stat § 14:134
SUBPART F. OFFICIAL MISCONDUCT AND CORRUPT PRACTICES
§134. Malfeasance in office
A. Malfeasance in office is committed when any public officer or public employee shall:
(1) Intentionally refuse or fail to perform any duty lawfully required of him, as such officer or employee; or
(2) Intentionally perform any such duty in an unlawful manner; or
(3) Knowingly permit any other public officer or public employee, under his authority, to intentionally refuse or fail to perform any duty lawfully required of him, or to perform any such duty in an unlawful manner.
B. Any duty lawfully required of a public officer or public employee when delegated by him to a public officer or public employee shall be deemed to be a lawful duty of such public officer or employee. The delegation of such lawful duty shall not relieve the public officer or employee of his lawful duty.
C.(1) Whoever commits the crime of malfeasance in office shall be imprisoned for not more than five years with or without hard labor or shall be fined not more than five thousand dollars, or both.
(2) In addition to the penalty provided for in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection, a person convicted of the provisions of this Section may be ordered to pay restitution to the state if the state suffered a loss as a result of the offense. Restitution shall include the payment of legal interest at the rate provided in R.S. 13:4202.
Amended by Acts 1980, No. 454, §1; Acts 2002, 1st Ex. Sess., No. 128, §6; Acts 2010, No. 811, §1, eff. Aug. 15, 2011.
Practical Dem says:
I agree with everything up to the last paragraph, which I wish you would edit. Not that I don’t agree that they are taking actions that hurt real people for ideological reasons, but because it’s inflammatory and will cause pushback from an otherwise open moderate Republican voter. Really, I would very much like to share this with Republican-leaning friends that I think could be swayed on the issue of tax increases, but I can foresee the conversation veering into wildly unproductive waters around that last bit.
Charles Bowman says:
Treasurer Kennedy was a proponent of Vitter fiscal maneuverings. He looks and sounds like a Vitterer to me. Stir up the Gumbo Pac. The war for Louisiana is just beginning although most of us would rather it were already finished. We are post-Vitter, post Tea Party. We are living in a present day world where Trump and Sanders are resonating! The establishments of both parties are reeling and can’t withstand much stress! It is foolish of Republicans to believe that Tea Party ideology will continue to suffice even in Louisiana.
For the criminal part the big word is “Intent”.
Jim Brewer says:
Stole bond money to pay current expenses; got it.
It’s hard for me to believe that such a florid psychopath and his accomplices didn’t commit a few felonies along the way.
Leave aside all the political hoo-haw. Poor financial controls + sociopaths – equals out and out theft.
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MEC Website
The Accounts that Didn’t Bark: Iraq’s Hidden State Balances
1 comment | 29 shares
by Ahmed Tabaqchali
A 50,000-dinar banknote, Iraq’s highest denomination (worth around £33). Source: Rudaw
Iraq’s new prime minister, soon after being elected, wrote in an article to Iraqis that ‘when I assumed my duties, I found nothing but an almost empty treasury and an unenviable situation after 17 years of change.’
The PM was referring to the accounts he would have been introduced to upon taking office – the Ministry of Finance’s (MoF) accounts with the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI), which at the end of May had net balances of 2.4 trillion (trn) Iraqi Dinars (IQD), made up of deposits of IQD 4.2 trn and debt of IQD 1.8 trn (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: MoF deposits & debt held with the CBI, data as of end of May 2020 (see sources).
However, these are not the only government bank accounts, and neither are their balances the only ones, as the government isn’t fully cognisant of all of its cash balances. The existence of the other accounts were discussed in the Minister of Finance’s first TV interview as he explained that in order to meet the payment of salaries and pensions for May, trillions of dinars were identified as held in the accounts of a number of ministries and SOE’s, which were drawn upon while the government also borrowed from the TBI.
CBI data as of March show that the aggregate accounts for ministries with banks were a net of IQD 2.5 trn, made up of deposits of IQD 23.5 trn and debts of IQD 21.0 trn, while for SOEs they were a net of IQD 10.0 trn, made up of deposits of IQD 23.2 trn and debts of IQD 13.2 trn, (Figures 2 and 3 below). It’s likely that these net balances would have declined by late May, like those of the MoF’s accounts (Figures 2 and 3).
Figure 2: Ministries deposits & debt held with state banks, data as of end of March 2020 (see sources).
Figure 3: SOE deposits & debt held with state banks, data as of end of March 2020 (see sources).
The primary reason for the incomplete picture is that Iraq lacks what is a called a Treasury Single Account (TSA): a treasury’s consolidated account, either as a single account with sub-accounts or as a series of linked accounts, through which all the government’s revenues and payments are received and made. Instead, the government accounts’ structure is that the MoF has two bank accounts at the CBI, an IQD and a USD account (Figure 1), while ministries, State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) each of which have a single or multiple bank accounts with state owned banks, chiefly Rafidain Bank, Rasheed Bank and the Trade Bank of Iraq (TBI) (Figures 2 and 3).
Other reasons are that even though opening government accounts require the approval of the Minister of Finance or her/his authorised representatives, the MoF had no database of the number of bank accounts operational or dormant. Also, whereas the law mandates that reconciliation of all central government bank accounts be carried out regularly within set time limits, in practise these limits are regularly exceeded by ministries, and there is no reliable information about bank reconciliations for the accounts of SOEs (correct at least as of 2016–17).
The creation and operation of a Treasury Single Account (TSA) was initially mandated in the Financial Management Law (FML) 2004-Section 4(9), and its implementation was continuously discussed and agreed upon in successive engagements with both the World Bank and the IMF. Since then, however, progress never moved beyond the aspirational.
These discussions got a fresh impetus with the signing of the Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) with the IMF in 2016 following the ISIS conflict and the crash in oil revenues. The government implemented and committed to implement a number of steps towards establishing a TSA. Essentially these involved three broad steps: a full list of the government’s banks, compiled by the CBI and MoF; modernisation of the system to enable the operation of a TSA by end of 2016, by March 2017 develop plans for a phased development of a TSA; and a manual implementation of a TSA through implementing zero-cash balances, i.e. the regular sweeping of cash balances into the main account during 2017–18. These steps, as with past discussions, seem to have remained in the realms of aspiration.
Technical challenges in implementing the TSA were, and continue to be, a significant obstacle given that state banks – especially Rafidain and Rasheed Banks – are structurally weak, operate as state bureaucratic institutions, and have outdated systems. Crucially, these banks don’t have a modern core banking system, which means that their combined 300 or so branches are not connected, and each operates as a stand-alone bank. This, combined with their weak capacity, makes reconciling the government’s accounts across these branches extremely difficult. Far more daunting is the requirement for the balances in all of these accounts to be swept on a regular basis, daily or weekly, to the treasury’s main account, either manually or electronically.
As a consequence, since 2003, each ministry and SOE effectively have their own financial structure with almost full autonomy over their finances, all funded by the budget. Whether by design or a happy coincidence, this financial autonomy has enhanced the value of ministerial appointments within the Mushasasa Ta’ifia structure, and within its Wikala sub-structure for the appointments of senior civil servants. These appointments, within the Muhasasa’s super-structure, enable the control of state resources by the ethno-sectarian parties in inclusive governments, in proportion to the seats won by each in parliamentary elections.
Given this perspective, not only would the implementation of a full automated TSA, or even a manual facsimile, mean the loss of financial autonomy for each ministry and SOE – it would lead to the creation of a super-powerful MoF to control these finances, and potentially strengthen the role of the prime minister. All of which might be the real reasons behind the failure to implement a TSA.
The upshot is that the lack of a TSA effectively hampers the financial performance of the state, in-particular its cash management operations – and makes it impossible to monitor its budget execution. This is especially problematic during crises when oil revenues fall significantly below the level required for the state’s ability to meet its domestic obligations, especially the payment of salaries and pensions, forcing it into unnecessary borrowing or curtailing essential investment spending such as the provision of electricity.
While the data on these accounts are in aggregate form, without specific details, the overall patterns are revealing – especially the different behaviours of the accounts of ministries and SOEs, probably reflecting the varying autonomies enjoyed by each. During the crisis of 2014–17, the deposits of ministries declined substantially, while debt increased as the government squeezed the system to meet its obligations. In contrast, for SOEs their deposits dropped marginally and debts decreased (reflecting the drop in trade finance volumes). The government squeeze ended once the crisis was over, and the system reverted to normal as ministries’ deposits – and debts – increased significantly from mid-2018.
The need to squeeze the system is now much more pressing than it was in 2014–17, as the persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging slow and unsynchronised rebound from the global lockdown suggests the onset of rolling crises, which will mean continued pressures on government finances. While accessing these funds would not negate the need for real financial reforms, it would provide the government enough breathing space to execute some reforms, delay the need to borrow and offset any need to cut investment spending – at minimum it would delay the onset of the worst of the inevitable painful economic adjustments should the government fail to make meaningful reforms.
Acknowledgements & Sources
The information in this report is based on publicly available information in web sites, publications, presentations, and research reports as will be seen from the hyperlinks. Specifically, data on the accounts of the MoF, government ministries and State Owned Enterprises (SOE) are taken from the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) at here and here. Debts for Ministries & SOE’s include cash credits (regular debt) and pledged credit (debt to enable trade finance). The updated status on the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and on the accounts of government ministries and SOE’s are from the World Bank’s 2017 assessment of Iraq’s Public Financial Management. Information on the steps taken for the development of a TSA are from the IMF country reports 16/225, 16/379, 17/251, 19/248. All errors, omissions and mistakes are the author’s own.
Disclaimer: Ahmed Tabaqchali’s comments, opinions and analyses are personal views and are intended to be for informational purposes and general interest only and should not be construed as individual investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy, sell or hold any fund or security or to adopt any investment strategy. It does not constitute legal or tax or investment advice. The information provided in this material is compiled from sources that are believed to be reliable, but no guarantee is made of its correctness, is rendered as at publication date and may change without notice and it is not intended as a complete analysis of every material fact regarding Iraq, the region, market or investment.
Ahmed Tabaqchali is Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of AFC Iraq Fund and and Assistant Professor at the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). He tweets @AMTabaqchali
Posted In: Iraq
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Reid Calls for Solving ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Sooner Rather Than Later
Siobhan Hughes
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) on Wednesday called on Congress to figure out how to deal with the “fiscal cliff,” a mix of tax increases and spending cuts set for next year, “sooner rather than later,” saying he sees no benefit to waiting.
“I’m not for kicking the can down the road,” Mr. Reid said. “I think we’ve done that far too much.” Mr. Reid said that “we know what the issue is; we need to solve the issue. Waiting for a month, six weeks, six months–that’s not going to solve the problem.”
“I think that we should just roll up our sleeves and get it done,” he said.
Previous On Social Media, Winners Get the Last Word Next Democrat Heitkamp Wins Senate Seat in North Dakota
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← Just around the corner
“I could write a book on this experience …” →
If you build it, they won’t come.
Damn, if this isn’t the saddest thing I’ve read in a while, I don’t know what is.
… For Georgia, heat certainly plays a role, though the exact reason for the school’s precipitous decline in student attendance still seems to be a mystery. This year, the University of Georgia cut its student section capacity from 18,026 to 16,200. Despite overselling on purpose (17,212), the school’s scanners revealed this sad fact: An average of 28.8 percent of those who bought tickets didn’t show up to home games.
Benjamin Wolk, a senior at the school who is a football beat writer for the student newspaper The Red & Black, says one of the reasons for the no-shows is because of a stale game atmosphere that caters to the old money that wants the traditions of decades ago.
“One thing Clemson, Vanderbilt and Auburn all had in common was a crazy stadium atmosphere,” Wolk said. “At Georgia? Traditional music and a PA announcer barely yelling ‘Let’s make some noise ‘on third down.”
Vanderbilt? Dude, seriously?
This, mind you, after a year in which Georgia played two of the most thrilling games I’ve had the pleasure of watching between the hedges. But evidently it takes a shot or three of fake juice to get Wolk’s generation motivated to put in an appearance.
Or, even sadder, outright bribery.
Since taking the job in 2010, Arizona’s athletic director Greg Byrne says he actively has to push students to not only get to the game, but also stay there once they arrive. After he saw defections at halftime, the message on the back of shirts given to the students called the Zona Zoo this year was as blatant as he could make it: “Zona Zoo STAYS the entire game.”
He moved the band closer to the student section, brought in a group of people called the Zona Zoo Crew to keep people at the game and then actually decided to give away cash prizes, which students could only claim their prize after the game ended.
For its first two home games, the school gave away a total of $5,000 that was to be equally split among 10 student fans.
The punchline? “Even that wasn’t a complete success, as three of the $500 prizes went unclaimed.”
Overall, attendance may be up, but students sound like they don’t give a shit. And athletic department administrators sound like they don’t have much of a clue about how to rectify the situation. I mean, how much can better seating and Wi-fi access help fix this?
“People would rather stay at fraternity houses with unlimited food, booze and a big-screen TV than make the trek to the stadium… Phone service is terrible during games and it’s hard to stay in touch with the world for the three hours you’re in the stadium.”
Yes, because staying in touch with the world is what you worry about most when you spend your entertainment dollar. (No wonder I don’t go to the movies anymore.)
Hey, it’s Darren Rovell and a small sample size. I get that. But you can’t brush aside the attendance data he cites. The reality is that there’s a significant part of the student fan base at schools all over the country that’s tuning out of attending games. And once lost, it’s unlikely they’ll return.
There’s a limit on how convenient you can make the in-game experience. There are only so many entrances, bathrooms and concession stands you can cram into a 90,000-seat stadium. Immediate gratification is a losing proposition when you’re selling football tickets. Just ask some kid named Aaron Stillman:
“The problem is in all the other areas. There’s nothing to do while I’m waiting on line for an hour to get into the stadium, and there’s little added value from being in the stands watching the game.”
And he’s one of the ones who showed up.
The long-term consequences of this are troubling. If the number of folks buying tickets declines over time, there are basically two ways to embrace the suck: accept the shrinking numbers and raise prices to make up the lost revenue (see, Atlanta Braves) and tie your fate even more strongly to television revenues. Neither really thrills me.
Maybe I’m overreacting. But it sure feels like another way college football is slowly getting away from me.
198 responses to “If you build it, they won’t come.”
it will be interesting to see (if we see) the results of the season ticket survey that went around.
I want better cell/wifi service at the game and better PA music.
I bet most season ticket holders wanted more of the stuff that will drive students away.
The phone service in Sanford is terrible. You can’t send a text or tweet during the game to save your life.
Keeping up with other games, twitter, texting with friends, and a little engaging pop music between plays/timeouts would really improve the experience.
I think they’re starting to do a better job with other game scores/happenings, although that could be further improved. As for Twitter and texting, I don’t care, but I get that your generation does.
As far as PA music between plays… well, if I wanted to go to a pro hockey or basketball game, I’d go to a pro hockey or basketball game.
I agree and I almost said that I dont want it to turn into a hockey game. So something more than what we have now with the music, but significantly less than hockey/basketball.
Not sure where the generational divide lies with the cellular issue, I’ll be 37 in March, and improved cellular service would be a major bonus for me. Of course, I’m not the target for it, because I’ll be there whether the cellular service improves or not. But I would think that it could have a positive affect on students who have a ticket, but don’t care too much one way or the other whether they go or not. If they can still do all the stuff on their phone, may be more likely to get them in there.
For me, my buddies and I are spread out throughout the stadium. Would love to be able to text with them during the game………during away games when we’re all sitting in front of our tv’s, we text the whole game, with our ongoing commentary. If I could do that during the home games, it would increase the level of enjoyment for me, and by a pretty significant amount.
Plus, sometimes something has happened but they either don’t show a replay or whatever, and you just want some more detail on it. It’s nice to be able to text a buddy who may be watching on TV, where they give the updates, and get the info needed, or log onto Twitter where the news is probably on there too.
I certainly don’t blame the older crowd that has no interest in looking at their phone other than maybe during halftime. But there’s a whole lot of people that I think it would make a big difference for.
This is what I do. Commenting with friends through text and twitter. There are some great follows on twitter for college football.
Jesus. Texting with each other during games. I’m 46, I text, I get it. But during a game…My head would explode. I’d either be too drunk or too into for that.
“too into it”
dc_oliver
I don’t think there’s much denying that other stadiums do a better job of getting the crowd pumped up. If you were at Clemson or Auburn this past season, I think you’ll agree.
Yes, they do it with piped in music between downs. I’m all for that but I know some older alums are not. I think the tie breaker in this scenario should be our players. And you know the players love the piped in music. Why not give them what they want, and also make home crowds a little louder in the process?
I was at the Auburn game, and the crowd wasn’t any more pumped up for that game than the Georgia crowd was for South Carolina or LSU.
Sure, if you only take into account the big moments during the game. But I stand by my observation that the Auburn and Clemson crowds were consistently louder than Georgia’s, from kick off to the end of the 4th.
It’s hard to get loud when I have people sitting behind me the entire game telling me to sit down and shut up. Not sure what the perfect solution to that is, but I think more popular music between downs could help get the entire crowd fired up. I’m sure if the older folks at Clemson, Auburn, etc. can adjust, the folks in Athens can too.
The Clemson crowd was wild because it was a huge game, not because of piped in music.
Tell me the Auburn crowd was raucous throughout for Western Carolina, and maybe I’ll be impressed.
I was at Auburn, LSU and South Carolina this year – Auburn was the least loud of the three.
Auburn was playing a lesser opponent.
Ask LSU whether UGA or Auburn was better this year.
SC and LSU were electric. Mizzou was kind of alright, but subdued. The rest were just like somewhere you thought you had to be – and that is if you pay for season tickets. The games are at noon or at night. If the students don’t live on campus, they have nowhere to park. They can get a few spots if they are in place at 6:15 am (of course they can’t set up until the clock strikes 7:00 am). I don’t go in at the student gate, but I assume it’s not fun with all of them at one place, where everyone starts out a criminal until they are frisked and all of their bags/purses are checked and cleared of bottled water or anything else. UGA cops are trying to tow every car not parked perfectly in an approved spot and roaming isles trying to catch someone drinking. Is tailgating still banned on North campus? But hey, you can now get a refillable $8 coke and popcorn. The university has done everything in their power to discourage people other than big money donors to attend games. I don’t understand whey they are confused.
Most posters on this blog are pretty far removed from what students go through now to get into a game. I sneak booze all the time, but for a 19 year-old kid who wants to get drunk (like I do) during a game, it may mean getting arrested now that they’re all herded to one place and really scoured and frisked.
In 1997 there were cops there too, but they didn’t care unless you got really out of line or had something sticking out of your pocket. Let’s just say managed to get a LOT of booze into games.
This comment, plus Spence’s comment @ 11:04am and hassan’s @ 12:22pm, rolled together, pretty much encapsulate the items that need to be on GM’s checklist of things to address to fix the attendance issues.
And it’s not only students, either. Imagine how much more willing alumni would be to attend & buy season tickets if you also make it easier for them! North Campus tailgating was more about alumni/visiting fans than anything else.
I’d call the Mizzou crowd less subdued, and more (rightfully) nervous about a then-untested, but undefeated team facing a home team that nearly lost to a bad Tennessee squad and lost several offensive stars the weekend before.
I was referring to how the crowd was pumped up at the game, and in my mind how that is affected by game time, etc. USC was 4:30, LSU – 3:30, Mizzou – 12:00. That, along with every other deterrent the University has thrown at us is a big cause for students (and a lot of the faculty and regular season ticket holders in my section) not showing up or staying until the end of games. USC and LSU were LOUD. Mizzou, people stood and kind of cheered when we scored with some high fives. App State, 12:30, everybody just sat there and lightly clapped when we scored.
I’m 34 and if they start piping in music all the time like they do at Tech I’ll cancel my fucking season tickets. This is a HORRIBLE idea and I hate hate hate sitting at Tech games and having their GD shit blasted in my ears.
Look, if you go to a Braves game and someone hits a home run, they play that stupid music, then when it’s done the crowd is silent. Why? Because you can’t hear yourself cheer. I know students at Clemson, Tech, and other places jump up and down when they play that Euro-techno song, but nobody else is. It’s a horrible idea.
Stadiums cannot compete with the flashing lights and pretty noises of TV. But they have something TV does not and never will, which is a huge roar of the crowd and the excitement of seeing things happen. If it was up to me, I’d have a scoreboard going with other scores on it, being updated constantly, then take out the big jumbo screen, or at least only use it for replays of cool stuff and ads during timeouts (I get that revenue is a part of the process). In other words, FOCUS ON THE UNIQUENESS OF THE STADIUM EXPERIENCE, don’t try to make it TV.
Students aren’t coming to games for the same reasons that everyone else isn’t coming to games… the broadcasts are getting better and better as are TVs, and you can grab a beer out of your fridge. Dilute the experience down more and more with half-ass efforts to stay modern (piped in Miley, shitty flashing jumbotron videos, etc) and they’ll stay home. Rile them up with calls to attend, good game times (no student likes a noon kickoff), and flexible student ticket sales, and you’ll see those seats fill back up.
+1000. Even as it is, I get major information / advertising / sensory overload.
And as pointed out by somebody above, the kids aren’t staying home because they don’t find live football interesting, they’re staying home because the administration treats them like felons, not customers. These kids today are the gentlest, best-behaved group you could ask for.
I’ve been to Auburn enough times to want to stab my own eardrums for a little relief from the fake juice/constant piped in BS noise they play every.Freaking.NANOSECOND. that the ball isnt in play.
If coming to the stadium and actually EXPERIENCING the game in person (live crowd. UGA Band. Weather. Watching the scoreboard for info instead of your i-phone) is too much trouble for your ADHD suffering spoiled self, do the grownups a favor and stay home. You can watch the game with one eye and play angry birds, update your instagram account, and tweet with your other afflicted friends instaed of, you know, paying atrtention to the game.
I’m 34 and if they start piping in music all the time like they do at Tech I’ll cancel my … season tickets. This is a HORRIBLE idea and I hate hate hate sitting at Tech games and having their (music) blasted in my ears. Look, if you go to a Braves game and someone hits a home run, they play that stupid music.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m old (to a lot of you), and also a classically trained musician. I quit going to games some years ago because of the ‘music’. And I use the word ‘music’ lightly. What heavy metal and hard rap noise have to do with football I’ll never know. We have one of the best bands in the world, at considerable expense, yet they have to share time.
To me, it ruins the atmosphere. My last game was Matt Stafford’s first start vs. UAB. 2006, I think. That was the game I reached my saturation point, and I’d had all of the ‘musical noise’ I could take. So I was surprised to read Georgia’s experience is “traditional”. If it really were, I’d be back in the stadium.
As it is, on big game days with good weather, I’ll go Friday afternoon and spend the evening downtown, have brunch on Saturday morning, then take in the tailgating around the stadium, just to see people and get the experience. The about half an hour before the game, I retreat back downtown to watch the game in an atmosphere I can enjoy.
Yet if what I’m reading here is true, the situation is worse in other places. Loud ‘music’ between plays? I can’t imagine. The last thing I want in my head is that crap, at any time. But between plays, I’m thinking, or at least trying to. I’m into the game.
To me, it’s a shame the atmosphere changed. And IIRC, it happened on Damon Evans watch, right after Dooley was shafted. But it doesn’t matter now. It is what it is. I don’t know the answer to the current problem. I just know I can’t be a part of it.
So I appreciate everything you’re saying very much, and know I made a case against piped in music. I stand by it. BUT, when we played Soulja Boy after the 3rd quarter bands were done playing (I believe it started against Ole Miss in 2007… turned the season around), I was fine with it. And here’s the thing, that song wasn’t blasted super loud, it’s a subtle beat, they took out the lyrics (heh) and everyone just danced and had fun. It was NEVER pumped in as loud as AC/DC is (and AC/DC over those speakers sounds miserable).
There’s a time and a place for a little piped in music, but you’ve got to know when/where. Don’t do it to get the crowd hyped, but inbetween 3rd and 4th and 1st and 2nd is a decent time. Certainly I’m fine with some pregame music, etc.
Regardless, anyone who thinks playing more music is going to get students to come either needs to turn over the sound system to them (and suffer the consequences) or realize they don’t want to hear the shit you think they want to hear. Let the damn band play.
Oh, also, have vendors sell sunscreen, visors, and fans during the scalders, especially over in my section (304). Maybe a little extra water too. Little things matter.
Very much agree about the early kickoffs. When Kentucky is the only nightgame we have, it’s going to be disappointing, turnout-wise. Now, I know ESPN set some of those early games, but I think far more people would show up for the North Texas and App States of the schedule if we treated them the way LSU treats gimmie games, and had them at night.
One of the WORST things about playing in the GA Dome is the loud shitty music and ads that are borderline deafening but add zero value to the game experience. And I love loud music… just not 20 seconds at a time when I am trying to pay attention to a football game.
People are completely missing the point. Students don’t care about rap music, checking twitter, or texting their friends. They care about partying. And with first-come first-serve seating, ruining North Campus tailgating, and frisking almost every student, the student section isn’t a party like it used to be.
The lower level is now 98% freshman without a drop of alcohol. It used to be 80% drunk with mostly juniors and seniors coming in from tailgating. Internet and phone service is nice, but if you want a full and loud student section, you need a party atmosphere.
When you’ve got one of the best band programs in the Southeast, actually one of the best in the country, you need to take advantage of that. For what it’s worth, when Dooley was AD, the only music during the game was provided by the Redcoats.
That’s what I thought.
Being tethered to a phone sounds thrilling…I have one, I certainly do not take it everywhere I go.
More wifi? WGAS, watch the game.
The people who aren’t coming to the games are the ones WGAS, which is the point of the post. 🙂
I think PTC’s point was that if they don’t GAS then they shouldn’t go to the game at all. Let someone who does GAS have the seat. FWIW I agree.
More wifi? Who gives a shit, watch the game.
Does that make it easier to understand?. Are they coming to a coffee house with free wifi or a football game?
I completely understood what WGAS meant. My point was that they’re trying to get more people to the game. The people who aren’t coming are the ones who give a shit about things like wifi. If they want more the stands full, they can’t have a WGAS attitude about what the people who aren’t attending the games actually want.
And it’s not just a student thing. Six years ago you had to have over 10,000 points just to get season tix (assuming you weren’t renewing). Now ANYONE who sends in a minimum contribution is pretty much assured of getting tix. Obviously there are economic factors at play there too, but they can’t have a WGAS attitude if they want a full stadium. My guess is that if you owned your own business (you might actually own one, I don’t know), and you were given specific feedback on why people weren’t buying your product or service, you wouldn’t then look at them and say “Well who gives a shit about that?” Like I’ve outlined under the very first comment above, the social aspect actually enhances the game watching experience for me and lots of others like me. It’s not that people just want to go to the game and surf the web the whole time.
Ok, moving on..what would it cost to supply a decent Wifi signal to the stadium area, assume 25K on at any one time? This I have no idea about.
I know the cell systems get overloaded on game day, can’t they bring in some type of repeaters to help with this?
Obviously there is more than just one problem with student attendance…
The economics would be another debate. I think a decent wifi system is seriously like over $5 million or something like that. This article says $6 million:
http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/dollars/post/_/id/1561/patriots-latest-to-install-wi-fi-in-stadium
I’d love to have the wifi system, but if it became an either/or situation……like either a wifi system or an indoor practice facility (which obviously doesn’t affect attendance, just using it as a budget concern), I’d have to rethink my stance on wanting the wifi system. Not because I think an IPF is essential……..but I still might rank it higher of a need for the good of the program than a wifi system for Sanford.
That’s why you get some company to subsidize the cost via sponsorship, like all the airports that have “Free Wi-Fi brought to you by AT&T/Verizon/etc”
I understand the position, “If the folks UGA wishes to sell season tickets to in 2024, 2034 and 2044 don’t want things to be the way PTC Dawg wants them to be then who gives a shit.” The “who” in the “who gives a shit” are the athletic association staffers with teh foresight to understand that one day PTC Dawg’s tickets and Gaskil Dawg’s tickets will become available beause they are dead and they have to sell those tickets to someone who was a feshman in 2014 and thought that those things 60 year old Gaskill Dawg and PTC Dawg DGAS about were important to his game day experience. At that point, UGAA will say, “Seats are available for th eingame experience.” The now successful 2014 freshman will say, I rememerb going to games and it was dfun for Gaskill Dag and PTC Dawg but not as much fun ofr me. I have gotten used to watching at home.”
It is a lot harder to sell “Experience Sanford!!!” when we ignorted the next generation of consumers’ tastes and their memories of “Experiencing Sanford” doesn’t end in an exclamation point. .
They do the PA music at University of Miami games but you see their crowds. OK so the stadium is not on campus, but at least it’s nice. The old Orange Bowl was close enough to campus but the gripe then was it was rickety. I think the moral of the story is that you can always find a reason not to go. But if being there is your thing (and it kinda has to be for a lot of people considering the money they spend) well then you will go.
There are issues for each age group no matter what is offered to enhance the game experience. Old guys hate loud rap, students want more of it and louder, etc. etc. etc. The bottom line is all games are on TV now and it is just too easy to avoid the stadium especially if you just can’t sit still. I suspect the schools don’t really care if the students come or not but it worries them because it looks bad on TV.
Nothing to do while you wait in line? You could go with a big group of friends. Also, look around you. Ever seen a sorority girl going to a football game?
Winner. Was about to leave the same comment. You may enjoy the view from your leather recliner, but there probably aren’t as many ladies in black dresses walking through your living room either.
The atmosphere for Carolina and LSU was hard to beat. There wasn’t too much to get excited about on the home schedule after that…
Exactly! Quit scheduling North Fucking Texas, Agnes Scott, Sisters of the Poor, etc. Get some home and homes with respectable teams. Then watch how fast the atmosphere changes.
North Texas was a bowl team last year.
Agree. North Texas was better than us on defense and special teams. We were fortunate to win that game.
Maybe they were a bowl team and maybe they were better than us but I bet no one was as excited (players or fans) for that game as they were for LSU or SC.
Scheduling is a complicated issue. Years ago we could get Cal, Baylor, Texas Tech, Oregon State, UVa and other major conference teams to come to our place for a one shot deal by paying some dinero. Now if UGA schedules Cal, for example, Cal wants the Dawgs to come to Berkley next year. Likewise with any other ACC, Pac 12, B1G or Big 12 opponent. Given that UGA is in this JAX situation every year there would be years where UGA would only have 5 home games if McGarity did what you said. And we sure as hell don’t need to have a 9 game conference schedule where some years UGA will have 3 SEC home games, 5 SEC road games plus the WLOCP in JAX. If the SEC goes to the proposed scheduling model where all SEC teams have to play an ACC or Big 12 opponent as a yearly OOC game, we’re already there with Tech. That would free Georgia up to play at least 1 OOC opponent of significance on a home and away basis (like Clemson), but that’s probably the best we can hope for realistically.
Problem cited. An undefeated team who would eventually win the east comes into town, but there was nothing more to get excited about?
Sanford was twice as loud as Mizzou’s stadium was 2 years ago. Plus half our team was crippled by then. I think our crowd may not have been sold on Mizzou last year. Probably won’t make that mistake again.
The third and fourth quarters of the Mizzou game were loud. Our fans got there late.
KitteryDawg
or not wait until 2 minutes before kickoff to enter
12:30 kickoffs are more to blame. College kids generally don’t like to get up at the crack of noon.
Look, not everyone loves football, but everyone does love a party. Make the stadium shake.
Wolk’s point is valid. I’ve heard it over and over again. The atmosphere sucks compared to places really put thought into getting the crowd involved, godforbid.
The 2 big September games are the exception for in game noise, not the rule. Email the stadium people asking to strategically use music and PA. You’ll get back “See the LSU game, it was wild!.” Well the other ones were not.
We schedule G-Day on Masters weekend. We don’t coordinate Baseball games with G-Day to bring the crowd over. Why? My guess is that BM doesn’t recruit talent to work there.
ThetaDog
Oh,please. The very idea of going to see a game just to see the game? How dumb is that? The guys on the field can’t get me a drink, answer their phones or do anything else that I find truly worthwhile.
Thank you sir, +1
Don’t put words in my mouth about phones. I said atmosphere. USCe tries with their music and it works. After the ’12 game in Columbia, Richt said their fans jumped on us and we couldn’t recover. Would be nice to return the favor. He has to literally make a point in his press conferences for fans to make noise.
Re Wolk’s brilliant analysis of how to “improve” the in stadium experience: it must be great to be 20 and know everything. Put your phone down and try watching the game, sport. Talk to the people around you. Get a date and pay attention to her between plays instead of your twitter feed. Believe it or not, the world wornt end if you fail to update your twitter account after every play.
somne of our young nerds sound like Tech students. How distressing for the future.
You’re muddling two separate arguments. Wolk’s for creating a lively atmosphere and another for cell/wifi signals.
You’re coming at this from a football fan’s perspective, not a ticket buyer’s perspective. These are not the same. “Customers” always get different needs met from the same product/event.
“There’s little added value from being in the stands watching the game.”
This is basically the attitude of an increasing number of fans these days of all ages (but especially those younger than, say, 40). HDTV’s are amazingly cheap, and when you pair a nice 52 inch or whatever HDTV with a good audio setup, beer on ice, food on the egg/smoker/grill, perfect 72 degree weather, bathrooms a few feet away with no lines, no traffic/parking issues, no idiots screaming/cussing next to you/your family, and all the rest…its no wonder that more and more are choosing to stay home.
This is why newer and proposed future stadiums are smaller in capacity with more luxury seating options at higher costs. Just look at the new Braves stadium and other proposed stadiums (such as L.A. for a future NFL team). These stadiums will be smaller in capacity with far more club/luxury type seating. At some point college stadiums will follow suit and decrease their capacity while adding more premium seating with built in entertainment options of some sort.
The reality is that 16,200 student tickets for a 30,000+ person campus is too many. Although I do not condone it, the majority of people are not the type of college football fans that really enjoy the atmosphere and pageantry and tradition. The same goes for students. It will mean more to them when they graduate, but for now, they don’t want to stand in the 100 degree heat to watch something they could better watch at home with a DVR and stocked fridge. Again, I don’t endorse it, but I understand.
Give priority back to the seniors, and make the freshmen hope there are tickets left over. Make having a ticket mean something again, and people will want it. Also, it might be a good idea to lump all the students in one place instead of three radically different sections within the stadium. Just a thought.
I honestly don’t think that making less tickets available will cause students to ‘want’ it more. I think they’ll simply shrug their shoulders and move on to something else without giving much thought (all while constantly staring at their smartphone.) The attitudes among today’s students and those of my generation of the mid to late 90’s (which really wasn’t that long ago) is astounding to me. Students today simply don’t care as much about football as they used to. Plus, as someone just mentioned, they have to be constantly stimulated or they quickly get bored and leave.
Also, like it or not (I’m one who does not) there has been a change in the make-up of the UGA student body because of increased admission standards caused by the Hope. Too many closet cases in Athens now. Hell, most of my fraternity brothers and I probably couldn’t have gotten into Georgia if the admission standards were what they are now–and we’re all lawyers and doctors. But we were partiers. You just don’t see that as much now.
Yes, UGA students have gotten far dorkier over the past 10-15 years. As a Charlottesville resident, I can tell you that UGA students are eerily similar to UVA students, if that tells you anything.
If that’s the case, from my experience at both schools, boy, have things changed. 😉
Umm. Do UGA fans hold hands and sing the logest slowest school song ever after each td? No? Then UGA does not =UVA.
Bojangles
If it’s a choice between a smarter student body (and a degree that’s now worth more thanks to HOPE) or lamenting that there are fewer bros on campus to rage at Sanford, I’ll take the former, as it is a university after all.
The admissions folks could give a little more preference to qualified in-state residents instead of soaking up the extra revenue from equivalent out-of-state applicants. The in-state kids may be more inclined to be Dawg fans already and in most cases, their parents have paid state income taxes that help support the state university system.
It’s worse than that. If you study who gets admitted to UGA most of the student body is from the “doughnut” area outside the perimeter around Atlanta, and Macon, Augusta, Savannah and Columbus with a major empasis on private schools in those cities, plus private schools in Atlanta, not to mention the out-of-staters. The idea of kids (boys and girls) from Villa Rica, Hahira, Zebulon, Waynesboro, Midway, Calhoun, Blairsville, Pooler, and Statenville, etc. going to school at their state university, marrying and making lifelong friendships, then returning to their hometowns to be the leaders of their communities is a thing of the past. They stayed in touch with each other for their entire lives in a statewide network. You still can see them at ballgames as 40, 50, 60 and 70 year olds. But this new crop are all on their way to grad school and a big job in Atlanta or out of state in insurance, law, finance or real estate. Just another casualty of that carperbagger Michael Adams and his attempt to use UGA as a springboard to the Presidency of Harvard. I, for one, do NOT think what we have in Athens now is an improvement. We’ve lost something that made Georgia a special university and I fear we will never be able to get it back again.
I agree with both of you. Even when at events Millennials crave constant stimulation via their smartphones, etc… but I the changes made to student ticketing in the past 7-8 years aren’t helping either. When I was a student for the ’01-’03 seasons there was a completely open “black market” for student tickets (which were still paper then) that created excitement. I never watched a single cfb game before attending UGA, but the immediate camaraderie of waiting in line for your lottery-awarded half-season package, and then trading for the ones you wanted and selling (at major profit) the ones you didn’t was exciting. I wanted to make sure I could sit with my friends and enjoy the event.
There was one game where I took my entire family into the stadium using only student tickets–no one cared who used them and the fact that anyone could get in both added to the scarcity and made sure all sections were packed. The move to having the tickets be based entirely off of the UGA Card a few years ago killed that black market and got rid of the scarcity. They’re no longer a hot commodity, and they can’t even be sold to people who would actually want them.
I think this is a damn good factor too. (And worse, students now don’t have game stubs they can keep for years after they’ve graduated…like my 2002 Tech stub from my final home game as a student.)
dudetheplayer
Ding ding ding. Thank you for bringing this up. Too often this discussion devolves into the “those damn kids and their smartphones” type of thinking that drastically simplifies and distorts reality.
Hey old guys, what about Geezer Joe in section 30 who is telling everyone in his section to pipe down and sit on their hands? Can’t stand those guys..
I think a large part of it is the convenience of flat screen TVs, multiple channels, booze, bathrooms, parties, etc. As for the boredom of waiting in line for an hour and bad cell service in the stadium, I understand that’s a fundamental difference between me and the current generation. It seems that no matter where they are, they have to constantly be in communication with everyone that’s somewhere else. They can’t just sit and watch, or cheer, or think; they have to be stimulated at all times.
dawg3fan4
I am one that has said the thing I love about college football is the college part of it, the band versus the PA. After having been to many other stadiums the last few years the ONLY difference in noise is that they are pumping in a lot more noise during the down times and it does create the illusion of a louder stadium. At its loudest Sanford is as loud as any I’ve been to but it is not consistent throughout the game.
If we want the home field advantage to be what it could be I think we will have to give into newer way of doing things. It is sad to me that college kids don’t know what they are missing as there is nothing like game day from the student section. For point of reference I will be 37 in a month.
Yo, all the cool people will be 37 next month. (March 11th for me)
Yo, all the cool people have birthdays next month. (I won’t tell how old I’ll be, though.) 🙂
Ha!!!!!!
gds923
Long time reader – first time commenter.
I was at UGA from 2000-2005 and 2006-2009. For the entirety of my first stint in Athens and for, at least, some of the time during my second stint, there was VERY little enforcement of secondary market activity for student tickets.
I know that the lack of enforcement led to its own set of problems (e.g., students would sign up for tickets solely for the purpose of reselling them at a black market rate) – but, I do think that old system resulted in better attendance because people who wanted to be there (young alumni, students from other state schools, etc.) were able to get in for a reasonable price.
This. The reality is that the majority of UGA students have always sucked as fans. They sucked fifteen years ago just like they do now. But fifteen years ago, they could sell their ticket to someone who wanted to be there who might not be a student of UGA. I took non-UGA friends to games all the time. I actually bought a set of season tickets from a Redcoat back when they allowed them to get/sell tickets, so I always had a non-UGA student with me.
I’d wager that the number of actual UGA students that attend the games hasn’t declined all that significantly from back in our day. It’s just that B-M has effectively banned anyone else from taking those seats, so it looks really bad, and we can all wring our hands about it and talk about this new generation and ask people to get off our lawn.
I was a student from 2004-2008 and totally agree with this. Even after I graduated, I would still pay premium prices for a student ticket because that’s where I wanted to sit. And if given the choice now, I would do the same thing. I’m sure I’m not the only one either.
This x 1000. I sold the games I couldn’t go to and bought extra student tickets for friends and family when needed. I still perfer to sit in or near the student section when I make it down for a game. My brother and his wife sneak into the student section damn every game they go to.
Good comment, you should comment more often. 🙂
This has been brought up some in the past, and I agree with you. Some of the attendance problems no doubt stem from the current system.
YES. Bring back paper tickets for students. The seats will be filled.
Exactly – and quit checking IDs while you’re at it. If the students want to sell their tickets, let them sell their tickets. Hardly anyone that will not act and look like a student will buy them anyway.
BTW – I’ve probably sat in the student section more times as a non-student than as a student despite the fact I spent 4 falls in Athens as a student.
CreswellKing
Good points. Don’t forget how the administration has also ruined tailgating (particularly North Campus) and now the student section is dominated by completely sober freshman because of the first-come first-serve rules. When the student section is like a party, it’s a lot more fun/popular, although that’s not PC.
I said this when they made the change, my thoughts were shot down.
Paper tickets are the way to go.
This. I was at school during the same time. Also I’m a little surprised that the administration doesn’t just charge more for paper tickets. More $$$, full house. win win.
I was also a student during this era. This is the biggest problem with student attendance right now. The card ticket idea was and is moronic.
(1) Ticket distribution to students is the real problem. It used to be that students camped out and if you weren’t there you did not get tickets. That pretty much ensured that the kids that wanted tickets got them. Now, anyone can sign up with a couple clicks and a bunch of kids that don’t really want tickets get them while kids that would go don’t get tickets. If Duke can have kids camp out for all of basketball season, we can do it for a night in the spring. THIS IS THE ISSUE. (I’ve got a sister-in-law at UGA now.) Camping out ended under Adams because the students had too much “fun.” Also, regardless of what people think, the student population does not have a ton of football fans. Out of 40K, half are guys and probably half of them are football fans – so you get 10K there. Of the girls, about 1/4 are football fans so you get 5k there. You have 10K more of the students that like to party but are not into football that much but will go to a game if it fits their party plans. You have 15K students that may go to a game or two if it’s convenient. I’d bet 30K sign up for tickets now. If you reinstitute camping out, you get the 15K that are football fans and the partiers most likely to find football convenient. Last, if you’re that concerned about the effect on academics, sell the tickets the Friday morning before spring break.
(2) I’ve never had to wait more than a few minutes to enter Sanford – and was glad pretty much every time as I was able to finish my drink – not sure what that dude was doing.
I was there 95-98, and yes camping outside of Steg was part of the fun. Nowhere near the scale of Duke, but it was part of the experience of being a student and a fan.
As hot as it was in the middle of August, yes, camping outside of the Steg with your friends was fun.
Oh, and also, on #2, that quote was from a kid at Michigan. But still, I’ve been to lots of games at a number of different stadiums, both college and pro, and never waited anywhere near an hour in line to get into a game. What the heck is Michigan’s entrance procedure?
This, but like you said, someone might have fun, or their phone might go dead and they miss a tweet or a text from a buddy, better to sit in the dorm and play with their phone.
Vanderbilt only has 6,800 undergrads. If every one of them showed up, it would be hard to notice.
UGA is unique in the SEC as it puts Athletic Department profits ahead of winning.
Students don’t care about Athletic Department profits.
^^This. Students aren’t stupid. They know the Administration doesn’t really support the team like it should, so why should they?
I do not understand why people pay big bucks to UGA for the privilege of being uncomfortable and inconvenienced each football season. Unless UGA is willing to send a limo to pick me up and bring me home, guarantee that I won’t EVER stand in line for anything or have to wait for anything, will provide me with unlimited free food and drink delivered promptly, and provide a comfortable seat with LOTS of personal space around me, I will never again spend money to see a college football game in person. Not worth the hassles.
I tried to read through all the responses thus far so my apologies if this is rehashing a point which has already been made, but in my mind one issue with the students these days is that they are too smart. The Hope Scholarship has had a positive effect on UGA’s academic profile over the last 15-20 years. Unfortunately, that has attracted a growing number of students that place too much importance on the academic side of their college experience. I studied hard when I was there (at times) but I also had a balance to my experience, attending just about every Bulldog sporting event at least once with the exception of equestrian. When we go up to tailgate with my wife’s cousin who is now a sophomore, the impression I get is that a fair number of students are just too worried about grades to really get the most out of the best 4-6 years of their life.
There may be some truth to this, but looking at the number of students at the game day tailgates, the number of students working in Athens’ food, drink, and entertainment venues, and the number of students downtown after the game, it doesn’t appear they are studying very much on Saturdays.
BulldogBen
Yeah I’m not buying this at all. It’s 6-7 Saturdays in the Fall. By this rationale, Duke would never have anyone attend basketball games.
“Unfortunately, that has attracted a growing number of students that place too much importance on the academic side of their college experience.”
Really? You see that as unfortunate?
We had Generation X, Generation Y, now we have Generation ADHD.
Yep. Like ferrets on amphetamines.
I was going to go with “coked out squirrels,” but I like your example, too.
Irwin R. Fletcher
I think one thing we should realize is that even for ‘our’ generation…whichever that may be…the number of college students/alumni who went to the game for the football vs. those who went for the social experience was different.
It’s just simple peer pressure and group mentality…it’s what got sorority girls (and completely clueless dudes) who gave two craps about football to the student section in my day or got men and women in the 50s to a sock hop or a pep rally or a parade etc. etc. etc. and it’s what keeps them at the house in front of TV’s now. Or keeps them at the tailgate instead of in the stadium. The technology is just the mechanism. It’s not that they ‘can’t tweet’ it’s that when they can’t tweet, they don’t feel like they are part of the party/group. They live in a culture where the larger the group, the more connection. Number of followers reached are more important than number of folks that actually care. Alternatively, they don’t feel like they are missing anything when they can stay by the cooler and drink with 40 of their friends during the game. (that’s kids and adults…how many adults come to Athens with no intention on going to the game each week?)
“Game Atmosphere” are small fixes…although, admittedly, installing a DAS system and/or reliable WIFI should be at the top of the list…the real issue is making it socially acceptable to be a fanatic. That’s going to require more creativity and grass roots efforts than just fixing the music.
Wait, when you ruin on-campus tailgating and switch to non-ticket system where that eliminates any secondary market and first-come first-serve seating, student attendance drops?
The student section used to be like a party of bar. After the tailgating rules and first-come first-serve, the lower level was dominated by stone-sober freshman who waited the three hours (instead of tailgating) in line to get those seats. Also, the lack of a secondary market really hurts attendence. Not every student who gets season tickets will attend EVERY SINGLE game. In the past, those tickets would get used by other students, young alumni, or friends/students at other schools visiting Athens.
As much as the narrative would like to say otherwise, this is the administration’s fault, not the students.
This x2.
Go to South Carolina and see how they keep their students engaged with hip hop music, one student section, etc. and then our game day experience. Just not the same right now; UGA is stuck in a generational power struggle that they have no idea what to do with.
The problem is that the students only make up about a sixth of the overall attendance at Sanford. How much catering can you do to them without turning off the paying majority?
Not sure, but Auburn and South Carolina managed to figure it out. Unless there is something culturally different at UGA(which I’m not necessarily saying there isn’t), then I don’t see why a middle ground can’t be reached. Consolidating the student section would go a long way.
Ricky McDurden
Difference in Auburn-Carolina and UGA is a cultural one: UGA fans grew up in a state with a million entertainment options (Braves, Falcons, Dawgs, Hawks, Jackets, etc.) and we have experienced some success in most all of those facets. Thus, Georgians tend to be a very fickle group overall (we don’t bother wasting money on a losing product, even if that product was winning last season and is destined to start winning in the near future). Carolina, however, has been an abysmal program with a dedicated following. What alternative is there for Carolina fans on a Fall Saturday? Same question for an Auburn fan? Georgians are snake bit by the privileges of our landscape.
Some truth to this. Go to downtown Athens after a game. It’s hard to tell if the home team won or lost.
The only other place I’ve seen this happen is Atlanta.
No snark intended here, that’s a good question. It seems like UGA isn’t willing to experiment to learn the answer though.
Exactly. The student game experience is not a priority at UGA. They don’t carry enough cash.
TV revenue, Hartman contributors, and $8 cokes are the priority.
Fair point, but what percentage of the total attendance is made up of former students and their families? I’d guess a whole heck of a lot, so if you don’t get them attending when they’re students, they likely won’t be attending as alumni either and the problem will snowball.
If Auburn and South Carolina are the paradigms for the future, does that mean our students should all be living in trailers and dating sheep? Or that we should move Sanford off campus about 5 miles to a dust filled stockyard?
What’s next? Should we start copying notes from the Clemson gameday playbook? Or UT?
get a grip.
No one is going or not going to football games because of hip hop music or a lack of hip hop music.
Of course not, that was merely an example that out rivals are doing more to appeal to their student crowd than we are. The stadium atmosphere feeds off the energy of a raucous student section.
The raucous student section has nothing to do with music, etc. Only one thing matters: alcohol.
SC doesn’t have one student section…sure, they have the “Cockpit” beneath their jumbotron, but they also do have an upper level student section too. SC also has a ticket system which mirrors UGA’s.
From my 3-year graduate tenure at SC, it wasn’t the hype; it was the fact that their tailgating experiences were not overregulated. All of the warehouse-style lots permit setup early (most parking outside of the Fairground lots, which is alumni dominated, is privately owned and student-dominated) and spread-out tailgating experiences. Not quite what we had at the high point of North Campus, but to me, tailgating overregulation has been one of the biggest stymies to UGA attendance (along with elimination of student paper tickets/secondary market).
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying re: student section. I know it’s not feasible to have one gigantic student block, a la LSU, but it would make a huge difference with stadium energy.
Agree. Stadium atmosphere is not the best, but not the biggest issue. These little issues (tailgating, game time, music)add up to indicate that the school/AD doesn’t try.
Another good point, UGA has no idea, and the older fans will bitch no matter what. Many of them have forgotten they were young once, and their folks hated their music/habits too.
I’ll say this about the music – I think the fans get really into it when the players seem really hyped up. When the players are dancing, jumping up and down, waving their arms for us to get loud, etc., that’s when Sanford is the loudest. That also seems to usually occur when hip hop music is playing. Say what you will about Soulja Boy, but that was the most fun I’ve ever had at a Georgia football game. Even if you don’t like hip hop I think there’s enough good hip hop music out there that isn’t raunchy but that still gets people excited.
Dawg in Austin
Of course improving wifi would ease fan frustration which should improve the crowd. Texting or tweeting during TOs or breaks doesn’t take much attention and keeps people connected. It doesn’t prevent them from being loud as hell, either. If you don’t understand the perspective, it really doesn’t matter. Just know many others want that experience, that it doesn’t hurt your own game day experience, and go with it.
I also completely agree with the comment that 16k tickets for the students is too many. Before enforcement cracked down on the secondary market, and even in the 90’s when I was there, many students sold their tickets. What does that tell you? 1) That a smaller number of students at our school want to go to games than are provided tickets and 2) that this is not a new phenomena of the digital age. Either cut the allotment or allow for resale again.
Maybe this is just a generational contrarian view, but it is just possible that if the home games were better, bigger games, if every game became important in the post-season scheme of things, then whether I can like Mike Bobo on fucking Facebook would seem to take on less importance.
Please explain to me why better Wi-Fi matters if the game is going on right there in front of you? Are you saying you simply have to have the capability to tweet about your game experience?
This “game-day” experience we are talking about…that does include the game and its outcome, right?
Frankly, the game day experience for me would be far better if people who did not really want to watch the football game would gather in a venue that has better Wi-Fi and let me watch the fucking game with people who are actually interested in watching the game.
But YMMV.
See my response under the very first comment at the top. Even during away games, my buddies and I are constantly texting with our ongoing commentary throughout the game. If anything, it makes us pay MORE attention to what is going on, and improves the experience (for us). I’d love to be able to do the same during home games. Don’t care what other people think about the game, but being able to keep a running a commentary with my close buddies actually is a big thing for me.
Exactly. There’s a difference between sitting on your ass and using Facebook all game vs sharing your experience with the friends who can’t make the game. It doesn’t make you any less of a fan, either.
Yep, and one close member of our group of friends was relocated to Colorado a few years ago. Being able to text among our group is a way to watch the game with your friends, without actually watching it with your friends. And it’s nice hearing his commentary because he sees things on TV that we don’t see live………especially questionable spots, close penalties, etc……..on the rare occasions we can actually get his texts, they are very helpful.
You are one of the dudes who will sit in a room full of people and not say a word to them, all the while pecking on your phone and giggling.
I have tried the text stream during a game and found it distracting…you don’t want to not respond cause it is rude, but it is distracting to me, and as I said…YMMV, but for me it is a distraction I don’t want…during timeouts etc, I want to watch the sidelines…coaches talking, trainer’s table etc.
TV may give your buddies another look at something, but what they see, and especially what they hear on TV (or the radio broadcast) does not matter, only what happens on the field or in the stadium matters.
When I watch a game on TV I turn the sound off and watch the game alone.
I am a little more “social” about the game, after the game…but not much.
I don’t multi-task football well, there is just too much detail you can miss.
Totally understand, and wouldn’t try to convince you to be anything different.
But here’s the thing……..Just because there’s an awesome wifi system in place, that doesn’t mean you or anyone like you is gonna be forced to use it. It just gives more options for people. And the more options for entertainment, the more likely you are to fill the stands, which is the point of the whole discussion.
I just honestly have no idea why anyone would be so dismissive of it, it won’t impact your personal experience of the game at all if there is a wifi system in place, it just helps accomplish the goal of getting butts in the seats.
Rev, as I said, YMMV or to each his own…but
“And the more options for entertainment, the more likely you are to fill the stands ”
Funny, I thought the entertainment was on the field, who knew?
Filling the stands with students is the subject I believe.
I have no problems with any of the “improvements” you want, and I have no problem with anyone using them…unless he or she is sitting next to me and when the play is over asks me what happened.
Let me see if I can explain my perspective more clearly…I don’t text in church…do you?
I don’t go to church for entertainment purposes. 🙂
Neither do I, nor to Georgia football games, in the sense you seem to mean. Both are serious…to me, equally serious. If Georgia football is only entertainment for you I feel for your soul.
Not at all. I’m as social as the next guy. The phone is an extension of that, not a replacement.
Though I certainly grant you that there ARE plenty of people who social media has become a replacement for actual personal interaction. But most folks on this board seem to be pretty normal folks. Some just more willing to jump to conclusions about people than others. 😉
I will admit it came off a little harsh, my comments that is. You must admit, you know the type.
Right, because that’s the only way people behave when they use phones.
Preach it Scorpio! Amen
JCann
I’m 31, a UGA alum, and a high school teacher, so I guess I’m somewhat in touch with both ends of the age group that is being discussed here. I can say for my age group, a lot of what keeps us from games is the expense. Donations and the cost of tickets is just too much to justify when I have 2 young children and my wife and I are both teachers. If they had the “young alumni” tickets when I graduated in 2005, it may have been a different story, so hopefully that will help.
As far as today’s kids…they don’t seem to care about any sort of school pride or spirit. I’ve worked at 2 different high schools, and it’s the same at both. Kids make fun of football players/athletes, tell them how they suck, say things like, “how did y’all pull that off” when the team wins. It saddens me, and they get an earful when they do that in my class. They even wear shirts from rival schools to school. Imagine walking into classes at UGA with a GT or Florida shirt on.
I also think the posts about how they do tickets is accurate. Not every student wants to go, so give them the ability to sell the tickets. I bought every ticket I could find when I was in school so my friends who loved the Dawgs, but didn’t go to UGA for whatever reason, would be able to come to games. The student section was full, even if they werent all UGA students.
Lets face it, the games are for the alumni who pay for the privilege…well privilege is somewhat opponent-dependent. The students who care get in, the ones who don’t won’t.
I would say that your experience with your students as an observer or their various reactions to high school football is at least partially location-dependent.
I don’t know where you teach, but I would have to assume it is not Dillon, Texas. (Which is actually Permian, I believe.)
Sad but true. My niece was a cheerleader in HS but only goes to the games at UGA to see other people if she goes at all. We need to find common ground on this because the fake juice the students apparently like (piped in music & screaming announcers) is what I hate about the games now. I like the decades old traditions and if we can’t find common ground the game will really decline or change for the worse.
Monday Night Frotteur
Students are treated like criminals when they try to enter games. It’s perfectly rational for them to infer from the way they are treated that they aren’t wanted at college stadia; this isn’t for them.
It’s beyond easy to fix this, if you really care about student attendance.
1) Night or late afternoon games only. Nothing at noon, ever.
2) No extra security or long lines for students. Let ’em in fast.
3) Alcohol should be sold throughout the stadium.
4) Full wireless capacity.
5) Show other SEC games on the scoreboards.
Noon games aren’t going away unless the SEC ditches its deal with ESPN.
That’s a big one. Kids hate noon games. Everywhere; FSU, Georgia, Michigan, Iowa, etc. Noon should be the exclusive province of MAC, AAC and C-USA. Real programs should always play late, and should play on other nights of the week instead of just Thursday and Saturday.
All the games were at noon back in the day. The rare big game was at 3:30. Students managed to attend then.
Dating myself, but I remember when the lights went in at Stanford. Ohhhh.
“National television at night under newly installed lights at Sanford Stadium overflowing with 82122 and against the defending national champions Clemson Tigers.”
I actually enjoyed the occasional noon game. Bloody beers and shit-on-shingle for breakfast while tailgating, a noontime win, then home for a nap before hitting downtown for the evening festivities.
I agree. I know that a noon game here and there is unavoidable, but it seems like we have gotten more than our fair share the past few years. If I weren’t crazy I would think our admin requests it when there’s an option. How many noon home games has LSU had, for example?
After reading all the comments I think the AD is just not trying. We know what is wrong but they don’t want to fix it. I have seen UGA go from a great place to tailgate and watch a game to being so restrictive that even long-time season ticket holders are opting out. From a student standpoint it is stupid not to have real tickets that they can sell. If the AD is still reversing the ticket priority that too is dumb. To make matters worst they stopped grad students from getting priority. I remember when the AD made a rule that after your forth year you went to the bottom of the priority. Why in the heck would they care as long as somebody shows up. From the South Stands it is obvious that the 600 nose-bleed section is empty for all but the biggest games but given the way the seats are first come first seated I think a lot of that is over crowding the lower sections.
If the students are losing interest college football is going to slowly shrink. They are not going to go as alumni if they don’t go as a student.
My daughter went to UGA as a grad student and could not get student tickets. We have season tickets so she used our ticket to get in and then went to sit in the student section. This was 2010-2012. She went to GCSU for her undergrad and used a friend’s student I’D to sit in the stands. The problem is kids getting tickets and not using them when others want them and can’t get them. Making them camp out would show who really wants to the game.
I’m in education, and I don’t think you guys have any idea how much the smartphone revolution has changed young people in a fundamental way.
Just wait – we’re only five years or so into it
As the father of three twenty-something daughters, believe me, I do.
The wi-fi part of this doesn’t bother me in the slightest. It’s my choice if I want to text and tweet, after all.
But if I have to listen to “Zombie Nation” three dozen times a game over the course of a season, I fear I’ll go mad. 😉
Amen Senator. I hate that “song”. I associate it with Techsters.
I agree, it sucks. Many never look up. They walk into crap, just go to a public area and watch folks, good comedy, and not just young folks either.
I was in a restaurant recently and watched 2 teenage guys sitting at a table nearby eating lunch. They each stared at their respective smartphones the entire time and never said a word to each other. In fact, other than placing the food order, neither one said a word at all. The whole time theysat, heads down texting madly using their thumbs in between bites. These kids are socially inept.
Hand out those clear movie theater glasses to the students and tell them the game is “Now in 3-D”!!!
Also, interesting to note that in UT’s experience, the best student attendance in the past 4 years was 1) a night game 2) against UT-Chattanooga.
Game time (ie not 12:30) and extended tailgating opportunities, not necessarily the matchup, seem to have dictated the attendance highs
pumblechook114
Being only a few years removed from student life at UGA, I learned the sad fact that the vast majority of students simply don’t care that much about football or athletics in general. There was always (and probably always will be) a relatively small core of students who attended every home game and stayed to the end, but I’d estimate that was maybe 10% of the allotted seats. The other 90% who would even consider going to a football game go because they want a party, plain and simple.
The question for this student then becomes: will it be worth my while? More and more it isn’t. There are a variety of reasons for this, 12:30 games being probably the biggest (most students who partied the previous night are only waking up by then). But when you consider the obstacles to attending a football game for the average student, its not difficult to see why the average student might skip the game. Tailgating is an expensive proposition and a logistical challenge for the average student (it was always a struggle for my fraternity to get a simple grill with hotdogs/hamburgers and a keg on campus). If you live off campus, there is parking to consider (which always must be of the free variety), as well as the extra hassle of pre- and post game traffic. Once you actually get to the game you are exposed directly to the elements by virtue of the location of the student section. This means that for half the home games you are roasting in the direct sunlight for almost 4 hours, all the while trying desperately not to break down and spend $4 on a too-small bottle of water, and God help you if you drank a little too much before the game. Add to that the utter lack of cell/internet service in the stadium, the boring atmosphere, at least 3 or 4 cupcake games that are over by halftime, and 28% of tickets unused doesn’t sound too horrible.
Not saying that this isn’t a sad phenomenon, but if you want to fill the student section you have to cater to the average student. Some ideas that spring to mind: less 12:30 home games (probably not likely), student reserved parking, discounts on food and beverages in the stadium with student ID, student reserved tailgating spots (perhaps by student organization), food-services sponsored tailgates for students with the meal plan (or even discounted catering for student organizations), stadium WiFi. And maybe just a little more engaging stadium atmosphere? Pretty please? The best times I’ve had in Sanford were solely due to the excitement of the crowd and the game, often in spite of what was going on in the stadium. If the administration is really serious about this generation being the next generation of season ticket holders, it has to do something to appeal to it.
The atmosphere at Vanderbilt was crazy because the stadium was 80% Georgia fans who were booing their asses off at idiot refs.
ahhh….nothing like a good “kids these days” thread to get everyone to comment.
Alright all you angry old dudes, just remember that there was a time in your life when the old guy shook his fist at you.
Wifi is just the giant radio headset of today.
We lose too much. That’s the problem.
^^Truth (sadly).
3 things caught my eye reading the comments:
1) Didn’t we have 1 night game this year at home (UK?). Also, the home schedule was terrible the 2nd half of the season. When I was in school, I went to cupcake games for a Quarter or two or not at all. They were also usually Noon games. I think that played into attendance numbers.
2) I think there is merit to the student ticket distribution model and the rules regarding selling and entry. The first several years after I graduated, none of my friends and I had seats together, so we would congregate in the student section so we could hang together. There was always room and it made the section appear full. Now, they are complete Nazi’s about letting non-students sit in there. They would rather it be empty that allow that, even well into the 2nd or 3rd quarter. You could also buy a scalped student ticket and still gain access.
3) Just curious. Where does success of the program come in? When UGA last won the SEC Championship, most of these kids were 8-9 years old. Are they apathetic due to not winning titles? Or even getting to experience that? I was there during the Donnan years and we were usually out of it by the UT game so the only games I really cared about were UF, AU, and Tech and we only played 1 of those at home each year.
From reading these comments, one could see why the Admin is confused about what to do…
I’m too lazy to look but would love to see the breakdown of this data by class: Freshman, Sophmore, Junior, Senior, Grad School. My daughter who is a Freshman at Clempsen didn’t miss a minute of any Clempsen home game. She LOVED the whole experience. Will be interesting to see if she has that same enthusiasm her senior year.
Two other thoughts – when I was a student, we didn’t miss a home game. BUT, we also rolled a pickup to a grassy spot on Friday night (near Creswell) and that was our spot the next day. We partied our faces off, usually got to the game ontime, etc. With the new tailgating rules, it’s a pain in the ass to get your stuff where it needs to be. Students don’t want to deal with all the hassle of carrying tents and such when they’re bombed out of their faces.
Also, for about five years after I graduated, I’d go to games in the student section. The tickets were cheaper, the seats were good, and I didn’t want to sit anyway. You could just buy a paper copy. I know I was never alone in doing so. My guess is that an awful lot of the student section of days of old was made up of people like me.
So make tailgating easy and fun, let people get back on North Campus and party, and let students sell their tickets to anyone, and you’ll see the end of the problem in the student section. But if you keep restricting things students like to do, make it harder for them to get into games, basically eliminate the ability of recent graduates to get to games cheap, etc. you’re not going to see a lot of attendance from that age group.
Restated, they’re a bunch of shit-faced kids who just want to party without being harassed or having to do anything they don’t want to do. Just like we all were in college. Oh, and they don’t give a shit about piped in music (they may want wifi so they can figure out where to keep drinking after the game).
As someone who NEVER missed a home game as a student and never left early no matter what, I can’t relate to showing up late, leaving early or just not going to the game. I would postulate that hand held devices have turned our collective attention spans to nanoseconds.
Also as someone who thinks that the games should primarily be about college students, both playing and watching, perhaps they can pull their heads out of their I-phones long enough to tell us what would keep their attention for 4 hours. I’ll suffer though whatever the kids want if they’ll show the hell up on time and stay until the end.
Yes even annoying disco tech noise and European soccer stadium atmospherics.
At least I learned a new word
Frotteur. Eww.
All this research, and interviewing people, and trying gimmicks is a bunch of wasted time and money to try and prop up the stupid new system they’ve dumped all this money into, by blaming the students. The students are the same fickle lot that loves football that they’ve always been. Just bring back paper tickets that they can sell to whoever they feel like at the last minute (just like everybody else who isn’t a student can), and this will all go away, and the stadiums across the land will be full.
Any other solution is a waste of time and money, and the inevitable empty seats up in the corner will continue to make the school look bad.
And any delusional old farts who thinks the seats would have been full back in their day even with the current system can stick it up their asses. They’re wrong.
This old fart tends to agree with you.
Define Old Fart? I might agree.
I think I agree but don’t want to admit to being an old fart.
StatGal
I agree. Going back to paper tickets for students (even if they do want to reduce the number sold) should fix the ‘student section problem’ pronto. How frustrating for the students NOT to to be able to trade for games they don’t need (going out of town) for games they need extras (sister, etc coming to town). We did this all the time in the late 90s with much satisfaction. In fact we were statistics grad students and would frequently drag a few international students who cared nothing for football with us to get tickets too so we could have theirs to wheel and deal with throuout the season. Ah… Good times! Ha. So sorry to hear the game-day experience has gone this way… I had not been to a game in many years and even then not as a student.
Observations (more like a rant):
My first memory of Sanford Stadium was playing under the bleachers before it was double decked………..my family history of UGA goes back to my Great Grandfather.
I graduated in 79. Do the math…..I’m an old fart
All games started at one. We were there.
I hate piped in music
I hate the idiot standing up in front of me when NO ONE ELSE IS STANDING
I love standing, screaming, going crazy when it’s fourth down and the defense needs us (well not so much under Grantham)
I would like better wifi and phone. I text to friends and follow other scores
I love the Redcoat Band. Play more!
The administration makes it difficult to tailgate. The city makes it difficult tailgate. They collectively try to run the city like a police state (I live there)
Neither of my children got into UGA because of Adam’s desire to be UVA. I have many, many, many friends whose children went to Auburn, Alabama, S. Carolina, etc. because of his policies (which continue)
I quit going to away games because I got tired of sitting in the upper deck,
even though I’m in the top 10% of points for GSEF.
I’ve been tailgating with the same people in the same place since 1975. (although we are losing East Hull and Sigma Chi to the Business school)
And just clipped a check for 5K donation
So, I’m not sure what the answer is………….I do know that we should never, ever consider expansion again. If we could take down the upper deck, I’d to that. If today’s UGA student thinks that doing it like S. Carolina or Clemson is good, then I weep for our future.
But I do love the Dogs.
Somebody has to be the first to stand…don’t get mad when it happens. I’m 50, if that makes me old, so be it….
The WiFi thing is a must have if you want to enhance the experience. Do I want it so I can play Words with Friends during the game? No. But I do want it for things like getting access to other scores, looking up that 4th stringer that I don’t know that just got in the game, rule clarification, etc.. All of which I have wanted to do the last couple of seasons, but have been thwarted.
And if a millennial is posting Facebook pics and status during the game about how much fun they are having, wouldn’t that enhance the cache of actually being there for their friends?
Sure, 20 years ago I went to the game and didn’t have WiFi, but now that I know all that information could be at my fingertips, I want it.
Could be a money maker for the school as well. Sell an app with exclusive game day info perhaps? Like a virtual program? Updated real time stats?
The whole smart phone thing is just part of the world we live in now. Period. If nothing else than just the fact that people plan that way now (all people)- 15 years ago you make a plan and stick with it, and people knew they couldn’t get in touch with you for a while and planned accordingly. Now everyone knows they can get in touch with everyone instantly and if there’s an emergency and they can’t, the shit hits the fan. The Wi-Fi and cell reception thing isn’t a debate, its a necessity and it should happen immediately and it has nothing to do with ticket sales. Fix it. Thats just how it is.
The only student attendance problem is the lack of paper tickets that can be sold to anyone any time, without having to go back through the school to do it.
As long as there is college, there will be kids with hangovers on game days, papers and tests that the morning of, guess what, “Turns out I actually do need to spend all Saturday preparing for this or writing that.” And there will be women who don’t have tickets, who need to be chased! The current system does not accommodate for that.
Playing “Sandstorm” when we’re on defense and giving away prizes isn’t going to change that.
I asked earlier, no answer..how much would it costs to get a Wifi system capable of the demands on an Athen’s gameday Saturday around the stadium? I have no idea. IF it would help and it’s not that expensive, the school should look into it.
Frankly, I don’t care, but obviously many do…anyone know what this would costs?
Not as much as an indoor practice facility….Boom.
Hey sorry was in a meeting and didn’t see your question until earlier. I answered it where you first posted the question above. It’s expensive.
I’m not reading everything but I have traveled quite a bit, my cousin played for Auburn and I went on player’s family tickets, one of my closest friend’s is a UT fan, and I grew going to UGA games back to the mid 80s. My uncle is a season ticket holder who is down to 6 tickets South Side, his pair are under the overhang 35-40 yard line. He is getting old and couldn’t take the heat for SC so I went. If I run across a reasonably priced ticket, I generally go and often see games in 3 stadiums a year.
I don’t like piped in Music, UT did that under Lane. They were rocking for us this year, I was there. My take is the fan base is pumped for a new coach, the team is hungry, and they had a shot a their biggest win in likely 5 years. They still played piped in music but less of it. It was the loudest game I’ve been too, Yes I’ve been to LSU/Auburn too, both in Baton Rouge, and Auburn, as well as the ’10 Iron Bowl in Tuscaloosa.
Auburn was not as pumped for us. We didn’t make a game of it for a half, and the fans were looking at the Iron Bowl. Yes UGA was more pumped for SC, I made both games. Auburn did crank up in the 4th Qtr. Auburn’s chants are generally more fun, and the Auburn band plays fun music. LSU’s band plays fun music too. Have the band play some 60s, or 80s music. It maybe lame on the radio but people enjoying singing to it and you can still sorta talk to each other unlike piped in NBA music. Going to games are fun dates, women like fun music, guys like girls having fun. Yes we all want to win, see Gurley put 200yards and 3 TD on the board but If you’re date is having a great time, it makes the entire thing better. I love UGA but many of the things the band plays belong in church on Sunday morning.
For sure, I agree about the LSU band…those folks know how to party.
DeputyDawg
As a former Redcoat, let me assure you that the attempts are made EVERY year to bring about new music. We would have up to five new tunes in the works at the start of every year. By the first game, they are almost always eliminated by the folks in Athletics.
Gotta say, I think the generational thing is overdone here. Fellow geezers, when we were matriculating back in the late 70’s/early 80’s, for all but a couple games a year, it was listen to Larry or go in person (or both); we could sell or buy student tickets; parking was generally not much hassle; the “what are you carrying in that bag” policing was much lighter; the drinking age was 18; the games were shorter with a lot less down time; and, on average, were simply better (usually just one sacrificial cupcake, sometimes not that). Plus, Poss’s BBQ! Nowadays, everything is regulated up the wazoo (parking, tailgating, “what’s in the bag?” oversight, ticketing), there’s much more down time with loooong commercial breaks and everlasting play reviews (while at home I can DVR back to re-watch the preceding play; I, too, am bored skull-less during the breaks and text when it works), there’s no Larry but plenty of TV; and always at least a couple games that don’t strike me as compelling.
Unfortunately, there’s no going back. The forever breaks are here to stay, and probably to get even longer; so are the cupcakes; so is the UGA Nanny. So, accept that TV has brought us to a point where the breaks have to be livened up with improved phone and net service, jazz up the music, and fer Gawd’s sakes, better concessions.
Honestly, it’s the Nanny State that bugs me the most about going to games…
I like road games better myself, and AU seems to have it figured out.
Meanmachineinredandblack
I have some experience working concessions for sporting events(Nascar and Indy Car) and amusement parks. Concessions are a huge way to increase fan experience. And the best way to improve concessions is to outsource some of them. It works out well for both sides. You bring in people who know what they’re doing(no disrespect to the volunteers, it’s God’s work that they’re doing), and the school makes more money because the stadium charges whatever they want off the top. The bottom line is much greater for the school, and the lines move faster, which generates more sales, and improves the fan experience.
I found an article about the mandates that the NFL has placed on stadiums for Wifi, etc..it states that a Wifi system capable of handling a stadium can run in the “mid seven figure sum”. That is quite an outlay.
Next question, is it worth it? Especially if it really costs that much. I say no, but obviously some disagree.
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2013/10/21/Leagues-and-Governing-Bodies/NFL-WiFi.aspx
Oops, should have read all the way down before I responded earlier. Yeah the patriots spent about $6 million on their’s, and they only seat about 70K. So I’d guess $7-$8 million to outfit Sanford Stadium. Plus whatever ongoing maintenance costs.
Like I said when replying to you above, if it became an either/or, I’d have to rethink my stance on wanting wifi, depending on what the other option being weighed was. But it would be nice to have.
Being a state funded government educational institution, UGA should be able to get a better deal as most vendors have education and government pricing available. Additionally, NFL teams have to staff up additional IT resources to maintain. Most schools are able to rely on student staff as part of an educational credit or pay at under market costs. The TCO for the schools should be less if they are smart.
Just something to think about. But yes, mid 7 figures may be right.
The stadium experience should be a community experience, and most live venues seem to be moving in the opposite direction. Blaring music prevents conversation, which isolates viewers – and I can be isolated at home. Same with Wi-Fi. When I want the family or a group to come together, I eliminate distractions like music, TV, or smart phones. But all stadiums now must have the world’s largest HD TV, constant concert-level music volume, and Wi-Fi. And I find all 3 seriously annoying in a football stadium. So do my kids, but maybe I’m just raising my kids to be weird.
Love going to high school games for a simple reason – none of them can afford any of this crap in their stadiums. I can talk football with friends and strangers alike.
I don’t doubt that a lot of students think the answer is MORE distraction, because that’s the way all other sources of entertainment in their lives are heading. But if a Jerry World experience is the ultimate destination of live venues, then I’m going to be interested to see where the point of diminishing returns lies. Maybe we’ve already passed it.
I don’t live in Athens but I did have season tickets up through the 2006 season. The tickets that I didn’t want, I sold either to friends or on eBay, etc. These days I typically attend at least 2 home games per year. The fixing the first two bullets below would probably double my attendance or possibly interest me in season tickets again.
These are just my opinions …
Tailgaiting / Parking … The school administration and the city has made life “less fun” on game days. They both have gone out of their way to make it more difficult and/or painful to attend games. As another poster stated above … They collectively try to run the city/school like a police state. The police, whether it’s campus or APD, seemed to be out for a nice payday at each home game. They troll(e)d the streets and parking lots looking to ticket/tow anybody they can.
Wi-Fi & Cell Reception … Whether you’re from Gen X, Y or whatever, the Wi-Fi & cell reception issue IS A NECESSITY. This would not only benefits the students that are constantly on their smartphones, but it would also benefit me … a 50 year old that enjoys keeping up with other games and occasionally texting or sending stadium photos to my friends. The administration can sit back and wait if they think that it’s a fad, but it ain’t going away! Technology is only going to continue to grow and they should (if they don’t already) realize it. Like it or not, that’s just how it is.
Student Attendance … When I was in college, there were three things (besides actually getting a degree) I was interested in and I think they remain important to a large majority of the students today: Drinking, Girls & Money.
Drinking … Ease off the frisking of the students, or at least search all of the folks that enter any gate in the same fashion.
Girls (or Boys) … Whether it be simply looking at them or a full-on skirt-chasing experience, the boys like that. And some girls, too.
Money … Since they changed from paper tickets to this ID card system, there is no free enterprise left for the exchange and/or sale of tickets that the student doesn’t want. If you want more students to attend, then make it easier for the transfer of the student tickets between each other. And maybe dial back the number of available student tickets a bit.
TrailCamGuy
I am 57 and a life-long UGA fan. The problem with declining attendance of students and the general population is affordability. The cost of attending a Division I football game is too expensive (i.e., tickets, parking, gasoline, concession prices, etc.) versus watching on a 60″ HD flat screen TV with surround sound.
Adding whatever gimmicks will not make a difference in student attendance unless attending a game is affordable for them.
Affordability is the reason I won’t have season tickets this year. I’m only a few years out of UGA, but Athletics has already priced me out. The new Young Alumni program was designed to keep people like myself involved before we had the resources to donate to the Hartman Fund. Unfortunately, they expected us to get a 25% raise this year in order to keep up the donations.
Also, the importance of kickoff time can not be overstated for student attendance. Sanford goes from being “Between the Hedges” to “the gates of Hell” anytime before 5:00PM in August, September, and October. I mean since player safety is currently a hot topic, can I bring up fan safety? Sitting on a metal bleacher, absorbing sunlight, in 90+ degree weather, for four hours, without shade = not good for you. Playing Florida Atlantic at 7PM two years ago was actually an enjoyable and exciting experience because a) the weather was temperate and b) it was late enough for students to mobilize.
I do not feel that we have sufficiently explored all the nuances of this topic.
#offseason
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The Fishing Report
Boho Beat
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Photograph by Danny Clinch
Back in the Box
by Bruce Robinson
John Oates has been digging deep into his past lately, reviewing his role as half of the phenomenally successful pop-soul duo Hall & Oates. His partnership with Daryl Hall dates back to 1967, when the two aspiring musicians met at a Philadelphia concert, and endures today in a forthcoming four-CD box set, due out in October, which prompted the backward looks.
Through 17 albums over 32 years, including a half-dozen No. 1 hits, the pair explored a number of variations in their blend of folk and R&B influences with crisp hooks, sharp rock guitars, dance grooves, techno touches and—always—tight vocal arrangements.
The evolution of a sound that embodied those disparate elements is traced through the 74 tracks (16 previously unreleased) that have been compiled for the forthcoming box, which even reaches back to include early singles that Oates and Hall each cut with their own early bands before they met, drawn together by a shared love of Philadelphia’s famed street-corner harmonizing.
“Doo-wop was an important part of our roots, a little bit more so for Daryl than me,” Oates says, settling in to chat from his mountainside home near Aspen, Colo. “My roots were more in folk and traditional American music—bluegrass, blues, acoustic-oriented stuff. When we met, we brought different elements of these roots to each other. If you had to distill what Hall and Oates is, it’s a combination of this acoustic Americana mixed with urban R&B.”
Still, that distillation took many different forms through the 1970s and ’80s before coalescing into the chart-topping sound of albums like Private Eyes, Voices and H2O and such hits as “Kiss on my List,” “Maneater” and “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” Revising the explorations along that path, Oates says, was full of surprises.
“When we actually had to listen to all these songs, I came away—and I’m not saying this from an ego point of view—pretty impressed with the adventurousness and the unusualness of a lot of the material, especially the stuff we resurrected from the vaults that was never released and live tracks that no one’s ever heard.”
But through it all, he adds, the basis for everything is their songs.
“Without the songs, we would be nothing, we would never have had a career,” he asserts. “For me, the accolades, the No. 1 records, the money—those things are byproducts of the songwriting.” And he marks a clear distinction between the song and a recording of it.
“They’re two completely different things to me. The song is what happens when you’re writing it, you’re sitting in your room with an instrument, and the record is what happens when you go into the studio and collaboration occurs between an engineer and musicians and producers and technology. A song can be recorded in a million different ways. Look at the Dolly Parton song ‘I Will Always Love You.’ Listen to her version and listen to Whitney Houston’s version; it’s the same song, but they’re two completely different records.”
Peeling back those studio embellishments was the basic idea underlying Oates’ recent series of solo dates, a show he titled The Stories Behind the Songs. “After all these years, so many people know this material and it’s become a part of the cultural and generational background, but a lot of people don’t know where the songs came from. I think it changes people’s perceptions of the songs because everyone, when they hear a song, seems to relate it to their own experience. That song speaks for an emotion or a moment or a feeling,” he says intently. “And what I do is say, from our point of view, this is where it really came from.”
The relaxed schedule that Hall & Oates maintain now also leaves room for some more unlikely individual projects, like Hall’s series of monthly online concerts, Live from Daryl’s House, featuring stars like Smokey Robinson performing in Hall’s living room and, perhaps more notably, the adventures of J-Stache, an online animated action show, in which Oates, lending his own voice, plays straight man to the distinctive mustache he sported throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
“I shaved my mustache off in 1989, so when I see that guy, it seems like someone else. It’s an animated version of what I used to be, so I can step away from it,” he laughs, “and the mustache can be the really insane character.”
Daryl Hall and John Oates perform together on Monday, Sept. 7, at Rodney Strong Vineyards. 4pm. $75&–$110. 11455 Old Redwood Hwy., Healdsburg. 707.869.1595.
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The Bohemian is an award-winning alternative newsweekly serving California’s Sonoma & Napa counties that traces its roots back to 1979. It is published by the Bay Area’s locally-owned, independent publishing group Weeklys.
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Our Musicians in Mexico
Anyone who’s lived on campus knows that Iowa weather can be hard to bear, especially during the winter. But Central’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble (SWE) and Combos Jazz Band got a break from the snow and ice this January. For 13 days during winter break, they escaped to sunny Mexico. Forty-three students, and ensemble directors Gabriel Espinosa and Mitch Lutch, traveled to the Yucatan, which happens to be Espinosa’s native land. There they performed concerts in Cancun, Xcaret Park, Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Merida.
Espinosa’s connections and knowledge of the area contributed to the trip’s success. As the students discovered, there’s no better way to learn about a country and its culture than beside someone who grew up there.
Band members agreed that the best part of the trip was the response to their performances. They played for packed houses nearly everywhere they went, and the crowds flocked to hear them. “Being able to share our music with such appreciative audiences is further proof that emotionally charged music is indeed a universal language,” says Lutch. “Our lives have forever been broadened, enriched and changed.”
Although the group spent a lot of time performing, they also enjoyed free time to experience the culture and see the sights. They visited Chichen Itza and other Mayan ruins, took a ride on a zip line and snorkeled.
Despite the thrill of these excursions, the students recognized that the trip was about more than just having fun. It was a cross-cultural experience. For Katlyn Alves ’14, an elementary education major from Lamar, Mo., the best part of the trip was connecting with people through music.
Those connections were often strongest with the kids they played for. “It was such an honor for me to be a part of what SWE brought to the children — an experience of quality classical music, and perhaps even inspiration to pursue a lifelong love of music, despite the limited resources available to them,” says Kevin Templeton ’13, a music education major from Muscatine, Iowa. “One kid asked about his chances of going to Central and playing music!”
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Search here for your favorite films!
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Reviews of Films from the Golden Age of Hollywood
Classic Dramas
Belinda O February 3, 2017 8 Comments
Now, Voyager, 1942, Columbia Pictures. Starting Bette Davis, Paul Heinreid, Claude Rains. Directed by Irving Rapper. B&W, 117 minutes.
The story of a plain and painfully shy young woman, held tightly under the grip of her abusive mother, Now, Voyager is a melodrama elevated to an unexpected level of quality by fine performances and a somewhat unpredictable plot. Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) was a late-in-life child for her sharp-tongued mother (Gladys Cooper), and the overbearing woman has never let her forget what a burden that has been.
With the help of kind relatives, Charlotte is sent to a sanatorium (today known as a mental health facility). There, under the patient and loving care of Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains), she evolves into a more confident young lady with style and panache.
The stay at the sanatorium isn’t all that helps cure her, however. She leaves the facility and goes on a cruise to South America, where she meets the dashing Jeremiah Duvaux Durrance (Paul Heinreid), a married man whose charm and attention bring her more fully into her own.
Claude Rains, Bette Davis
But the trip ends, and Charlotte returns home. From there the story has both its predictable and surprising moments, with an ending only a melodrama of that era could pull off.
The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Actress for Davis, Best Supporting Actress for Cooper, and Best Music, Scoring for Max Steiner. It won the music award, as well it should have. Reviews were mixed, in fact, they tended to be more critical than praising. However, the movie did well, particularly with women, its intended audience. Melodramas (“weepies”) were popular with the female crowd at the time, and this one was better than most.
Producer Hal B. Wallis originally envisioned Irene Dunne in the lead, but when Davis heard about the film she vigorously campaigned for the part. She was under contract to Warner Bros., she argued, while it would cost the studio to borrow Dunne from Columbia. Also, as a native New Englander, she could understand Charlotte Vale and her lifestyle.
During production, Davis gained a reputation for fighting her own and her cast members’ battles with director Irving Rapper, who was said to go home every evening exhausted from the day’s work with his strong-willed star. Heinreid later said he appreciated her intervention on his behalf, including campaigning for a second screen test when his appearance on the first was “wrong in every way.”
Bette Davis, Paul Heinreid
Many women wrote to the studio saying they saw themselves in the homely Charlotte, and believed if that transformation could be made for her, it could for them, as well. As Davis was not a classic beauty, this was yet another reason choosing her for the part was wise. It did, indeed, show the power of confidence, self-worth, and some savvy style decisions.
Now, Voyager has staying power because of its solid performances and very human storytelling, as well as the sharp cinematography and feminist perspective. For Bette Davis fans it is a must-see, and should be on the list of movies to watch for all classic film fans.
CategoriesClassic Dramas, Classic Films, Classic Movies
Tags1940s, Bette Davis, Classic Film Reviews, Classic Movie Reviews, Claude Rains, f, Film Reviews, Movie Reviews, Paul Heinreid
Bachelor Mother
Gentleman’s Agreement
Decker February 4, 2017 at 4:48 pm
As I’ve noted before with all your posts and reviews – always learn something new. Wasn’t aware that Irene Dunne was Mr. Wallis’ choice for the lead initially. Another wonderful review. Thank you!
Belinda O February 4, 2017 at 6:21 pm
Thank you! Yes, that was news to me, too. I’m a big fan of Irene Dunne, but Bette Davis was so marvelous in this film it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role!
Eric Binford February 4, 2017 at 5:10 pm
Ahh … Max Steiner’s music! Sublime! It’s really a fantastic score — perhaps my favorite film score of all time! 🙂
I agree, it’s incredible!
solsdottir February 5, 2017 at 9:38 am
Claude Rains and Bette Davis – what more could you want?
Belinda O February 5, 2017 at 11:08 am
I fell in love with this movie 40 years ago, and still love it today…it’s a great film.
Stella Dallas (1937) – Classic for a Reason February 21, 2017 at 4:03 pm
[…] book of the same name by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote the novel Now, Voyager, on which the film starring Bette Davis was based. Prouty also became a mentor to Sylvia Plath and is believed to be the inspiration for the […]
The Adventures of Robin Hood – Classic for a Reason February 20, 2018 at 4:04 pm
[…] an actor is once again highlighted. He is barely recognizable from his characters in such films as Now, Voyager and […]
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It Takes A Lot
From the recordings Love - 2013 and Orchestra Hall Setlist
It takes a lot of going nowhere, until you find it's not about the place.
It takes a lot of being no one, until you find it's not about the face.
It takes a lot of birth and death, until you ask who's really in control.
It takes a lot of love and pain, until you learn the art of letting go.
Let go go go go.
It takes a lot of hurtful thoughts, until you tame the jerk inside your head.
It takes a lot of feeling lost, until you find you're always where you're led.
It takes a lot of broken heart to wonder why we get what we've got.
But we get what we've got and when it comes to Heart, my friend, you've got a lot.
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Back to COCM.COM Student Housing Matters
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Join the Conversation Podcast Episode 4 – Interview with Edward Burger
In this episode, we interview the author of the book “The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking,” Edward Burger. Edward is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and is an educational and business consultant. Read his full bio below.
Capstone’s Alton Irwin wrote a blog post on the book recently. You can find that post HERE.
You can subscribe to the podcast by directly searching for “Join the Conversation Podcast” in iTunes, or by going HERE.
For any unit or group that is interested in purchasing copies of “The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking” for distribution to their teams or to students, Princeton University Press (as a university press) has agreed to offer a 40% discount on bulk orders. For more information, please contact either Timothy_Wilkins@press.princeton.edu or Alison_Anuzis@press.princeton.edu
Edward Burger is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College and most recently served as Vice Provost for Strategic Educational Initiatives at Baylor University. He is the author of over 60 research articles, books, and video series (starring in over 3,000 on-line videos). Burger was awarded the 2000 Northeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Award for Distinguished Teaching and 2001 MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo National Award for Distinguished Teaching of Mathematics. The MAA also named him their 2001-2003 Polya Lecturer. He was awarded the 2003 Residence Life Teaching Award from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2004 he was awarded Mathematical Association of America’s Chauvenet Prize and in 2006 he was a recipient of the Lester R. Ford Prize. In 2007, 2008, and 2011 he received awards for his video work. In 2007 Williams College awarded him the Nelson Bushnell Prize for Scholarship and Teaching. Burger is an associate editor of the American Mathematical Monthly and Math Horizons Magazine and serves as a Trustee of the Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. In 2006, Reader’s Digest listed Burger in their annual “100 Best of America” as America’s Best Math Teacher. In 2010 he was named the winner of the 2010 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching—the largest and most prestigious prize in higher education teaching across all disciplines in the English speaking world. Also in 2010 he starred in a mathematics segment for NBC-TV on the Today Show and throughout the 2010 Winter Olympic coverage. That television appearance won him a 2010 Telly Award. The Huffington Post named him one of their 2010 Game Changers; “HuffPost’s Game Changers salutes 100 innovators, visionaries, mavericks, and leaders who are reshaping their fields and changing the world.” Most recently in 2012, Microsoft Worldwide Education selected him as one of their “Global Heroes in Education.” In 2013 Burger will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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Tags: Edward Burger, Effective Thinking, Higher Ed, Higher Education, join the conversation, podcast
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Title 12. Code of Criminal Procedure
§ 12.55.155
Alaska Statutes Title 12. Code of Criminal Procedure § 12.55.155. Factors in aggravation and mitigation
Search Alaska Statutes
(a) Except as provided in (e) of this section, if a defendant is convicted of an offense and is subject to sentencing under AS 12.55.125(c) , (d) , (e) , or (i) and
(1) the low end of the presumptive range is four years or less, the court may impose any sentence below the presumptive range for factors in mitigation or may increase the active term of imprisonment up to the maximum term of imprisonment for factors in aggravation;
(2) the low end of the presumptive range is more than four years, the court may impose a sentence below the presumptive range as long as the active term of imprisonment is not less than 50 percent of the low end of the presumptive range for factors in mitigation or may increase the active term of imprisonment up to the maximum term of imprisonment for factors in aggravation.
(b) Sentences under this section that are outside of the presumptive ranges set out in AS 12.55.125 shall be based on the totality of the aggravating and mitigating factors set out in (c) and (d) of this section.
(c) The following factors shall be considered by the sentencing court if proven in accordance with this section, and may allow imposition of a sentence above the presumptive range set out in AS 12.55.125 :
(1) a person, other than an accomplice, sustained physical injury as a direct result of the defendant's conduct;
(2) the defendant's conduct during the commission of the offense manifested deliberate cruelty to another person;
(3) the defendant was the leader of a group of three or more persons who participated in the offense;
(4) the defendant employed a dangerous instrument in furtherance of the offense;
(5) the defendant knew or reasonably should have known that the victim of the offense was particularly vulnerable or incapable of resistance due to advanced age, disability, ill health, homelessness, consumption of alcohol or drugs, or extreme youth or was for any other reason substantially incapable of exercising normal physical or mental powers of resistance;
(6) the defendant's conduct created a risk of imminent physical injury to three or more persons, other than accomplices;
(7) a prior felony conviction considered for the purpose of invoking a presumptive range under this chapter was of a more serious class of offense than the present offense;
(8) the defendant's prior criminal history includes conduct involving aggravated assaultive behavior, repeated instances of assaultive behavior, repeated instances of cruelty to animals proscribed under AS 11.61.140(a)(1) and (3)--(5) , or a combination of assaultive behavior and cruelty to animals proscribed under AS 11.61.140(a)(1) and (3)--(5) ; in this paragraph, “aggravated assaultive behavior” means assault that is a felony under AS 11.41, or a similar provision in another jurisdiction;
(9) the defendant knew that the offense involved more than one victim;
(10) the conduct constituting the offense was among the most serious conduct included in the definition of the offense;
(11) the defendant committed the offense under an agreement that the defendant either pay or be paid for the commission of the offense, and the pecuniary incentive was beyond that inherent in the offense itself;
(12) the defendant was on release under AS 12.30 for another felony charge or conviction or for a misdemeanor charge or conviction having assault as a necessary element;
(13) the defendant knowingly directed the conduct constituting the offense at an active officer of the court or at an active or former judicial officer, prosecuting attorney, law enforcement officer, correctional employee, firefighter, emergency medical technician, paramedic, ambulance attendant, or other emergency responder during or because of the exercise of official duties;
(14) the defendant was a member of an organized group of five or more persons, and the offense was committed to further the criminal objectives of the group;
(15) the defendant has three or more prior felony convictions;
(16) the defendant's criminal conduct was designed to obtain substantial pecuniary gain and the risk of prosecution and punishment for the conduct is slight;
(17) the offense was one of a continuing series of criminal offenses committed in furtherance of illegal business activities from which the defendant derives a major portion of the defendant's income;
(18) the offense was a felony
(A) specified in AS 11.41 and was committed against a spouse, a former spouse, or a member of the social unit made up of those living together in the same dwelling as the defendant;
(B) specified in AS 11.41.410 -- 11.41.458 and the defendant has engaged in the same or other conduct prohibited by a provision of AS 11.41.410 -- 11.41.460 involving the same or another victim;
(C) specified in AS 11.41 that is a crime involving domestic violence and was committed in the physical presence or hearing of a child under 16 years of age who was, at the time of the offense, living within the residence of the victim, the residence of the perpetrator, or the residence where the crime involving domestic violence occurred;
(D) specified in AS 11.41 and was committed against a person with whom the defendant has a dating relationship or with whom the defendant has engaged in a sexual relationship; or
(E) specified in AS 11.41.434 -- 11.41.458 or AS 11.61.128 and the defendant was 10 or more years older than the victim;
(19) the defendant's prior criminal history includes an adjudication as a delinquent for conduct that would have been a felony if committed by an adult;
(20) the defendant was on furlough under AS 33.30 or on parole or probation for another felony charge or conviction that would be considered a prior felony conviction under AS 12.55.145(a)(1)(B) ;
(21) the defendant has a criminal history of repeated instances of conduct violative of criminal laws, whether punishable as felonies or misdemeanors, similar in nature to the offense for which the defendant is being sentenced under this section;
(22) the defendant knowingly directed the conduct constituting the offense at a victim because of that person's race, sex, color, creed, physical or mental disability, ancestry, or national origin;
(23) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and
(A) the offense involved the delivery of a controlled substance under circumstances manifesting an intent to distribute the substance as part of a commercial enterprise; or
(B) at the time of the conduct resulting in the conviction, the defendant was caring for or assisting in the care of a child under 10 years of age;
(24) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and the offense involved the transportation of controlled substances into the state;
(25) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and the offense involved large quantities of a controlled substance;
(26) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and the offense involved the distribution of a controlled substance that had been adulterated with a toxic substance;
(27) the defendant, being 18 years of age or older,
(A) is legally accountable under AS 11.16.110(2) for the conduct of a person who, at the time the offense was committed, was under 18 years of age and at least three years younger than the defendant; or
(B) is aided or abetted in planning or committing the offense by a person who, at the time the offense was committed, was under 18 years of age and at least three years younger than the defendant;
(28) the victim of the offense is a person who provided testimony or evidence related to a prior offense committed by the defendant;
(29) the defendant committed the offense for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a criminal street gang;
(30) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.41.410 -- 11.41.455 , and the defendant knowingly supplied alcohol or a controlled substance to the victim in furtherance of the offense with the intent to make the victim incapacitated; in this paragraph, “incapacitated” has the meaning given in AS 11.41.470 ;
(31) the defendant's prior criminal history includes convictions for five or more crimes in this or another jurisdiction that are class A misdemeanors under the law of this state, or having elements similar to a class A misdemeanor; two or more convictions arising out of a single continuous episode are considered a single conviction; however, an offense is not a part of a continuous episode if committed while attempting to escape or resist arrest or if it is an assault on a uniformed or otherwise clearly identified peace officer or correctional employee; notice and denial of convictions are governed by AS 12.55.145(b) -- (d) ;
(32) the offense is a violation of AS 11.41 or AS 11.46.400 and the offense occurred on school grounds, on a school bus, at a school-sponsored event, or in the administrative offices of a school district if students are educated at that office; in this paragraph,
(A) “school bus” has the meaning given in AS 11.71.900 ;
(B) “school district” has the meaning given in AS 47.07.063 ;
(C) “school grounds” has the meaning given in AS 11.71.900 ;
(33) the offense was a felony specified in AS 11.41.410 -- 11.41.455 , the defendant had been previously diagnosed as having or having tested positive for HIV or AIDS, and the offense either (A) involved penetration, or (B) exposed the victim to a risk or a fear that the offense could result in the transmission of HIV or AIDS; in this paragraph, “HIV” and “AIDS” have the meanings given in AS 18.15.310 ;
(34) the defendant committed the offense on, or to affect persons or property on, the premises of a recognized shelter or facility providing services to victims of domestic violence or sexual assault;
(35) the defendant knowingly directed the conduct constituting the offense at a victim because that person was 65 years of age or older;
(36) the defendant committed the offense at a health care facility and knowingly directed the conduct constituting the offense at a medical professional during or because of the medical professional's exercise of professional duties; in this paragraph,
(A) “health care facility” has the meaning given in AS 18.07.111 ;
(B) “medical professional” has the meaning given in AS 12.55.135(k) ;
(37) the defendant knowingly caused the victim to become unconscious by means of a dangerous instrument; in this paragraph, “dangerous instrument” has the meaning given in AS 11.81.900(b)(15)(B) .
(d) The following factors shall be considered by the sentencing court if proven in accordance with this section, and may allow imposition of a sentence below the presumptive range set out in AS 12.55.125 :
(1) the offense was principally accomplished by another person, and the defendant manifested extreme caution or sincere concern for the safety or well-being of the victim;
(2) the defendant, although an accomplice, played only a minor role in the commission of the offense;
(3) the defendant committed the offense under some degree of duress, coercion, threat, or compulsion insufficient to constitute a complete defense, but that significantly affected the defendant's conduct;
(4) the conduct of a youthful defendant was substantially influenced by another person more mature than the defendant;
(5) the conduct of an aged defendant was substantially a product of physical or mental infirmities resulting from the defendant's age;
(6) in a conviction for assault under AS 11.41.200 -- 11.41.220 , the defendant acted with serious provocation from the victim;
(7) except in the case of a crime defined by AS 11.41.410 -- 11.41.470 , the victim provoked the crime to a significant degree;
(8) before the defendant knew that the criminal conduct had been discovered, the defendant fully compensated or made a good faith effort to fully compensate the victim of the defendant's criminal conduct for any damage or injury sustained;
(9) the conduct constituting the offense was among the least serious conduct included in the definition of the offense;
(10) the defendant was motivated to commit the offense solely by an overwhelming compulsion to provide for emergency necessities for the defendant's immediate family;
(11) after commission of the offense for which the defendant is being sentenced, the defendant assisted authorities to detect, apprehend, or prosecute other persons who committed an offense;
(12) the facts surrounding the commission of the offense and any previous offenses by the defendant establish that the harm caused by the defendant's conduct is consistently minor and inconsistent with the imposition of a substantial period of imprisonment;
(13) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and the offense involved small quantities of a controlled substance;
(14) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and the offense involved the distribution of a controlled substance, other than a schedule IA controlled substance, to a personal acquaintance who is 19 years of age or older for no profit;
(15) the defendant is convicted of an offense specified in AS 11.71 and the offense involved the possession of a small amount of a controlled substance for personal use in the defendant's home;
(16) in a conviction for assault or attempted assault or for homicide or attempted homicide, the defendant acted in response to domestic violence perpetrated by the victim against the defendant and the domestic violence consisted of aggravated or repeated instances of assaultive behavior;
(17) except in the case of an offense defined by AS 11.41 or AS 11.46.400 , the defendant has been convicted of a class B or C felony, and, at the time of sentencing, has successfully completed a court-ordered treatment program as defined in AS 28.35.028 that was begun after the offense was committed;
(18) except in the case of an offense defined under AS 11.41 or AS 11.46.400 or a defendant who has previously been convicted of a felony, the defendant committed the offense while suffering from a mental disease or defect as defined in AS 12.47.130 that was insufficient to constitute a complete defense but that significantly affected the defendant's conduct;
(19) the defendant is convicted of an offense under AS 11.71, and the defendant sought medical assistance for another person who was experiencing a drug overdose contemporaneously with the commission of the offense;
(20) except in the case of an offense defined under AS 11.41 or AS 11.46.400 , the defendant committed the offense while suffering from a condition diagnosed
(A) as a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder substantially impaired the defendant's judgment, behavior, capacity to recognize reality, or ability to cope with the ordinary demands of life, and the fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, though insufficient to constitute a complete defense, significantly affected the defendant's conduct; in this subparagraph, “fetal alcohol spectrum disorder” means a condition of impaired brain function in the range of permanent birth defects caused by maternal consumption of alcohol during pregnancy; or
(B) as combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder or combat-related traumatic brain injury, the combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder or combat-related traumatic brain injury substantially impaired the defendant's judgment, behavior, capacity to recognize reality, or ability to cope with the ordinary demands of life, and the combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder or combat-related traumatic brain injury, though insufficient to constitute a complete defense, significantly affected the defendant's conduct; in this subparagraph, “combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder or combat-related traumatic brain injury” means post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury resulting from combat with an enemy of the United States in the line of duty while on active duty as a member of the armed forces of the United States; nothing in this subparagraph is intended to limit the application of (18) of this subsection;
(21) the defendant, as a condition of release ordered by the court, successfully completed an alcohol and substance abuse monitoring program established under AS 47.38.020 .
(e) If a factor in aggravation is a necessary element of the present offense, or requires the imposition of a sentence within the presumptive range under AS 12.55.125(c)(2) , that factor may not be used to impose a sentence above the high end of the presumptive range. If a factor in mitigation is raised at trial as a defense reducing the offense charged to a lesser included offense, that factor may not be used to impose a sentence below the low end of the presumptive range.
(f) If the state seeks to establish a factor in aggravation at sentencing
(1) under (c)(7), (8), (12), (15), (18)(B), (19), (20), (21), or (31) of this section, or if the defendant seeks to establish a factor in mitigation at sentencing, written notice must be served on the opposing party and filed with the court not later than 10 days before the date set for imposition of sentence; the factors in aggravation listed in this paragraph and factors in mitigation must be established by clear and convincing evidence before the court sitting without a jury; all findings must be set out with specificity;
(2) other than one listed in (1) of this subsection, the factor shall be presented to a trial jury under procedures set by the court, unless the defendant waives trial by jury, stipulates to the existence of the factor, or consents to have the factor proven under procedures set out in (1) of this subsection; a factor in aggravation presented to a jury is established if proved beyond a reasonable doubt; written notice of the intent to establish a factor in aggravation must be served on the defendant and filed with the court
(A) 20 days before trial, or at another time specified by the court;
(B) within 48 hours, or at a time specified by the court, if the court instructs the jury about the option to return a verdict for a lesser included offense; or
(C) five days before entering a plea that results in a finding of guilt, or at another time specified by the court.
(g) Voluntary alcohol or other drug intoxication or chronic alcoholism or other drug addiction may not be considered an aggravating or mitigating factor.
(h) If one of the aggravating factors in (c) of this section is established as provided in (f)(1) and (2) of this section, the court may increase the term of imprisonment up to the maximum term of imprisonment. Any additional aggravating factor may then be established by clear and convincing evidence by the court sitting without a jury, including an aggravating factor that the jury has found not to have been established beyond a reasonable doubt.
(i) In this section, “serious provocation” has the meaning given in AS 11.41.115(f) .
Read this complete Alaska Statutes Title 12. Code of Criminal Procedure § 12.55.155. Factors in aggravation and mitigation on Westlaw
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Canceled: Guest Pianist: Karinè Poghosyan
Described as ‘extraordinary,’ ‘larger than life,’ ‘the powerhouse pianist’… Award-winning Armenian-American pianist, Kariné Poghosyan, has been praised on the world stage for her “ability to get to the heart of the works she performs.” Since her orchestral debut at the age of fourteen, Kariné has been enchanting concert audiences around the globe, with her masterful artistry and exceptional performances that leave them forever transformed.
Friday, April 24, 2020 at 7:30pm
Events for Faculty & Staff, Events for Students, Events for Alumni, Events for General Public, Events for Prospective Students
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2 Grand Slam events added to curling bubble at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary
Gregory Strong
Published Thursday, December 3, 2020 10:20AM MST
Two more events have been added to the planned calendar for curling in Calgary in 2021. (File photo)
CALGARY -- Add two more competitions to the Calgary curling “bubble” that's slated to hold several events later this season.
The Grand Slam of Curling said Thursday that it plans to host The Players' Championship and Champions Cup at Winsport's Canada Olympic Park in Calgary. Dates have yet to be finalized, but both bonspiels will likely be held in the spring.
The announcement comes two days after Curling Canada first unveiled curling hub plans for the Alberta city. The federation intends to hold the 2021 men's and women's national championships, the mixed doubles championship and the men's world curling championship in Calgary.
Curling Canada plans to adopt a similar model to the one the NHL used when it completed its pandemic-interrupted campaign by using “bubbles” in Toronto and Edmonton. Spectators were not allowed in the hockey venues and that will be the case for curling as well.
Conditional on government approval, the proposed curling events will adhere to strict health guidelines to prioritize the safety of players, staff and all involved, Sportsnet said in a release.
The Players' Championship was originally set for April 7-12, 2021 in Toronto. The Champions Cup had been scheduled to close out the Slam season from April 29 to May 3, 2021 in Olds, Alta.
4 major curling events planned in Calgary for 2021
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Browse: Home » 2011 » November » Vengeful Seductress: Judith
Vengeful Seductress: Judith
November 30, 2011 · by Amy · in Art, Art History, Caravaggio, Explorations, Religious History, Series
I’m so excited about this post. Since it obviously can’t be book or even research paper length, I have to warn you that it will not do justice to the topics it addresses (Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Caravaggisti, Judith, Judith Slaying Holofernes, women in art). That being said, the goal of this post is to be informative, provide some insight, and examine two paintings by two Baroque masters. Like the previous two Seductress posts, this one will focus on a couple paintings and have a gallery with different representations of Judith at the end. On the Entry Bibliographies page, you’ll find a list of recommended reading for the life and art of Artemisia Gentileschi.
Judith’s story can be found in the deuterocanonical book of Judith. The entire book is worth the read, and naturally all the events it discusses are relevant to Judith’s motives for slaying Holofernes. Nebuchadnezzar has decided to go to war with all the nations that refuse to worship him as their god. (Side note: the book of Daniel has some great stores about Nebuchadnezzar.) Based out of Nineveh (the same city Jonah was told to go to before he was swallowed by a whale), Nebuchadnezzar trusts greatly in the city’s fortifications and vast army, both described at length. He anticipates a sweeping victory across these lands and believes that the sight of his armies alone is enough to make any nation surrender. He puts his general, Holofernes, in charge of this war and tells him to kill everyone unless they agree to worship him. Holofernes goes out to destroy or convert the nations. When his armies get close to Israel, they set up camp and decide to destroy Israel by taking their water supply, waiting until they are faint with thirst and hunger, and then sweep in and demolish them. News of the nearby armies reaches the ruler of Israel and the High Priest.
Enter Judith. She is a widow whose wealthy husband, when he died in the barley harvest, left her his entire estate. Judith is described as a very beautiful woman. Yet since her husband’s death she has fasted nearly daily, worn only her mourning clothes, and spent all her time in her husband’s home. When she hears about the impending attack, she goes to the leaders of Israel and recommends that they do nothing until she’s had a chance to remedy the situation. She is respected as a woman of great wisdom and faith, so Israel’s king trusts her when she says that the Lord has delivered Holofernes and his armies into her hand. She admonishes them not to ask how she will achieve this victory.
Judith goes home after her talk with Israel’s leaders. She prostrates herself on the floor and asks God to bless her lips which will speak deception and to use her beauty and words as tools to defeat Holofernes. Then she proceeds to bathe, put on her precious jewels and fine clothes (which she “used to wear when her husband was alive”), and comb her hair. Her maidservant packs Judith a bag with food and supplies. At night, Judith and her maid go to the camp of Holofernes. They are greeted by guards who are stunned by Judith’s beauty and fine regalia. She claims that she has run away from Jerusalem because they were treating her poorly and she wants Nebuchadnezzar’s armies to destroy them. She promises, if they take her to Holofernes, to give him insider information that will help him defeat Israel. The guards take her to Holofernes, and the deception begins.
Since the moment he saw Judith, Holofernes wants her for himself. Judith wants Holofernes dead. She tells him what she told the guards, that the Lord will allow the Assyrians to smite Israel because of their sin. Holofernes’ men set up a tent for Judith and he offers her food, but she says that her supply will not run out. She stays with them for a number of days, each night going out to pray with her maid.
One night, Holofernes has a party and insists on inviting Judith. He drinks too much wine. It is here that his sexual desires for Judith are revealed. She stays with him through the night, and eventually, a drunk Holofernes passes out on his finely ornamented bed. Judith seizes the opportunity. She takes the sword hanging above the general and brings it down with all her might onto his neck. He’s asleep – keep that in mind for the artwork we’ll see. She eventually cuts off his head. Her maid rushes in with the supply bag that held their food and they place the head in the bag, leaving the body sprawled out and bloody. They leave the tent together, and the guards think nothing of it because they went to pray together every night.
The next morning, Holofernes’ trusted servant knocks on the door of his tent. There is no answer. He assumes that his master and Judith slept together the previous night so he pokes his head in the door and lets out a scream. Holofernes’ headless body is laid out before him and he can’t find the head! Meanwhile, Judith reports her victory to Israel’s leaders and shows them the head. She tells them to go down to the camp ready to attack. The men will be scared and in want of their fearless general. They will retreat and Israel will kill them and plunder their goods. This is exactly what happens. After, the entire city rejoices that the great armies of Nebuchadnezzar were defeated at the hands of a woman. Judith was praised and crowned with garlands. She remained a widow for the rest of her life despite men vying for her affections.
Judith’s song of thanksgiving in Judith 16:7-10 provides a summary of her defeat of the feared Assyrian general:
For their mighty one did not fall by the hands
of the young men,
nor did the sons of the Titans smite him,
nor did tall giants set upon him;
but Judith the daughter of Merari undid him
with the beauty of her countenance.
For she took off her widow’s mourning
to exalt the oppressed in Israel.
She anointed her face with ointment
and fastened her hair with a tiara
and put on a linen gown to deceive him.
Her sandal ravished his eyes,
her beauty captivated his mind,
and the sword severed his neck.
The Persians trembled at her boldness,
the Medes were daunted at her daring.
How is Judith portrayed in art history? As a beautiful, graceful woman? As a woman of power and strength? Or does it depend on the time and artist?
Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598-99
In Caravaggio’s famous 1599 depiction of Judith, she is a combination of graceful beauty and fearless strength. Caravaggio chooses the moment when the sword is still stuck on Holofernes neck. Judith is standing upright as if to keep herself from the blood that’s spluttering down on the bed under her, focused on the task at hand. Her old friend, her maid, that came with her, is fascinated by what she’s seeing. True to his oeuvre, Caravaggio chose the moment of execution when there is the most dramatic impact – the most startling and theatric moment. There is historical evidence to suggest that Caravaggio had seen real executions, which explains the realism of Holofernes’ neck wound and facial expression, and strength with which Judith is bringing his sword down onto him.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1612 (one version)
Caravaggio’s painting of this story is interesting, but more interesting (yes, it is amazing that I think something can be more interesting than a Caravaggio) are Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings of the scene, produced from 1612, two years after Caravaggio died, to 1620. Artemisia’s biography is of extreme importance. In 1612, her father, Orazio Gentileschi (one of the Caravaggisti), brought Agostino Tassi to trial. Tassi was working on a Papal commission with Orazio and in this time, became acquainted with his daughter. Tassi raped Artemisia, which he was found guilty of but never confessed to. She resisted his advances and wounded him with a knife. (Some scholars read the Holofernes paintings, with the Artemisia-esque Judith taking a knife to her enemy, as a visual metaphor of Artemisia’s resistance against Tassi.) During the trial, Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews and she was accused of being promiscuous prior to the rape. She told the court that she continued a sexual relationship with Tassi after the rape because he said he would marry her: “What I was doing with him, I did only so that, as he had dishonored me, he would marry me.” Marriage was the socially acceptable band-aid for rape in seventeenth century Italy. It was also discovered that Tassi (who didn’t marry Artemisia) had a history of sex crimes – raping his sister-in-law (who became pregnant) and one of his wives (who he possibly hired bandits to kill). Tassi was exiled from Rome, although due to noble influence he was back in the city a few months later.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1612-20.
Artemisia painted Judith Slaying Holofernes multiple times. The 1612 painting “has been interpreted by art historian Mary Garrard as a metaphoric expression of female resistance to masculine sexual dominance.” Artemisia’s oeuvre consisted mostly of iconography that involved strong female subjects. The violent scene of Holofernes’ beheading wasn’t Artemisia’s first foray into violence, and it certainly wasn’t her last, but the historical moment surrounding her first Judith painting, and the fact that she didn’t abandon this scene after one representation (much like Caravaggio didn’t abandon David and Goliath), speaks to its paramount importance to our understanding of her life and how she perceived and related to the story of Judith.
I asked my readers to weigh in on the issue of Caravaggio vs. Artemisia and the iconography of Judith Slaying Holofernes. These are their wonderful and thoughtful responses:
grow-up-frozen: C’s is a bit more conservative for the time, both in terms of gore and also putting the power and action of the hands of a young woman. In C’s, the old crone (reminiscent of a witch figure) is holding the bag, implying that she had some sway over Judith in convincing her to commit an out-of-character act of violence. You can see the fear and hesitation on her face. G’s is a lot more shocking, there’s more of a blood spray and both women (closer in age, neither is witch-like) are acting decisively and are dominant in the situation, rather than one leading the other. I’m partial to Gentileschi’s myself, it seems more physiologically and psychologically “naturalistic” while Caravaggio’s feels much more posed.
vivalacacka: yo! So, i’m doing a series of modern feminists twists within the art history subjects of heroines. My first subject I’m working is Judith and Holofernes and I’m working around the subject matter that she basically seduced him/screwed him, than cut his head off. I’m just wondering if we have any theories of this whole sexual side of the story? I’ve only heard she got him into a drunken stupor. What’s your opinion?
angelkissingonasinner: This is regarding vivalacacka’s question. In terms of biblical text, Judith didn’t actually had sex with him. She only got him into a drunken stupor. I think painters depict her as a seductress because it’s more exciting. It’s moralizing to men (don’t trust beautiful women), and moralizing to women (your sexuality is your highest value). It creates a more dramatic scene if Judith did seduce him before killing him because it creates a vengeful woman who sacrificed her purity. It’s more B & W.
artisandoflove: I think, in response to the seductress question, that her reaction to the “feminist” aspect of the “sexual” trope is a little misguided. Nineteenth-century artists (decadents, aesthetes) who depicted “Salome” and “Judith” characters were responding to anxieties surrounding gender boundaries and sexuality, similar to those late Rennaisance and Baroque artists who depicted the same subjects- they are manifestations of morality and virtue, seen through the distorted lens of social norm. Context !!!
I’ve discussed what I think, and you’ve read what these fine folk think. What do you think? Do you agree with vivalacacka that Judith seduced Holofernes before killing him? Or do you side more with the textual and socio-historical bases for these paintings and their iconography?
Obviously, there is a lot more to be said about these paintings and this post barely scratches the surface. The goal was to get you thinking about how the text relates to Judith paintings: how artists visually interpret the text, if their representations are really true to the text, and how their personal lives and experiences may or may not affect their art.
In the mean time, see more images of Judith Slaying Holofernes here, and check out a wonderful Artemisia-themed recommending reading list on this site.
It’s well into December and time to move on to examinations of the Annunciation and Nativity story in art history, so we’ll return to this topic in the New Year! Feel free to leave a comment or email your thoughts!
Tags: Baroque Art, Caravaggio, Italian Baroque Art, Judith, Judith Slaying Holofernes, Series, Victory
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Epidemiology/Health Services/Psychosocial Research
The Burden of Mortality Attributable to Diabetes
Realistic estimates for the year 2000
Gojka Roglic, MD1,
Nigel Unwin, DM, MFPH1,
Peter H. Bennett, MB, FRCP2,
Colin Mathers, BSC, PHD3,
Jaakko Tuomilehto, MD, PHD456,
Satyajit Nag, MRCP7,
Vincent Connolly, MD, FRCP7 and
Hilary King, MD, DSC1
1Department of Chronic Diseases and Health Promotion, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
2National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Phoenix, Arizona
3Measurement and Health Information, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland
4Department of Epidemiology and Health Promotion, National Public Health Institute, Helsinki, Finland
5Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
6South Ostrobotnia Central Hospital, Seinäjoki, Finland
7Diabetes Care Centre, The James Cook University Hospital, Middlesborough, U.K.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Dr. Gojka Roglic, World Health Organization, 20 Avenue Appia, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. E-mail: roglicg{at}who.int
Diabetes Care 2005 Sep; 28(9): 2130-2135. https://doi.org/10.2337/diacare.28.9.2130
Suppl Material
OBJECTIVE—To estimate the global number of excess deaths due to diabetes in the year 2000.
RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We used a computerized generic formal disease model (DisMod II), used by the World Health Organization to assess disease burden through modeling the relationships between incidence, prevalence, and disease-specific mortality. Baseline input data included population structure, age- and sex-specific estimates of diabetes prevalence, and available published estimates of relative risk of death for people with diabetes compared with people without diabetes. The results were validated with population-based observations and independent estimates of relative risk of death.
RESULTS—The excess global mortality attributable to diabetes in the year 2000 was estimated to be 2.9 million deaths, equivalent to 5.2% of all deaths. Excess mortality attributable to diabetes accounted for 2–3% of deaths in poorest countries and over 8% in the U.S., Canada, and the Middle East. In people 35–64 years old, 6–27% of deaths were attributable to diabetes.
CONCLUSIONS—These are the first global estimates of mortality attributable to diabetes. Globally, diabetes is likely to be the fifth leading cause of death.
DECODA, Diabetes Epidemiology, Collaborative Analysis of Diagnostic Criteria in Asia
DECODE, Diabetes Epidemiology, Collaborative Analysis of Diagnostic Criteria in Europe
WHO, World Health Organization
Diabetes is a serious illness with multiple complications and premature mortality, accounting for at least 10% of total health care expenditure in many countries (1). However, routinely reported statistics based on death certification seriously underestimate mortality from diabetes (2), because individuals with diabetes most often die of cardiovascular and renal disease and not from a cause uniquely related to diabetes, such as ketoacidosis or hypoglycemia (3).
Most international mortality statistics, including those published by the World Health Organization (WHO), are based solely on the “underlying cause of death” as recorded on the death certificate, even in the presence of other information. Complex methods have been developed for estimating cause-specific mortality for some conditions (AIDS, tuberculosis) but not for diabetes (4).
Based on routine statistics, recent World Health Reports estimated mortality from diabetes in the world as 987,000 deaths for the year 2002 (5), which was 1.7% of total world mortality. There were estimated to be at least 170 million people with diabetes in the world in the year 2000 (6); therefore, mortality attributable to diabetes could be expected to be much higher, since diabetes is a serious and chronic condition. The aim of this study was to provide a more realistic estimate of the number of deaths attributable to diabetes.
Model and data
To estimate the number of deaths attributable to diabetes in the year 2000, we used a software program, DisMod II, developed for the Global Burden of Disease 2000 study (7,8) and routinely used by WHO for disease estimates. The DisMod II disease model is that of a multistate life table that describes a single disease. There are two causes of death, from the disease and from “all other” causes, that are assumed to be independent. There are four transition hazards: incidence, remission, case fatality, and the “all other mortality” hazard. These transition hazards are age specific, but DisMod II assumes them to be constant within a 1-year age interval. The analytical solution to these equations enables the calculation of the number of people in each of the three states (healthy, diseased, and dead) at age x as a function of the number of people in those states at the previous age and of the three hazards at that age. Setting initial conditions for age 0 then allows the computation of the numbers of people in the three states from the lowest age up. From these numbers, the other rates, such as prevalence and mortality, are calculated. The above equations assume that three hazard transitions (incidence, remission, and case fatality) are available as input variables. When this is not the case, and input variables like prevalence are available instead, DisMod II combines the analytical solution with a loss function and minimizes that loss function to find values of the hazards that minimize the difference between the input and output variables. Of six disease-specific input variables (incidence, remission, case fatality/relative risk [RR] for total mortality, prevalence, duration, and mortality), three are needed, together with population size and total mortality, to calculate the others in the model. Input data for this study included population structure and all-cause mortality rates, age- and sex-specific diabetes prevalence, remission (equal to zero), and available published estimates of RR of death for people with diabetes.
Regional country groupings developed by the World Health Organization were used (available at http://www.who.int/whr/2004/annex/topic/en/annex_member_en.pdf). They are based on the geo-political grouping of countries into six regions (AFR, African Region; AMR, Region of the Americas; EMR, Eastern Mediterranean Region; EUR, European Region; SEAR, Southeast Asia Region; WPR, Western Pacific Region). These six regions are further divided into 17 subregions (5), on the basis of mortality rates in children <5 years old and in males 15–59 years old (A, very low child, very low adult; B, low child, low adult; C, low child, high adult; D, high child, high adult; E, high child, very high adult).
Estimates for prevalence and the number of people with diabetes were those from a recent WHO study (6), in which population-based, age- and sex-specific diabetes prevalences from 40 countries were applied to the United Nations population estimates for every country to get the number of people with diabetes in the year 2000 (online appendix [available at http://care.diabetesjournals.org]).
We searched the literature for measures of RR of death for people with diabetes, compared with people without diabetes. Only a few cohort studies were found to be representative of the diagnosed diabetic population, provide the RR of all-cause mortality for individuals with diabetes by sex and age-group (9–11), or provide the number of deaths among individuals with diabetes and individuals without diabetes in the case of follow-up of population-based samples (12). Data from these studies were combined and weighted by the total number of deaths in each study to provide combined RRs (Table 1). Based on a recent U.K. study, the RR of dying in the age-group 0–19 years was assumed to be 1.8 for males and 3.1 for females (13). In people >80 years old, the RR of dying was assumed to be 1.
In 1994, a population-based cohort of 4,842 individuals with diagnosed diabetes was identified in South Tees, U.K., and followed up annually for mortality until 1999 (14). The number of deaths attributable to diabetes in 1995–1999 in this cohort was calculated as the actual observed number of deaths that occurred in the cohort, reduced by the number of deaths that would have occurred if South Tees’ death rates in people without diagnosed diabetes operated in the diabetes cohort. This directly calculated number of excess deaths attributable to diabetes was compared with the number of excess deaths calculated by DisMod II.
To validate the DisMod II method, separate calculations of the number of deaths due to diabetes were performed according to the formula proposed by Miettinen for estimating the proportion of a disease or event caused by a given exposure (15):
where EF indicates the fraction of total mortality that is attributable to diabetes (the “etiologic fraction”), P indicates the proportion of the population with diabetes, and RR indicates the ratio of the mortality rate among individuals with diabetes to that among individuals without diabetes in age-groups 0–19, 20–39, 40–59, 60–79, and 80+ years. To estimate the number of deaths attributable to diabetes, the calculated “etiologic fractions” for each region were applied to the total number of deaths from the corresponding region for the year 2000 (16). Again, diabetes prevalence rates were obtained from the recent WHO publication (6), and the RRs of dying were those used in DisMod II.
To further validate the assumption that the available few published RRs of death were suitable proxy for unavailable information, we also used previously unpublished age-specific but otherwise unadjusted RRs of death in people with diabetes from the DECODE (Diabetes Epidemiology, Collaborative Analysis of Diagnostic Criteria in Europe) and DECODA (Diabetes Epidemiology, Collaborative Analysis of Diagnostic Criteria in Asia) studies to calculate the number of deaths attributable to diabetes in people older than 39 years (J.T., personal communication). The DECODE study examined 22 adult European cohorts for diabetes, and >27,000 people were followed up for mortality for an average of 11 years (17).
The DECODA study followed five cohorts of Japanese and Indian origin (18). We used the RR of deaths in 3,482 Asian Indians living in Mauritius and Fiji to recalculate the number of deaths for Southeast Asia and compared it with the number of deaths derived using published RRs of dying from studies conducted in Europe and the U.S. The unadjusted RR of death for diabetic patients, compared with people without diabetes in the DECODA study populations of Asian Indian origin, was 5.76 for men and 3.28 for women in the age-group 30–39 years; 8.16 for men and 1.77 for women in the age-group 40–49 years; 4.07 for men and 3.13 for women in the age-group 50–59 years; 2.44 for men and 1.87 for women in the age-group 60–69; and 2.02 for men and 2.32 for women in the age-group 70–89. The RR above the age of 89 was assumed to be equal to 1.
To get a range of numbers of deaths attributable to diabetes, we calculated the number of deaths using the RRs from each of the four studies. For both men and women, the lowest number of deaths was obtained by using RRs from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) (12). South Wales RRs gave the highest number of deaths in men (10), and the U.K. study RRs gave the highest number of deaths in women (11). Therefore, age- and sex-specific RRs of death from these three studies were applied to each region to get a range based on published results.
The numbers of excess deaths due to diabetes and the percentage of total mortality in each WHO region are presented in Table 2. Global excess mortality attributable to diabetes is estimated at 2.9 million deaths (1.4 million men and 1.5 million women), which is equivalent to 5.2% of world all-cause mortality in the year 2000: 1 million deaths in developed countries and 1.9 million deaths in developing countries. The percentage of excess deaths was lowest (2.4%) in the poorest African countries and in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam (WPR B2) and highest in the Middle East (9% in the Arabian Peninsula) and North America (8.5% in the Region of the Americas). In countries with a high prevalence of diabetes in younger age-groups (Southeast Asia Region, SEAR D; Arabian Peninsula, Eastern Mediterranean Region, EMR B; and Western Pacific Region, WPR B3), the percentage of excess deaths peaked at 50–54 years of age. In the rest of the world, the percentage of excess deaths due to diabetes was highest in people aged 55–59 years.
Overall, 7.5 million people with diabetes are estimated to have died in the year 2000. This includes 4.6 million people with diabetes assumed to have died from causes other than diabetes, plus the excess 2.9 million that died because of diabetes. In individuals with diabetes younger than 35 years, 75% of all deaths were attributable to diabetes; in individuals with diabetes aged 35–64 years, 59% of deaths were attributable to diabetes; while in individuals with diabetes and older than 64 years, 29% of all deaths were attributable to diabetes.
The number of directly calculated deaths attributable to diabetes in South Tees was systematically 5–32% higher for each year than that calculated by the model (76 vs. 72 in 1995, 94 vs. 64 in 1996, 87 vs. 63 in 1997, 86 vs. 58 in 1998, and 88 vs. 66 in 1999).
Using the method of Miettinen, the estimated total number of excess deaths was comparable to the DisMod II results (Table 3).
Table 3 also compares the excess diabetes deaths in individuals aged ≥40 years calculated with RRs of death from the published studies and those calculated with unpublished RRs from the DECODE study. In developed regions, the DECODE study RRs of death yielded a number of excess deaths that was 4–15% higher than the number of excess deaths calculated with published RRs. In developing regions, the DECODE study RRs yielded estimates 10–28% lower. The total world number of deaths in this age-group differed by 11%. Applying the RR of death from the Asian Indian DECODA cohort to the SEAR D region yielded 1 million deaths attributable to diabetes, which is almost double that estimated using RRs derived from European populations.
The range for the overall number of deaths is 1.9–3.7 million when the lowest and highest published RRs of death were used for the calculations (Fig. 1).
The DisMod II method yielded an estimate of excess global mortality attributable to diabetes that is three times higher than estimates given in available international statistical reports mostly based on death certificates. The number of excess deaths attributable to diabetes is similar in magnitude to numbers reported for HIV/AIDS in the year 2000 (16). The higher proportion of excess deaths in females compared with males is explained by females’ lower background mortality levels. There is a larger increase in the absolute risks of dying in women compared with men with diabetes in almost all age-groups. Validation using the South Tees population data indicates that the estimated number of deaths is probably conservative for developed countries, possibly because in reality the RR of death in individuals >80 years is higher than the value of 1 assumed for this study because of the lack of data. Diabetes is often perceived as a disease of affluent countries. This study suggests that in most developing countries, almost one in ten deaths in economically productive individuals aged 35–64 years can be attributed to diabetes.
The RRs of death obtained in developed countries may have overestimated the number of deaths among individuals with diabetes in developing countries because of higher competing mortality risks in developing countries. However, in Mauritius and Brazil, the risks were about three times higher in individuals with known diabetes than in the general population (19,20), but these studies were not used in our calculations because RRs were not presented by age-group. DECODA study data indicate that Indians with diabetes in Mauritius had a higher RR of dying than individuals with diabetes in Europe and the U.S. This is consistent with the sparse information from low-income countries indicating a poor prognosis for individuals with diabetes, largely due to infection and acute metabolic complications (21,22). The number of deaths attributable to diabetes in SEAR D, affected by the size of the RRs selected for the calculations, can substantially alter global numbers because of the large population size and high diabetes prevalence in the region. Although the RR of death may not be the same for Indians living in India and those living in Mauritius and Fiji, the RRs from the DECODA study were judged to be the most appropriate for validation.
The sensitivity analysis with the lowest and highest published RRs of death shows that the global number of deaths attributable to diabetes could be as low as 1.9 million. This is still double the number in available reports. No sensitivity analysis was performed for the WHO estimates of diabetes prevalence used for these calculations (6), and we have not speculated on the possible range. However, subsequent studies have shown that the WHO study probably underestimated the prevalence of diabetes (23), and, consequently, these mortality estimates are likely to be conservative.
The prevalence estimates of diabetes used include both diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes, whereas the RRs of death were derived from individuals with diagnosed diabetes. The proportion of undiagnosed diabetes varies and is often higher than 50% (24). The RR of death may not be the same for diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes, but data from the DECODE study show that the difference is relatively small (17). Moreover, people with impaired glucose tolerance have a 40% increased mortality, regardless whether they progress to diabetes or not (25,26). Because impaired glucose tolerance is a common condition affecting 15–40% of adults (27,28) and is an independent predictor of mortality, the impact of hyperglycemia on mortality is larger than that associated with diabetes alone.
Our aim was to provide more realistic estimates of diabetes-attributable mortality than currently exist. The results suggest that mortality attributable to diabetes is likely to be considerably higher than previous global estimates based on death certificates. This moves diabetes from the eighth to the fifth place in cause of death ranking, after communicable diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and injuries. The number of deaths related to hyperglycemia would have been even higher if mortality attributable to impaired glucose tolerance was taken into account (1,25). Even in the poorest countries, at least one in twenty adult (35–64 years of age) deaths is diabetes related, and in most countries, the proportion is substantially higher. These figures illustrate the considerable burden diabetes currently imposes on poor countries, a burden that will inevitably increase with the estimated doubling of the population with diabetes in the next 25 years (6).
Variation in the number of deaths attributable to diabetes according to lowest and highest RR of death. *See Table 1 and research design and methods for the derivation of the combined RR.
Studies used to estimate age-specific RR of dying in individuals with diabetes compared with individuals without diabetes
Estimated number of deaths attributable to diabetes (thousands) and percentage of total deaths by age and WHO region
Number of excess deaths attributable to diabetes in individuals ≥40 years old by source of RR of death (thousands)
The work of J.T. was supported by the Academy of Finland (grant 46558).
We thank Christina Bernard, World Health Organization, Geneva, for technical assistance with DisMod II, and Dr. Gang Hu, National Public Health Institute, Helsinki, for assistance with the DECODE/DECODA data.
This work was presented in part at the 39th meeting of the European Diabetes Epidemiology Group, at the American Diabetes Association 64th Annual Meeting, and at the 40th Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
Additional information for this article can be found in an online appendix at http://care.diabetesjournals.org.
A table elsewhere in this issue shows conventional and Système International (SI) units and conversion factors for many substances.
See accompanying editorial, p. 2320.
Accepted May 8, 2005.
Received January 19, 2005.
Diabetes Atlas. Gan D, Ed. Brussels, Belgium, International Diabetes Federation, 2003
Fuller JH, Elford J, Goldblatt P, Adelstein AM: Diabetes mortality: new light on an underestimated public health problem. Diabetologia 24: 336–341, 1983
Morrish NJ, Wang SL, Stevens LK, Fuller JH, Keen H: Mortality and causes of death in the WHO Multinational Study of Vascular Disease in Diabetes. Diabetologia 44 (Suppl. 2): S14–S21, 2001
Murray CJ, Lopez AD: Mortality by cause for eight regions of the world: Global Burden of Disease Study. Lancet 349: 1269–1276, 1997
World Health Organization: The World Health Report 2003. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2003
Wild S, Roglic G, Green A, Sicree R, King H: Global prevalence of diabetes: estimates for the year 2000 and projections for 2030. Diabetes Care 27: 1047–1053, 2004
Murray CJ, Lopez AD: Regional patterns of disability-free life expectancy and disability-adjusted life expectancy: Global Burden of Disease Study. Lancet 349: 1347–1352, 1997
Barendregt JJ, Van Oortmarssen GJ, Vos T, Murray CJ: A generic model for the assessment of disease epidemiology: the computational basis of DisMod II. Popul Health Metr 1: 4, 2003
Berger B, Stenstrom G, Sundkvist G: Incidence, prevalence, and mortality of diabetes in a large population: a report from the Skaraborg Diabetes Registry. Diabetes Care 22: 773–778, 1999
Morgan CL, Currie CJ, Peters JR: Relationship between diabetes and mortality: a population study using record linkage. Diabetes Care 23: 1103–1107, 2000
Swerdlow AJ, Jones ME: Mortality during 25 years of follow-up of a cohort with diabetes. Int J Epidemiol 25: 1250–1261, 1996
Gu K, Cowie CC, Harris MI: Mortality in adults with and without diabetes in a national cohort of the U.S. population, 1971–1993. Diabetes Care 21: 1138–1145, 1998
Edge JA, Ford-Adams ME, Dunger DB: Causes of death in children with insulin dependent diabetes 1990–96. Arch Dis Child 81: 318–323, 1999
Roper NA, Bilous RW, Kelly WF, Unwin NC, Connolly VM: Excess mortality in a population with diabetes and the impact of material deprivation: longitudinal, population based study. BMJ 322: 1389–1393, 2001
Miettinen OS: Proportion of disease caused or prevented by a given exposure, trait or intervention. Am J Epidemiol 99: 325–332, 1974
World Health Organization: World Health Report 2001. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2003
DECODE Study Group, European Diabetes Epidemiology Group: Is the current definition for diabetes relevant to mortality risk from all causes and cardiovascular and noncardiovascular diseases? Diabetes Care 26: 688–696, 2003
Nakagami T: Hyperglycaemia and mortality from all causes and from cardiovascular disease in five populations of Asian origin. Diabetologia 47: 385–394, 2004
Shaw JE, Hodge AM, de Court, Chitson P, Zimmet PZ: Isolated post-challenge hyperglycaemia confirmed as a risk factor for mortality. Diabetologia 42: 1050–1054, 1999
Salles GF, Bloch KV, Cardoso CR: Mortality and predictors of mortality in a cohort of Brazilian type 2 diabetic patients. Diabetes Care 27: 1299–1305, 2004
McLarty DG, Kinabo L, Swai AB: Diabetes in tropical Africa: a prospective study, 1981–7. II. Course and prognosis. BMJ 300: 1107–1110, 1990
Lester FT: Clinical features, complications and mortality in type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetic patients in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, 1976–1990. Ethiop Med J 31: 109–126, 1993
Rathmann W, Giani G: Global prevalence of diabetes: estimates for the year 2000 and projections for 2030. Diabetes Care 27: 2568–2569, 2004
World Health Organization: Screening for Type 2 Diabetes: Report of a WHO/IDF Meeting. WHO/NMH/MNC/03.1. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2003
Glucose tolerance and mortality: comparison of WHO and American Diabetes Association diagnostic criteria. The DECODE study group. European Diabetes Epidemiology Group. Diabetes Epidemiology: Collaborative analysis Of Diagnostic criteria in Europe. Lancet 354: 617–621, 1999
Qiao Q, Jousilahti P, Eriksson J, Tuomilehto J: Predictive properties of impaired glucose tolerance for cardiovascular risk are not explained by the development of overt diabetes during follow-up. Diabetes Care 26: 2910–2914, 2003
DECODA Study Group: Age- and sex-specific prevalence of diabetes and impaired glucose regulation in 11 Asian cohorts. Diabetes Care 26: 1770–1780, 2003
DECODE Study Group: Age- and sex-specific prevalences of diabetes and impaired glucose regulation in 13 European cohorts. Diabetes Care 26: 61–69, 2003
September 2005, 28(9)
You are going to email the following The Burden of Mortality Attributable to Diabetes
Gojka Roglic, Nigel Unwin, Peter H. Bennett, Colin Mathers, Jaakko Tuomilehto, Satyajit Nag, Vincent Connolly, Hilary King
Diabetes Care Sep 2005, 28 (9) 2130-2135; DOI: 10.2337/diacare.28.9.2130
Suboptimal Use of Cardioprotective Drugs in Newly Treated Elderly Individuals With Type 2 Diabetes
Disparities in Diabetes Care Between Smokers and Nonsmokers
Elevated Cystatin C Concentration and Progression to Pre-Diabetes
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Search results for 'The Time:Gigolos Get Lonely Too'
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Jean-Paul Riopelle: 1923 – 2002
October 7, 2019 By Wendy Campbell
Born on October 7, 1923 in Montreal, Canada, Jean-Paul Riopelle is one of Canada’s most famous painters. Riopelle studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in 1942, and then at the École du Meuble, graduating in 1945. He studied with Paul-Émile Borduas under whose direction Riopelle created his first abstract painting.
Riopelle was a member of a group of writers and artists in Quebec called the Automatistes, led by Borduas, and was a signer of the Refus global manifesto. In 1946, he traveled to France, and then returned to settle the following year. Pioneering a style of painting where large quantities of coloured paints were thickly applied to the canvas with a trowel, Riopelle gained increasing success and immersion in the Parisian cultural scene. From 1949, he had numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, the United States and Sweden. He was represented in New York and participated in the biennials of contemporary art in Venice (1954) and Sao Paulo (1955). He spent his evenings in Paris bistros with friends including playwright Samuel Beckett and artist Alberto Giacometti.
In the 1960s, Riopelle renewed his ties to Canada. Exhibitions were held at the National Gallery of Canada (1963), and the Musée du Quebec held a retrospective in 1967. In the early 1970s, he built a home and studio in the Laurentians in Quebec. From 1974 he divided his time between St. Marguerite in Quebec, and Saint-Cyr-en-Arthies in France. Riopelle participated in his last exhibition in 1996. From 1994 until his death, he maintained homes in both St. Marguerite and Isle-aux-Grues, Quebec. Jean Paul Riopelle died at his home on Îsle-aux-Grues on March 12, 2002.
Riopelle received numerous awards and honorary degrees in his lifetime including the 1958 Prix International Guggenheim award, the 1962 Unesco prize, the 1973 Philippe Hébert Prize, and in 1975, he was inducted as a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Riopelle’s works are in collections around the globe including New York’s Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, the Galerie d’art Moderne in Basel, Switzerland, the Museum of Modern Art in Brazil, Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Ottawa’s National Gallery.
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Peinture III
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Untitled - 1956
Jean-Paul Riopelle - The Wheel II - 1956
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Place - La-Joute - 1969
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Mont orange - 1970
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Perspectives - 1956
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Horizons ouverts - 1956
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Composition - 1950
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Descriptif - 1959
Jean-Paul Riopelle - Bleury - 1957
Sources: Gallerie Walter Klinkhoff, National Gallery of Canada, All-Art.org,
Filed Under: ART, Art History, Painting, Sculpture Tagged With: Abstract Expressionism, abstract-art, Canadian Art, French-Canadian Art, Jean Paul Riopelle
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Salvador Dali: 1904 – 1989
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol (Salvador Dali) was born on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain near the French border. A painter, draughtsman, illustrator, sculptor, writer and film maker, Dali was one of the most prolific, flamboyant, and well-known artists of the 20th century.
He was a student at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid but was expelled for encouraging students to rebel and for withdrawing from an exam because he said the teachers were not qualified to judge his work.
Dali gained recognition relatively quickly after just three shows: a solo show in Barcelona in 1925, a showing of his works at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1928, and in 1929, his first solo show in Paris. It was at this time that Dali joined the ranks of the surrealists and met his future wife, Gala Eluard.
“The Persistence of Memory” was painted in 1931 after seeing some Camembert cheese melting in the heat on a hot summer day. Later that night, he dreamt of clocks melting on a landscape. The small work (24 cm x 33 cm) is one of the most famous of the surrealist paintings. During this time, and inspired by Sigmund Freud, Dali used his “paranoiac-critical method” to create his art.
During the 1930s Dalí’s political indifference alienated him from the other Surrealists who were mainly leftist. In 1937, he painted an unusual series of Adolf Hitler that were considered to be in bad taste and partly led to his expulsion from the movement.
Salvador and Gala spent World War II in the United States, where he became a popular figure. He painted portraits, dressed shop windows, created a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Spellbound” and created a cartoon, “Destino”, with Walt Disney.
Dalí returned to Europe in 1948 and was completely disconnected from Surrealism. He painted mainly in Spain, with an eclectic approach focusing on history, religion, and science. Dalí created over 1,500 paintings in his career as well as illustrations for books, lithographs, designs for theatre sets and costumes, numerous drawings, sculptures, and various other projects.
Dali was greatly affected by the death of his wife Gala in 1982. After that time, he lost much of his passion for life. His health began to fail, and he painted very little. On January 23, 1989, at the age of 84, Salvador Dali died from heart failure with respiratory complications. He is buried in his Theater Museum in Figueres.
For a full biography of Salvador Dali, see the source links below.
Metamorphosis_of_Narcissus-Salvador-Dali-1937
The_Ghost_of_Vermeer-Salvador-Dali-1934
Lobster_telephone-Salvador-Dali-1936
Salvador Dali Cartel des Don Juan Tenorio
Sacrament-of-the-Last-Supper-Salvador-Dali-1955
Tuna-Fishing-Salvador-Dali-1967
The_Burning_Giraffe-Salvador-Dali-1937
The_Swallows-Tail-Salvador-Dali-Dalis-Last-Painting-1983
The_Face_of_War-Salvador-Dali-1940
Crucifixion-Salvador-Dali-1954
Swans_reflecting_elephants-Salvador-Dali-1937
Still_Life_Moving_Fast-Salvador-Dali-1956
Sleep-Salvador-Dali-1937
Galaofspheres-Salvador-Dali-1952
Face_and_Fruit_Dish-Salvador-Dali-1938
Dream_Caused_by_the_Flight_of_a_Bumblebee_around_a_Pomegranate_a_Second_Before_Awakening-Salvador-Dali-1944
Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory-Salvador-Dali-1954
Cabaret_Scene-Salvador-Dali-1922
dali-last-supper
The Persistence of Memory - Salvador Dali (1931)
Sources: MOMA, Salvador Dali Museum, Wikipedia
Filed Under: ART, Art History, Illustration, Painting, Sculpture Tagged With: Catalan Art, Paranoiac Critical Method, Salvador Dali, Spanish Art, Surrealism
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Originally released in 1982, Run for the Roses is Jerry Garcia's fourth and final solo studio album. Produced by Garcia and John Kahn the track list includes several new Garcia/Hunter originals including the title track, "Midnight Getaway" plus choice covers of Bob Dylan and The Beatles among others. Run for the Roses features the first appearance by organist Melvin Seals who remained with Garcia for the next 15 years. The album artwork was created by legendary psychedelic visual artist Victor Moscoso. Jerry Garcia was best known for his work as the lead guitarist and as a vocalist with the band Grateful Dead, which came to prominence during the counterculture era in the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader or "spokesman" of the group.
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Lisa Raitt on the violence and exhaustion of caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s
TORONTO — Former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt is speaking out about the violence she and her children face as her husband struggles with early onset Alzheimer’s during a pandemic that has blocked a normal course of treatment.
In a radio interview with The Evan Solomon Show on Thursday, Raitt said that her husband Bruce Woods, 61, wakes up frequently throughout the night, wandering the house muttering and cursing. His “throes of behavioural, psychological symptoms” happen every day, all day. He calls her “mommy” now. She can’t work until he’s sleeping or has a hired caregiver with him, which is only about five hours a day.
The situation has been turning violent more and more. This summer, he shoved one of their sons. Last week, he punched Raitt.
“I know it’s uncomfortable for people to hear but it’s a reality,” she told host Evan Solomon.
“This is where we always tell each other it’s the disease, not the person.”
Raitt and her sons have had to implement safety precautions inside their home. They hide knives and other potential weapons. They installed locks on the doors of several rooms in case they need to retreat to one. They make sure their cell phones have a sufficient charge at all times. They set up video cameras throughout the house so they know where he is if they need to leave.
“But the biggest precaution us getting in touch with your doctor and making sure that there are medications that can help and not being ashamed of asking for that help in that way,” she said. “That’s what has been the last six to eight weeks of our lives right now.”
‘I’M OUT OF MY LEAGUE’
The COVID-19 pandemic means the typical course of treatment for someone like her husband isn’t possible. Normally, he might be in a hospital and they’d more easily be able to “find the right cocktail of drugs” so that he could be “the normal Bruce that I knew.”
“But what we have now is a situation where I’m getting Telehealth prompting and coaching,” she said. “I’m the nurse that’s charting all of the reactions and the treatments. I’m out of my league.”
Raitt has been looking for a long-term care facility that can take her husband on, but with COVID-19, it’s more challenging. Plus, a home is unlikely to take him until “his moods and his aggressions even out,” she said, so there’s no other option but their own house. “The option of him being hospitalized in a psychiatric ward isn’t there for me because of COVID,” she said.
Earlier this month, Raitt posted a Twitter thread about the difficulties, including a video of Bruce pacing their bedroom, babbling and cursing. She feels a need to speak out about it, she said. On Thursday, she told Solomon that ever since her husband’s diagnosis, she knew she’d share the story in an eventual memoir, but realized that she shouldn’t wait. Why not share now when it can have an impact on other people’s lives and “move the narrative” forward on young-onset Alzheimer’s.
PRESSURE ON CAREGIVERS
Part of what has motivated her is the stigma around admitting that caregivers struggle too. After the diagnosis, the focus is “all about the dignity of the person with the disease,” she said. The focus is on trying treatments, helping them live their best life and being “gung-ho about wanting to find a cure.”
“And then at some point it flips over and the the amount of pressure that is at play is really on the caregiver,” she said. “There is a point in time when a story isn’t about the person who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, but the story is also about the caregiver around.”
A recent study out of Australia, found that 94 per cent of dementia caregivers were sleep deprived, a condition that can lead to worsening health effects and can make a caregiver more likely to seek space in long-term care for their loved one.
“Enabling people living with dementia [of which Alzheimer’s is a common cause] to stay at home, rather than transfer to long-term care is the optimal outcome for many families, but this can’t be at the detriment of the caregiver’s own wellbeing,” said Aisling Smyth, a co-author of the study out of New Edith Cowan University, in a news release. “Therefore, to support the person living with dementia to remain at home, preserving sleep and maintaining caregiver health is vital.”
For Raitt, one of the best ways to try to preserve caregiver health is through speaking about it. “Talking about it is good,” she told Solomon. “It acknowledges that there is a real issue that either I can be inactive and ignore or I can be active and deal.”
And sharing the intimate details of her family’s personal battle with the disease might help bring more attention to Alzheimer’s research or shine a light on the breadth of suffering.
“There are a lot of families out there suffering through exactly the same thing,” she said.
COVID-19: Dr. Deena Hinshaw calls leaked public health meeting recordings a ‘personal betrayal’
Trudeau unable to answer premiers’ questions on coronavirus vaccine rollout: sources
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News • Science Diplomacy
Global Collaboration Needed To Solve Coronavirus Challenges
The leaders of Imperial and Tsinghua University have called for global collaboration to tackle coronavirus and other global challenges.
President Alice Gast and Chen Xu, Chairperson of University Council, Tsinghua spoke at a joint symposium between the two universities on the ‘Covid-19 fightback and the future new normal’.
Former Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Margaret Chan and WHO Coronavirus Envoy, Dr David Nabarro, joined the university leaders from London, Beijing and around the world at the event to discuss how universities can help the global response to coronavirus.
President Gast said: “It is clear that the pandemic, as well as other global challenges cannot be solved by one country or one university alone, and that we will need collaboration and cooperation from all.”
President Gast added: “The COVID-19 pandemic has since caused us to make a number of rapid and profound changes in the ways we work and operate as scientists and as a university, but one thing that has not changed is our commitment to working with international colleagues and partners.”
Chairperson Chen said: “Global public health is facing an incredible challenge as COVID-19 threatens the lives of people across the world. At this moment it has never been so clear and urgent that only through solidarity and collaboration can we overcome this challenge.
“It is clear that the pandemic, as well as other global challenges cannot be solved by one country or one university alone, and that we will need collaboration and cooperation from all.”
President Gast and Chairperson Chen also announced that the Imperial-Tsinghua seed fund would be open for applications later in the year.
The symposium brought together academics from Imperial and Tsinghua working in economics, vaccine development and diagnostic tools to share their thoughts on the impact of the pandemic and how their research is helping to overcome it.
Vice President Maggie Dallman, who chaired the symposium, said: “The pandemic has highlighted a real importance of friendships, relationships and collaborations. Already having a strong relationship with Tsinghua puts us in a strong position to help our world come through this crisis.”
Tsinghua’s Vice President and Provost, Yang Bin, said: “We have to learn from this challenge that only through solidarity and cooperation can we overcome difficulties and sustain higher education.”
Coronavirus is ‘the most cunning virus’
Margaret Chan, who is the Dean of Tsinghua’s Vanke School of Public Health, said: “The current pandemic is truly unprecedented in human history in terms of speed, severity and scale. The novel coronavirus is the most cunning virus I have ever seen in 40 years of working in global health.
“Development of drugs and vaccines are still underway and it is hard to predict if and when they become available.”
Professor David Nabarro, co-Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) said: “We know from the experience of China and other countries that in order to be able to ensure that social and economic life can continue, communities need to be able to defend themselves against the virus.
“People depend hugely on local and national governments, on universities with their capacity to provide science and evidence, on local and national organisations, on businesses as well, to be able to find their way to live with this virus as a constant presence and sometimes as a threat to their livelihoods.”
Economic catastrophe
Professor of Financial Economics at Imperial College Business School, and former Bank of England rate-setter David Miles, joined Tsinghua’s Jiandong Ju to speak about the economic impacts of coronavirus.
Professor Miles said: “The positive message is if there was ever a time in the history of countries to run enormous fiscal deficits, it’s right now. That’s because the interest rates in real inflation adjusted terms is extraordinary low.”
“It’s an economic catastrophe for the government to be borrowing so much money, at least it has come at a time when it is extraordinary cheap to borrow money.”
Jiandong Ju, Unigroup Chair Professor at PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua said: “Without international collaborations, the world is in crisis and China is facing both external pandemic and economic risks.”
Vaccine manufacturing
Imperial and Tsinghua with the support of TUS Holdings, are currently in discussions about further deepening our collaboration in vaccine manufacturing and to set up a Vaccine Manufacturing Innovation Hub.
Professor Nilay Shah, Head of Department of Chemical Engineering, and Linqi Zhang, Chair of Global Health and Infectious Diseases Center, School of Medicine, Tsinghua discussed how Imperial and Tsinghua were working together in vaccine manufacturing.
Professor Shah explained how his team is working on ways to produce any successful vaccine rapidly and in mass quantities.
Professor Shah said: “We simply don’t have time to go through normal approaches to vaccine development.”
Imperial and Tsinghua have some of the world’s top scientists on diagnostic tools.
Imperial’s Dr Pantelis Georgiou, is developing lab on a chip techniques for infectious diseases. Professor Georgiou said: “Coronavirus has brought to light a huge need for rapid diagnostic testing.”
Professor Jing Cheng from Tsinghua’s School of Medicine talked about the strategies for precision diagnosis for infectious disease, and proposed a national monitoring network for infectious diseases.
Source: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/198154/global-collaboration-needed-solve-coronavirus-challenges/
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Allergens need collaborators to cause allergy
Publié le 23 janvier 2018 par Editor_at_CRDiagnostics
Researchers from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) find direct evidence that the ligands, compounds carried by allergens, are actively involved in the allergic sensitization phase.
Researchers from Centre for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP), a joint research centre of UPM and INIA, ha found that certain compounds carried by allergic proteins would be collaborating agents needed in the processes that trigger immune responses with the appearance of allergic symptoms.
This study was carried out by researchers from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Swiss Allergy Centre in Zurich and Institute of Applied Molecular Medicine of Universidad San Pablo CEU in Madrid. The obtained results will help develop preventive methods and effective treatments for allergies.
In spite of a great effort, fundamental questions on the molecular and immunological origin of allergies are still ignored. Many studies have sought solutions to an ancient enigma: why some proteins cause allergies despite being very similar to others that are harmless. Researchers achieved to identify the proteins which are common allergens are in pollen, mites, domestic animals, food…
Unfortunately, the characteristics of these proteins linked to allergens have been not found yet. However, in recent years a hypothesis developed in collaboration with the allergens group of CBGP has gained importance: certain compounds carried by the allergen proteins, known as ligands, would act as necessary collaborator agents in the allergic sensitization phase.
Pru p 3 was the protein selected for this study. This protein is responsible for the peach allergy, being very common in Mediterranean countries. The CBGP team has recently identified in a study the natural ligand of Pru p 3 as a compound formed by an alkaloid attached to a hydrocarbon tail. In the current study, the team has found direct evidence of the participation of the Pru p 3 ligand in the processes of the immune system recognition in the allergic sensitization phase.
Results reveal that the ligand is recognized by a type of cellular receptor called CD1d in the cell surface where the antigens appear, that is, substances able to provoke a response of the immune system to produce antibodies. The CD1d expressions are responsible for presenting lipid antigens activating cells of the immune system called iNKT (invariant natural killer T-cells). Once activated, these iNKT cells produce an enormous amount of substances that cause the characteristic symptoms of allergic disorders.
Since many allergens transport diverse compounds, the discovery of Pru p 3 lipid-ligand as an adjuvant to promote allergic sensitization through its recognition by CD1d expressions open new horizons. This new discovery could be a general essential feature of the mechanism underlying the phenomenon of allergenicity.
Allergies are a serious public health issue due to their high social and economic costs. Their prevalence has multiplied by 4 in the last 30 years and affects nearly 150 million citizens in the European Union, with a particular emphasis on the child population. Thus, the results of this work are especially significant: to reveal the role of the collaborators needed of the ligands will allow us to fully understand allergy causes and to know more about the development of new methods of diagnosis and therapy.
These results were published in an article in the December 2017 issue of Clinical and Experimental Allergy.
Story Source provided by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Nuria Cubells-Baeza, Cristina Gómez-Casado, Leticia Tordesillas, Carmen Ramírez-Castillejo, María Garrido-Arandia, Pablo González-Melendi, María Herrero, Luis F. Pacios, Araceli Díaz-Perales. Identification of the ligand of Pru p 3, a peach LTP. Plant Molecular Biology, 2017; 94 (1-2): 33 DOI: 10.1007/s11103-017-0590-z
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← See all showcase
Curation by Community
The best ideas often seem obvious in hindsight. When Gannawarra Shire Council, in Victoria’s north, wanted to reinvigorate their ailing performing arts program, the answer was simple – get the community more involved. But Arts and Culture Officer Kirsty Orr could not have predicted how successful her experiment in community partnership would be, or that the Council would eventually pick up the Arts Animates award at the National Awards for Local Government for their new programming model.
It all started back in 2015. Kirsty was looking at the vibrant arts programs of nearby regional centres such as Swan Hill, Bendigo and Echuca and wondering how Gannawarra, with its small budget, with no dedicated arts facilities and its population of little over 10,000 people spread across 3,732 sq km could ever compete - and why they were missing out on the top touring shows.
“We were waiting for shows to come to us, and then we’d book them,” says Kirsty. “The quality of the shows was pretty ordinary, and there was no overall program curation. It was short-term programming, and it was exhausting.”
Around that time Kirsty and her colleagues discovered Showcase Victoria, an annual performing arts marketplace run by Regional Arts Victoria and the Victorian Association of Performing Arts Centres where programmers, bookers, producers and more can learn about the range of performing arts shows that are available to tour. Kirsty’s boss made the pilgrimage to Melbourne to check it out and was inspired by what she discovered. But it took another year before they came up with the award-winning plan.
“We sat down and thought, what are our assets? And they were the strong community leaders that we have,” says Kirsty. While many local council arts officers would simply go to Showcase Victoria themselves to select a program for the coming year, Kirsty decided to put together a small team of people from the community to help choose shows to bring to towns like Kerang, Cohuna, Lake Charm and Leitchville.
Some were tapped on the shoulder, while others nominated themselves. What they had in common was a strong network they could go back to and discuss programming possibilities and drum up an audience.
“The people we take are connected,” says Kirsty. “Some are linked with art, some aren’t. But everyone comes back and is inspired and talks amongst their own network. It helps build an audience from an early stage.”
One such person is Angela Hird, who was one of the first to join the initiative. A self-confessed football and netball nut from Kerang, when she first got involved Angela didn’t know much about art, but knew what she liked. Angela has been part of the group of four or five community members who travel to Showcase each year since 2016. These days she adds performing arts to her list of passions.
“I’ve been to trade shows, and I expected a lot of walking around and networking, talking to people with a heavy theatre background and not being able to speak their language,” Angela says. Instead, the group discovered they would be sitting in an auditorium for two days seeing five- or ten minute-long grabs of around twenty shows a day, ranging from traditional narrative theatre to music, dance and circus. Angela thought the others in her group would be more arts-inclined than she was, “but we were all green as green and we learned from each other. By lunchtime we kind of sounded like we knew what we were talking about.”
“They don’t believe me before we go down that they’ll be tired,” says Kirsty. “But they are by lunchtime on the first day. Most people up here haven’t seen a lot of theatre, and they don’t know what they like or don’t like. But if you sit them down in Showcase they work it out pretty quickly.”
The marathon viewing experience at Showcase is only the beginning of the consultation process for the team from Gannawarra Shire. The group then go back to their respective communities to talk about what would be a good fit in each town. Council set up a Facebook poll so people can watch video previews of possible shows and vote on the shortlist. They also run regular art salons which are open to all, where everyone can enjoy a glass of wine and nibbles and have their say about upcoming programming decisions.
Some of the choices made by the community have taken Kirsty by surprise, like the raunchy cabaret The Exotic Lives of Lola Montez, which visited Cohuna.
The Exotic Lives of Lola Montez
With each community now invested in the shows that will be touring to the area, the community group gets involved in making them truly spectacular. A performance by Hungarian gypsy-folk-tango trio the Stiletto Sisters was held as a pop-up picnic at a secret location, organisers having transformed a school basketball court into a romantic European market stall.
For a production of Dinosaur Time Machine on the school holidays in Leitchville, shops windows were full of dino dioramas, a nest with dinosaur eggs appeared outside the hall, and bones from the local butcher were buried in dirt for months to make them look aged before planting them in the school sand pit for a palaeontology dig.
“It’s up to each community to put their own stamp on it,” says Kirsty. “And it means that if you go and watch that show there, you won’t get that experience anywhere else.”
Where performing arts in Gannawarra once struggled to find an audience, there is now a thriving, community-led program that not only draws a crowd but also draws out creativity and celebration from the public. The Arts Animates award is designed to recognise ‘excellence in building vibrant and resilient communities’, and with every show the Shire outdoes itself once again.
And Kirsty’s favourite show? What has been the highlight?
“Well, that’s always the latest show,” she says, in all seriousness. “Because each time we seem to be getting better.”
Visit Gunnawarra Shire Council
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Orphans of a Dead Nation
Chapter 8 – Our Future
The room was cool, cold white marbles underneath booted feet. John was leaning over on the half edge protrusion with his elbows as he stared through the glass pane.
“It’s been two days… How is one one zero?”
John jumped when he heard the voice. Looking back, he saw a tall man dressed in dark, silk tunic and pants. The long sleeves draped past his hands as he held them behind his back.
Calming himself, John straightened his thin white coat. The material was thin, just thick enough to keep some splashes at bay, but not thick enough toward the chill in the air. He could not help but glance at the blue jewels embedded equidistant from each other in the room. Each one was slowly drawing in the heat around them. If they weren’t such a marvel, a rarely made material that only activated when the temperature went beyond a certain point, he would have already dug them out and smashed them with a hammer.
The black swathed man coughed, drawing John back from his tangent thoughts. “One one zero?”
“Ah yes, one one zero. Everything is set, we are just waiting to commence the test.” John said. He looked at the man. His skin was of a dark sheen; his hair short and curly but still brushed back in the way of most nobility. But suddenly, John realized something. “Umm… Sir, I’m sorry, but I must ask, who are you?”
The dark man looked down upon John. His eyes were dark and cold. It made John’s blood freeze. At first he had been startled and began to speak without thinking, but now that he had time to calm himself, he noticed that he did not recognize the man at all. For so long he had never dealt with anyone of high status or position except for the woman who came to hire him half a year ago.
“You do not need to know who I am. You do not have the right to know who I am. If you did, you would have known already.”
“Sir… I… I cannot say the details of-”
“If I didn’t have the authority to know, would I be here? Would I have gotten through the vastness of security that this building has?”
John closed his mouth. The man was right. This place was a closed-off facility far within the secure guard. While there was a chance that this man snuck in and was a pretender, he wasn’t paid to care. He wasn’t even told to protect the information of this place as a contingent on him joining. All he knew was how to be careful enough to take care of himself. He was not going to stop this man, nor hamper him. If there were problems later, it would be on the head of his supervisor. After all, they were in charge of security.
John sighed, and gestured towards the window. “He’s in there. They are hooking him up now.”
Just as John said the last word, two people came into the room on the other side of the glass. Both of them were men wearing blue long coats similar to John’s own. They came to stand over a large circular bath that was six feet deep and striated at the curved sides. The basin of the pool was black in color and had silver metal coils jutting out, with the ends rising up and sticking down into the white marble around it.
The dark clothed man seemed not to notice any of that. Perhaps he’s used to it. What he did seem to focus on was what was inside the basin. Lying down, seeped slightly in a half-foot of clear thick liquid, a boy of the age of fifteen, and one of his arms was missing, was there.
One of the blue-coated men went to the wall. He unhinged a latch and pulled out a long and large tube. He tugged at it, trudging towards the pool. He latched the end of the tube to an opening at the edge, connecting the tube with the basin.
“This is?” The dark clothes man’s voice was light, but it caused John to shiver.
“You will see,” John said. The words were brusque. A habit of his. But John was not going to change habit now. Though he was wary, he was not afraid of offending the man. This was his laboratory. His experiment. And per their agreement, he would detail things when necessary. He would not, in any case, put himself out of sorts. After all, the group came to him, not the other way around. There were many other job offers out there anyway.
The man behind him seemed calm as if the tiny spite didn’t bother him. But now John was regretting. He’s that type, huh. The type that would hold it in or dismiss it altogether. John’s eyes narrowed. Either way, it just showed that this man was potentially dangerous.
John walked to the glass. At the far corner was a hole, bridging his room to the next. Only, filling the hole was a giant slug-like creature. It had a mouth on either end, and it would squirm slightly from time to time. John put on a pair of gloves and grabbed hold of his end. He shivered as he felt the squishiness within his palm. I hate these things.
Sighing, John squeezed. The tip of the end, which was not grabbed, widened and John leaned up close, “You may begin.” He said. And the other one of men nodded as if they heard him. One of the men turned around and grabbed hold of a lever. Pulling down, the distant wall rumbled.
Seconds went by, and then a roaring sound, first soft, grew louder and louder until it was like a flood, the sound coming through from the opening of the slug. Bright red liquid gushed out of the tube in the basin of the other side. It poured into the basin rapidly, beating down upon the boy, drowning him, and in mere seconds the basin was filled.
And then, the pumping of the liquid stopped.
“The blood of the Sevir Devils of the North Marshes that I was provided with, at least that is what you said it was. I have studied Sevir Devils before, and I have never seen blood like that. Nevertheless, using that as a base, the blood of the creatures from the forest beyond the city limits were integrated and seeped in arrays for several months. Now we just need to see.”
The dark man smiled. His smile was bright, revealing his two rows of perfect white teeth.
Who smiles like that? John thought to himself. But for some reason, he could not help think how the smile was just perfect on the man. It was not creepy, or malicious. It was just perfect. And although it seemed natural, John shivered again. There was just something menacing about it. And it was then that John fully realized something. I cannot become an enemy of this man.
“You will die. You will die. You will die. Even if I don’t kill you, you will die!”
Braen looked up. The sky was a clear blue, the clouds white and fluffy with a hint of a dark hue at the bottom as the sun shined behind. The trees rustled with the slight breeze; nice structured houses of the nearby ten-foot cliff stood firm. It was calm.
But even with all these niceties, Braen was not taking in the view. He was looking at the large black sphere above him in the distant sky. Compared to the world, it was infinitesimal in size, but to him, it was the size of a house. And It floated there, fifty feet above, unmoving.
Braen couldn’t help stare at it. All the things before remained forgotten. All that was and was to be became the sphere. The sphere was a dark pool, its surface shiny and metallic, reflecting the surroundings on its surface like a poorly made mirror. The clouds. The sky. The trees. The cliff. The houses. Braen could see them all. The only thing he did not see in the sphere was himself. There was no reflection, no mirror image. No matter the shifting leaf of the tree at his side, or the blade of grass behind him, they could be seen; but not him.
For a while, Braen stood there. He just stared, getting lost in the world of the sphere. It was if the world was him and he was the world.
Suddenly, the sphere moved. A bulge came, boring out to the side. It was quick at first but slowly moved towards a stop. As the blob was stretching out, a black hand, its skin as black and shiny as the sphere itself formed.
Braen just stood there lost. He was in a daze. More and more bulges came out of the sphere. And like the first, they too formed hands and arms. The arms were long, but not long enough to reach him.
And then Braen shuddered. As if realizing that everything seemed wrong, his daze went away. And everything returned to him. His memory of his childhood, his memory of the last mission, and more importantly, the memory of his missing arm. He did not think of the snow that did not cover the ground. He did not think of the warm breeze that showed no semblance of the biting cold. He didn’t even realize that he stood there naked, his arm back as if it was always there.
He just watched in terror as the arms suddenly lunged. It was as if physics no longer applied to the world. Somehow the land folded in, time-warped, and space was cut short. The tens of hands pounced upon him.
Braen’s eyes constricted, but he did not move. More like, he could not move. It was as if there was a powerful force keeping him down. His head felt light, and he felt as if the world was about to go dizzy; as if all his power had already been drawn to keeping his mind clear, leaving him drained.
As the black hands stretched out, they wrapped around him like a bubble, cloaking him in the metallic black sheen, only to gather and entwine themselves and swallow his arm, opening him back to the world. The same arm he had lost before, but now somehow had.
Braen felt no pain; no discomfort; but there was a deeply seeded coldness that pervaded his every pore; his every thought.
And then it stopped. Everything stopped. Like a growing smile in a painting, he moved, but that tree that swayed from the breeze, its branches remained in its unnatural tilt- an impossibility. That blade of grass or that same exact cloud was motionless. The whole world stood still. But he, Braen, was moving.
He brought his hand to his face, watched the metal black skin that changed to its normal hue and texture at the mid-bicep. He glanced over it for a long while now. And just as he had seen enough, he looked towards that mirror-like sphere, its dark surface back to it being as still as stagnant water.
And once again, the world moved.
A roar erupted.
John winced as he removed the slug away from his ear. Letting, go, the room he was in went silent.
He looked through the glass pane, staring at the bright red pool. The two assistants of his took a step back. They watched as the pool of blood had rippled, and the boy inside had sat up. His hands and feet were still steeped in the thick liquid, but he was screaming. Roaring in fact. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin red. And soon the glass trembled. Even John and the man in silk could feel the room begin to vibrate.
John was asked to set some things up. To do so and so, and to do it a particular way, like the use of blood and arrays. He was never in charge of designing the theory behind the experiment nor did he obtain the specimens. And though he had an idea that it came from something to do with the empire, he did not ask. This meant he did not even know who the boy in the basin was. He did not know who any of the people who came before the boy was. All he was in charge of was the setup and the actual generation of the material. So far, many specimens would come in. Most died. But this was the first time one reacted like this. It was just too…
“My God, what is that? What did you ask me to make?” John asked, the words slipping past his lips.
“That?” The darkly dressed man smiled. “That is our future.”
Author’s Notes: Please comment. Tell me how you like the story so far. If you haven’t? Review! Also, I would love it if you donated. Build a queue. That way, I will be prompted to release more chapters more quickly. I have two other series and focus on the one with the most attention and donations. Thanks.
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Bernanke Breaks Down: "This Whole Thing Is a Klept...
Part 44: A Shocking Revelation (serialized fiction)
The Knowledge Economy's Two Classes of Workers
The Ten Best Employers To Work For
The Tailwinds Pushing the U.S. Dollar Higher
Post-Cyprus Blues: Confusion and an Erosion of Faith
Why the Government Is Desperately Trying to Inflat...
Part 43: Finally Free to Live Large (serialized fi...
Read This Blog or the Puppy and Kitten Get It
What Could Cause Interest Rates to Rise?
How I Became a Trillionaire (and Some Thoughts on ...
What's Supposed to Happen, and What Might Happen: ...
The Deeper Meanings of Cyprus
Part 42: Kylie: a wild poppy turning its iridescen...
Good News: the Bees Have Returned (at least to our...
A Community-Based Alternative to the Welfare State
Net Worth vs. Net Value
The Global Endgame
The Erosion of the U.S. Economy In Two Words: Jobs...
Inequality and the Decline of Labor
Unpopped Housing Bubbles Abound
A Look at U.S. Taxes and Hauser's Law
The Hollowing Out of Private-Sector Employment
Understanding Failed Policies: Wealth Effect, Wage...
Part 41: "I should have known there was a man in y...
Capital Controls, $5,000/oz Gold and Self-Directed...
Bernanke Breaks Down: "This Whole Thing Is a Kleptocracy"
Our April Fool's wish: someone in the inner circle of power would finally tell the truth.
In an unprecedented abandonment of his carefully scripted responses to Congressional questions, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke unleashed what appeared to be a heart-felt and spontaneous disavowal of the financial and political systems of the United States.
Asked a question about the wealth effect, Bernanke paused and said, "The wealth effect. Ah, right." He then smiled faintly and shook his head. "You want to know about the wealth effect? Well, I'll be candid with you. This whole thing is a kleptocracy--the financial system, the political system, it's one big kleptocracy. That's the real wealth effect."
Seeming to find his footing, Bernanke continued with a passion that startled the audience. "You know, I told myself to just repeat the party line for another year so I could step down quietly and let Yellen or another of the toadies take over, but I realized that I can no longer stomach the lies, the obfuscation and the plundering."
"Yes, I have a plum position lined up at Goldman Sachs after my retirement. You know, give a few speeches and pocket a couple of million dollars, but I am tired of the dirtiness of all this money."
Leaning into the microphone, Bernanke asked, "Aren't you tired of the dirtiness of all the money you take? Aren't you tired of the lies we're all living?"
"I am supposed to be an expert in economics. So I'll tell you how the system works in very simple terms. It's no different from the late Roman Empire, actually. The trick is to get close to the seat of Imperial power, which in our country is the Federal government. You bribe those on the make--there's always an abundance of them--to grant you special privileges, subsidies, contracts or a monopoly. You skim a great fortune off this proximity to political and financial power, and then you take this fortune and buy a rentier income--you know, thousands of rental homes, farmland, buildings in Manhattan, tax-free municipal bonds, and so on."
"This is how we ended up with cartels running everything: national defense, healthcare, higher education, the financial sector. You--the elected nobility--enable this vast skimming operation in the name of democracy and capitalism. But we all know those are facades. Democracy is a fraud at the national level, but we're all too cowardly to confess it."
Taking a sip of water, Bernanke said, "Let me tell you a little secret about all our policies based on Keynesian principles. Paul Krugman and I put on witch doctor masks and we dance around a campfire waving dead chickens and chanting nonsense. That's Keynesianism."
"It's hopelessly flawed, a disaster, for one simple reason: the Keynesians think all investment is productive, when the truth is most investment is unproductive and has to be written off. But that isn't allowed to happen any more, because those close to power would lose."
"As a result, everything we do and say here in Washington and in New York is a travesty of a mockery of a sham, an endless parade of lies, half-truths and spin. President Bush, in his own homespun way, spoke the truth when he said, 'This sucker's going down.' He meant the kleptocracy, the whole fraud we're living to enrich ourselves and keep power. I have had enough, ladies and gentleman, and this is my last public appearance as an employee of the Federal Reserve."
Fed officials explained the chairman's spontaneous comments as "the unfortunate result of a mix-up in the chairman's medication," triggering speculation that Mr. Bernanke had stopped taking Ibogaine. Sudden bursts of truth-telling are one side-effect of withdrawal, according to those familiar with the psychotropic medication.
According to sources within the Federal Reserve and Treasury, those supporting Janet Yellen as the new chair of the Fed are battling another faction who believe it would better serve the interests of the economy to install a high-frequency trading machine at the helm of the Fed. "There is a growing sense that it's time to cut out the middleman, so to speak, and just let the HFT computers openly trade the Fed's accounts," said one unnamed source.
Alas, April Fools. Sadly, no one in power has the courage to tell the truth.
Wait a minute--one former insider is willing to tell the truth--David Stockman:
The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America
The Great Deformation (Kindle edition)
Thank you, Joe G. ($5/month), for your wondrously generous renewal subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership. Thank you, Garrett R. ($5/month), for your fantastically generous renewal subscription to this site --I am greatly honored by your steadfast support and readership.
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Some Of My Favorite Music From Before 1950
September 15, 2017 By C.S. Elston
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big lover of music. It inspires me, helps me grieve, comforts me, and at times, even makes me laugh. So, I thought I would start a series of posts on my all-time favorite music. The only problem is, there’s way too much of it! Even when I try to narrow it down by decade, it’s a long list. But, that’s what I’ll be doing after this first post on the subject. Even then, it won’t be fully comprehensive. For now, let’s just look at some of the great music given to us before 1950.
While I appreciate classical music, and admire some of the great classical composers of the past like Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Wagner, Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Schubert, and Rachmaninoff, it’s far less common for me to listen to unless I’m trying to get inspired while writing (which is something I’ll likely get into in further detail in a future post on finding inspiration for writing). Here, I’m primarily (but not exclusively) referring to more popular fare in my every day life. In fact, I’m also purposely excluding Christmas music. I’ll save that for a later post, too.
To look at some of that older, awesome, and relatively popular music, I must start all the way back in the 18th century with one of my favorite hymns: John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” (1779). Whether you’re a Christian or not, it’s unlikely you have been around on this planet for long and not heard that song. And, with good reason. Few songs cut to my core like that one does. You can’t help but feel Newton’s passion and gratefulness for God’s grace. This is a man who grew up without religious conviction and worked in the slave trade until his conversion and commitment to the study of Christian theology. This song looks back with deep conviction and appreciation for the moment that everything changed. When precious grace appeared, the hour he first believed.
Okay, now we can fast forward in time a little bit. But, not too far. The 19th century gave us some great music, too. Francis Scott Key delivered with “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814.) So did Stephen C. Foster with “Camptown Races” (1850,) Sarah Adams with “Nearer, My God to Thee” (1859,) Julia Ward Howe with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862,) Patrick S. Gilmore with “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (1863,) and Johan Strauss II with “The Blue Danube” (1867.) Then T. Brigham Bishop gave us “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me” (1869) and William Howard Doane supplied us with “Safe In The Arms of Jesus” (1870.) But, the 19th century was far from over. Arthur Sullivan kept it going with “Onward Christian Soldiers” (1871.) So did Brewster M. Higley with “Home on the Range” (1873,) Euphemia Allen with “Chopsticks” (1877,) Charles E. Pratt with “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” (1881,) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with the “1812 Overture” (1882,) Percy Montrose with “Oh, My Darling Clementine” (1884,) J. Hanold Kendall with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (1889,) Henry S. Miller with “The Cat Came Back” (1893,) Samuel A. Ward with “America the Beautiful” (1895,) and John Phillip Sousa with “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1896,) to name a few. Alright, that’s more than a few. But, to be fair, I did warn you this was a long list . . .
And, we’re not done yet. We are, however, finally headed into the 20th century. The first couple of decades were, for me, a bit sparser. However, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov provided us with “Flight of the Bumblebee” (1900) right away and Scott Joplin wasn’t too far behind him with “The Entertainer” (1902.) Then, Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tizer gave us “Take me Out to the Ball Game” (1908,) the Fisk University Singers delivered “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” (1909,) and Frederic Edward Weatherly supplied us with “Danny Boy” (1913.)
As the twenties began to roar, so did the music. Al Jolson hit the scene with songs like “April Showers” (1922,) “California, Here I Come” (1924) and “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along” (1926.) Bessie Smith came on strong, delivering “Downhearted Blues” (1923,) “St. Louis Blues” (1925,) “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” (1929) and, eventually, “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” (1931.). Plus, Gene Austin gave us “My Blue Heaven” (1927,) Blind Willie Johnson supplied us with “Motherless Children (1927,) Maurice Ravel gave us “Bolero” (1928) and Jimmie Rodgers delivered “In the Jailhouse Now” (1928.) The roaring twenties also introduced us to The Carter Family who gave us the songs “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1928) and “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (1935,) Cliff Edwards who delivered “Singing in the Rain” (with Annette Hanshaw, 1929) and “When You Wish Upon a Star” (1940) and, one of the all-time greats, Louis Armstrong who gave us “St. James Infirmary Blues” (1929); and “All of Me” (1932.)
While the stock market crashed in 1929, the music scene didn’t. The 1930’s had Harry Richman “Puttin on the Ritz” (1930,) Cab Calloway delivered “Minnie the Moocher” (1931,) Albert E. Brumley gave us “I’ll Fly Away” (1932,) and Ethel Waters provided “Stormy Weather” (1933.) The King of Swing, Benny Goodman delivered both “Moonglow” (1934) and Sing Sing Sing (1937.) Fred Astaire had us dancing “Cheek to Cheek” (1935) while Bing Crosby delivered “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime” (1932,) “Pennies From Heaven” (1936,) and eventually both “Swinging On A Star” (1944) and “Don’t Fence Me In” (1944.) Robert Johnson gave us “Sweet Home Chicago” (1936,) “Hellhound On My Trail” (1937,) “Cross Road Blues” (1937,) “Love in Vain” (1937,) and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” (1937.) The 1930’s also introduced us to the unique and unforgettable style of Billie Holiday who delivered brilliant songs like “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (1937,) “The Very Thought of You” (1938,) “Strange Fruit” (1939,) “God Bless The Child” (1941,) “Gloomy Sunday” (1941,) and “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1944). And, finally, Judy Garland closed the 1930’s out with the timeless hit “Over The Rainbow” (1939.)
The 1940’s were ushered in by the likes of Jimmie Davis with “You Are My Sunshine” (1940,) Coleman Hawkins with “Body and Soul” (1940,) Artie Shaw and His Orchestra who gave us both “Frenesi” (1940) and “Star Dust” (1941,) and Glenn Miller who delivered both “In the Mood” (1940) and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (1941.) Then Joseito Fernandez gave us “Guantanamera” (1941) and The Andrew Sisters delivered both “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (1941) and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me – 1942.) Soon after that, Harry James and Helen Forrest gave us “I’ve Heard That Song Before” (1943,) Doris Day joined Les Brown and his Orchestra to deliver “Sentimental Journey” (1945,) and Perry Como supplied us with the song “Till the End of Time” (1945.) Then we were blessed by the soft baritone voice of Nat King Cole on songs like “For Sentimental Reasons” (1946,) “Route 66” (1946); and “Nature Boy” (1948.) Next, we were introduced to one of the most important American singer/songwriters of the 20th century, Hank Williams, who delivered “Honky Tonkin’” (1948,) “I Saw the Light” (1948,) “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” (1949,) “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (1949,) “Lovesick Blues” (1949,) and “Lost Highway” (1949.) Finally, to close out the 1940’s, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five gave us “Saturday Night Fish Fry” (1949,) Vaugn Monroe” delivered “Riders in the Sky” (1949,) and an evolutionary process that started in 1885 with Carl Gustav Boberg was completed in 1949 when Stuart K. Hine blessed us all with another amazing and timeless classic hymn called “How Great Thou Art.”
Again, I warned you it was a long list. But, wait until we enter the 1950’s. Rock and roll is just getting started . . .
Filed Under: Blog, Home, Music Tagged With: 1812 Overture, 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, Al Jolson, Albert E. Brumley, Albert Von Tizer, All of Me, Amazing Grace, America the Beautiful, American, Andrew Sisters, Annette Hanshaw, April Showers, Arthur Sullivan, Artie Shaw, Bach, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Beethoven, Benny Goodman, Bessie Smith, Big Band, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Blind Willie Johnson, Blue Danube, bluegrass, Blues, Body and Soul, Bolero, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, Brahms, Brewster M. Higley, Brother, Cab Calloway, California Here I Come, Camptown Races, Can the Circle Be Unbroken, Can You Spare A Dime, Carl Gustav Boberg, Charles E. Pratt, Chattanooga Choo Choo, Cheek to Cheek, Chopin, Chopstics, classical, Cliff Edwards, Coleman Hawkins, country, country & western, country and western, Cross Road Blues, dance, dancing, Danny Boy, Don’t Fence Me In, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me), Doris Day, Downhearted Blues, Ethel Waters, Euphemia Allen, Fisk University Singers, Flight of the Bumblebee, For Sentimental Reasons, Francis Scott Key, Fred Astaire, Frederic Edward Weatherly, Frenesi, Gene Austin, Glenn Miller, Gloomy Sunday, God Bless The Child, Guantanamera, Handel, Hank Williams, Harry James, Harry Richman, Helen Forrest, Hellhound On My Trail, Henry S. Miller, Home on the Range, Honky Tonkin’, How Great Thou Art, hymn, hymns, I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, I Saw the Light, I’ll Be Seeing You, I’ll Fly Away, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, I’ve Heard That Song Before, In the Jailhouse Now, In the Mood, J. Hanold Kendall, Jack Norworth, Jazz, Jimmie Davis, Jimmie Rodgers, Johan Strauss II, John Newton, John Phillip Sousa, Joseito Fernandez, Judy Garland, Julia Ward How, Keep on the Sunny Side, King of Swing, Les Brown and his Orchestra, Lost Highway, Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, Love in Vain, Lovesick Blues, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Maurice Ravel, Minnie The Moocher, Moonglow, Motherless Children, Mozart, Music, My Blue Heaven, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It, Nat King Cole, Nature Boy, Nearer My God to Thee, Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Oh My Darling Clementine, Onward Christian Soldiers, Over The Rainbow, Patrick S. Gilmore, patriotic, Pennies From Heaven, Percy Montrose, Perry Como, Puttin on the Ritz, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Riders in the Sky, Robert Johnson, rock and roll, Route 66, Safe in the Arms of Jesus, Samuel A. Ward, Sarah Adams, Saturday Night Fish Fry, Schubert, Scott Joplin, Sentimental Journey, Shoo Fly, Shoo Fly Don't Bother Me, Sing Sing Sing, singer/songwriter, singer/songwriters, Singing in the Rain, song, songs, St. James Infirmary Blues, St. Louis Blues, Star Dust, Star-Spangled Banner, Stars and Stripes Forever, Stephen C. Foster, Stormy Weather, Strange Fruit, Stuart K Hine, Sweet Home Chicago, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, swing music, Swinging On A Star, T. Brigham Bishop, Take me Out to the Ball Game, Tchaikovsky, The Carter Family, The Cat Came Back, the entertainer, The Very Thought of You, Till the End of Time, Vaugn Monroe, Wagner, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along, When You Wish Upon A Star, William Howard Doane, You Are My Sunshine
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The Evolution of Civic Engagement: South Africa: A Case Study
American University in Cairo
In 1992, shortly before democracy in South Africa, the Joint Education Trust (JET) was a private sector initiative (a consortium of 20 leading companies) with a commitment of R500 million over five years. It supported more than 400 NGOs involved in early childhood development, youth development, adult education and training, and teacher development.
In 2000 it began a new life with a commitment of R650 million from local and offshore donors. It has provided key policy support to government. With funding from the Ford and Kellogg Foundations, JET created a special initiative called CHESP (Community Higher Education Service Partnerships). The original pilot programme worked with seven universities to support the conceptualization, implementation and research on:
Service-learning academic courses
Community, faculty, and service agency involvement in community-higher education engagement
Student assessment in community engagement
Organizational structures conducive to community engagement
Quality assurance of community engagement and service-learning
CHESP has been seminal in making community engagement an integral part of teaching and research—a mechanism to enrich teaching and research with a deeper sense of context, locality, and application.
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The transformative power of trauma
Jonathan Rollins February 1, 2012
Since 9/11 and the United States’ subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans have grown all too familiar with the term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which was first popularly applied to veterans of the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Today the term shows up regularly in headlines and in magazine articles, in TV news accounts and on websites. Although some mental health professionals protest that posttraumatic stress is not a “disorder” but rather a normal reaction to extraordinary and disturbing events, the term is widely understood to convey that a person’s ability to cope and function has been significantly impaired.
Another trauma-related term developed in the ’90s is much less familiar to the general public and perhaps even to counselors. But given counselors’ focus on wellness and growth, both Lea Flowers and Gerard Lawson believe this term — posttraumatic growth — should be on the tips of their colleagues’ tongues in the counseling profession.
As defined by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, psychology professors at the University of North Carolina Charlotte who pioneered the development of research and theory concerning posttraumatic growth (PTG) in the ’90s, PTG is a “positive psychological change experienced as the result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances.” To meet the criteria for PTG, the transformation the person goes through must be a by-product of the traumatic experience itself. PTG is not simply a “return to baseline functioning,” which more accurately characterizes resilience.
Lawson, president of the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision, a division of the American Counseling Association, says a general awareness of “adversive growth” spans back to World War I, “but the language was always pretty loose, and the research was not there.” He credits Tedeschi and Calhoun with giving form to the concept of PTG but acknowledges that it has taken some time for the concept to catch on, especially in the face of much greater publicity concerning PTSD.
“We need to focus on the client’s growth and not just the disorder as it relates to trauma,” says Lawson, who chairs the ACA Crisis Response Planning Task Force. “This is right in our wheelhouse as counselors. What are the strengths that this person continues to demonstrate despite [his or her] traumatic experience? We need to be deliberate about highlighting those for our clients.”
Flowers, a licensed professional counselor and ACA member who co-directs the Post-Traumatic Growth Research Team at Georgia State University, agrees. “As counselors, we are positioned to really make this concept come alive,” she says. “Posttraumatic growth really fits with our wellness and growth-oriented perspective. [With PTG] you’re not trying to figure out what’s sick and what’s not working but rather how the person coped and was transformed because of [the traumatic event]. It’s less about identifying symptoms and deficits and more about using the process as a root for growth. We will find that this is where counselors can come alive because we’re facilitators of hope and change. We’re trained to do this. That’s not what our cousins in social work and psychology necessarily do.”
Both Flowers and Lawson are strong advocates for counselors applying PTG principles in their trauma work with clients. This is due in large part, they acknowledge, to their personal connections to two of the most traumatic events in recent U.S. history — the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the mass shootings by a student on the campus of Virginia Tech in 2007.
Lawson, an associate professor of counselor education at Virginia Tech, was among the key players on what came to be known as the Mental Health Advisory Group, a collaborative panel that met the day after the mass shootings to develop a strategy for providing mental health support to the entire Virginia Tech community. In the near-term aftermath of the shootings, Lawson recalls, “there was lots of exposure to PTSD, and the focus” — both in the media and within the university community — “was very much on that. But as the situation evolved some, our counseling program decided that we had to advocate for a focus on resilience and posttraumatic growth. We started asking, ‘How do we tell how our campus is doing?’ If you focus on the negative, you’re going to see the negative.”
While Lawson witnessed and helped facilitate PTG on the Virginia Tech campus, Flowers had an even more personal brush with PTG. She was in the final stages of securing her doctorate at the University of New Orleans (UNO) when Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city. Like thousands of others, she was forced to evacuate. Tuning in to coverage of the natural disaster on CNN, she was astonished to see police officers and Coast Guard personnel in a boat, cruising down the street where her home was located.
Flowers stayed with family members and lived in hotels while completing her doctorate at UNO. “I remember defending my dissertation and gutting my house in the same day,” she says. “I lost everything I owned. I lost my whole city. Everything I had was gone except for my dissertation. … What I was experiencing, what my community was experiencing, what my family was experiencing was PTSD.
“But when I started talking to people, I noticed their strength. There was a shift in our life perspective. It was a collective experience. Up until that date [when Hurricane Katrina struck], my datebook had really mattered to me. After Katrina, I was just focused on the present moment. That was a huge transformation for me.”
Flowers recalled that most of the trauma studies and training she had been exposed to previously had been focused from a crisis perspective. Recognizing that she and others she knew had been transformed in positive ways in the wake of a traumatic event, Flowers began searching for an alternative perspective and uncovered information on PTG. “I didn’t find that counselors were gravitating to trauma work, so I was excited when I discovered there was a place in trauma where I could be comfortable. Posttraumatic growth resonated with my training and who I was as a counselor. It still speaks to me today, both as a person and a professional.”
A former assistant professor at Georgia State and clinical supervisor of counselors-in-training, Flowers now owns Chrysalis Counseling and Consulting, a private practice through which she offers consulting services to organizations and professionals and provides growth-oriented counseling services for women. The mission of the practice is explained on its website: “To help facilitate a transformative process for our clients building upon her inner strengths and resilience.”
Domains of change
It is important for counselors to understand the distinction between resilience and PTG, Flowers says. While resilience implies a resistance to the negative impact of trauma, PTG implies a significant and positive change in the person. Another way to put it: “Resilience is how we get through the trauma using our coping skills,” Flowers says. “Posttraumatic growth is how we are transformed because of the trauma.”
She uses the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and the TV show America’s Most Wanted as recognizable examples of PTG in action. In both instances, parents who experienced the loss of children to tragic and disturbing circumstances were transformed by the experience and took action to create positive change as a result.
Flowers also points to Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder, chair and CEO of Apple Inc., who in a commencement address at Stanford University in 2005 described getting fired in a public and humiliating way at age 30 from the very company he had helped to build from the ground up.
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me,” Jobs told the audience. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
“During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. … I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.”
“When I read this,” Flowers says, “I thought, ‘This is PTG. This is PTG in a big way.”
At the same time, Flowers cautions that all individuals who experience major life crisis will not necessarily experience PTG, and if they do, it may not show itself in a grand public manner. “Transformation is personal,” she says. “Everyone will not do something with large public impact as a result of posttraumatic growth.” What is important, she adds, is that the transformation is personally meaningful and recognizable to the client, which is where counselors can be of great assistance.
In their research, Tedeschi and Calhoun identified five domains in which positive changes take place in the PTG process:
Greater appreciation of life and a changed sense of priorities. This suggests that clients have faced their mortality and no longer take life for granted, Lawson says. Flowers adds that this domain represents a change in philosophy concerning what really matters in life.
Greater sense of personal strength. In this domain, clients have discovered they are able to overcome challenges they might not have thought possible before, Lawson says. At heart, Flowers says, this represents a change in perception of self — “If I could get through this, I can get through anything.”
Warmer, more intimate relationships with others. This most often manifests itself as an ability to relate to others in a deeper, more meaningful way, Lawson says. Flowers says PTG in this area might also lead to reconciling relationships with others or bonding with another individual or group because of a shared experience.
Recognition of new possibilities or paths for one’s life. “They begin to see life with a broader view, perhaps because they learned something about themselves through the traumatic experience,” Lawson says.
Spiritual development. Both Lawson and Flowers point out that this domain is not necessarily about an increase in religious behavior, such as attending religious services more frequently, but rather feeling a stronger connection to God or another spiritual power. In many instances, this spiritual development helps those who have gone through a traumatic event to make meaning of the experience or to make meaning in other areas of their life where it had been absent previously.
Windows of opportunity
The possibility that client growth can potentially be cultivated out of a traumatic experience will be a revelation to some counselors. But Lawson says the fresh thinking shouldn’t stop there. “Counselors really need to expand the way they think about traumatic events in general,” he says.
This includes having an understanding that trauma isn’t limited to large-scale natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other instances of mass violence, or war-related experiences. According to the current version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an event can be considered potentially traumatic if 1) “The person experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others” or 2) “The person’s response involved intense fear, helplessness or horror.”
More than 80 percent of people will be exposed to a traumatic event in their lifetime, Lawson says, and most of these events, such as instances of bullying or domestic violence, will never make the news. “The work we do these days as counselors puts us in direct contact more often than we may recognize with clients who have been traumatized,” Lawson says. “Given the numbers of people exposed to trauma, we need to not focus solely on the negative side of the trauma equation.”
In trying to implement the PTG concept in their work with clients, counselors should keep several important points in mind.
First, says Flowers, PTG is not an intervention but rather a way of conceptualizing the client and the treatment plan. “Posttraumatic growth is more of a perspective or a process that you integrate into whatever approach you are using with the client,” she says, adding that it weaves particularly well into existential, narrative and cognitive-based interventions.
Second, PTG is not a given with every client. “Just because there has been a traumatic experience does not mean there will be a growth experience,” Flowers says, “or that there will be a growth experience soon.”
Lawson adds that clients who were closer to healthy functioning before exposure to a traumatic event generally are also better positioned to experience PTG than clients who were already struggling to function before the trauma. This also aligns with the literature regarding which individuals are more susceptible to experiencing PTSD, he says.
Third, PTG should never be forced on or demanded of the client. “In embracing posttraumatic growth in our work, we have to be careful that we don’t come off as Pollyanna when the person just lost their house,” Lawson says. “We have to be sure that we are patient with the process of grieving and allowing clients to work through issues that are completely normal after a traumatic event. We don’t want to rush them to look better, feel better, function better. But at the same time, through the normal course of conversation, we want to highlight ways that the client may be moving [through the five domains of change]. We begin talking about it with the client in terms of, ‘And where will this take you?’”
Although there is no prescribed timetable dictating exactly when to incorporate the PTG concept into treatment with traumatized clients, Lawson says the “immediate noise from the trauma begins to calm down” three to six months after the event. “In that window especially, we begin to look at opportunities for growth,” he says. “We don’t want to be there immediately [after the traumatic event] to pounce on them, but we want to be able to be there to offer support when they need support and before their trauma membrane fills back over. It’s much harder to go back in after the fact.”
“Posttraumatic growth is not something to consider when clients are in crisis,” Flowers adds. “Growth is further down the line for these clients because we first have to help manage the initial crisis, then after things have stabilized, help facilitate them through a more reflective process. … Timing is a huge part of [the PTG process]. Counselors may have terminated their work with these clients when growth finally happens. We may just be there to plant seeds. Likewise, the client’s transformation might be very incremental instead of dramatic.” She also points out that distress from the trauma might continue even as growth is happening, meaning the two are not mutually exclusive.
The role of the counselor
No special training is needed to integrate the PTG process into counseling work, Lawson says, but a certain skill set is required to support PTG properly. “Counselors need to be comfortable doing posttraumatic work and tuned in to the factors for posttraumatic growth,” he says. “You also have to be willing to sit with clients’ grief and loss and capable of identifying their strengths. Then you need to encourage them to answer some questions: How are you going to be able to see the world in a broader way? Where are we going to focus our energy? What are we going to pay attention to?”
Flowers says counselors have been provided with all the basic tools they need in their training programs to integrate PTG into their work, but she suggests looking at growth-oriented models and frameworks to grow more comfortable with the PTG process. “Posttraumatic growth will change your clinical mindset,” she asserts.
According to Flowers, the main role of the counselor is to be a facilitator in the PTG process (rather than trying to be the “creator” of growth), to serve as a companion to the “expert” (the client) and to help the client engage in meaning-making concerning what has happened to him or her.
Using a narrative approach with clients works particularly well in identifying and cultivating PTG, Flowers says, although she adds that counselors must exude patience, empathy and a willingness to meet clients where they are at that moment. “You listen to how they story their experience and stay alert to changes in perception they have had since experiencing the trauma,” she explains. “You want to help them restory their narrative from traumatic and distressing to positive and growth-inducing, but you first have to respect the trauma survivor’s struggle. You may listen to their story and assess that they’re not yet ready to restory their experience. But keep in mind that you’re not the expert — they are. You’re coming along as the expert’s companion. You don’t want to lead the client. That can be almost as damaging as the trauma itself because it can sound like you’re diminishing what happened to them.”
Flowers breaks the narrative approach incorporating a PTG focus into simple-to-understand steps: Listen to the client’s story, reflect the story back to the client using his or her own language and then highlight for the client how he or she has emerged from the traumatic experience and been transformed in a positive way.
“You’re using very basic counseling skills in this process but helping to facilitate hope,” Flowers says. “Our job is to help clients see those areas of transformation when they’re ready and to help them make meaning of whatever is left. We’re trying to move them from a feeling of hopelessness to a feeling of hopefulness.”
Both Flowers and Lawson view PTG as an exciting and beneficial yet relatively undeveloped frontier in trauma work — a frontier that would seem particularly inviting for counselors to explore and, potentially, to break new ground in.
“Right now,” Flowers comments, “there is nothing that says, ‘These are the proper techniques you use for posttraumatic growth.’ I believe counselors are best positioned to perhaps identify or even develop those techniques.”
Lawson concurs. “This philosophy is so consistent with our approach as counselors that the natural next step is for counselors to take the lead in how clients can maximize posttraumatic growth. We need to be the ones to answer the unanswered questions about posttraumatic growth.”
For more information about PTG, contact Gerard Lawson at glawson@vt.edu and Lea Flowers at drleaflowers@gmail.com.
Jonathan Rollins is the editor-in-chief of Counseling Today. Contact him at jrollins@counseling.org.
Posttraumatic growth, trauma
Helping clients grow from loss
Past trauma in counselors-in-training: Help or hindrance?
‘That I may serve’
Salutogenesis: Using clients’ strengths in the treatment of trauma
← Thanks, and a request Why counselors make poor lovers →
Verna Clay February 10, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Thanks for sharing this most informative article on the concept of posttraumatic growth. Throughout my journey through loss grief and ongoing healing I have definitely experienced PTG many times; just didn’t know what to call it. Thanks for providing a name for it so that I and others can discuss, recognize, appreciate, and better understand what is happening as we begin to focus more on our strengths and the progress we have made; the progress we are making, as we continue on our journey through loss grief and ongoing healing. Beautiful and well written article.
Katrina Beaudoin February 24, 2012 at 5:07 pm
What a fantastic new conceptualization of trauma-based counselling. The idea that clients can learn and grow from traumatic experiences should not be ignored, and this article clearly highlights the steps clients may go through when counsellors take on the role as a guide to post-traumatic growth. I will be attending a trauma-based counselling workshop in the next couple of weeks, and I will most definitley mention this article and the arguments presented by the authors. I am only just starting out in my career, and this article helped me reaffirm the stance I take on counselling as focusing on positive outcomes of negative experiences, while being aware of the client’s own pace and expectations for counselling.
C Walsh April 6, 2016 at 10:01 am
I would like to ask further questions about the use of technology in PTG and specifically how to begin the process with children, who have suffered more acute trauma, or kids living in vicarious trauma when living with sibling who suffered trauma.
Tim Segrest August 25, 2020 at 10:48 pm
Healing from PTSD is a long process that cannot be achieved through medications alone. There are several things that veterans and other patients of PTSD can and should do to heal themselves, and creative writing is one of the most effective of them.
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Cult Cartoon Essentials
CULT TV Essentials
Cult Movie Essentials
Cult Comic Essentials
Cult Video Game Essentials
Heroes of Cult
The Crib Sheet
CULT FACTION
For all your cult film, tv, cartoon, comic and video game needs
George “Buck” Flower
There are not many actors who can say they played (basically) the same character throughout their entire career! When asked about it he stated he was cast that way “probably because I look like a dirty drunk and a drifter. They say we play best what we are. God! I hope that’s not true”. Keep your eyes peeled and you will spot him! John Carpenter had him in almost all his movies, he crossed paths with the Dukes of Hazzard, Marty McFly, Maniac Cop, Pumpkinhead, The Puppet Master, Brisco County Jr, Reno Reigns, and various Power Ranger Teams! He is George “Buck” Flower (also credited as Ernest Wall, Buck Flower, George “Buck” Flower, George Flower, Buck Flowers, C. D. LaFleur, C.D. LaFleure, C.D. Lafleuer, and C.D. Lafleur).
“There’s only one good job on a movie set. Actor! It’s the only position where you are responsible to only yourself. Screenwriter is, among the positions I have held, the biggest heart-breaker. I believe it was ‘Earl Felton’ who said, “You know you have a good story when everyone involved wants to write their own version.”
Born on October 28th 1937 in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon, Flower joined the army in his teenage years and following his military service attended Eastern Oregon College. Flower then moved to California and attended Pasadena City College where he became a member of The Inspiration Players – a repertory theatre group. He remained with the group for twelve years touring all over the U.S.A.
Debuting in 1970 in the film Norma, Flower would appear in a number of soft-core movies including Country Cuzzins, Cousin Jed Rises Again, Touch Me, Below the Belt, Satan’s Lust, Mother Knows Best, Sex in Comics, The Dirty Mind of Young Sally, The Dirty Dolls, the Sex Prophet, Suckula, Guess Who’s Coming This Weekend, Video Vixens!, and The Candy Tangerine Man.
In 1975 Flower appeared in Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS as well as Gemini Affair, The Invisible Man, The Wilderness Family, Criminally Insane, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Devil’s Ecstasy, A Small Town in Texas, Drive In Massacre, Bad Georgia Road, Bare Knuckles, The Cliffwood Avenue Kids, The Alpha Incident, Big Bob Johnson and His Fantastic Speed Circus, The Further Adventures of the Wilderness Family, Killer’s Delight, Police Girls Academy, The Time Machine, The Capture of Bigfoot, Up Yours, and Adventures of the Wilderness Family 3.
In 1980 Flower began collaborating with John Carpenter with his role as Tommy Wallace in The Fog. He would also appear in Carpenter’s Escape From New York, Starman, Body Bags, They Live, and Village of the Damned. He would also appear in a huge number of Cult TV and movies throughout the rest of the 80’s including The Dukes of Hazzard, Flo, In Search of a Golden Sky, Rigged, Back to the Future, The Night Stalker, Bates Motel, Berserker, Code Name Zebra, Death Blow: A Cry for Justice, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Maniac Cop, Bloody Pom Poms, Pumpkinhead, Mac and Me, Death Nurse 2, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, One Man Force, Back to the Future Part II, Ghost Writer, Speak of the Devil, and Nerds of a Feather.
“John is a very special filmmaker. He has already shot every single angle of the movie inside his head prior to arriving on the set. He is also a master of communication. If one doesn’t know what’s going on at all times during a Carpenter shoot, one wasn’t paying attention. He is also very quiet for the most part. John knows he’s the director and seems to feel there is no reason to remind people of that fact.”
Throughout the 1990’s Flower would appear in They Came from Outer Space, Puppet Master II, Blood Games, Dragonfight, The Giant of Thunder Mountain, Soldier’s Fortune, Camp Fear, 976-Evil II, Waxwork II: Lost in Time, Munchie, Warlock: The Armageddon, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, Tammy and the T-Rex, Hard Bounty, Renegade, Dark Breed, Black Dawn, NYPD Blue, Demolition High, Wishmaster, Bloodsuckers, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Power Rangers in Space, and The Pretender.
As the 2000’s rolled in so did appearances in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, 18 Wheels of Justice, Power Rangers Time Force, Power Rangers Time Force: Photo Finish, and The Curse of the Komodo. His final role came in 2004 as Old Chuck in They Are Among Us. Sadly Flower died of cancer at age 66 on June 18th 2004 in Los Angeles, California. His daughter actress/costume designer Verkina Flower continues the family name in the film and television industry.
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Rocacorba Daily: Monday April 8
Good morning and welcome to another edition of the Rocacorba Daily. This morning we’ve got a wrap-up of last night’s cracking edition of Paris-Roubaix, results from a handful of other races that wrapped up on the weekend, and a handful of other interesting bits and pieces that should help ease you into this Monday morning. Enjoy!
Mission accomplished for Cancellara at Paris-Roubaix
Fabian Cancellara (RadioShack Leopard) has claimed his third victory at Paris-Roubaix in a stunning win last night that wasn’t guaranteed until he reached the Roubaix velodrome. Coming onto the track with Sep Vanmarcke, Cancellara positioned himself behind the Team Blanco rider and sprinted for the line, taking the win by a bike length.
Cancellara’s teammates built a solid foundation for their Swiss team leader, controlling the race for the opening 200km, never allowing a break to gain any significant advantage. A group of eight did eventually get away though and it was left to Cancellara to bridge the gap on his own.
On sector 6 of the race’s famous cobbles, where Cancellara had crashed in reconnaissance the other day — the Bourghelles à Wannehain — Spartacus joined the leading group and then attacked again, heading off in search of Stijn Vandenbergh (Omega Pharma-QuickStep) and Vanmarcke who had moved away from the lead group.
Just before sector 5 there were four leaders in the race — Cancellara, Vanderbergh, Zdenek Stybar (Omega Pharma-QuickStep) and Vanmarcke. When Stybar and Vanderbergh collided with spectators their chances of victory were over and it was left to Vanmarcke and Cancellara to ride to the famous Roubaix velodrome together.
With his Tour of Flanders win last week, Cancellara headed into the race as the clear favorite and in the position of having everyone ride against him. Cancellara said:
“When I see how in this race everyone was against our team, against me, I just had to do a selection. The team came into a little bit of difficulty because we lost a few guys because of bad luck. But that’s Roubaix. It’s always nice to win alone but today there was pure fighting until the very end. I could not believe it when I crossed the finish line. My legs and my head wanted to bring me here.”
As Cancellara talked reporters through the finale in the press room afterwards, he sat slumped in his chair with his chin resting on his knee, even closing his eyes while his responses were translated from English to French. “I went over my limits like never before to cross the line first today,”
Click here to see the full results and a highlights video from the 2013 Paris-Roubaix.
Collisions cost Vandenbergh and Stybar Paris-Roubaix podium spots
The Omega Pharma-QuickStep team went into the Carrefour de l’Arbre cobbled sector with two men in the four-rider breakaway: Stijn Vandenbergh and Zdenek Stybar. But in a short period of time, both riders had unfortunate encounters with spectators, costing them a chance at a podium finish.
Vandenbergh eventually crossed the line last in a group that sprinted for eighth place on the velodrome, suffering from a wound on his left elbow and hip and blood spattered on his left leg.
“I know that I can win this race one day,” said Vandenbergh. “Today I had a really good chance for the win or a podium result at least. Cancellara was the strongest man out there. It’s sad that I missed out on a podium result because of the crash. I’m really disappointed.”
Offredo crashes out of Paris-Roubaix
One of the more spectacular crashes from yesterday’s Paris-Roubaix happened to FDJ rider Yoann Offredo.
FDJ manager Marc Madiot said of Offredo:
“He was at the tail of the peloton, he’d just asked me for a bike change. Before I could respond, he had not seen that the peloton was splitting to go each side of a traffic island and he hit the sign at full speed. He hurt himself badly, he’s wounded on his chin, his knees, his ribs. That’s how it ended for him…”
Paris-Roubaix in quotes
We’ve gone through the press releases sent out about Paris-Roubaix by the various teams and put together a collection of quotes from riders and team directors. Click here to see what the likes of Cancellara, Terpstra, Stybar, Chavanel, Phinney and more have to say about how the epic race unfolded.
Quintana wins the Vuelta Ciclista al Pais Vasco
Colombian Nairo Quintana (Movistar) has won the Vuelta Ciclista al Pais Vasco (Tour of the Basque Country) after finishing second to Tony Martin in the 24km final stage time trial on Saturday.
Quintana started the day six seconds behind compatriot Sergio Henao (Sky) on the overall classifaction but Henao finished 40 seconds behind Quintana, just holding on to take third place ahead of Simon Spilak (Katusha).
Henao’s Australian teammate Richie Porte (Sky) finished fourth on the day to ensure he took second overall. As expected, Martin of the Omega Pharma-Quick Step team won the stage convincingly, finishing in a time of 35 minutes 5 seconds. The German was 17 seconds quicker than Quintana, with Spaniard Benat Intxausti (Movistar) coming in third a further 15 seconds back.
Click here the full results from stage 6 and the overall classification in the Tour of the Basque Country.
Porte takes out stage 5 of Pais Vasco to secure second overall
Richie Porte finished second overall in the Tour of the Basque Country, a result that was secured with this fourth place in the final stage time trial. But Porte also won the fifth stage which featured 10 categorised climbs and which was marred by torrential rain, sleet and even some snow.
Porte’s Sky team spent almost the entire day at the front of the field, first reeling in a breakaway, and then controlling the race for Porte.
The final climb of the day came 6km before the finish and it was on the way down after that climb that a select group of riders, including Porte, came together. Porte attacked with 1.5km to go and was able to hold off the surging group to take the win.
Click here to see the full results from stage 5 of the Vuelta Ciclista al Pais Vasco.
Ellen van Dijk wins the Energiewacht Tour
Dutch rider Ellen van Dijk (Specialized-Lululemon) has taken out the six-stage Energiewacht Tour by 1:21 over compatriots Loes Gunnewijk (Orica-AIS) and Kirsten Wild (Argos-Shimano) after a dominant performance in the ITT on stage 3a.
Van Dijk won the 21.1km time trial by 51 seconds over Lisa Brennauer to set up the overall win but in many ways, the Tour belonged to Kirsten Wild. Wild won four of the available six stages, dominating the rest of the field when it came to the bunch sprints.
Loes Gunnewijk (Orica-AIS), Ellen Van Dijk (Specialized-Lululemon) and Kirsten Wild (Argos-Shimano) atop the Energiewacht Tour podium.
For a personal account of the Energiewacht Tour, check out Orica-AIS rider Gracie Elvin’s blog.
Click here to see the overall results from the 2013 Energiewacht Tour.
Cancellara leads WorldTour rankings
Fabian Cancellara’s victory in Paris-Robaix overnight has seen him leap-frog Peter Sagan (Cannondale) — who didn’t race Paris-Roubaix — to the top of the WorldTour individual rankings.
Cancellara moves to 351 points with the 100 he picked up overnight with Sagan in second and Richie Porte, who finished second overall in the Tour of the Basque Country, sitting in third.
The top 5 on the individual rankings is as follows:
1. Fabian Cancellara (351)
2. Peter Sagan (312)
3. Richie Porte (200)
4. Nairo Quintana (182)
5. Joaquim Rodriguez (144)
Spain (465) leads the national rankings from Switzerland (360) and Belgium (358) and Sky (536) leads the teams rankings ahead of RadioShack-Leopard (466) and Katusha (400).
Click here to see the full up-to-date rankings.
Rick Zabel wins U23 Ronde van Vlaanderen
Rick Zabel, son of famous German sprinter Erik, confirmed he is moving out of the shadow of his old man and creating his own story after claiming the U23 Tour of Flanders over the weekend.
Zabel won the bunch sprint ahead of Dylan Groenewegen (Netherlands) and Magnus Cort Nielsen (Denmark).
Zabel’s win is a huge coup for the waning popularity of German road cycling — perhaps Rick will be the protagonist to bring German cycling back to the mainstream?
Click here to see the full results from the U23 Tour of Flanders.
The tech of Paris-Roubaix
There’s always a lot of buzz about Paris-Roubaix, not just because it’s one of the toughest and most memorable races on the WorldTour calendar, but because it’s a race that often sees the riders using equipment that you simply wouldn’t see in a regular road race.
This piece in VeloNews runs through the alternate tech and bike setups used at Paris-Roubaix overnight, including tyre pressures, tyre widths and so on.
Click here to read more on VeloNews.
Armstrong asks court to dump SCA lawsuit
Lance Armstrong has asked a Dallas court to throw out a court case by SCA Promotions, the company that paid Armstrong $12 million in bonuses for winning multiple editions of the Tour de France.
SCA Promotions is suing Armstrong to recover the $12 million, suggesting that Armstrong lied under oath about his doping.
Armstrong is trying to have the case dismissed, arguing that the settlement reached between the two parties is legally binding and can’t be appealed.
Click here to read more on road.cc
Video: a death-defying MTB ride
And finally, check out this video of a couple of MTB riders on a track where one small slip could prove deadly. Their balance (and confidence) are amazing — I’m not sure I could walk that track without tumbling to my doom.
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Australian Cyclocross Championships: Defending champion Lisa Jacobs will need to leap an extra barrier
by Simone Giuliani
Australia is holding its third National Cyclocross Championships in Melbourne this weekend. The mud-loving cycling discipline has only recently taken hold in the country, but its popularity is rapidly expanding and the competition throughout the fields is heating up. However, in the women’s elite field one rider stands head and shoulders above her competitors. Lisa Jacobs is the only female national cyclocross champion Australia has ever had, but the task of retaining the jersey for a third year running has became much more difficult since injury struck.
A couple of months ago it would have been hard to find anyone with even a shadow of a doubt that Lisa Jacobs would continue her reign as Australia’s only national cyclocross champion. Jacobs may not have been the favourite when she won at the first Australian National Cyclocross Championships in 2013, but since then the work she has put into developing her cyclocross skills and fitness has taken her to a whole new level.
The intensity of the Rapha-Focus rider’s efforts to try and secure a top 20 finish in the 2016 World Cyclocross Championships have seen her move from a strong competitor in Australia, to a dominant force that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the field.
Rather than constantly riding lap after lap off the front by herself in the women’s field, she has taken to racing with the men at club races to get an experience closer to the level she would be up against at international women’s cyclocross events. It has been a welcome extra level of competition to help her build on what had already been an extremely successful start to 2015.
Early in the year she spent time racing in Belgium and took out sixth in a field of heavy-hitters at the Boels Classic Internationale Cyclocross Heerlen in the Netherlands. Back home in Australia, Jacobs had taken an emphatic lead in the Australian National Cyclocross Series, taking out the first four rounds with ease. Then, last month, two days before the Canberra rounds of the national series, her ideal run ended.
“I was doing some barrier practice. I was doing some run-throughs and skip-throughs and I did a different movement and got an Achilles injury,” Jacobs told Ella CyclingTips. “Four weeks out from Nationals is a pretty stressful time to get injured.”
She hasn’t raced since.
Since the injury, Jacobs has been working hard towards making it to the start line of the Australian Cyclocross Championships with intensive physio and rehabilitation work.
Fortunately, she has still been able to ride, but it is the obstacles during the race that will cause her the greatest difficulty.
Often, there isn’t a lot of running in Australian races, but the course put together for the national title by Fields of Joy is an exception. There is a long muddy uphill slog that forces all the female racers off the bike every lap, and only the odd rider in the elite male field can sometimes grind their way slowly up the climb.
It is this climb that is going to prove the greatest obstacle to the injured Jacobs and it is a feature the rider herself pushed to have incorporated as it replicates the hill on the 2016 World Championship course in Heusden-Zolder, Belgium.
“I know it is going to be an incredibly tough day,” said Jacobs. “My run in hasn’t been ideal but whatever happens I know that I have tried my best to prepare. Whoever wins on that course is going to be a worthy winner, because that course finds everyone out.”
The other riders competing for the green and gold stripes of the national jersey include some who have won Australian championships before, just in other disciplines. Two of the leading contenders are former Australian mountain bike marathon champion Melissa Anset and former Australian road champion Oenone Wood.
Anset has regularly placed second to Jacobs and took out one of the national series rounds in Canberra, when Jacobs was absent with injury. Mountain biker Terri Rhodes, who will also be vying for the title, took out the other Canberra round.
Then there is April McDonough, who rounded out the podium at last year’s Australian championship and Josie Simpson who is currently running second in the national series, behind Anset, as she has consistently delivered top 5 results.
Building a cross culture and a top 20 rider
Lisa Jacobs is the only female national cyclocross champion Australia has ever had.
A handful of cyclocross devotees awakened an interest in the sport in Australia a few years ago, and in the last couple of years, it has really gained momentum, to the point that there is now a winter calendar packed with racing.
A lot of work has gone into building the fields, but also an inclusive culture surrounding cyclocross which embraces a sense of fun for spectators and riders alike. Many race organisers have held development days to get more people into the sport while also highlighting kids races and building exciting, spectator-friendly courses.
In an effort to continue this growth, this year’s Cyclocross National Championships will feature a teams race, which requires the four-person relay team to include at least one junior and one female rider.
At the elite level, Australia sent its first team to the Cyclocross World Championships in 2014, and the ambitions are now moving beyond just taking part.
Jacobs, a former road cyclist, currently looks to be Australia’s best chance for a high finish. In 2014 she made a last-minute decision to take part in the World Championships. Even with little time for preparation, she finished 39th and was on the lead lap. Jacobs, a full-time lawyer, missed the 2015 event due to work commitments and instead chose to devote her energy to an all-out effort to target a place in the top 20 in 2016.
“We had some pretty firm plans for the start of the World Cup season, which we are now going to have to revise, depending on how Nationals go and how my injuries pulls up afterwards,” said Jacobs.
The first World Cup round is CrossVegas in mid-September.
“If my injury means missing the start of the World Cup season to get my body sorted so that I can have a really good run into the World Championships, then there is time,” Jacobs commented. “At least this hasn’t happened two months out from Worlds because then it would be really problematic.”
The Australian Cyclocross National Championships are taking place August 8-9 in Essendon Fields, Victoria. Ella will be at the events posting updates on Twitter and Instagram. A summary of the races will be posted on Ella early next week.
#2015 Australian National Cyclocross Championships
#cx
#cyclocross
#Lisa Jacobs
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344.41(3)(b) (b) Whenever any person whose proof has been canceled or returned under sub. (1m) (b) desires reinstatement of his or her registrations prior to the expiration of the period during which proof of financial responsibility is required, he or she shall again furnish proof of financial responsibility. Thereupon his or her registrations may be renewed or reinstated upon payment of the fee required under s. 341.36 (1m).
344.41 History History: 1973 c. 90; 1975 c. 270; 1977 c. 29 s. 1654 (7) (c); 1977 c. 273; 1987 a. 27; 1991 a. 269, 316; 1997 a. 84.
344.42 344.42 Submission of certifications and recertifications by insurers. If the sum of certifications and recertifications under ss. 344.31 and 344.34 that are submitted by an insurer to the department in any year exceeds 1,000, the insurer shall pay to the department a transaction fee of $1.50 per certification or recertification that is not transmitted electronically to the department. The department shall promulgate rules establishing procedures for the collection of transaction fees under this section.
344.42 History History: 1997 a. 27; 2009 a. 245.
344.42 Cross-reference Cross-reference: See also ch. Trans 197, Wis. adm. code.
subch. IV of ch. 344 SUBCHAPTER IV
PENALTIES FOR VIOLATIONS OF CHAPTER
344.45 344.45 Surrender of license and registration upon suspension.
344.45(1)(1) Whenever a person's operating privilege or registration is suspended under this chapter, the department may order the person to surrender to the department his or her operator's license and the registration plates of the vehicle or vehicles for which registration was suspended. If the person fails immediately to return the operator's license or registration plates to the department, the department may direct a traffic officer to take possession thereof and return them to the department.
344.45(2) (2) Any person who intentionally fails or refuses to return a license and registration plate or plates as required by this section may be required to forfeit not more than $100.
344.45 History History: 1971 c. 278; 1977 c. 29 ss. 1465, 1654 (7) (a), (c); 1977 c. 43, 203; 1985 a. 29; 1989 a. 72; 1997 a. 84.
344.46 344.46 Transfer of vehicle ownership to defeat purpose of chapter.
344.46(1)(1) No owner of a motor vehicle involved in an accident in this state which is reportable under s. 346.70 shall transfer the ownership or registration of any vehicle whose registration is subject to suspension or revocation under this chapter until all of the applicable provisions of this chapter has been complied with or until the secretary is satisfied that such transfer is proposed in good faith and not for the purpose or with the effect of defeating the purposes of this chapter.
344.46(2) (2) Any person violating this section may be required to forfeit not more than $200.
344.46(3) (3) This section does not apply to or affect the registration of any vehicle sold by a person who, under the terms or conditions of any written instrument giving a right of repossession, has exercised such right and has repossessed such vehicle from a person whose registration has been suspended or revoked under this chapter.
344.46 History History: 1971 c. 278; 1977 c. 29 s. 1654 (7) (c); 1991 a. 269; 1997 a. 84; 1999 a. 80, 186.
344.48 344.48 Forged proof.
344.48(1)(1) No person shall:
344.48(1)(a) (a) Forge or, without authority, sign any notice provided for in s. 344.14 or 344.15 (4), or both, to the effect that a policy or bond is in effect or, knowing or having reason to believe that the notice has been forged or signed without authority, file or offer the notice for filing; or
344.48(1)(b) (b) Forge or, without authority, sign any evidence of proof of financial responsibility or, knowing or having reason to believe that such evidence has been forged or signed without authority, file or offer such evidence for filing.
344.48(1)(c) (c) Sign or file the affidavit mentioned in s. 344.15 (4), knowing that it contains a false statement.
344.48(2) (2) Any person violating this section may be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned for not more than 9 months or both.
subch. V of ch. 344 SUBCHAPTER V
FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR RENTED AND HUMAN SERVICES VEHICLES
344.51 344.51 Financial responsibility for domestic rented or leased vehicles.
344.51(1g)(1g) In this section:
344.51(1g)(a) (a) “Lessor" means a person who, for compensation, leases a motor vehicle to a lessee to be operated by or with the consent of the lessee or who acquires a contract for the leasing of a motor vehicle from another person.
344.51(1g)(b) (b) “Motor vehicle" means a self-propelled vehicle.
344.51(1g)(c) (c) “Rental company" means a person who, for compensation, rents a motor vehicle to a renter to be operated by or with the consent of the renter or who acquires a contract for the renting of a motor vehicle from another person.
344.51(1m) (1m) No lessor or rental company may for compensation rent or lease any motor vehicle unless there is filed with the department on a form prescribed by the department a certificate for a good and sufficient bond or policy of insurance issued by an insurer authorized to do an automobile liability insurance or surety business in this state. The certificate shall provide that the insurer which issued it will be liable for damages caused by the negligent operation of the motor vehicle in the amounts set forth in s. 344.01 (2) (d). No lessor or rental company complying with this subsection, and no lessor or rental company entering into or acquiring an interest in any contract for the rental or leasing of a motor vehicle for which any other lessor or rental company has complied with this subsection, is liable for damages caused by the negligent operation of the motor vehicle by another person.
344.51(2) (2) Any lessor or rental company failing to comply with this section is directly liable for damages caused by the negligence of the person operating such rented or leased vehicle, but such liability may not exceed the limits set forth in s. 344.01 (2) (d) with respect to the acceptable limits of liability when furnishing proof of financial responsibility.
344.51 History History: 1971 c. 278; 1977 c. 29 s. 1654 (7) (a); 1979 c. 102; 1995 a. 329; 1997 a. 48.
344.51 Annotation A lessor is not liable to the lessee's insurer for monies that the insurer paid to a victim of the lessee's negligence. American Family Mutual Insurance Co. v. Reciprocal Ins. Service Exchange Mgt. Co. 111 Wis. 2d 308, 330 N.W.2d 223 (Ct. App. 1983).
344.51 Annotation When a lessee's insurance was insufficient to cover all damages, the lessor's errors and omissions policy was required to cover remaining damages. Germanotta v. National Indemnity Co. 119 Wis. 2d 293, 349 N.W.2d 733 (Ct. App. 1984).
344.51 Annotation No statute requires a self-insured entity under s. 344.16 to provide uninsured motorist coverage as part of the optional insurance it offers to its customers. Prophet v. Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company, Inc. 2000 WI App 171, 238 Wis. 2d 150, 617 N.W.2d 225, 99-0776.
344.51 Annotation A car-rental company issued a certificate of self-insurance under s. 344.16 and subject to liability limits under s. 344.01 (2) (d) and this section was not a self-insurer for purposes of an underinsured motorist clause that excluded coverage for a vehicle owned or operated by a “self-insurer." Bethke v. Auto-Owners Insurance Company, 2013 WI 16, 345 Wis. 2d 533, 825 N.W.2d 482, 10-3153.
344.52 344.52 Financial responsibility for foreign rented vehicles.
344.52(1g)(1g) In this section, “motor vehicle" means a self-propelled vehicle.
344.52(1r) (1r) Whenever any motor vehicle rented for compensation outside this state is operated in this state, the lessor of the motor vehicle is directly liable for all damages to persons or property caused by the negligent operation of the rented vehicle unless, at the time when the damage or injury occurs, the operation of the rented vehicle is effectively covered by a policy of insurance that provides coverage at least in the amounts specified in s. 344.01 (2) (d) for property damage, personal injury, or death suffered by any person on account of the negligent operation of the rented vehicle. The amount of liability imposed upon the lessor by this section in the absence of insurance coverage shall not exceed the limits set forth in s. 344.01 (2) (d) with respect to the acceptable limits of liability when furnishing proof of financial responsibility. The fact that the rented vehicle is operated in this state contrary to any understanding or agreement with the lessor is not a defense to any liability imposed by this section.
344.52(2)(a)(a) If a motor vehicle rented for compensation outside this state is operated in this state, the lessor of the vehicle is considered to have irrevocably appointed the secretary as the agent or attorney upon whom legal process may be served in any action or proceeding against the lessor or the lessor's personal representative, successors, or assigns, growing out of the operation of the rented motor vehicle in this state, which appointment is binding upon the lessor's personal representative, successors, or assigns. The operation of the rented motor vehicle in this state is a signification of the lessor's agreement that legal process or notice may be served upon the lessor or the lessor's personal representative, successors, or assigns and that process or notice so served has the same legal force as if personally served upon them in this state.
344.52(2)(b) (b) Service of process or notice under par. (a) shall be made as provided in s. 345.09. This section does not affect the right to serve process or notice on the nonresident operator of the rented motor vehicle as provided in s. 345.09.
344.52 History History: 1977 c. 29; 2001 a. 102; 2005 a. 149.
344.52 Annotation Unlike the domestic financial responsibility statute, s. 344.51, this section does not require a lessor to file a bond or insurance policy with the state, but instead requires that some insurance policy provide coverage up to the statutorily required amount. If such a policy exists, the lessor will be held directly liable for damages caused by the negligent operation of the vehicle up to the statutory amount. This section explicitly covers any motor vehicle rented outside this state but operated in this state. It is irrelevant that a vehicle was maintained and operated in Wisconsin because both statutes contemplate that possibility. Casper v. American International South Insurance Co. 2010 WI App 2, 323 Wis. 2d 82, 779 N.W.2d 445, 06-1229, decided on other grounds 2011 WI 81, 336 Wis. 2d 267, 800 N.W.2d 880, 06-1229.
344.55 344.55 Insurance for human service vehicles.
344.55(1)(1) No motor vehicle may be used as a human service vehicle unless a policy of bodily injury and property damage liability insurance, issued by an insurer authorized to transact business in this state, is maintained thereon. The policy shall provide property damage liability coverage with a limit of not less than $10,000. The policy also shall provide bodily injury liability coverage with limits of not less than $75,000 for each person and, subject to such limit for each person, total limits as follows:
344.55(1)(a) (a) $150,000 for each accident for each motor vehicle having a seating capacity of 7 passengers or less.
344.55(1)(b) (b) $200,000 for each accident for each motor vehicle having a seating capacity of 8 to 15 passengers.
344.55(1)(c) (c) $250,000 for each accident for each motor vehicle having a seating capacity of 16 to 24 passengers.
344.55(1)(d) (d) $375,000 for each accident for each motor vehicle having a seating capacity of 25 to 36 passengers.
344.55(1)(e) (e) $500,000 for each accident for each motor vehicle having a seating capacity of 37 to 49 passengers.
344.55(1)(f) (f) $500,000 plus not less than $10,000 for each accident for each passenger seat accommodation for each motor vehicle having a seating capacity of 50 or more passengers.
344.55(2) (2) The department may not issue registration plates for such a vehicle unless there is on file with the department a certificate of insurance showing that the vehicle is insured in compliance with sub. (1). No such policy may be terminated prior to its expiration or canceled for any reason unless a notice thereof is filed with the department at least 30 days prior to the date of termination or cancellation. The department shall suspend the registration of a vehicle on which the insurance policy has been terminated or canceled, effective on the date of termination or cancellation.
344.55 History History: 1983 a. 175 s. 20; Stats. 1983 s. 344.55; 1997 a. 84; 2009 a. 28; 2011 a. 14.
344.57 344.57 Definitions applicable to ss. 344.57 to 344.579. In ss. 344.57 to 344.579:
344.57(1) (1) “Accident" means collision of a private passenger vehicle with another object or other upset of the private passenger vehicle not caused intentionally by the renter.
344.57(2) (2) “Authorized driver" means, in connection with a private passenger vehicle under a rental agreement, all of the following:
344.57(2)(a) (a) The spouse of the renter, if the spouse is a licensed driver and meets any minimum age requirement in the rental agreement.
344.57(2)(b) (b) A person listed in the rental agreement as an authorized driver.
344.57(2)(c) (c) The renter's employer, employee or co-worker, if the employer, employee or co-worker engages in a business activity with the renter, is a licensed driver and meets the rental company's minimum age requirement.
344.57(2)(d) (d) A person who operates the private passenger vehicle during an emergency or while parking the private passenger vehicle at a commercial or private establishment.
344.57(3) (3) “Damage waiver" means a contractual provision under which a rental company agrees for a charge not to hold a renter or authorized driver liable for damage or loss related to a private passenger vehicle rented by the renter.
344.57(4) (4) “Private passenger vehicle" means a type 1 automobile.
344.57(5) (5) “Rental agreement" means a written agreement setting forth the terms and conditions governing the use of a private passenger vehicle provided for rent by a rental company.
344.57(6) (6) “Rental company" means a person in the business of providing private passenger vehicles for rent to the public.
344.57(7) (7) “Renter" means the person who rents a private passenger vehicle from a rental company under a rental agreement.
344.572 344.572 Applicability to rental agreements.
344.572(1)(1) Except as provided in sub. (2), ss. 344.574, 344.576 and 344.578 apply to all rental agreements concerning private passenger vehicles rented from locations in this state for a period of 30 consecutive days or less.
344.572(2) (2) Sections 344.574, 344.576 and 344.578 do not apply to a rental agreement under which a person rents from a motor vehicle dealer licensed under ss. 218.0101 to 218.0163 a private passenger vehicle owned by the dealer if the private passenger vehicle is rented only for use while a vehicle owned or leased by the person or which the person has agreed to purchase is being serviced, repaired, manufactured or delivered.
344.572(3) (3) If a rental agreement is subject to ss. 344.574, 344.576 and 344.578, any provision of the rental agreement that violates any requirement of ss. 344.574, 344.576 and 344.578 is void.
344.572 History History: 1989 a. 328; 1999 a. 31.
344.574 344.574 Limited liability for damage.
344.574(1)(1) Damage to private passenger vehicle.
344.574(1)(a) (a) Unless a renter purchases a damage waiver offered in accordance with s. 344.576, a rental company may hold the renter liable to the extent permitted under subs. (2) to (4) for physical or mechanical damage to the rented private passenger vehicle that is caused by any of the following:
344.574(1)(a)1. 1. An accident occurring while the private passenger vehicle is under the rental agreement.
344.574(1)(a)2. 2. The renter or an authorized driver who is using the private passenger vehicle, intentionally or by his or her reckless or wanton misconduct.
344.574(1)(a)3. 3. Theft of the private passenger vehicle intentionally caused by the renter. A renter is presumed not to have caused the theft intentionally if all of the following apply:
344.574(1)(a)3.a. a. The renter or authorized driver has possession of the ignition key furnished by the rental company or establishes that the ignition key furnished by the rental company was not in the vehicle at the time of the theft.
344.574(1)(a)3.b. b. The renter or authorized driver files an official report of the theft with the police or other law enforcement agency within 24 hours of learning of the theft and reasonably cooperates with the rental company, police, and other law enforcement agencies in providing information concerning the theft.
344.574(1)(b) (b) Unless a renter purchases a damage waiver offered in accordance with s. 344.576, a rental company may hold an authorized driver liable to the extent permitted under subs. (2) to (4) for physical or mechanical damage to the rented private passenger vehicle that is caused by any of the following:
344.574(1)(b)1. 1. An accident occurring while the private passenger vehicle is operated by the authorized driver and is under the rental agreement.
344.574(1)(b)2. 2. The authorized driver who is using the private passenger vehicle, intentionally or by his or her reckless or wanton misconduct.
344.574(2) (2) Limits on liability.
344.574(2)(a) (a) The total liability of a renter or authorized driver under sub. (1) for damage to a rented private passenger vehicle may not exceed all of the following:
344.574(2)(a)1. 1. The lesser of:
344.574(2)(a)1.a. a. The actual and reasonable costs that the rental company incurred to repair the private passenger vehicle or that the rental company would have incurred if the private passenger vehicle had been repaired, which shall reflect any discounts, price reductions or adjustments available to the rental company.
/statutes/statutes/344 true statutes /statutes/statutes/344/v/51/1g/c Chs. 340-351, Vehicles statutes/344.51(1g)(c) statutes/344.51(1g)(c) section true
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← COVID-19: Breaking the Lockdown, Defeating the Coup, Averting Extinction
Was the COVID-19 virus genetically engineered?
Posted on May 12, 2020 by Luther Blissett
By Claire Robinson
Source: GM Watch
Since the COVID-19 pandemic took off, speculation has been rife about its origins. The truth is that nobody knows for certain how the virus first took hold. But despite that uncertainty, suggestions that the virus may have been genetically engineered, or otherwise lab-generated, have been rejected as “conspiracy theories” incompatible with the evidence.
Yet the main evidence that is cited as ending all speculation about the role of genetic engineering and as proving the virus could only have been the product of natural evolution turns out to be surprisingly weak. Let’s take a look at it.
The authors of a recently published paper in the journal Nature Medicine argue that the SARS-CoV-2 virus driving the pandemic arose through natural mutation and selection in animal (notably bats and pangolins) or human hosts, and not through laboratory manipulation and accidental release. And they say they have identified two key characteristics of the virus that prove this: the absence of a previously used virus backbone and the way in which the virus binds to human cells.
Not the “ideal” design for infectivity?
As you would expect of a virus that can cause a global pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 is good at infecting human cells. It does this by binding with high affinity (that is, it binds strongly) to the cell surface membrane protein known as angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which enables it to enter human cells. But, basing their argument on a computer modelling system, the authors of the Nature Medicine paper argue that the interaction between the virus and the ACE2 receptor is “not ideal”.
They say that the receptor-binding domain (RBD) amino acid sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein – the part of the spike protein that allows the virus to bind to the ACE2 protein on human cell surfaces – is different from those shown in the SARS-CoV family of viruses to be optimal for receptor binding.
They appear to argue, based on their and others’ computer modelling data, that they have identified the “ideal” CoV spike protein RBD amino acid sequence for ACE2 receptor binding. They then seem to imply that if you were to genetically engineer SARS-CoV for optimal human ACE2 binding and infectivity, you would use the RBD amino acid sequence predicted by their computer modelling. But they point out that SARS-CoV-2 does not have exactly the same computer program-predicted RBD amino acid sequence. Thus they conclude that it could not have been genetically engineered, stating: “This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”
To put it simply, the authors are saying that SARS-CoV-2 was not deliberately engineered because if it were, it would have been designed differently.
However, the London-based molecular geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou commented that this line of reasoning fails to take into account that there are a number of laboratory-based systems that can select for high affinity RBD variants that are able to take into account the complex environment of a living organism. This complex environment may impact the efficiency with which the SARS-CoV spike protein can find the ACE2 receptor and bind to it. An RBD selected via these more realistic real-world experimental systems would be just as “ideal”, or even more so, for human ACE2 binding than any RBD that a computer model could predict. And crucially, it would likely be different in amino acid sequence. So the fact that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.
Limits to computer modelling
Dr Antoniou said that the authors’ reasoning is not conclusive because it is based largely on computer modelling, which, he says, is “not definitive but only predictive. It cannot tell us whether any given virus would be optimized for infectivity in a real world scenario, such as in the human body. That’s because the environment of the human body will influence how the virus interacts with the receptor. You can’t model that accurately with computer modelling as there are simply too many variables to factor into the equation.”
Dr Antoniou added, “People can put too much faith in computer programs, but they are only a beginning. You then have to prove whether the computer program’s prediction is correct or not by direct experimentation in a living organism. This has not been done in the case of this hypothesis, so it remains unproven.”
It is even possible that SARS-CoV-2 was optimized using a living organism model, resulting in a virus that is better at infecting humans than any computer model could predict.
More than one way to engineer a virus
The authors of the Nature Medicine article seem to assume that the only way to genetically engineer a virus is to take an already known virus and then engineer it to have the new properties you want. On this premise, they looked for evidence of an already known virus that could have been used in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2.
And they failed to find that evidence. They stated, “Genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.”
But Dr Antoniou told us that while the authors did indeed show that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to have been built by deliberate genetic engineering from a previously used virus backbone, that’s not the only way of constructing a virus. There is another method by which an enhanced-infectivity virus can be engineered in the lab.
A well-known alternative
A well-known alternative process that could have been used has the cumbersome name of “directed iterative evolutionary selection process”. In this case, it would involve using genetic engineering to generate a large number of randomly mutated versions of the SARS-CoV spike protein receptor binding domain (RBD), which would then be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells.
This selection can be done either with purified proteins or, better still, with a mixture of whole coronavirus (CoV) preparations and human cells in tissue culture. Alternatively, the SARS-CoV spike protein variants can be genetically engineered within what is known as a “phage display library”. A phage is a virus that infects bacteria and can be genetically engineered to express on its exterior coat the CoV spike protein with a large number of variants of the RBD. This preparation of phage, displaying on its surface a “library” of CoV spike protein variants, is then added to human cells under laboratory culture conditions in order to select for those that bind to the ACE2 receptor.
This process is repeated under more and more stringent binding conditions until CoV spike protein variants with a high binding affinity are isolated.
Once any of the above selection procedures for high affinity interaction of SARS-CoV spike protein with ACE2 has been completed, then whole infectious CoV with these properties can be manufactured.
Such a directed iterative evolutionary selection process is a frequently used method in laboratory research. So there is little or no possibility that the Nature Medicine article authors haven’t heard of it – not least, as it is considered so scientifically important that its inventors were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018.
Yet the possibility that this is the way that SARS-CoV-2 arose is not addressed by the Nature Medicine article authors and so its use has not been disproven.
No proof SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered
In sum, the Nature Medicine article authors offer no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been genetically engineered. That’s not to say that it was, of course. We can’t know one way or the other on the basis of currently available information.
Dr Antoniou wrote a short letter to Nature Medicine to point out these omissions in the authors’ case. Nature Medicine has no method of submitting a simple letter to the editor, so Dr Antoniou had to submit it as a Matters Arising commentary, which the journal defines as presenting “challenges or clarifications” to an original published work.
Dr Antoniou’s comments were titled, “SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through laboratory manipulation”. However, Nature Medicine refused to publish them on the grounds that “we do not feel that they advance or clarify understanding” of the original article. The journal offered no scientific argument to rebut his points.
In our view, those points do offer clarification to the original article, and what’s more, there is a strong public interest case for making them public. That’s why we reproduce Dr Antoniou’s letter below this article, with his permission.
Not genetic engineering – but human intervention
There is, incidentally, another possible way that SARS-CoV-2 could have been developed in a laboratory, but in this case without using genetic engineering. This was pointed out by Nikolai Petrovsky, a researcher at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in South Australia. Petrovsky says that coronaviruses can be cultured in lab dishes with cells that have the human ACE2 receptor. Over time, the virus will gain adaptations that let it efficiently bind to those receptors. Along the way, that virus would pick up random genetic mutations that pop up but don’t do anything noticeable.
“The result of these experiments is a virus that is highly virulent in humans but is sufficiently different that it no longer resembles the original bat virus,” Petrovsky said. “Because the mutations are acquired randomly by selection, there is no signature of a human gene jockey, but this is clearly a virus still created by human intervention.”
Dr Antoniou agrees that this method is possible – but he points out that waiting for nature to produce the desired mutations is a lot slower than using genetic engineering to generate a large number of random mutations that you can then select for the desired outcome by a directed iterative evolutionary procedure.
Because genetic engineering greatly speeds up the process, it is by far the most efficient way to generate novel pathogenic viruses in the lab.
Vested interests?
So why do some experts – and non-experts for that matter – seem so determined to put a stop to any speculation about whether SARS-CoV-2 could have been genetically engineered?
One explanation might be fear of a backlash against such research from the victims of the pandemic. Virologists, for example, who may want as much freedom as possible to study and manipulate viruses in their labs, won’t want their research restricted because of public concern. Others using genetic engineering in their work may also fear it will damage the general reputation of the technology and encourage tighter regulation.
And if concerns that SARS-CoV-2 may have been developed in a lab were to gain traction, the consequences in such a heavily commercialised area as biotechnology might not just be reputational but also financial.
In this context it is worth noting that one of the authors of the Nature Medicine piece is Robert F. Garry, who lists his “competing interest” as being “co-founder of Zalgen Labs, a biotechnology company that develops countermeasures to emerging viruses”. Heavier restrictions on genetic engineering or laboratory virus research might be considered counter to the interests of Zalgen Labs.
It is clear that there is no conclusive evidence either way at this point as to whether SARS-CoV-2 arose by natural mutation and selection in animal and/or human hosts or was genetically engineered in a laboratory. And in this light, the question of where this virus came from should continue to be explored with an open mind.
SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through laboratory manipulation
Dr Michael Antoniou
Kristian Anderson and colleagues (“The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, Nature Medicine, 26: 450–452, 2020) argue that their amino acid sequence comparisons and computational modelling definitively proves that SARS-CoV-2 has arisen through natural mutation and selection in animal or human hosts, and not through laboratory manipulation and accidental release. However, although the authors may indeed be correct in how they perceive SARS-CoV-2 to have arisen, the data they present does not exclude the possibility that this new coronavirus variant could have been created through an in vitro, directed iterative evolutionary selection process (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_evolution). Using this method, a very large library of randomly mutagenized coronavirus spike proteins could be selected for strong binding to the ACE2 receptor and consequently high infectivity of human cells. The power of such directed evolution to select for optimal enzymatic and protein-protein interactions was acknowledged by the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 (see https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/summary/).
This entry was posted in GMOs, Health, news, Science, society, Technocracy, Technology and tagged bioengineering, Bioweapons, coronavirus, Covid-19, Dr Michael Antoniou, Genetic Engineering, GMOs, Nikolai Petrovsky, Pandemic, Public Health, SARS-CoV-2, science. Bookmark the permalink.
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Home > Learn > Key Resources > Site
Site Leadership Framework
The Site Leadership Framework is grounded in two key concepts: (1) the centrality of the principal as school leader, and (2) the importance of integrating and streamlining the work of school improvement. The framework addresses the leadership work of the principal as the central leader of the school. It is the principal who establishes the school’s culture, sets expectations for student success, directs the work of other leaders, develops teachers, manages the school’s operation, and situates it in the larger district and community context
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Home News Breaking News Conference of Presidents Leaders Laud Opening of Police Station on Har Hazeisim
Conference of Presidents Leaders Laud Opening of Police Station on Har Hazeisim
Richard Stone, Chairman, and Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman, of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, lauded the opening of a police sub-station on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
“We welcome the announcement today of the opening of the police station on the Mount of Olives, which we hope will stem the continuing acts of violence and desecration and add to the security of the residents and visitors from around the world who come to visit graves of the luminaries of Jewish history interned there. In particular, those with loved ones buried on the mountain will hopefully be able to visit without fear and will not have to face the daunting and often expensive task of reconstructing graves after multiple acts of destruction,” said the Jewish leaders.
“The Mount of Olives has for 3,000 years served as a Jewish burial place. From the First Temple period to today, those interned on the holy site span from the Prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, many great rabbis, and as many as 150,000 others.
“We visited just a few weeks ago together with Congressmembers Elliot Engel and Jerald Nadler and we were all shocked by the wanton acts of desecration and vandalism. While there, a delegation of the Conference of Presidents was subjected to an attack in which large rocks were thrown at the Conference delegation. It was a stark reminder of the situation that has developed there and which resulted in the injury of numerous people as well as damage to cars, including several serious attacks in the last few days. Even a bridegroom visiting the grave of his recently departed mother on the day of his wedding was severely injured.
“The government has also installed 125 cameras and has a team working to monitor them, which should enable the police to respond in a timely fashion and apprehend those responsible for these crimes. It is important for the government to support legislation that will impede acts of vandalism in the future by holding the perpetrators, even if they are minors or their parents, accountable.
“We commend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his staff for their leadership in this effort, as well as Minister of Public Security Yitzchak Aharonovich, and all those, including the Mayor of the City of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, who have made extensive efforts to end the violence and enhance this historic site with its great significance. This is an obligation that we bear to protect the dignity of the departed and sanctity of this 3,000 year old holy place for future generations,” said Stone and Hoenlein.
{Noam Amdurski-Matzav.com Newscenter}
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heshy April 6, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Why don’t they make a law of attemped murder anyone caught throwing stones and ten years jail, no parole.
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Home News Breaking News How Did Israel Go from Inspiring Underdog to Supposed Oppressor?
How Did Israel Go from Inspiring Underdog to Supposed Oppressor?
By Michael Oren, The Wall Street Journal
So Life magazine described Israel on the occasion of its 25th birthday in May 1973. In a 92-page special issue, “The Spirit of Israel,” the magazine extolled the Jewish state as enlightened, robustly democratic and hip, a land of “astonishing achievement” that dared “to dream the dream and make that dream come alive.”
Life told the story of Israel’s birth from the Bible through the Holocaust and the battle for independence. “The Arabs’ bloodthirsty threats,” the editors wrote, “lend a deadly seriousness to the vow: Never Again.” Four pages documented “Arab terrorist attacks” and the three paragraphs on the West Bank commended Israeli administrators for respecting “Arab community leaders” and hiring “tens of thousands of Arabs.” The word “Palestinian” scarcely appeared.
There was a panoramic portrayal of Jerusalem, described as “the focus of Jewish prayers for 2,000 years” and the nucleus of new Jewish neighborhoods. Life emphasized that in its pre-1967 borders, Israel was “a tiny, parched, scarcely defensible toe-hold.” The edition’s opening photo shows a father embracing his Israeli-born daughter on an early “settlement,” a testament to Israel’s birthright to the land.
Would a mainstream magazine depict the Jewish state like this today, during the week of its 64th birthday?
Unlikely. Rather, readers would learn about Israel’s overwhelming military might, brutal conduct in warfare and eroding democratic values-plus the Palestinians’ plight and Israeli intransigence. The photographs would show not cool students and cutting-edge artists but soldiers at checkpoints and religious radicals.
Why has Israel’s image deteriorated? After all, Israel today is more democratic and-despite all the threats it faces-even more committed to peace.
Some claim that Israel today is a Middle Eastern power that threatens its neighbors, and that conservative immigrants and extremists have pushed Israel rightward. Most damaging, they contend, are Israel’s policies toward the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, toward the peace process and the Palestinians, and toward the construction of settlements.
Israel may seem like Goliath vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but in a regional context it is David. Gaza is host to 10,000 rockets, many of which can hit Tel Aviv, and Hezbollah in Lebanon has 50,000 missiles that place all of Israel within range. Throughout the Middle East, countries with massive arsenals are in upheaval. And Iran, which regularly pledges to wipe Israel off the map, is developing nuclear weapons. Israel remains the world’s only state that is threatened with annihilation.
Whether in Lebanon, the West Bank or Gaza, Israel has acted in self-defense after suffering thousands of rocket and suicide attacks against our civilians. Few countries have fought with clearer justification, fewer still with greater restraint, and none with a lower civilian-to-militant casualty ratio. Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza to advance peace only to receive war in return.
Whereas Israelis in 1973 viewed the creation of a Palestinian state as a mortal threat, it is now the official policy of the Israeli government. Jewish men of European backgrounds once dominated Israel, but today Sephardic Jews, Arabs and women are prominent in every facet of society. This is a country where a Supreme Court panel of two women and an Arab convicted a former president of sexual offenses. It is the sole Middle Eastern country with a growing Christian population. Even in the face of immense security pressures, Israel has never known a second of nondemocratic rule.
In 1967, Israel offered to exchange newly captured territories for peace treaties with Egypt and Syria. The Arab states refused. Israel later evacuated the Sinai, an area 3.5 times its size, for peace with Egypt, and it conceded land and water resources for peace with Jordan.
In 1993, Israel recognized the Palestinian people ignored by Life magazine, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the perpetrator of those “Arab terrorist attacks.” Israel facilitated the creation of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza and armed its security forces. Twice, in 2000 and 2008, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In both cases, the Palestinians refused. Astonishingly, in spite of the Palestinian Authority’s praise for terror, a solid majority of Israelis still support the two-state solution.
Israel has built settlements (some before 1973), and it has removed some to promote peace, including 7,000 settlers to fulfill the treaty with Egypt. Palestinians have rebuffed Israel’s peace offers not because of the settlements-most of which would have remained in Israel anyway, and which account for less than 2% of the West Bank-but because they reject the Jewish state. When Israel removed all settlements from Gaza, including their 9,000 residents, the result was a terrorist ministate run by Hamas, an organization dedicated to killing Jews world-wide.
Nevertheless, Israeli governments have transferred large areas to the Palestinian Authority and much security responsibility to Palestinian police. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has removed hundreds of checkpoints, eased the Gaza land blockade and joined President Obama in calling for the resumption of direct peace talks without preconditions. Addressing Congress, Mr. Netanyahu declared that the emergence of a Palestinian state would leave some settlements beyond Israel’s borders and that “with creativity and with good will a solution can be found” for Jerusalem.
Given all this, why have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious “Israel Lobby” purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians? Why is Israel’s record on gay rights dismissed as camouflage for discrimination against others?
The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel’s enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.
It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism-a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.
Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization as it did armies and bombers in the past. Along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past. “The Spirit of Israel” has not diminished since 1973-on the contrary, it has flourished. The state that Life once lionized lives even more vibrantly today.
Mr. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
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????? May 18, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Who may go up to the Mountain of God?’
reprinted from The Jerusalem Post
May 18, 2012 Friday 26 Iyyar 5772
by Jeremy Sharon
Religious affairs: Current status of Temple Mount is one of most explosive issues for competing faiths anywhere in world.
As points of religious contention go, the current status of the Temple Mount is one of the most potentially explosive issues for competing faiths anywhere in the world.
For Jews, it is the holiest place on Earth, from where the world was created, the site of the Binding of Isaac and the location of the First and Second Temples.
For Muslims too, al-Haram al-Sharif (noble sanctuary), has become a crucial place of worship and pilgrimage, where there stands a monumental shrine the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, a site of great importance in Islam.
This reality, combined with the Temple Mount’s physical location at the heart of contested territory, has given it a unique geopolitical combustibility not to be found anywhere else on the planet.
Ariel Sharon’s visit to the site in September 2000 prompted large-scale riots that eventually escalated into what became the second Palestinian intifada.
In 1969, a fire started in the al-Aqsa mosque by a mentally unstable Christian evangelical from Australia caused extensive damage and led to mass demonstrations in east Jerusalem and the West Bank. The event was also one of the motivating factors in the creation in 1969 of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an international body devoted to safeguarding Muslim interests.
But inter-religious and political concerns aside, there is another, less prominent but nevertheless bitter dispute currently being waged, this one between different Orthodox Jewish groups regarding the permissibility of going up to Judaism’s holiest site.
The divisions among different rabbinic leaders are sharp; some outlaw ascent to the Temple Mount in absolute terms on pain of spiritual excommunication; others see the refusal to go up and insist on the Jewish right to pray at the site as a deviation from Torah law.
And although access for Jewish Israelis (and foreign tourists) is currently subject to tightly restricted, time-limited slots, this has not impeded the prosecution of a tough war of words and a struggle over the contested battleground of what is and is not permitted according to Jewish law.
FOLLOWING Israel’s conquest of east Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government allowed a Jordanian Islamic Wakf (religious trust), which had traditionally administered the Temple Mount complex, to continue to do so, despite the historical and religious importance of the site in Judaism.
Additionally, current Israeli law stipulates that Jews and other non-Muslims may not pray on the Temple Mount because of tensions this may cause, and supervisors from the Wakf follow visiting groups to ensure that they do not pray or conduct any visible form of worship But despite these restrictions, there is a small, committed contingent of devout Jews who visit the Temple Mount regularly, deny that doing so is not permissible under Jewish law and campaign actively for Jews to visit in greater numbers.
It is a widely held belief that Jews today are forbidden from going to the site of the Temple because of ritual impurity caused by contact with the dead.
Should someone contract this status and it is hard to avoid Jewish law prohibits entry to certain parts of the Temple Mount on pain of spiritual excommunication.
The religious establishment, principally the Chief Rabbinate, is keen to reinforce this notion. In April, for the second time in two months, the Chief Rabbinate issued a notice reiterating the stance of chief rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger, as well as numerous other senior rabbinical figures such as Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, that it is completely forbidden according to Jewish law to visit the Temple Mount.
But for many others, the ban is an affront to their religious sensibilities. Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute is one such person who fervently and passionately believes not only in the permissibility of ascending to the Temple Mount but that there is an obligation to do so, and to pray there.
“This is the holiest place in the world and the only true holy site in Judaism,” Richman told The Jerusalem Post. “We have a natural, healthy desire to be seen by God on the Temple Mount, and there is something very, very, wrong with rabbis who want to cauterize the natural well-spring of feeling and dedication Jews have for this place.”
Politicians from the Israeli Right are also eager to assert Jewish rights to and sovereignty over the Temple Mount. National Union MKs Arye Eldad and Uri Ariel visited the Temple Mount in December and Likud MK Danny Danon, who has also visited in recent times, is another advocate of Jewish rights at the site.
“The time has come for the government to exercise its sovereignty over the holiest spot in the Jewish religion,” Ariel said after his recent visit.
According to Richman and other notable rabbis, both past and present, concerns about stepping in the wrong place on the Temple Mount are unfounded.
Maimonides, for example, is known to have gone up to the Temple Mount in 1166 during a pilgrimage he made from Egypt to Israel. He wrote a brief letter about his experience, vowing to commemorate the date, the sixth of the Jewish month of Cheshvan, as a special holiday.
Richman cites David Ben-Zimra, a 15th-century rabbi from Spain who lived intermittently in Safed, Jerusalem, Fez and Cairo, and who wrote a responsa detailing the site of the Holy of Holies, which is strictly off-limits halachically, as well as areas where he said that it is permissible to visit. Moshe Feinstein as well, one of the most respected arbiters of Jewish law in the last 60 years, wrote of an “established tradition from the earliest sages, that it is permitted to visit [the site].”
There are also various historical sources that illustrate how Jews were accustomed to go up to the Temple Mount following the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. One of the most famous such sources is a recounting in the Talmud of a story that occurred after the destruction, when several of the most prominent sages of the time, including Rabbi Akiva, went up to the Temple Mount. All of them began to cry over the ruins, the Talmud relates, when they saw a fox running over the Holy of Holies, but Rabbi Akiva laughed, seeing in the experience the fulfillment of one prophecy and thereby expecting the future of fulfillment of the Temple’s restoration.
Other historical accounts also testify to Jews visiting the site, and even the presence of a synagogue in the early Muslim era until the 11th century.
SO IF the historic evidence is so compelling why is the rabbinate so adamant that Jews must not visit the Temple Mount? The rabbi of the Western Wall complex, Shmuel Rabinovitch, who has endorsed the ban on visiting the site, says that despite the opinions and historical evidence cited by those in favor, many of today’s leading and most authoritative Torah scholars nevertheless continue to prohibit such activity.
He told the Post that Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the most respected authority on Jewish law today, personally spoke with him about the importance of doing everything possible to prevent Jews from setting foot on the site.
“Does Rabbi Elyashiv not know the [opinions of] Rambam [Maimonides], the Radbaz [David Ben Zimra] and these other arguments?” he asked rhetorically.
“Did [the late] Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Aurbach, who also prohibited it, not know them?” Rabinovitch continued, proceeding to reel off a long list of other prominent scholars all banning Jews from visiting the Temple Mount.
Rabinovtich himself is reluctant to enter into the specific laws, details and debates surrounding the issue, sufficing to rely on the rulings of the abovementioned rabbis instead of listening to what he would consider less authoritative opinions.
But Rabbi Ratzon Arusi, municipal rabbi of Kiryat Ono and member of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate, expounds to a slightly greater extent. Yes, he acknowledges, Maimonides did ascend to the Temple Mount, as did others. The reason behind the rabbinate’s ban he says, is because, despite the fact that there are some areas of the Temple Mount where we know it is possible to visit, issuing a blanket permit for Jews to ascend would be very problematic.
As even Rabbi Richman and others concede, it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to know where one halachically may and may not go on the Temple Mount. Coupled with this are numerous other restrictions and requirements, including the necessity of immersing in a mikve [ritual bath], not wearing leather shoes and other conditions.
Most people, Arusi says, are not familiar with these issues, and may anyway disregard them. The consequences in Jewish law for stepping in the wrong spot, spiritual excommunication one of the gravest punishments applicable to transgressions such as failing to be circumcised is too great to risk, he argues.
OUTSIDE of a religious desire to visit and pray on the Temple Mount is another driving factor for those who are so insistent on Jewish access to the site.
MK Arye Eldad of the National Union sees not only religious significance in the Temple Mount, but cultural and political importance as well. The failure of Jews to maintain their connection with the place, he says, undermines Israel’s political claim to it as well. In addition, he continues, it bolsters Muslim and Arab claims to the site, and denials that any Jewish Temple ever stood there.
“There is most definitely a political struggle going on here,” says Eldad. “The Arabs think that if they can succeed in prizing away this piece of property from the Jews, then they will be able to seize every other Jewish property here, whether it’s territorial, historical, cultural or religious.”
Richman concurs.
“Efforts are being waged by the forces of Islam to delegitimize the Jewish connection to Israel and Jerusalem. And on the Temple Mount in particular, they are trying to remove all vestiges of Jewish history,” he says. “We need to go to show we’re still connected and that it’s still ours. Unfortunately, the Diaspora experience has lobotomized the body of Israel’ and has created an idiosyncratic self-defense mechanism which has denuded Judaism of its true spiritual essence.”
There is also something Messianic in the efforts of those who ardently seek to restore a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount. The Temple Institute has devoted huge sums of money into constructing and producing the vessels, implements and garments required for the Temple, using the exact instructions set out in the Torah. Among the vessels constructed is a fully working golden menorah, which cost $2 million and is ready for use in the Temple.
Yisrael Ariel, the founder and director of the Temple Institute, who was among the soldiers who conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, certainly felt at the time that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount was a harbinger of the very imminent arrival of the Messiah.
Dr. Motti Inbari, an expert in Jewish fundamentalism at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, cites an interview with Ariel in his book, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount. In the interview, conducted in the Or Hozer journal of yeshiva high schools, Ariel vividly describes his emotions and experiences upon the capture of the Temple Mount and states that he thought that “these are the days of the Messiah.”
Rabbi Richman and the institute insist that the Temple will not “descend from the heavens,” as some believe, but will have to be constructed by men here on earth, as evidenced by their efforts to reconstruct the Temple vessels.
Asked if it is time to re-build the Temple, he responds “We’re 2,000 years late in doing so.”
To those who say that now is not the right time, or that the Jewish people must work on themselves spiritually and socially before even beginning to think about such an endeavor, Richman retorts, “maybe it’s not the right time to put on tefillin? Who says there is a time limitation for the mitzva of building the Temple? It is our job to do all the mitzvot.” He insists, however, that it is not the intention of the institute to start rolling out the tape measure on the Temple Mount and start building.
Other groups, such as the Temple Mount Faithful, led by Gershon Salomon, are clearer about their ultimate goals. This organization says unabashedly that its goals include “the building of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in our lifetime in accordance with the Word of God and all the Hebrew prophets” as well as “the liberation of the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation.”
The homepage of the Temple Institute website currently bears a line from the well-known movie Field of Dreams: “if you build it, he will come.” The longterm goal, as stated on the website, is to do “all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time.”
Journalist and author Gershom Gorenberg, who wrote The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, sees a strong nexus between Jewish messianism and aspirations for the Temple Mount.
“The place has always elicited strong messianic symbolism and exerted a magnetic attraction for anyone awaiting the Messiah,” he told the Post. “For those who find it unbearable that we haven’t rebuilt the temple, there is an urge to bring about a redemption by human means, forcing God’s hand, as it were.”
For those opposed to increased Jewish activity at the Temple Mount, Gorenberg continues, although it’s generally wrapped in technical objections of a political or halachic nature, the subtext is that rebuilding the Temple is beyond the ability of human hands and effort and must await the arrival of the Messiah.
“In Jewish history, people who were certain they knew how to bring the Messiah ended up being disastrous for the Jewish people,” he concludes.
Regardless of the longer-term aspirations of the various groups, the current debate surrounding whether or not Jews can and should visit and pray at the Temple Mount will continue because of the activities of organizations like the Temple Institute.
According to the Chief Rabbinate, the reason they have recently re-iterated their ban on Jews going to the site is because of increased organized visitations, a growing phenomenon that it would like to stamp out.
But the political and spiritual desire among some who want to insist on their right to pray at Judaism’s holiest site is still very much alive. The nature of that desire highlights both the very deep-seated Jewish attachment to this revered place and the huge potential it has to spark intra-religious dispute along with political conflict.
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Pepperdine Law Review
Home > LAW > PLR > Vol. 18 (1991) > Iss. 4
The Right to Waive Competent Counsel: Extending the Faretta Waiver
Augustine Gerard Yee
Augustine Gerard Yee The Right to Waive Competent Counsel: Extending the Faretta Waiver, 18 Pepp. L. Rev. Iss. 4 (1991)
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol18/iss4/3
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Tag: disability
LRD is proud supporter of National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM). > U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters > Story Article View
CINCINNATI– (Oct. 1, 2020) – October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, an observance tied to the Army’s commitment to a diverse and inclusive workforce. The theme, “Increasing Access and Opportunity,” promotes educating employees and hiring authorities about disability employment issues and celebrating the many and varied contributions of workers with disabilities.
“Emphasis should be on the point that people with disabilities are typically creative problem solvers; they must be able to navigate a world historically designed for people without disabilities,” noted Jennifer Sheehy, deputy assistant secretary, of the Army’s Office of Disability Employment Policy.
In 1945, Congress declared the first week of October “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” In 1962, the word “physically” was dropped to include individuals with all types of disabilities. Congress expanded the week to a month in 1988 and changed the commemoration to National Disability Employment Awareness Month.
This year marks not only the
Participants in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course reported significant improvement in levels of pain, depression and disability — ScienceDaily
A mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course was found to benefit patients with chronic pain and depression, leading to significant improvement in participant perceptions of pain, mood and functional capacity, according to a study in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. Most of the study respondents (89%) reported the program helped them find ways to better cope with their pain while 11% remained neutral.
Chronic pain is a common and serious medical condition affecting an estimated 100 million people in the United States, which correlates with annual costs of approximately $635 billion. The small-scale study was conducted in a semi-rural population in Oregon where issues of affordability, addiction and access to care are common. Participants received intensive instruction in mindfulness meditation and mindful hatha yoga during an eight-week period.
“Many people have lost hope because, in most cases, chronic pain will never fully resolve,” says Cynthia Marske, DO, an
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History, Identity, Immigration, Remembering, Russia, Soviet Union, Ukraine
My Journey From East to West and Back
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, who no one else can spare us . . . I can see that the picture of what we were at an earlier stage may not be recognizable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not repudiate it, for it is proof that we have really lived.”
– Marcel Proust
This quote from Remembrance of Things Past is a fitting way to begin my new blogging adventure. Proust is addressing issues of identity and transformation; the necessity of understanding who we are as a function of our history. However flawed or jagged the past might be, it is part of us and we must embrace it to gain insight into our present selves. With a little luck, we can even learn enough from the past to move toward a better future. Nothing seems more true or more urgent to understand in today’s world.
I haven’t always thought about my identity and history in quite such consequential terms. In fact, I’ve spent much of life hurrying away from the past, trying to fit as seamlessly as possible into my new American life. Having learned English quickly the way children do, I didn’t have to carry the burden of my roots on my tongue for very long. Unlike others of my family, I wasn’t cursed with a “foreign” accent. I could pass for an all-American kid. But kids grow up, and even those in a hurry to become their adult American selves yearn to know and understand the history that has shaped their lives.
My journey took me from my birthplace in the Soviet Union’s Ural Mountains, dividing Europe from Asia, to Poland, where my father was born, to join a postwar Jewish refugee community. Eventually, we traversed Europe, through then Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, and France, where we boarded a Dutch ocean liner and finally crossed the Atlantic Ocean. When we landed in New York Harbor one frigid February day, my cultural journey was to get even more complex, and I see now, extraordinarily rich.
As a child I didn’t understand that my parents’ sacrifices were in fact tremendous gifts to me. I was a kid from the Soviet Union in America at the height of the Cold War–and a Jew to boot. This was, to say the least, very strange and hard. Harder still for my parents, who had lost everything – and nearly everyone – in World War II, and who uprooted their barely rebuilt postwar lives again and again for a shot at having a better American life, in what turned out to be an often openly hostile and very foreign land. There were no civic institutions supporting Soviet-Russian refugees like us, not in the ’60s. As challenging a transition as it was for my small family, it was a time of great transitions for the U.S. too, whose cultural revolution and resulting struggle for equality, inclusion, free speech, civil rights, and, yes, peace and love, became my refuge and has informed everything I’ve done since.
By training I am a linguist, lawyer, advocate and teacher. I have degrees in Russian Literature, Slavic Languages, Linguistics, and Law, from Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley. I speak several languages and read a good number more. My interests have always been diverse and progressive, ranging from cross-cultural communication to human rights to garage punk rock. My primary focus these days, however, is Russia and Ukraine.
I didn’t know until it happened, that my past journeys prepared me so well for this one. As I watched last year’s EuroMaidan protests, where so many ordinary Ukrainians poured into Kyiv’s Maidan Square, calling for a better government so they could have a shot at better lives, I instantly understood their struggle. But there was something else too. I recognized in them my own family, those who walked the same ground they were walking, streaming in from the countrysides and the cities to make their voices heard. I recognized their songs, their foods, their faces, and their hopes. This was both startling and exciting. You see, because Ukraine had been my family’s Bloodlands, I had pushed it back into the recesses of my mind. I had almost forgotten that Ukraine had also been my mother’s much beloved homeland. It was where she grew up, attended school, learned to embroider, sang on the radio, played at the beach. And when war and hate forced her to abandon her homeland just as she was about to embark on a promising academic career, she quietly hung on to her memories of Ukraine like precious artifacts.
Maidan was my wake-up call to look beyond my presumptive image of Ukraine as one of war and tears. Euromaidan showed me a Ukraine of solidarity and unity, of joy and excitement, of hard work and determination. I saw young and old, Muslims and Jews, hipsters and bikers, musicians and poets, all in common pursuit of what I had come to take for granted in my adopted homeland, democracy and dignity. I soon realized that I had to reexamine what I thought I knew about Ukraine, past and present. I’ve taken on that challenge over the past many months, embracing my Ukrainian heritage, the good and the bad, for my family, for me, and perhaps even for Ukraine.
I wrote on some of the issues EuroMaidan brought up for the Ukrainian diaspora, particularly for Jews, back in December 2013 at the height of the protests. Wherever we were, in the East or in the West, whatever our past hurts, there was no denying that we were witnessing the birth of something new and something great in Ukraine. This new Ukraine was determined to move beyond its past and the burden of its Soviet legacy, toward a democratic, inclusive civil society where European values of justice, dignity and rule of law would reign over corruption and might. I couldn’t turn away, and so I got involved.
My journey has now taken me full circle, back to the part of the world where I started, though from a different vantage point and equipped with experience and important skills. Not only can I read about what is happening in my former and ancestral homelands, but I am of there too, which informs and deepens my perspective.
With Russia back in the news almost daily, there’s a lot of information to process. Some of the larger issues are clear. Putin’s overt and covert aggression in Ukraine has killed thousands, leveled cities and villages, displaced millions, and this may only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As war ravages Ukraine’s southeastern regions, Russia is moving rapidly from its nominal ‘managed democracy’ to a full-fledged repressive state, persecuting critics, bankrupting civil institutions, dividing society into patriots and traitors.
A good deal of this information, particularly about Ukraine, is also quite muddled, contradictory, which can be overwhelming in a different sense. This isn’t just a matter of being lost in translation. The landscape of the Russia-Ukraine war is purposely made messy, to mess with our heads, so to speak. This is part and parcel of Russia’s hybrid warfare, a war effort not only on land, but one on tv and the airwaves, whose goal is to control and manipulate information. It’s an old tenet that history is written by the victors. But in today’s information age, controlling information enables Russia to write its own history right now, sometimes before it happens. Russia has established a sophisticated network of state-run international media outlets, overt, like RT (Russia Today) and SputnikNews, and covert, like the St Petersburg troll factory, whose job it is to pump out a specific Kremlin version of reality. And when that narrative proves too hard to swallow, which it often does, then their job is to overwhelm us, sow confusion, so perhaps we’ll just disengage, not knowing what is true or who to believe.
This is where I come in. I can shine a bright light, a magnifying glass, on Russia’s information war so perhaps you won’t throw your hands up and disengage. Perhaps I can guide you through the morass of propaganda that obscures the truth. At the very least, I hope to raise awareness, particularly in the U.S., where Americans are naturally war-weary and whose knowledge of Eastern European history is often rudimentary, that neither Russia nor Ukraine is someone else’s problem. What’s happening there will have important repercussions for all of us for generations to come.
So I ask that you care about what’s happening in Ukraine, Russia and other post-Soviet regions. Many in the West thought our work was pretty much done when the USSR and its totalitarian regime collapsed. Obviously, we were wrong. These complicated regions demand our attention, from the hawks as well as the peaceniks. We’ve come too far as a global community in articulating and embracing international standards of justice and human dignity to turn the clock back. So I will continue to do my small part, here and elsewhere, to keep the truth from being drowned out by the propaganda lies. I’ll post important and interesting news and analysis from all over the world. I’ll translate and give you my take in short and long form as needed. If you find you don’t agree with something I say or share, no worries. I’m not here to argue. I’m here to help open the East to the West.
Paula Chertok
I am a linguist, lawyer, teacher, journalist, and writer. I was born in Soviet Russia to Holocaust survivors from Ukraine, Belarus and Poland. I have degrees in Russian Literature, Slavic Languages, Linguistics, and Law, from Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley. I cover an eclectic range of topics, though my work focuses on the language of propaganda, the media, cross-cultural communication, and human rights and civil society, particularly in Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet states. Bylines at @euromaidanpress, @stopfakingnews. You can usually find me on Twitter @PaulaChertok. View all posts by Paula Chertok
November 10, 2015 March 12, 2016 3 CommentsBloodlands, disinformation, East West Blog, Euromaidan, History, Holocaust, Identity, Immigration, Jews, journey, Maidan, Poland, Postwar, Propaganda, Refugee, Russia, Soviet Union, Ukraine, US, World War II
3 thoughts on “My Journey From East to West and Back”
Pingback: Social media a destabilisation tool in the Middle East and Syrian conflict | Marcus Ampe's Space
A J Cater says:
I’m very happy to have encountered you on Twitter and this website. I wish that I could message you directly at times to get answers to questions that arise on Ukraine and Russia. Keep up the good work. I look forward to reading your posts and comments each day.
Thanks from a Canadian friend and Best Wishes.
Paula Chertok says:
Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m happy to answer your questions as best I can. You can message me on Twitter too.
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Tag Archives: Megan Whalen Turner
Eugenides, Thief of Eddis, married the queen of Attolia, and now, through a series of unimagined twists and turns, he is the high king of the entire peninsula, including Eddis, Attolia, and Sunis. His cousin is queen of Eddis, and his friend is king of Sunis. The powerful Medes are not happy to see the little countries unified, and so they launch an attack that may end them all.
Pheris is the young heir to Baron Erondites’ family, and his grandfather berates his mother for not killing the crippled boy when he was a baby. Eugenides has asked for the baron’s heir to be raised at the palace in order to create a bond with this dangerous family, but everyone thinks that the heir is Pheris’ younger brother. When Pheris arrives, drooling on the floor, Gen sees something in him that no one else does. Even though he realizes that the Baron sent him to humiliate the new king, Eugenides insists that he stay in the capital. The entire book is written as Pheris’ journal.
Megan Whalen Turner does not rush to get a book out every year, so when she does publish a new title, it is An Event. In October, after twenty years of writing, she released the last of six titles in her beloved “The Queen’s Thief” series, Return of the Thief, and it is a perfect resolution. The title has many meanings, only the first of which is the return of Eugenides as the main character of the story. “Gen” has often been voted the best hero of YA literature, and readers missed him in a couple of earlier volumes when Turner focused her story on secondary characters. Now, however, he is front and center, but the title also hints at the deep character study Turner unfolds throughout the story. All human beings are more complex than meets the eye, but brilliant and powerful people are able to indulge their desires in ways that may be dangerous to those around them, and the revelation of one’s darker nature can be unsettling, even to those who love them. Eugenides is a king, but before his ascension to the throne, he was born to be a Thief.
This series has never fit comfortably in the Young Adult category, and this particular volume continues the political intrigue and subtle deception while adding thoughtful explorations of marriage and other adult relationships. “The Queen’s Thief” is set in a pseudo-ancient Greek world, with rugged terrain, hot weather, and a panoply of pagan gods and goddesses. The series reads mostly as historical fiction, but it slips into fantasy territory with the occasional visitation from the gods. Eugenides is startled to discover that he is not the only person able to see the goddess Moira.
I cannot recommend this series highly enough for everyone from smart young teens to adults. The layered plots and intricate relationships stand up to repeated readings, as I can attest after reading earlier volumes over again as each new one came out. It is best to read them in order, as they are not stand-alone novels, and the details are complex. Turner certainly stuck the landing. The last few pages and the epilogue fairly sing off the pages.
*Postscript: The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Disney has picked up The Thief for the screen. It will be tough to do the books justice. Here’s hoping!
Disclaimer: I read a library copy of this book. Opinions expressed are solely my own and may not reflect those of my employer or anyone else.
Tagged as Megan Whalen Turner, Return of the Thief, The Queen's Thief
Thick as Thieves, by Megan Whalen Turner
Although he was a slave, Kamet was more than satisfied with his life as secretary to the brother of the heir to the throne of the Mede empire. He is well-educated, well-dressed, and well fed. He is even amassing his own personal library, and when the new emperor ascends to the throne, who knows? He may be given to him as a gift. Aside from the occasional beating, Kamet was a man of authority.
When his beloved Laela pulls him aside in the hallway to whisper that their master had been poisoned, he panics. Slaves are always tortured when a murder has been committed, and many are killed when their masters die of any cause. Kamet decides to accept an Attolian’s offer to help him escape, leaving all of his possessions behind. This journey has none of the royal accoutrements to which Kamet is accustomed; there is hunger, danger, and endless fatigue. Furthermore, Kamet had only intended to escape his master’s guards. Now he has to figure out how to escape from the Attolian.
Thick as Thieves is the latest volume in the brilliant, award-winning “Queen’s Thief” series by Megan Whalen Turner. Although this book stands on its own, readers of the earlier episodes will recognize Kamet as a minor character whose life now moves to the center of the action. The identity of the man called “the Attolian” almost all the way through will slowly become clear. After Kamet endures experiences that change him into a much wiser man, the reader will delight to see many earlier characters gathered together to resolve the mystery of why an officious, little scholar would be so important to an enemy king.
“The Queen’s Thief” remains one of my favorite series in young adult literature. I have reviewed the entire series here. I am looking forward to meeting Megan Whalen Turner at Book Expo in New York next week, and I’ll be sure to ask her several nervous questions about the fate of a couple of my favorite characters. Some of her hints at the end of this book have me on pins and needles!
Very highly recommended.
Disclaimer: I read an advance reader copy of this book, although I hope to obtain a signed copy next week! Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not reflect those of my employer or anyone else.
Tagged as Book Expo 2017, Megan Whalen Turner, Queen's Thief, SLJ Day of Dialog 2017, The Queen's Thief, Thick as Thieves
The Queen’s Thief series, by Megan Whalen Turner
This is a public service announcement from Reading Central. Megan Whalen Turner writes what is quite probably the best current series of books for young people. In any case, it is certainly my favorite. And while other authors put out a title every year—or in the case of James Patterson and his committees, a book every two weeks—Ms. Turner only publishes every four or five years, so when she has a new book, it is An Event. So, I am hereby announcing that the fifth volume of “The Queen’s Thief” series is due to come out this May.
Why am I telling you this now, rather than just writing a book review in May? Because you need to catch up! There are four books to read in the next two months, so get to it! I am just about to start re-reading the second one. In order, they are:
Only the first volume, The Thief, seems to be a book for teens. The main character, Eugenides, who has been in prison for theft for several months, is suddenly yanked out into the screaming light of day and conscripted for a special mission with the Magus. A small group of men travel for weeks through rough terrain so that “Gen” can break into an ancient temple and retrieve a stone with mystical powers that can confer immortality on the sovereign who holds it, but can kill anyone who tries to steal it.
The setting is a group of small countries that resemble Greece several centuries after its golden age, with ruined temples and olive groves. So, although it has horses and warring monarchs, it is not at all like the scores of faux-medieval fantasies on the market. Furthermore, it is set in a re-imagined past, with bits of supernatural elements, such as gods and goddesses, but there are no vampires, zombies, or fairies. Rather, it is more a book of political intrigue. After The Thief, the series is more adult than teen, with marriages, diplomacy, spies, and assassinations. This is the perfect series for your kids who are advanced readers if you do not want them exposed to the more seamy side of young adult literature. The language is fine, there are no explicit sex scenes, and Turner does not seem to have an agenda of any kind. So refreshing! On the other hand, the vocabulary is rich, and the plot is complex and challenging.
Why is this the best series out there?
Eugenides is one of the most incredible heroes in literature. He has likeable and unlikeable characteristics, is much smarter than he lets on, and is completely unpredictable. In short, he is wickedly cool.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems. You will be surprised. Turner’s writing is so complex and subtle that you will miss the hints she puts out there and will suddenly be shocked and need to go back and re-read. And…
It completely stands up to re-reading. I just finished The Thief for the third time, and I picked up details that I had missed before. It is such a pleasure to read.
It is appropriate for everyone, adults and teens, male and female. The only reason that tweens and younger may not be the best audience is because they may not understand it. Otherwise, it is fine for a family read-aloud.
I hope that is enough to send you to the bookstore or library. I was so thrilled to find out that I will have an opportunity to meet this author at SLJ’s Day of Dialog in May, and I hope to post a review of the latest volume, Thick as Thieves, before then!
Filed under Book Reviews, Books and reading
Tagged as A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia, The Queen of Attolia, The Queen's Thief, The Thief
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About the ECC
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June 29 - July 2, 2021
Rotterdam | De Doelen
More information about the dates and format of the Plenary Lectures will follow.
ECC21 will feature the following plenary speakers:
Alberto Bemporad (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca)
Marcel Heertjes (ASML, The Netherlands)
Danica Kragic Jensvelt (Royal Institute of Technology, KTH)
Dragan Nesic (The University of Melbourne)
Karen Willcox (The University of Texas at Austin)
Jan-Willem van Wingerden (Delft University of Technology)
{KOPIE VOOR LATER-NU NIET ZICHTBAAR} Plenary Lectures will take place at the Auditorium of the Hotel Royal Continental (Continental building); they may also be followed in streaming at the Aula Magna of Partenope Congress Center.
Once the conference is completed, the videos of each of the Plenary lectures can be found on this page.
ECC21 will feature the following five plenary lectures.
Date – Lecture Title 1
Alberto Bemporad
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Speaker Bio:
Alberto Bemporad received his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Control Engineering in 1997 from the University of Florence, Italy. In 1996/97 he was with the Center for Robotics and Automation, Department of Systems Science & Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis. In 1997-1999 he held a postdoctoral position at the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where he collaborated as a senior researcher until 2002. In 1999-2009 he was with the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Siena, Italy, becoming an Associate Professor in 2005. In 2010-2011 he was with the Department of Mechanical and Structural Engineering of the University of Trento, Italy. Since 2011 he is Full Professor at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy, where he served as the Director of the institute in 2012-2015. He spent visiting periods at Stanford University, University of Michigan, and Zhejiang University. In 2011 he cofounded ODYS S.r.l., a company specialized in developing model predictive control systems for industrial production. He has published more than 350 papers in the areas of model predictive control, hybrid systems, optimization, automotive control, and is the co-inventor of 16 patents. He is author or coauthor of various software packages for model predictive control design and implementation, including the Model Predictive Control Toolbox (The Mathworks, Inc.) and the Hybrid Toolbox for MATLAB. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control during 2001-2004 and Chair of the Technical Committee on Hybrid Systems of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2002-2010. He received the IFAC High-Impact Paper Award for the 2011-14 triennial and the IEEE CSS Transition to Practice Award in 2019. He is an IEEE Fellow since 2010.
Professor of Control Systems
IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Marcel Heertjes
Marcel Heertjes received both his MSc and PhD in mechanical engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology in 1995 and 1999, respectively. In 2000, he joined the Philips Centre for Industrial Technology in Eindhoven. In 2007 he joined ASML as principle engineer and control competence leader. Marcel Heertjes is also part-time professor on nonlinear industrial control for high-precision mechatronics at the department of mechanical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology.
His main research interests are with industrial control for high-precision mechatronic systems with special focus on nonlinear control, feedforward and learning control, and data-driven optimization and self-tuning. His nonlinear control contributions and developments focus on full support of frequency-domain design, synthesis, loopshaping, and qualification tools that attempt at breaking free from linear control design limitations. His primary ambition is to provide a clear view on (a) robust nonlinear control design and stability analysis, and (b) the associated data-driven controller synthesis and tuning.
He served as guest editor of International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (2011) and IFAC Mechatronics (2014) and currently is associate editor of IFAC Mechatronics (since 2016). In 2015, he received the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award ‘‘For the development and application of variable-gain control techniques for high-performance motion systems’’.
ASML
Danica Kragic Jensvelt
Danica Kragic is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She received MSc in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Rijeka, Croatia in 1995 and PhD in Computer Science from KTH in 2001. She has been a visiting researcher at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and INRIA Rennes. She is the Director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems. Danica received the 2007 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and Young Academy of Sweden. She holds a Honorary Doctorate from the Lappeenranta University of Technology. She chaired IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision and served as an IEEE RAS AdCom member. Her research is in the area of robotics, computer vision and machine learning. She received ERC Starting and Advanced Grants. Her research is supported by the EU, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and Swedish Research Council. She is an IEEE Fellow.
School of Electrical Engineering
Royal Institute of Technology, KTH
Dragan Nesic
Dragan Nesic is a Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Melbourne. He received his Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering Degree at the University of Belgrade (1990) and his PhD at the Australian National University (1997). Professor Nesic’s research interests are in the broad area of control engineering including its mathematical foundations (e.g. Lyapunov stability theory, hybrid systems, singular perturbations, averaging) and its applications to various areas of engineering (e.g. automotive control, optical telecommunications) and science (e.g. neuroscience). More specifically, he has made significant contributions to the areas of nonlinear sampled-data systems, nonlinear networked control systems, event-triggered control, optimization-based control and extremum seeking control and he presented several keynote lectures on these topics at international conferences.
Prof. Nesic is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of IFAC and he served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Control Systems Society of the IEEE. He was a co-recipient (with M. Nagahara and D. Quevedo) of the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award (2017). He is a recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including Doctorate Honoris Causa by the University of Lorraine (2019), Humboldt Research Award (2020), Humboldt Research Fellowship (2003-2004), as well as Future Fellowship (2010-2014) and an Australian Professorial Fellowship (2004-2009) funded by the Australian Research Council. He is an Associate Editor for the journal IEEE Transactions on Network Control Systems (CONES) and Foundations and Trends in Systems and Control. He has also served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control , Automatica , European Journal of Control and Systems and Control Letters . Prof. Nesic was a General Co-Chair of 2017 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and a General Chair of the 2011 Australian Control Conference. He served on International Program Committees of many international conferences, such as the American Control Conference, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, NOLCOS, Asian Control Conference, European Control Conference, and so on. Prof. Nesic also served on various committees including the Board of Governors, IEEE Control Systems Society.
The University of Melbourne
Karen E. Willcox
Karen E. Willcox is Director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and a Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Simulation-Based Engineering and Sciences and the Peter O’Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems. Prior to joining the Oden Institute in 2018, she spent 17 years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the founding Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering, and the Associate Head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Willcox holds a Bachelor of Engineering Degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and masters and PhD degrees from MIT. Prior to becoming a professor at MIT, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group.
Willcox is Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). She has served in multiple leadership positions within AIAA and SIAM, including leadership roles in the SIAM Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering and in the AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Technical Committee. She is a current member of the AIAA Board of Trustees. She is a current member of the National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics, and has served on five National Academies studies and review panels. In 2017, she was awarded Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM).
Oden Institute for Computational
Engineering & Sciences
Jan Willem van Wingerden
Jan-Willem van Wingerden graduated cum laude in mechanical engineering at TU Delft in 2004. In 2008 he obtained his doctorate, cum laude, in mechanical engineering at the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC) for his study Control of Wind Turbines with ‘Smart’ Rotors: Proof of Concept & LPV Subspace. After obtaining his doctorate, Wingerden started working as a tenure tracker at DCSC (3mE). In 2012 he was awarded an NWO Veni grant and in 2019 an NWO VIDI grant both in the field of wind farm control. Since 2017 he is leading the data-driven control section within the Delft Center for Systems and Control, where he is currently a Full Professor.
Jan-Willem is passionate about the development of data-driven control systems for wind turbines and wind farms. In recent years he and his team developed novel data-driven flow models for coordinated wind farm control and showed that these models are key enablers for robust closed-loop wind farm control.
Jan-Willem van Wingerden
Delft Centre for Systems and Control
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Home/Science of Sound/Advanced Topics in Sound/Statistical Uncertainty/Statistical vs. Biological Significance
Statistical vs. Biological SignificanceChris Knowlton2018-12-19T09:34:55-05:00
The conclusion that there is a statistically significant difference indicates only that the difference is unlikely to have occurred by chance. It does not mean that the difference is necessarily large, important, or significant in the common meaning of the word. An example is the measurements made to determine whether or not Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active (SURTASS LFA) sonar transmissions affect the singing of humpback whales near Hawaii. The following graphs show the distribution of humpback whale song length (in minutes) during control periods when no sounds were being played (top) and during experimental conditions when LFA sounds were being played (bottom).
The graphs show the distribution of humpback whale song length (in minutes) during control periods when no sounds were being played (top) and during experimental conditions when LFA sounds were being played (bottom). The two graphs look similar and show that there is considerable variation in the length of humpback whale songs. The songs were slightly longer during LFA playbacks. Graph from data in Fristrup, K. M., Hatch, L. T., & Clark, C. W. (2003).
The mean length of the whale songs was 29% greater during transmissions. Given the measurements that were made, there is only a 4.7% probability that this difference is due to chance, and the scientists doing the study therefore concluded that the result is statistically significant. However, these data are from measurements made on a small number of whales that were followed before, during, and after transmissions. Since the number of measurements is relatively small, the probability that the scientists could have made a false negative (Type II) error is 50%. The power of the measurements to detect a difference is low.
Although the scientists concluded that the difference in the length of whale songs in the presence and absence of transmissions is statistically significant, the two graphs look similar and show that there is considerable variation in the length of humpback whale songs. The standard deviations of the distributions are considerably greater than the difference in the means. The response to the transmissions, that is the magnitude of the increase in song length, is well within the normal variation in the absence of the transmissions. The songs are sung exclusively by males and are thought to be displays to attract mates. Large changes in singing behavior might therefore have significant consequences to a humpback whale population. It seems unlikely, however, that changes in singing behavior that are well within the natural range of variability pose such a risk. The conclusion is that although the difference in song lengths is statistically significant, it is unlikely that it is biologically significant.
Additional pages under Statistical Uncertainty:
Measurement Errors are due to the physical limitations of the sensors and techniques used to make the measurements.
Natural Variability is the range in values of naturally occurring parameters in biological and other natural systems.
False Positives and False Negatives are errors associated with making a decision.
Behavioral Changes
Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System Low Frequency Active (SURTASS LFA) Sonar
Fristrup, K. M., Hatch, L. T., & Clark, C. W. (2003). Variation in humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) song length in relation to low-frequency sound broadcasts. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113(6), 3411. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1573637
Miller, P. J. O., Biassoni, N., Samuels, A., & Tyack, P. L. (2000). Whale songs lengthen in response to sonar. Nature, 405(6789), 903–903. https://doi.org/10.1038/35016148
Zales, C. R., & Colosi, J. C. (1998). An exercise where students demonstrate the meaning of “not statistically significantly different.” The American Biology Teacher, 60(8), 596–600. https://doi.org/10.2307/4450557
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On 3 March 2011 The National Archives released the 7th tranche of MoD UFO files. Listen to the podcast here.
All 35 files and 4 annexes can be downloaded from the TNA UFO page where you will find a highlights guide, podcast and background briefing. Here is a summary of the key stories and themes that I have chosen from this collection.
(1) Destruction of Files – the first ‘Smoking Gun’?
A number of papers in this tranche of files reveal the MoD destroyed whole collections of UFO files as recently as 1990 for reasons they could not explain They were reluctant to publicly admit they had destroyed files as they feared this might add fuel to allegations they were involved in a cover-up. They were right!
The most frank admission appears in papers covering an internal MoD exchange following the public release of the famous ‘Rendlesham File’ in 2001. When a copy of this file – that contained unclassified paperwork – was sent to me in May of that year it was immediately obvious from the paper trail that further documents relating to the case must be held by other MoD branches, specifically the secretive Defence Intelligence Staff section DI55 that had an interest in UFOs and foreign technology. But an archive search by MoD records staff revealed that a collection of DI55 files covering the period 1980-82 had been destroyed, even though other files from the surrounding years had survived. Even worse, record staff could not say who authorised the destruction of the files or why, as it was MoD policy to shred the Destruction Certificates after five years (DEFE 24/2026/1). MoD were warned that if what it called this “apparent anomaly in the records” were made public…
“…it could be interpreted to mean that a deliberate attempt had been made to eradicate the records covering this incident”.
Why were these files destroyed? The most likely answer is that, at the time, intelligence staff believed they contained nothing worth preserving. We know these files were just a fraction the total number “lost” or destroyed in the chaotic and disorganised MoD records system before Freedom of Information regulations forced them to put their house in order.
But in hindsight, by allowing the arbitrary destruction of swathes of intelligence records, MoD have helpfully provided a stick for conspiracy theorists to beat them with.
(2) ‘Media obsession’ leads to policy change
DEFE 24/1986/1 is the first of a number of MoD UFO Policy files to be released. It contains some papers originally classified as Secret (the first examples so far during the four year TNA UFO project).
The contents reveal how in 1996-97 the workload of the UFO desk at MoD increased by 50% as a direct result of the “media obsession” with the subject that followed the 50thanniversary of the Roswell incident. The papers also show that MoD partly blamed the increased workload on the media activities of its former desk officer, Nick Pope, whose second book, The Uninvited (on alien abductions) was published in the summer of that year.
In a April 1997 internal briefing, Martin Fuller, the head of Secretariat Air Staff 2 (the department responsible for UFOs), wrote that he and Pope’s successor, UFO desk officer Kerry Philpott, were struggling to answer a stream of letters
“…from members of the public…seeking information about the existence of alien life forms, or seeking a detailed investigation/explanation for…allegations of abduction by aliens, out of the body experiences, animal mutilations, crop circles etc” (DEFE 24/1986/1).
The doubling of the Sec(AS) workload directly led to a significant change to MoD policy covering how staff handled sighting reports made by members of the public. In February 1997 a 24-hour UFO hotline answerphone service was set up to make it easier for people to report their sightings directly to Whitehall. However, from April of that year it was agreed that only reports made by credible witnesses such as police officers, aircrew and other service personnel, that had some degree of corroboration and/or were reported in a timely fashion, would be forwarded to Air Defence and Defence Intelligence staff for further checks. The remiander would simply be filed and forgotten. The briefing papers underline that, in reality, MoD had no real interest in receiving any “singleton reports from the public which tell us nothing.” But in practice officials briefed they could not close their UFO reporting facility and had no choice but to continue to accept reports from the public. Anything less than this “would reveal our [true] policy and there would be a risk that it would be divulged to the UFO fraternity.”
This policy change is significant as it preceded the decision by DI55 to remove themselves from UFO research with the completion of the Condign report in 2000. Nine years later, the inevitable endgame arrived. In November 2009, against a backdrop of public service cuts, the MoD took its opportunity. It pulled the plug on its UFO hotline and closed its ‘UFO desk’, saying it had no further interest in receiving any reports from any source in future.
(3) 9/11: UFOs on Radar
A RAF briefing prepared for the MoD’s UFO desk officer (see DEFE 24/2025/1) reveals 15 unidentified aircraft were detected on radar approaching UK between January-July 2001 immediately before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Six of these were unidentified (although two did not enter UK airspace and four were assessed as ‘friendly’). And despite the arrival of ‘open government’ the RAF were reluctant to answer specific questions from members of the public about these radar detections as they:
a) feared the information would be misinterpreted by those who did not understand how the air defence system worked and
b) their answers could reveal official secrets to an enemy.
More information on radar detection of ‘unidentified aircraft’ and procedures for scrambling RAF aircraft to intercept intruders can be found in DEFE 24/2041/1. This file contains a important RAF ADGE briefing dated 30 October 2000 that says:
“…there is no record of any air defence aircraft employed on any air defence mission ever having intercepted, identified or photographed an object of an extra-terrestrial nature.”
The RAF Wing Commander responsible for this statement also briefs that during the Cold War aircraft were scrambled on a daily basis to intercept Warsaw Pact aircraft approaching the UK coast. After 1989 there was a dramatic fall in scrambles to just two or three incidents per year but there was
“….no evidence to suggest that any of these scrambles have taken place against anything other than man-made aircraft”.
In DEFE 24/2092/1 a response to a Parliamentary Question from Lynn Featherstone MP reveals the numbers of UFO sightings reported to MoD had fallen dramatically from a peak of 609 in 1996-97 to an average of 130 per year between 2001 and 2006. Just 12 reports received since 2001 had been referred to experts in Air Defence for further scrutiny and “none of these had been determined as posing any risk to the integrity of UK airspace”.
Two files contain detailed reports summarising the results of RAF investigations into UFO incidents. The first followed a spate of UFO reports from across the British Isles on 16 April 1978. This ‘flap’ was solved by RAF Fylingdales BMEWS station in North Yorkshire that found the sightings coincided with the re-entry of space debris into Earth’s atmosphere (DEFE 24/2048/1). A briefing prepared by Group Captain Neil Colvin based on 501 reports reviewed by the RAF during 1977-78 concluded:
“…none have ever been confirmed as having an unknown origin by our radar sites”.
A second investigation report was compiled in October 1996 following press reports of lights in the sky filmed by police in Lincolnshire that were reportedly confirmed by a blip seen on radars at RAF Neatishead, Norfolk (see DEFE 24/1986/1 and DEFE 24/2018/1). These events led the late Labour MP for Don Valley, Martin Redmond, to write to Defence Minister Michael Portillo questioning why no RAF aircraft were scrambled to investigate this apparent breach of UK airspace. As a result, a RAF Wing Commander was asked to compiled a report and spent eight working days quizzing eye-witnesses. His report (DEFE 24/2032/1) concludes that two entirely separate phenomena were involved: the lights seen by police were bright stars and the blip on radar was a permanent echo created by a tall church spire (Boston Stump).
(4) Cosmic Crashes – UFOs that Fell to Earth
A UFO file from 1979 (DEFE 24/2037/1) reveals government concern about the risk posed by the crash-landing of debris from space on UK. When the nuclear-powered Soviet reconnaissance satellite Cosmos 954 disintegrated over the northwest territory of Canada in January 1978 radioactive debris was scattered over 124,000 square kilometres. Fears of what could happen if a similar piece of junk should rain down from the sky over Britain were raised in the following year when the giant US space station Skylab began to decay from its orbit. Although not powered by a nuclear reactor, it weighed some 75 tonnes and there were fears that debris might strike parts of the British Isles.
In March 1979 the head of MoD’s Defence Intelligence asked the Home Office to circulate guidelines to police, fire and local authorities in the UK. The ‘restricted’ document dated 20 April 1979 titled Satellite Accidents, spelled out the emergency procedures that should be put in place in the event of a nuclear hazard reaching the UK from space. Skylab was not nuclear powered but there remained the possibility of injury or damage from falling debris, although this was deemed to be “extremely remote.”
The file also reveals MoD were keen to examine examples of space debris and wanted the police to ensure any found by the public were swiftly reported to the MoD’s UFO branch, S4(Air). The space station burned up harmlessly over the Indian Ocean on 11 July 1979, scattering debris over a large area of the west Australian desert. Nevertheless, MoD were presented with two sets of “debris from space” that had supposedly fallen in Britain. One metallic object was found on a golf course in Eastbourne, while another – consisting of twenty pieces of “rock-like debris” – woke a woman in North Wales when they crashed onto her roof at 5 a.m. one June morning. The file reveals police divided the rocks into three samples, placed them in plastic bags and sent them to Whitehall. The lump of metal from Eastbourne, on investigation, was found to be “simply a piece of molten scrap metal”.
There are further relevant papers in DEFE 24/1997/1 including correspondence between UFO author Nick Redfern and the Home Office regarding emergency procedures for dealing with “landed and crashed UFOs and space satellites.” DEFE 24/1986/1 contains correspondence between TV documentary marker John Keeling and MoD concerning a ‘War of the Worlds’ incident in 1967 that, for a few hours at least, was treated as a potentially real “alien invasion” of the UK.
John is writing a book based on the bizarre events that followed the discovery, early in the morning of 4 September 1967 of six miniature “flying saucers” in a perfect line across Southern England from the Sheppey to the Bristol Channel. After 12 hours of mayhem, in which four police forces, bomb disposal units, the army and the MoD’s intelligence branch were mobilised, it emerged the saucers were a rag-day hoax by engineering students from Farnborough Technical College.
These events reveal how difficult it would be for the authorities to conceal a real UFO “crash landing” from the public. As John writes in his excellent Fortean Times articleInvasion 1967 (FT 228), this incident has been ignored by proponents of government UFO cover-ups because it raises too many uncomfortable home truths, such as:
“Where was the cover up? Where were the UFO crash retrieval teams? Even at the height of this drama, no meaningful efforts were made to suppress information. The fact is, you can’t cover something like this up.”
(5) Nick Pope
Nick was the Sec(AS) civil servant responsible for UFO reports 1991-94. After his ‘tour of duty’, and whilst employed elsewhere in MoD he publicly proclaimed his belief in UFOs and in 1996 published a book, Open Skies Closed Minds, that was cleared for publication. In the following year the publication of Pope’s second book, The Uninvited, that dealt with ‘alien abductions’, led MoD to prepare a set of “press lines”. These said “clearance to publish does not imply MoD approval of, or agreement with, the contents” (DEFE 24/1986/1).
DEFE 24/2092/1, contains a background briefing on Nick Pope prepared by MoD following a Parliamentary Question from Lib Dem MP Norman Baker in March 2006 that asked:
“…the Secretary of State for Defence whether his department’s UFO project is still extent.”
The briefing said the question was most likely prompted by “recent press articles…in which Mr Nick Pope, a serving Civil Servant, has been widely quoted on the topic of the MoD’s ‘UFO Project’” The briefing continues:
“The MoD has never operated anything described as ‘the UFO Project’
and continues:
“…Mr Pope left Sec(AS) in 1994 and his knowledge of this issue, other than from publicly available sources, must be regarded as dated. Mr Pope elected to describe his position as the ‘Head of the MoD’s UFO Project’, a term entirely of his own invention, and he has used his experience and information he gathered (frequently by going beyond the official remit of his position) to develop a parallel career as a pundit on the topic, including writing several books, some purportedly non-fiction. Mr Pope constantly puts himself forward in various parts of the media, solicited and unsolicited, as an ‘expert’ (despite his lack of recent knowledge about the work carried on in the branch concerned) and seeks credit amongst other aficionados for having ‘forced’ MoD to reveal its ‘secret’ files on the subject. The latter is far from the truth, as we had begun publishing details of the most ‘popular’ reports in the Publication scheme, prior to the advent of the Freedom of Information Act. Mr Pope’s activities have nevertheless resulted in the generation of considerable workload for the stuff currently employed in responding to questions on this topic.”
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Jill September 5, 2019 November 9, 2019 Art House Films, Documentary Film, Film Festival, Foreign Film, Independent Cinema, Uncategorized, women in film
Nothing is trite if you look at it with empathy and love. — Agnès Varda, from her last film, Varda by Agnès
a darling illustration of Varda from a bag I was lucky enough to score from the film’s publicist
Tom Luddy, Rosalie Varda, Martin Scorsese, Mathieu Demy, moderator Annette Insdorf
Agnès Varda, the Belgian-born French filmmaker died in March and the Telluride Film Festival dedicated this year’s festival to her and celebrated her life and work with special guests. Bringing in her friend Martin Scorsese and her two children, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy and the founder of the festival, Tom Luddy to discuss her ground-breaking work and then screening Varda’s last film, Varda by Agnès. An instant film-studies classic, her film is a beautiful overview of her work and collaborations with actors and cinematographers. Varda is shown giving talks to students in both France and the US with clips of her work, then the film jumps to new footage of Varda speaking with her actors in the same locations where she filmed.
Martin Scorsese spoke about having Agnès Varda visit him on the set of The Irishman (Opening at the NY Film Festival where Varda’s film will also screen). She chided him on his politics and he soothed her with saying the film was about unions since she’s was all about the working man. It was touching to hear how he sought her approval and valued her opinion. Rosalie and Mathieu spoke about their unusual upbringing when famous directors and stars were guests at their home and they traveled to LA with their father, Jacque Demy and their mother. She was always busy making films. Indiewire has a lovely interview with Rosalie in Agnès Varda’s Daughter On Her Mother’s Death and the Future of Her Archive.
from the 46th Telluride Film Festival Program
I was so glad I got to be at the Tribute screening of this film because Tom Luddy spoke of his relationship with Varda from his years in San Francisco. He introduced her to Jean Varda, who turned out to be a relative of hers and she immediately decided to make a film about their reunion. Luddy is in the film as she recreated her introduction by him in the short Uncle Yanco…and it’s featured in Varda by Agnès. The short also screened at the festival with Black Panthers, another film that Tom Luddy assembled the crew for and encouraged Varda to make so she could document an important movement in US history. It was great to her about her filmmaking process and how her creative energies; her joie de vivre made her someone that no one wanted to say no to.
Agnès Varda was a true genius, working right till the end of her life and it’s so inspiring to see her work and celebrate her life. Faces Places (Visages Villages) brought her a resurgence of popularity and the film was nominated for an Oscar and won many International awards. I hope this film will also get the acclaim it deserves.
Agnes Varda, Faces Places, Martin Scorsese, Mathieu Demy, Rosalie Varda, Telluride Film Festival, Tom Luddy, Varda by Agnes
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Worsening
SYRIA: The third round of meetings planned for August is postponed due to the increase of violence in the country, especially around Aleppo
The escalation of war in Syria, especially in the city of Aleppo, and its serious consequences for the population, is preventing the resumption of negotiations among the parties. The special envoy of the UN and the Arab League, Staffan de Mistura, had called for the talks to resume in August, but the process was postponed given the evolution of hostilities and no new date was set for the third round of meetings. Diplomatic circles stressed that the scenario was not conducive to significant talks. In fact, throughout August, diplomatic efforts focused unsuccessfully on trying to secure access to humanitarian aid in the areas most in need, especially in Aleppo, proposing 48-hour truces, and on seeking ways to restore the ceasefire, in line with the truce agreed on in February, which collapsed after a few weeks of relatively less violence. In late August, media reports indicated that Russia and the United States, leaders of the International Syria Support Group, had made efforts to reach an agreement on Syria as part of talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva. After another meeting in mid-August, the foreign ministers of Iran and Turkey, countries that are antagonistic to each other with regard to the Syrian conflict, pledged to boost bilateral cooperation to resolve the Syrian crisis. (UN News, 27, 30/08/16; The Guardian 09/08/16; al-Jazeera, 27/08/16; al-Arabiya, 12/08/16)
SUDAN: The peace talks between the government and rebel groups fail
Less than one week after the start of the talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to try to ensure a lasting ceasefire in the regions of Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile, the negotiations collapsed, according to a statement released on 15 August by the coordinator of the Sudanese government’s negotiating team. The largest armed groups of the three regions had signed a road map early in the month, which had been negotiated with mediators from the African Union, in order to reach a first step towards the cessation of hostilities. This initial agreement had raised hopes of making progress towards peacebuilding in the country after various rounds of talks that had not been successful. However, the disagreements between the parties blocked the negotiations again and prevented the cessation of violence. Both the government and the rebel movements have blamed each other for the failure of the talks. The African Union’s mediation team criticised the rebel movements of Darfur (the JEM and the SLA-Minnawi) for the failure and said that it was primarily due to the fact that both groups once again raised issues that had already been agreed on and others that contradicted the road map agreement. (Reuters, 16/08/2016)
YEMEN: The negotiations in Kuwait collapse amidst an escalation of violence and the United States tries to promote a new peace initiative
After a one-month break in the negotiations between the parties and no prospects that they would resume, the UN special envoy for Yemen stated that he considered the talks in Kuwait finished and announced the start of a new stage in which he would try to work with the parties separately. Ismail Ould Sheikh Ahmed recognised that one of the main problems in the negotiations was the lack of trust between the parties and urged the adoption of confidence-building measures, like continuing to release prisoners on both sides. However, the atmosphere in the country only deteriorated in August. Houthi forces intensified their attacks in the area bordering with Saudi Arabia and the international coalition led by Riyadh resumed its air strikes in the Yemeni capital, killing many civilians. Given this deteriorating security situation, US Secretary of State John Kerry promoted a new initiative to revive the peace talks. According to the proposal, the Houthis will participate in a national unity government in exchange for the transfer of heavy weapons to a third party. Kerry ensured that the Gulf states had agreed to the initiative during a meeting in Saudi Arabia. (Al Jazeera, 25/08/16; UN News, 06, 12/08/16; Middle East Eye, 26/08/16)
BURUNDI: UN Security Council approves establishing a police component in the country
The UN Security Council approved resolution 2303 of July 29 that gives the green light to the creation of a 228-strong UN police component. It has also urged the Government, in coordination with the AU Commission, to ensure the deployment of 100 AU human rights observers and 100 AU military experts, and asks the Government to provide full cooperation and complete access to the three missions to facilitate the implementation of their mandate. In addition, the Council has called for an end to violence by all actors and efforts to launch a political dialogue between the Government and opposition led by the East African Community (EAC), with backing by the AU and facilitated by the EAC mediator and facilitator. Although the Government had already agreed to accept the presence of the AU observers and experts, deployment has been slow. Furthermore, the Government strongly opposed the deployment of the UN police component because it considers that its security forces are under control. Thousands of demonstrators protested outside the French embassy, due to France’s role in drafting the resolution, and outside the Rwandan embassy, which the protesters accuse of training the rebels. However, the French ambassador to Burundi, Gerrit Van Rossum, has also spoken out against the resolution and has participated in the demonstrations. More than 500 people have been killed in the wave of violence that has shaken Burundi since April 2015 and at least 270,000 people have left the country. Burundi has also rejected the deployment of a 5,000-strong AU mission and said that it would not accept more than 50 UN police. (UNSC 2303 de 29/07/16; Xinhua, 30/07/16; Al Jazeera, 03/08/16; BBC, 08/08/16)
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Violence persists in the country as efforts to promote DDR continue
The Government and the AU held a training workshop on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants (DDR) with over 200 key actors in the country. President Faustin-Archange Touadéra has been conducting peace talks with different armed groups to launch the DDR plan. MINUSCA stated that despite the clashes and setbacks regarding the security situation, it will continue to push the DDR process forward. Since his election in February, the president has stated that his main responsibility is to promote DDR in the country and to reorganize the Armed Forces. In April he had already began talks with the former Séléka coalition to launch the DDR program. Touadéra had insisted that DDR should begin before agreeing to any demands, while Séléka had stated that it will not start DDR until an agreement is reached regarding the group’s demands. The DDR program has been affected by persistent clashes and outbreaks of violence, which continue in several parts of the country. Meanwhile, sources from the Ugandan Armed Forces, which are participating in the Regional Initiative against the Ugandan armed group LRA, stated that the mission will soon withdraw due to the lack of international support and resources. (RFI, 10/08/16; AU, 19/08/16)
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: The Government and part of the political opposition agree to start national talks in September
The National Dialogue preparation committee, with representatives from the Government, civil society and the opposition, held a meeting between August 23 and 27 and reached an agreement to hold the National Dialogue between September 1 and 14. Members of the opposition present at the committee meetings included the Union pour la Nation Congolaise (UNC) party led by Vital Kamerhe. The AU has appointed Eden Kodjo, Togo's former prime minister, as the facilitator of the national dialogue process. Opposition sources with ties to Rassemblement, the country's main opposition coalition, announced that they will not participate in the national dialogue with President Kabila because the AU facilitator is biased and acts in the interests of the Congolese government. Martin Fayulu, one of the coalition leaders, said he would participate in the dialogue mandated by UN Security Council resolution 2277, which calls for talks that respect the Constitution. Thus, Rassemblement decided not to participate in the dialogue and announced a general strike for August 23, which did not attract much participation and during which the police arrested at least 32 people. The UN Secretary-General called for the process to be as inclusive as possible. (Agenzia FIDES, 22/08/16; VOA, 01, 23/08/16; UN, 23/08/16)
MYANMAR: Advisory commission for Arakan State created, chaired by Kofi Annan
The Government has announced the creation of an advisory commission for Arakan State that is to be led by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. The task of this commission shall be to recommend lasting solutions for the complex situation in Arakan State, and will be made up of nine people. Three of them are representatives of the international community: Kofi Annan, Ghassan Salamé (a Lebanese academic and an advisor to Annan) and Laetitia van den Assum (a Dutch diplomat); two Arakanese Buddhists, two Muslims and two government representatives. Both Arakanese Buddhists and the Muslims come from Rangoon; the Muslims have no relationship with Arakan. The commission shall consult with the local Buddhist and Muslim communities and convey the messages from these consultations to the central government. Arakanese representatives expressed their disagreement with the fact that the members of the commission were not local representatives from Arakan State; this concern was not shared by the Rohingya people, however. (The Irrawaddy, 17 & 24/08/16)
PHILIPPINES (MINDANAO-MNLF): President urges MNLF founder and chairman Nur Misuari, currently a fugitive, to begin dialogue
President Rodrigo Duterte publicly confirmed he had been in contact with MNLF founder and chairman Nur Misuari to convince him of the need to start peace talks. A warrant of arrest was issued against Misuari in connection with his involvement in the Zamboanga siege in late 2013, although Duterte publicly undertook to suspend his arrest and avoid placing him under government custody, granting him a safe conduct pass. Duterte, who in mid-August even travelled to Jolo island–Misuari’s birth place where it is suspected he has been a fugitive in recent years–as a symbolic measure to show his openness to dialogue, indicated that Misuari expressed his willingness to engage in swift negotiations and he had exhibited a preference for such negotiations to unfold in Malaysia under the mediation of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. It is necessary to point out that in preparation for the presidential elections that were held on 9 May, in March Misuari urged his supporters to vote for Rodrigo Duterte, who he called the MNLF’s candidate. It was the first time since the MNLF was founded that its chairman made such an explicit call at the presidential election. Following his election, Duterte publicly stated his intent to involve Nur Misuari in peace talks on a number of occasions. (CNN, InterAksyon, 30/08/16)
SOUTH SUDAN: The political crisis worsens, threatening the validity of the peace agreement
The crisis generated by the serious incidents that occurred in Juba in July continued to weaken the peace agreement and to pit the different parties against each other. After replacing the opposition leader, Vice President Riek Machar, the government of President Salva Kiir went further and dismissed six ministers of the recently created Transitional Government of National Unity, who are allies of Machar. The fired ministers (of the interior, oil, education, labour, water and land and housing) were replaced by others linked to the new Vice President Taban Deng Gai. James Gatdet Dak, the spokesman for Riek Machar, declared that the dismissal of the ministers is illegal and against the peace agreement. The regional organisation IGAD continued to urge Kiir’s government to restore Riek Machar to his office. The African Union Peace and Security Council (PSC) approved a resolution in its 616th session in Addis Ababa, requesting Machar’s return to the vice presidency and Gai’s dismissal, as well the deployment of a protection force composed of troops from third countries to guarantee security in Juba. Festus Mogae, the chairman of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC), the highest monitoring body for the implementation of the peace agreement, said that he and other diplomats approve the appointment of the new Vice President Taban Deng Gai because “they have no other option”. The JMEC has warned that any greater deterioration in the security situation may lead to the end of oil production, which is practically the government’s only source of revenue and would affect the internal crisis even more. (Bloomberg, 01/08/2016; Reuters, 03/08/2016; Sudan Tribune, 04, 12/08/2016; The NYT, 28/08/2016)
TURKEY (SOUTHEAST): The government demands that the pro-Kurdish party HDP condemn and distance itself from the PKK if it wishes to avoid political exclusion
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım demanded that the pro-Kurdish party HDP cut all alleged ties with the armed organisation PKK and to start by condemning it. According to Yıldırım, this is the government’s condition for cooperating with the HDP, which has been excluded from the meetings and talks held between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the leaders of the opposition parties CHP and MHP since the failed coup d’état on 15 July. As part of these talks, discussions began on amending the Constitution and on the security situation in the country. The HDP, which condemned the coup attempt, has publicly denounced the PKK’s attacks, urged the government and the PKK to resume the peace process and also criticised its exclusion from multi-party meetings. Some analysts have also pointed to the initial climate of unity following the coup, with the statement made by four parliamentary groups in July, as an opportunity to address the different challenges facing the country, including the armed conflict between the state and the PKK. In any case, the government and the PKK have escalated their respective threats in recent weeks with the declaration of “total war” by the government and the PKK’s announcement that it was expanding the war to the cities and across the entire country. (Hürriyet, Firat, 1-31/08/16)
COLOMBIA: The negotiating teams reach a historic peace agreement
After four years of peace negotiations in Havana, on 24 August the negotiating teams of the government and the FARC achieved a historic peace agreement that ushers in a new political era for the country. The chief negotiator for the Colombian government, Humberto de la Calle, said that in his opinion, the historic final deal signed with the FARC guerrillas is the “best agreement possible”. Luciano Marín Arango, alias “Iván Márquez“, the chief negotiator for the FARC, has described the agreement as victory in “the most beautiful of all battles, that of peace in Colombia”. The agreement must be ratified in a referendum that will be held on 2 October, which has received approval from the Constitutional Court. President Juan Manuel Santos sent Congress the definitive text of the final agreement and informed it of the decision to hold a referendum on the date indicated, the same that was made official on 30 August. The United Nations, UNASUR, the US government and many other countries in the region and other parts of the world have been very pleased with the announcement of the final agreement. The agreement consists of six points “that aim to contribute to the transformations necessary to lay the foundations for a stable and lasting peace”: 1) comprehensive rural reform; 2) political participation: democratic opening for peacebuilding; 3) a bilateral and definitive ceasefire and cessation of hostilities and the abandonment of weapons; 4) a solution to the problem of illegal drugs; 5) victims; and 6) implementation and verification mechanisms. Both President Santos and the leader of the FARC, Rodrigo Londoño, also known as “Timochenko”, have ordered a definitive ceasefire starting on 29 August. On 3 August, the opposition announced that it will conduct a campaign against the agreement and promote the “no” vote for the referendum. Opinion polls about voters’ intentions have given contradictory results. Finally, early in the month, Carlos Arturo Velandia, a former ELN guerrilla fighter, who had been arrested in Bogota over a month ago when he returned from Spain, has been released and will assume the role of peace manager. (Efe, 2, 24-25, 28/08/2016)
INDIA (NAGALAND): Government and NSCN-IM hold new round of negotiations
The Government of India and the armed opposition group NSCN-IM have held a new round of peace conversations. After the round ended, the armed group declared that conversations were advancing positively towards a final solution to the conflict. The group highlighted the positive momentum given to the negotiations since Nerendra Modi assumed office as Prime Minister, which led to the signing of a preliminary peace agreement in August 2015. In the last round of negotiations Easter Chisi Swu, the widow of recently deceased Chisi Swu, the leader of the armed group, participated for the first time. The secretary-general of the NSCN-IM, Thingaleng Muivah, and the government negotiator, RN Ravi, issued a joint statement highlighting that negotiations are progressing in the right direction and that they expect a positive solution in a brief period of time. Since the armed group and the Indian Government signed the ceasefire agreement, there have been 80 rounds of negotiations between the parties, without reaching a definitive peace agreement. (Indian Express, 25/8/16)
PHILIPPINES (NPA): Government and NDF resume formal peace negotiations, following several years of obstruction
The government and the NDF met in Oslo between 22 and 27 August, resuming the formal talks that were halted in 2013. After the meeting, both parties summonsed one another for a second round of official negotiations in mid-October and committed to speed up the pace of the peace process and to sign a peace agreement within one year, which would grant Duterte’s government a period of five years for its subsequent implementation. Moreover, following the aforementioned meeting both parties signed an open-ended ceasefire agreement, the first such pact in three decades. Days earlier, both parties had each agreed on unilateral ceasefires for the duration of the talks in Oslo, but in the case of the CPP-NPA this ended on the last day of negotiations. The government and the NDF also agreed to sign the Comprehensive Agreement on Socioeconomic Reforms (CASER), deemed by many analysts as the foremost item in the substantive agenda, within six months and to renew the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG), the aspect that has generated the greatest controversy between the parties in recent years and stood in the way of the peace process amid talks with the former government of Benigno Aquino. In this regard, it should be pointed out that days before the start of talks, the government and the Supreme Court approved the temporary release of 20 NDF prisoners to form part of the delegation travelling to Oslo. Those granted temporary release included Benito Tiamzon and Wilma Tiamzon, the two senior NPA and CPP leaders in the Philippines. According to both parties, during the negotiations in Oslo important developments were achieved in relation to each of the five items addressed: the ratification of the agreements achieved thus far (more than 20); a timetable for negotiations on the three main aspects of the substantive agenda (social and economic reforms, political and constitutional reforms, and the cessation of hostilities), with a commitment from both sides to speed up the pace of negotiation; the reformation of the list of individuals covered by the JASIG; amnesty for political prisoners; and a cessation of hostilities. The governmental panel is headed up by Employment Secretary Silvestre Bello, with Luis Jalandoni heading up the NDF panel. As in previous years, the Norwegian government is acting as dialogue facilitator. (Minda News, CNN, Inquirer, 26/08/16; Rappler, 21 y 26/08/16; Manila Times, 22/08/16; Philippine Star, 01, 16 y 29/08/16)
SOMALIA: Leaders agree on election calendar
Official sources announced the agreement reached between the country’s political leaders with regard to the new election calendar and the voting procedure. Presidents from the different regions of the country and the President of the Federal Government, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, with the support of the Federal Indirect Electoral Implementation Team (FIEIT) sponsored by the UN, held a meeting and reached an agreement on the election calendar. The commission decided that the election of the 275 members of Parliament will take place September 24 and October 10, while the election of the Senate or Upper House will finalize on September 25. More than 14,000 delegates representing the various clans in the country will choose their representatives in a system of six electoral colleges, similar to the system used in the United States. A minimum of 30% must be women. Each federal state will select its members for the Upper House. Subsequently, both chambers will elect a new president. The current president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is one of a dozen candidates. The UN Secretary-General, among other political leaders, has welcomed the announcement, and has also applauded the commitment by the National Leadership Forum (NLF), which brings together the various regional and government leaders and the Federal Parliament) to ensure the transition towards a multi-party system in 2018 in preparation for the 2020 elections. The NLF has agreed that those elected in 2016 should join a political party within two years or resign, as part of efforts to set aside clan-based politics. (Garowe Online, 06/08/16; VOA, 07/08/16; Shabelle Media Network, 10/08/16)
UKRAINE (EAST): Agreement on a truce for the start of the school year
The Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine, Russia, OSCE) and representatives of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk agreed on a ceasefire to coincide with the start of the school year. After the round of meetings of the trilateral mechanism and of the working groups, the special representative in Ukraine of the rotating chairperson-in-office of the OSCE and OSCE representative in the Trilateral Contact Group, Martin Sajdik, announced that the parties had expressed the need for a permanent ceasefire in relation to the school year, beginning on the night of 31 August. Calls for containment increased during August. Among them, US Vice President Joe Biden urged Ukraine and Russia to show restraint amidst a spike in tension between both countries. Following incidents in Crimea in August, Russian President Vladimir Putin questioned the usefulness of the negotiating process, which under Normandy format brings together Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. However, he later expressed his willingness to continue participating in the process. He also announced that the leaders of Germany, France and Russia would meet during the G20 summit in early September to address the conflict. All three leaders held a related telephone conversation on 23 August. Other diplomatic moves took place during the month. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier met with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Russia in mid-August to address the crises in Ukraine and Syria. Both expressed their support for the Minsk negotiating process. Lavrov stated that he was ready to provide “irrefutable” proof of Ukrainian plans to conduct acts of sabotage in Crimea, while Ukraine continued to deny the accusations. Steinmeier urged both sides to investigate the events. (OSCE, Reuters, RFE/RL, 1-31/08/16)
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Kentucky high schools ban ‘shooter game’ Fortnite from state esports programs
By Gene Park
Fortnite has been banned from varsity esports programs in Kentucky by the state’s high school athletic association because of concerns about how it portrays gun violence. However, there is some confusion between the involved parties as to whether such a ban is applicable and whether it can be applied at all, given the details of the game’s implementation as an esport at the high school level.
The third-person shooter by Epic Games — which features no gore and has a cartoon aesthetic — was introduced last week as an esport at the high school and college levels via a partnership between Epic and PlayVS, an organization that offers esports programs in U.S. schools. PlayVS creates competitions by partnering with the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), including the Kentucky High School Athletic Association (KHSAA).
The recent announcement by PlayVS alarmed KHSAA Commissioner Julian Tackett, who sent an email to Kentucky school officials stating that “there is no place for shooter games in our schools,” reported the Lexington Herald-Leader. Tackett also cited the 2018 shooting at Marshall High School that killed two people and wounded a dozen others.
To read more:
Minneapolis set for esports national stage, featuring Minnesota’s newest team
YouTube’s Latest Bet on eSports Is a Quiet Win for Activision Blizzard
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elementaryvwatson
Life in Newcastle and beyond…
About elementaryvwatson
Praise for Vic Watson
Tag Archives: Story Tyne
Guest Post: Jennifer C. Wilson on The Joy of Supportive Writing Buddies
My friend Jennifer C. Wilson is here today to celebrate the release of her story ‘The Raided Heart‘.
Jen’s going to talk to us about the importance of having a strong network of peers who understand what you’re going through as a writer and will help you when you need it most.
My thanks to Jen for sharing her experiences and thoughts with us.
Vic x
Hi Victoria, and thanks for hosting me on your blog today. To say I’m excited about the release of The Raided Heart is an understatement, and I know that you know just how long I’ve been working on it, and what a big deal it is for me to finally be releasing it through Ocelot Press. You’ve also heard a lot of the story before the book’s released, as it’s been my work-in-progress at writing group for the last year or so.
And I’ve got to be honest, if it wasn’t for writing group members, The Raided Heart might still be in the proverbial desk drawer.
Back in the summer, I was having a total nightmare with the final draft. I was struggling to hit my word count targets, and angry at myself for that fact, given that I wasn’t even writing a new story; I was rewriting one, and for the third time at that. You’d think I would know what was going to happen next, to who, how, and when? Nope. Despite having a beautifully bullet-pointed synopsis, outlining in detail the entire plot, I just couldn’t find the words to bring any of it to the page. I was writing pieces here and there, at writing group, or on a Sunday afternoon, when I practically chained myself to my desk, but it was like wading through treacle, and I wasn’t enjoying it. Given that it had been with me for so long, this was anxiety-inducing, to say the least.
Bringing Richard III into things had helped with the plotting, and the words had flowed for a while, but now they had dried up again. Hence one miserable night at a local crime-reading event, where I ended up pouring my heart out to fellow writers Sarah and Penny. In hindsight, declaring that I was quitting writing for good may have been a tad melodramatic, but it’s honestly how I felt in that moment.
This is where being part of a circle of writers is so important. If I hadn’t been out that night, there’s a real chance I’d have been sat at my desk, hating the blank page, and deleting things rather than creating them. Instead, I was with good friends, who talked through everything which was bothering me, and came up with a genuinely helpful plan of action. Writing can be a solitary, if not downright lonely, activity, and having a solid group of people around you who know what you’re going through is so critical in my opinion.
And it’s not just to pull you through when you’re threatening to throw in the pen – it’s wonderful to have people who understand just what it means to you when you get shortlisted in a competition, have something accepted for publication, or (drum roll), you get yourself that magical Book Deal, and become a Published Author. Family and non-writing friends will be happy for you, yes, but only another writer can sometimes really ‘get’ just what you’ve been through to get to that point, and know what it means to have that success.
That’s the reason I love hosting North Tyneside Writers’ Circle, and attending Elementary Writers, as well as getting a week-long fix of it at Swanwick Writers’ School every summer. And it’s why I cannot wait to celebrate seeing ‘The Raided Heart‘ into the world with people who really understand that after twenty-odd years in the writing, it’s a magical feeling to hold that paperback, and see it going live on Amazon.
Meg Mathers, the headstrong youngest sibling of a reiving family on the English-Scottish border, is determined to remain at her childhood home, caring for the land and village she’s grown up with. When an accident brings her a broken ankle and six weeks in the resentful company of ambitious and angry young reiver Will Hetherington, attraction starts to build. Both begin to realise they might have met their match, and the love of their lives, but 15th century border living is not that simple, as Meg soon finds herself betrothed to the weakling son of a tyrannical neighbour, Alexander Gray. When tragedy strikes, can Meg and Will find their way back to each other, and can Will finally take his own personal revenge on Gray? ‘The Raided Heart‘ is the first of “The Historic Hearts”, a collection of historical romantic adventures set in Scotland and the North of England.
About Jennifer:
Jennifer C. Wilson has been stalking dead monarchs since childhood. At least now it usually results in a story, it isn’t considered (quite) as strange. Jennifer won North Tyneside Libraries’ Story Tyne short story competition in 2014 and, as well as working on her own writing, she is a founder and co-host of the award-winning North Tyneside Writers’ Circle and has been running writing workshops since 2015. Her debut novel, ‘Kindred Spirits: Tower of London‘ was published by Crooked Cat Books in 2015, with the fourth in the series, ‘Kindred Spirits: York‘, released in early 2019. Her timeslip romance ‘The Last Plantagenet?‘ is published through Ocelot Press, an authors’ collective formed in 2018.
You can find Jennifer on Twitter and Instagram.
Posted in Guest Post, Writing
Tagged Amazon, authors, award-winning, blog, book, book deal, Competition, crime reading, draft, Elementary Writers, family, libraries, novel, page, pen, plan, plot, plotting, publication, published, rewriting, story, Story Tyne, synopsis, word count, words, work in progress, workshops, writers, writing, writing group
Guest Post: Jennifer C Wilson on ‘The Last Plantagenet?’
Today, my friend Jennifer C Wilson joins us on the blog to talk about her first foray into self-publishing with her upcoming novella ‘The Last Plantagenet?‘ which is available to pre-order now.
Having the opportunity to edit this novella, I’ve had a sneak peak and I recommend that you seek it out immediately.
Hi Victoria, thanks for kindly asking me to visit your blog again today, for the launch of ‘The Last Plantagenet?‘, my new time-slip romance novella. As well as being my first foray into time-slip (and romance, for that matter), it’s also the first time I have self-published anything.
It’s been a nerve-racking experience, getting everything ready in time for my self-imposed publication date of 2nd October, to tie in with the birthday of my leading man, Richard III (obviously…). I’m really lucky to have had beautiful artwork, from Soqoqo Design, and of course your good self to review and edit the content, but I’ve still been having nightmarish visions of people opening the ebook on the morning, and finding blank pages, every other word missing: the usual frets!
But it’s still been fun, and definitely an experience I’m not afraid to repeat, if another idea strikes me.
‘The Last Plantagenet?‘ follows Kate, as she goes out for a relaxing day at a joust re-enactment at Nottingham Castle. All is well, until the rain starts. Here’s the opening scene, to whet your appetite…
2nd July 2011, Nottingham Castle
The fireplace hadn’t looked like a time-portal. Of all the things flying through Kate’s mind as she gazed around the chaos that was the medieval kitchen, that was the one that stood out.
It was meant to be just an ordinary Saturday. A blissful day, enjoying the pounding of hooves cantering around the grounds of Nottingham Castle. Kate had relaxed for once, watching a re-enactment of the Wars of the Roses, celebrating the town’s part in King Richard III’s fateful final few weeks, as he travelled to Leicester to meet Henry Tudor, and his fate at Bosworth. As an avid fan of the period, it was Kate’s perfect Saturday, watching the actors in their armour or fine costumes. She meandered between the stalls, ate her fill of food from the time, and absorbed the atmosphere, enjoying a break from the drudgery of real life. Now, full of roasted chicken and mulled wine, even in the middle of summer, Kate was casually forgetting the accounts she knew she had to settle when she returned to the office on Monday morning. So few of the re-enactments Kate had watched featured Richard III as the hero of their piece, and yet, here he was, taking centre stage, just where he belonged in Kate’s opinion. Too many documentaries, plays and other works cast him as an evil, power-grabbing, child-murdering maniac; today, he was just as she had always pictured him – a man doing his best, no worse than any other medieval monarch, who fell foul of Tudor propaganda. Kate had always supported the underdog, she thought as she wandered around the tents, and Richard was certainly that.
But then the rain started. A summer storm, Kate decided, ignoring the gathering clouds for as long as she could, but once the heavens opened, they refused to close, drenching everyone to the skin as they ran for cover. Ducking inside, Kate found herself standing in front of the former kitchen’s grand fireplace, flickering away with fake, LED flames, fake meat roasting on fake spits. A clap of thunder made Kate jump, causing her bag to slide off her shoulder and in amongst the ‘burning’ logs; she leant in to retrieve it, just at the moment the first bolt of lightning struck.
In a heartbeat, the world went black.
It’s been fun spending time with a version of Richard III who’s actually alive for a change, rather than a ghost. I’ll be having an online launch party on the evening of 2nd October to celebrate the release – visit my Facebook page for more details, and to get involved.
And now, it’s back to my ghosts, as I’m working on what I hope will at some point become the third Kindred Spirits novel, exploring the ghostly community of Westminster Abbey. With over three thousand people buried or commemorated in there, there’s a pretty large cast of characters to choose from!
Jennifer is a marine biologist by training, who spent much of her childhood stalking Mary, Queen of Scots (initially accidentally, but then with intention). She completed her BSc and MSc at the University of Hull, and has worked as a marine environmental consulting since graduating. Enrolling on an adult education workshop on her return to the north-east reignited Jennifer’s pastime of creative writing, and she has been filling notebooks ever since. In 2014, Jennifer won the Story Tyne short story competition, and also continues to develop her poetic voice, reading at a number of events, and with several pieces available online. She is also part of The Next Page, running workshops and other literary events in North Tyneside.
Jennifer’s debut novel, Kindred Spirits: Tower of London, was released by Crooked Cat Books in October 2015, with Kindred Spirits: Royal Mile following in June 2017. She can be found online at her website, on Twitter and Facebook, as well as at The Next Page’s website. Her time-slip historical romance, The Last Plantagenet? is available for pre-order, and on sale from 2nd October 2017.
Posted in Author, Blog Tour, Books
Tagged blog, Books, characters, Creative Writing, ebook, literary, novel, novella, pages, poetic, scene, self-published, short story, Story Tyne, word, workshops
More of Vic's work here...
'Blood from the Quill' by Elementary Writers
'Dangerous Driving' on Kindle
'Home Tomorrow' in paperback
'Home Tomorrow' on Kindle
'Letting Go' on Kindle
'Off The Record 2: At The Movies'
'Off the Record' on Kindle
'True Brit Grit' on Kindle
After Nyne
Download Elementary Writers' Thrills 'n' Chills Anthology
Listen to Vic's interview on Metro Radio
Part 11 of Diegesis Cycle
Read Victoria's award-winning story 'The Piano' here
The Northern Line
Vic appears on ArtyParti
Vic on The MYOB Show
Vic's Live Theatre blogs.
Vic's Proofreading Site
Vic's second appearance on The MYOB Show
Victoria interviewed on Writers & Artists.
Victoria's article in LIVErNEWS
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Azerbaijani Army will be guarantor of security in the region, says President Aliyev
"I want to say again – I have already spoken about this – we would have taken Lachin, Kalbajar and Agdam anyway. We had plans and we were consistently moving towards them. But everyone should know that Kalbajar and Lachin districts have a very difficult natural terrain," President Ilham Aliyev said in his address to nation.
"The road to Kalbajar district that existed in Soviet times passed through Aghdara district. In Soviet times, this district was called Mardakert and the Armenians lived there. There was no other road, one might say. Now we have entered Kalbajar from Goygol and Dashkasan districts. We could have suffered heavy losses, especially in winter, given the difficult terrain. We could have suffered great losses in liberating Aghdam, Lachin and Kalbajar districts. It would have taken a lot of time.
Therefore, our victory is a historic victory. We have liberated several districts from the enemy on the battlefield, returned three districts and forced the enemy, thus resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is gone. If someone thinks that this conflict is still exists, they are wrong. People living in Nagorno-Karabakh today are citizens of Azerbaijan. I want to say again that they will live better within a united Azerbaijani state. They will get rid of this poverty. Notice that we are currently building a railway from Barda to Agdam. The distance from Agdam to Khankandi is around 20-30 kilometers. How long will a trip from the capital of Armenia to Khankandi take – perhaps ten hours by truck. Moreover, this route lies through mountain roads. From Agdam to Khankandi, it will take half an hour.
This will precondition our future prospects. Therefore, we must be ready for this and build our strategy, take tactical steps so that there is no source of threat in this region any more. The Azerbaijani army is the guarantor of this, of course. If we look at the geography of this region, then everyone can see that Armenia today is connected with Nagorno-Karabakh by a corridor 5 kilometers wide," said the head of the state.
More about: #IlhamAliyev
Azerbaijan recognized as one of best countries in fight against COVID-19
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Eddie’s Blog
I write about stuff
Author: EddieB
I love to write. Thank you for taking the time to visit my site
The Real Invisible War
6th Jun 2020 9th Jun 2020 EddieB21 Comments
“They considered themselves free and no one will ever be free as long as there is plague, pestilence and famine”
– Albert Camus, The Plague
The paradox of safety;
A deconstruction of the “first wave” of the COVID-19 scam (see also Tyranny by numbers);
In society fear and consumption are the offspring of power. An analysis of human relations in the light of “the new normal”;
A dissection of the role of “the new normal” in the global economy, how and why it is being implemented;
Why in a technocratic system science, politics and money become the same;
A discussion of the constitutional validity of universally mandated medicine;
The nature of market economics in the light of “conspiracies” and “the new normal”;
The rise of the age of transhumanism;
The simple peaceful solution to reduce an unhealthy overreach of power
The paradox of safety
In many places the COVID-19 outbreak has been witness to the worst interference with personal liberty in history. Authority has either enforced a qualified house imprisonment, applicable, in principle, to the whole population; or it has imposed unprecedented restrictions on the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people. What has been particularly inexplicable about this is that whatever your position on COVID-19, this has, by historical standards, not been a serious pandemic.
As we established in Tyranny by numbers, the severity of the disease has been proportional to media hype and manufactured data. Indeed, the closer the country has been to the US, UK, EU power axis, the worse it has been affected. Global pandemics should touch populations equally, with perhaps seasonal differences, population density, healthcare infrastructure, and various other pertinent indices all having the effect of either reducing or aggravating spread and recovery rates. But the “first wave” of this virus has been discriminate of wealth and power far more than the standard of healthcare and population density. It has been targeting the richest nations with the most freedoms far more than poorest nations with the least freedoms, save for a few examples far away from the hub of western power, such as Iceland, which has scarcely been impacted at all.
The body politic in many nations has been so tyrannised by the disease that the people have been convinced to trade their freedoms for safety. Which begs the question, if safety is the number one consideration, why on earth are people paying any heed to the corporate state apparatus? It seems quite the leap of faith to presuppose its benign intent; to presuppose its honesty and competence. It also tragically ignores the paradox of safety and thus fails in its own aim.
The paradox here is that to earn something valuable one must risk not having it; to keep something valuable one must risk losing it. While an individual who shuns risk summons concomitant risks, a society that shuns risk is one that forfeits freedom. To do so invites a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence on the one hand, and the most prosaic form of human life on the other, in which every single object suggests a vast sum of qualified conditions. In such a world absolute control is universal, and therefore safety is conditional.
Even so, the modern imagination is now stooping to the misery of trying to abolish the danger of things by abolishing the things themselves. In order to preserve the enjoyment of parks and beaches, the logic has it, one must temporarily abolish the enjoyment of parks and beaches. This twisted logic is especially dear to authority because it is depressing.
The public are being encouraged to wear masks. It appears the modern imagination is craven enough to try and mitigate the danger of human interaction by circumscribing human interaction itself. This twisted logic is especially dear to authority because it is dehumanising.
Social distancing is an oxymoron – being social is the opposite of being distant. But the modern imagination yearns to keep people apart so that they can ultimately stay together. This twisted logic is especially dear to authority because it is anti-social.
The public’s disenfranchisement is especially dear to society because, being conditioned to live in fear, the people are paralysed by fear, and thus safety becomes the paragon of human aspiration. Once accustomed to living within small enclosures of self and mind, people welcome the transition to a sterilised space. It seems that the modern spirit wants to slowly snuff out life itself in order to preserve it. This is especially dear to authority because it is ugly, it is controlling, and it is misanthropic.
Governments have bound the public’s ability to walk freely into the future in the same manner men in certain cultures used to bind their women’s feet. In the public’s interest generational wealth has been squandered and stolen in a matter of months, increased overt state surveillance and control has been introduced and people have even been encouraged to “snitch” on lockdown rule-breakers. In Britain, a ritualistic nationwide clap for carers and the NHS cringe-fest has been observed every Thursday evening because hero-worshipping state institutions is not creepy at all. All of this has been especially dear to authority because it is Orwellian.
The British state propaganda arm, the BBC, epitomises the post-truth world so succinctly in a recent self-adulating fluff-piece. Having perhaps done more to promulgate dread, distortion and deceit than any other British entity, which has helped to wedge loved ones apart, many permanently, with people who did not even have the ‘virus’ being forced to die alone to combat the threat of the ‘virus’, the BBC describes its role as: “Bringing us closer”.
The east coast of Ireland. ‘Temporary’ measures or a little more permanent?
COVID-19 has ushered in these new norms, which have been enforced in many places by a police service doing its best impression of an occupying force. To keep people safe by stamping out their freedoms is one part of this “new normal”. Though these measures are ostensibly temporary, the “new normal” is in fact a catchphrase to help condition a new reality. It is of course a euphemism for permanence.
A new philosophy is most often a rebranding of some older vice. For instance, sophists will defend vanity and call it the liberty of the self. They will defend self-indulgence and call it personal truth. They will defend cowardice and call it considerate and safe. Similarly, it seems to me that the “the new normal” is simply the promotion of a much older normal. It is this: through fear and division the few will have dominion over the many.
One of life’s cruellest paradoxes is that the many are superior to the few yet appear always at their mercy. The good news is their subjugation does not exist in the material; it exists in the immaterial.
There are two illusions at play here. The first is that the government is in control. The truth is that the people are always in control, hence the elaborate ways in which their consent is engineered.
Take the easing of restrictions. In many places the restrictions were easing well before a formal state ruling because mass civil disobedience was effectively negating enforcement. On the back of this recalcitrance the state issues an order to slowly lift restrictions and thereby the illusion of state control is maintained. Had disorder in the UK continued to be isolated, I expect full lockdown would have continued in place for the planned 12 weeks, and even more damage would have been inflicted on the economy and public health.
The second illusion is that in a democracy the government is accountable to the people and is set up by and for the people. The truth is that the country and its government function like a company. It is answerable to the shareholders, all of whom are transnational entities, and will actively work against the interests of the nation and its people whenever there is conflict between those interests.
Take the imposition of restrictions. In a free society people must be trusted to behave in a sensible and responsible manner, otherwise it is not free. By definition. The prudent action, in the case of a slightly more severe seasonal flu (at worst) openly acknowledged many months ago, would be to make the public aware of the danger, particularly the elderly and immunocompromised, which appear the only demographic significantly touched by this outbreak, and allow people to use their own discretion. People will generally be circumspect when it comes to immediate precaution in matters of their own health.
The imprudent action, what we have in fact seen on an almost global scale, is for all arms of the body politic to work as one to distort and sensationalise the threat level. It has cultivated a kind of strange theatre of omnipotent fear, which has reduced minds to a primitive state of panic and confusion. The collapse of the economy, the violation of rights and freedoms, increased anxiety, and stress, all of which are disastrous for public well-being has been the harvest. The irony is not lost on most, but it is lost on those whose opinions are the symptoms of irrational impulse, position, or privilege.
This strange theatre of omnipotent fear, which characterises society generally – with the COVID-19 pandemic merely being the latest manifestation – is the product of our relationship with authority. Power is flaccid without control. Which is why in the secular age of industrial globalism, which has redefined the world through the lens of materialism, there has been a concerted effort to keep people on a hamster wheel of fear and consumption.
Power and control in the age of industrial globalism
In the past power was asserted through force and self-sanctification. Human relations were throughout of a divine order, and power placed itself at the terrestrial head of that divine order. In the modern world, however, in which rapid economic growth has been the direct result of the liberty of self, power is asserted through secular mechanisms of manipulation, namely science, technology and the state. We have essentially deified our appetites – the need for food, sex, status, shelter, comfort, security and so on – and the powerful simply tap into those appetites and use them against us.
“A change has come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer”
– Unkown American Journalist, 1927
Once machine technique was perfected it was necessary to transition from a needs-based economy to a desires-based economy. Because it is impossible to have economic growth in an era of mass production without also having mass consumption. These new economic modalities gave rise to the age of consumerism.
The apple never falls far from the tree. Everything depends on the surroundings and proceeds from those surroundings, and no person can be entirely independent of them. In the public arena, in which the multitude fights for position and vies for prestige, material wealth and comfort has therefore been both outwardly and tacitly preached as life’s main aim. People have in effect been turned into passive consumers whose function is to use goods and services in a system of planned obsolescence.
In a consumeristic culture the public are not necessarily sovereign, the public’s fears and desires are sovereign. The people themselves exercise little decision-making power. Because humans are primarily driven by instinctual or unconscious fears and desires, it is therefore possible to persuade people to behave irrationally if a product or an idea is linked to those unconscious fears and desires. Certainly, people generally buy products to feel good about themselves, often as an act of self-expression. It is self-evident, then, that in a system in which material possessions are being used as a palliative, choice is indissolubly connected with the unconscious.
In a system of planned obsolescence, if people are stimulated often, it follows as a corollary that their stimulation cannot be protracted beyond certain limits. Their attention span will not allow for it. Thus, a large proportion of the political economy is organically reduced to the lowest common denominator. But in the case of democracy itself, there are more contrived efforts to limit the average person’s democratic agency.
It has long been thought that an “excess of democracy” leads to a “crisis of democracy”. The central idea is that if the political system is overloaded with participants and demands it will become ungovernable and make a society dangerously unstable. To prevent this from happening ordinary people must be marginalised from a decision-making capacity. They simply can’t be trusted to make decisions on a rational basis for the greater good of society.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)
The dawn of this age of “consumptionism” witnessed an enormous amount of local and global political instability; primarily because, it was thought, mass groups were over stimulated. Political theorists in the 1920s like Walter Lippmann argued that an urgent re-think was needed for democracy. If human beings were driven by unconscious irrational forces, and not information, it was necessary for an enlightened elite to apply scientific management to tame what Lippmann called the “bewildered herd”.
The public, in Lippmann’s view, could pick from a pre-selected choice of elected officials, but that those officials would receive guidance from the technocrats, who would essentially manage public affairs by proxy.
In ‘The Public and its Problems’ written in 1927, John Dewey identified the main flaw in this model. He wrote: “The very ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability, which are alleged to incapacitate them from sharing in public affairs, unfit them still more for passive submission to rule by intellectuals”. Dewey’s insight correctly deduced that Lippmann’s analysis contained a hidden paradox. If the public were too incorrigibly backward and obtuse to take part in public affairs, then this backwardness would make them even more insubordinate to a ruling technocratic elite, however well-intentioned. It was necessary, therefore, that if these ideas were implemented, without inviting insurrection, the plutocrats would have to work behind the scenes with the experts.
This is essentially the model of democracy still in place today. At its core, democracy was about changing the relations of power which had governed the world for so long. The Chartists, the Suffragettes, various grassroot socialist movements had fought tirelessly to better working conditions and to liberate the ordinary man and woman from oppressive, antiquated systems of power. The elite eventually had to cede ground to mollify the mutinous swell. But universal suffrage ultimately resulted in the dilution of democracy.
It demoted it from something which presumes aparticipative civic duty, to something that resembles more of a product to be consumed. A kind of placebo, if you will. The democratic system will give the illusion of responding to a complaint or yearning but will not really change the objective circumstances at all. Indeed, we even have a disparaging term for an elected official or policy uncouth enough to treat democracy as a non-placebo: “populist”.
For democracy to be a turned into feel-good medicine is, I suppose, a foreseeable consequence of a consumeristic culture, in which people have grown so accustomed to depending on the guidance of others, they are happy to have everything chewed up for them first before they swallow.
Every election campaign evinces as such. The balloons, bunting, cheap sloganeering, repetitive mantras, create an atmosphere of childishness, which has the effect of removing the public from the arena of meaningful democratic action. With the public’s role as passive consumers, plutocrats understand that if you can stimulate their irrational impulses, in the manner of big business, it is possible to steer a majority in the desired direction.
In the lives of most people, it must be said, the ratio between the irrational and the rational is very much in favour of the irrational. They are liable to clothe feelings in erroneous ideas. What is true of the individual is even more true of groups, which are distinctly more volatile and malleable. In a nutshell, leadership manipulates and manages those feelings and clothes them in the correct ideas.
”The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country”
– Edward Bernays, Propaganda
Persuasion and conditioning, rather than physical coercion, has up until now been sufficient to exert control over a society. Those with means have essentially reduced those without into emotional puppets. They manipulate them by stimulating desires and fears. We should add that this method of population control has been more pressing in an age of industrial globalism where contractual obligation is prized high above a sense of abstract fidelity to national sovereignty. When nationhood itself has become a dirty word, it becomes necessary to entice the public toward hidden objectives, by inciting their emotions, rather than to demand allegiance on patriotic grounds.
There may in fact be particularly good reasons for a stated policy but to explain it rationally to the public would cause insurmountable difficulties. Because they are not rational – those who stand to lose everything from said policy will be even less rational. So, it is necessary to excite their inner fears and manipulate them in the interests of a higher truth. Edward Bernays, the founding father of public relations – a euphemism for propaganda – called it the “engineering of consent”.
To uncover that which is intended to remain hidden will always involve a certain amount of conjecture. But we can say that in a world of finite resources the “consumptionism” that has been the order of things in the west and elsewhere for the last century cannot realistically continue. The lockdown, which has purportedly been triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, is in fact coloured by the same brush as the fallacious fears aroused over climate change. It is to impede the western and global economy to bring it in line with a more sustainable future – a controlled demolition of its productive capacities.
This requires more state interference and the destruction of the middle-class. The “second wave” of the pandemic – which sounds like more of a threat than a warning – will be another step in the ongoing process of centralisation, increased global integration and authoritarianism.
The dominant ideas are the ruling ideas
It is only natural that the system we are in has left a profound impress upon our thoughts and opinions. When a story is fabricated, one which goes on to dominate social discourse, such as WMDs in Iraq, many of us assume that it can’t be ideologically framed because we wrongly believe that our mass media is independent and objective and would filter out fact from fiction. In this sense, a story’s monotonous dispersion confirms its authenticity. The exact reverse, of course, is true. Consider the ultimate source.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) wrote that capitalism was pregnant with communism
Marx also wrote that the dominant ideas are always the ruling ideas. The more dominant a theme, therefore, by implication, the more likely it will be a falsehood because it will derive from the source which has the most to gain and the most to lose. These ideas will also be ostensibly in service of the highest good: the preservation of state and the social order. But since the truth is often anathema to the preservation of that social order, and since the state is nothing more than a consortium of vested interests which direct the resources of government, actions and the ideas behind them will usually be performed in service of power and ambition, not in service of the truth and the people.
The problem here is that if the truth does not act as a brake to power, what will? The Roman poet Juvenal put it best: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who will guard the guards themselves?). Hence why a commitment to the truth is perhaps the most important value in any free society. In fact, we could go further and insist that Truth is oxygen to Freedom’s lungs. When the general atmosphere is so starved of air or is an airless vacuum, freedom must suffer. Dictatorships can only emerge and be sustained once the truth and the people have been sidestepped so ingeniously.
A people committed to freedom must be committed to truth. But “the new normal”, of which so much has already been written, most of it in the bland, lifeless style of the new normal itself, is evidently not a commitment to truth, it is a commitment to social order. It is a means to turn the whole of human existence into a crisis that demands state intervention. In such a world, it must be said, the truth will be an unwelcome intrusion. It already is.
There’s more chance of dying from a bolt of lightning
If we are to take our lessons from history, we would observe that control over human behaviour is never, on the face of it, introduced with totalitarian intention. Each new step in the assertion of control is invariably taken as a rational response to a pressing need. As Aesop put it, “a tyrant will always find a pretext for their tyranny”. Those that lived under dictatorship know this only too well, though many others would have certainly internalised these pressing needs to have been quite unconscious of the manipulation. This unthinking obedience, if not essential, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.
It is certainly curious, considering the rich history of political manipulation across all societies, that when you openly question the truth of claims it will invariably attract venom and condemnation. Even a moderate position will do so. One that, say, questions the continuance of a lockdown in the light of new information from the Centers of Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC), which estimates the COVID-19 fatality rate to be 0.4% for symptomatic people. This means the true lethality rate is 0.26% because it believes 35% of cases will be asymptomatic.
As one commentator pointed out, given that these numbers are inflated by care home deaths, which account for about half of all deaths in most western countries, that would mean the fatality rate for the rest of the population would be under 0.1%. Though this of course includes people of all ages and all health statuses. Since nearly all deaths are accompanied by comorbidities, the chances of a person in good health dying are therefore extremely slim. Remember, the above figures are also predicated on contracting the virus. It is thought that anywhere between 40-70% of the world’s population may do so. When you factor the chances of contracting the virus with the chances of dying of the virus, a study from Canada found that COVID-19’s individual rate of death for people under 65 is 6 per million, or 0.0006%, or 1 in 166,000. There is much a greater chance of dying from a road traffic accident (1 in 14,053); there is a much greater chance of a young person with no underlying health conditions dying from a lightning strike (1 in 1,107,143).
Detractors will rightly point out that Canada has been on lockdown and that will purportedly reduce spread and case mortality; but as we saw in Tyranny by numbers, countries that haven’t been on lockdown, such as Sweden, are reporting lower mortality rates per capita than countries that have. And how is the CDC’s fatality rate of under 0.1% for those infected, when adjusted for non-care home members of the community, something that justifies such draconian measures if the point of the exercise is to protect public health?
The rigid nature of social hierarchies
Is the mainstream media reflecting this information or is it propagating senseless fear? Fear has the effect of anesthetising portions of one’s brain. So, while those who question the legitimacy of a lockdown which has already caused incalculable damage to public health are often ridiculed, the rest of society, like soldiers answering the drill instructor, appear to group themselves automatically into regimented formation. But one must always be on guard to not be one of a number, especially at times of acute insanity. Something that unfortunately seems antithetical to human instinct.
All humans are endowed with the propensity of bolstering their postulates with the beliefs of those around them, with the presumptions of the immediate surroundings, and whatever the distance one may remain from any presumption, moral or social, one is partly influenced by them and will even adapt their life to them. Psychologists and social anthropologists call this process ‘socialisation’. This predilection to presumption and conformity is the glue in social cohesion but the enemy to truth and reason.
We can also note that only those who accept or tacitly accede to the prevailing illusions can survive in a demanding workplace. Opposing views invariably find little traction, while a failure to conform to the standard practices and attitudes results in eviction by the typical mechanisms.
When the whole of society presents itself as a hierarchy, with a top to bottom chain of command, the multitude existing at the lower levels of that chain of command, one can see how a society can be steered in certain directions. For instance, since most mass media outlets are owned by a handful of mega-corporations, it’s very easy for those at the top of that command-chain to saturate the airwaves with a specific message. Certainly, the uniformity and synchronicity we are witnessing is typically not a symptom of objectivity, but of hierarchical order.
The problem with centralisation is that it can create opacity as to who are making the decisions and the rationale behind them, and it can make the whole of human civilisation subject to the goodwill of a very few people. In the next article, The Common Enemy of Man (which will be published later in June), I will explore in further detail the origins of global centralisation and the forces behind it. The purpose of the present discussion has been to demonstrate that the lockdowns have not been put in place to mitigate the effects of a deadly virus, but for other reasons, the contraction of the global economy being an obvious starting point.
Aldous Huxley was right. But he was beaten to it
First Edition, 1931
The two great novels of the 20th century in the English language that depicted a dystopian future were Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, respectively. One presents a totalitarian society which has attained total subversion of the individual’s psychology and physiology, the other a totalitarian society ruled by censorship and violence. Upon publication of 1984, Orwell sent a copy of the book to Huxley, who, as chance would have it, was his former French teacher at Eton. Huxley wrote back to him. He praised his book as being “profoundly important”, but added:
“Whether in actual fact the policy of boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World……Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. This change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency”
This vision of a futuristic technocratic rule aligns closely with the writings of influential political theorist and social commentator, Walter Lippmann, who, we recall, advocated for an enlightened elite to apply scientific management to tame the “bewildered herd” a decade before the publication of Huxley’s dystopian classic.
This scientific management has extended to arousing desires and fears by stimulating the public’s irrational impulses, such as the deliberate exaggeration of threat levels, whether they be those posed by a foreign dictator or COVID-19. By ramping up fear, or in some cases even inventing a story, you can convince a populace to support a policy in spirit, the underlying reasons for which has nothing to do with those stated.
Brave New World was published in 1931, but in the 1920’s a new template of how to run a society was already beginning to emerge. At its core was the all-consuming self, the promotion of which was not only necessary for economic expansion in an era of mass production, it also stimulated the populace, and made it docile, so created a stable society. President Hoover, in a speech in 1928 to a group representing the nascent Public Relations industry, stating: “You have taken over the job of creating desire. And have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines that have become the key to economic progress”.
But when the goal is to contract and not expand the economy, in an era of “sustainable development”, this century old vision of population control, modelled around the all-consuming self, is clearly no longer viable. “The new normal”, therefore, is one modelled around sustainability and a kind of oligarchical collectivism, in which the all-consuming self is constricted and subordinate to the greater interests of the collective.
A world where science, politics and money become the same
Hitherto the freedom enjoyed in the west and many other parts of the world has been contingent on economic freedom. Because the freedom to make money entails the freedom to spend it. As we know, before the 1800s the dominant economic order was feudalism, a world in which individual freedoms were curtailed in line with a divine order and hereditary entitlement. It saw little to no economic growth. Life was “nasty, brutish and short”.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. This will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change…..It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation”
– Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2015
Climate change is in fact as pertinent to the discussion of “the new normal” as COVID-19. Because both are fuel in the engine to a reach a new “sustainable” economy, and not important in and of themselves. For instance, according to the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy (you can download it here), the Chinese economy, which is heavily reliant on coal-fired power, as of 2017, emits more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU block combined (about 9.428 billion metric tons to 9.394 billion metric tons [page 59 of the report]). While the US has decreased annual carbon emissions by nearly 800 million tons over the last decade, and the EU block by 681 million tons, Chinese emissions continue to soar by a 235 million ton increase per year. The Chinese primary energy consumption (commercially traded fuels, including renewables) per capita is 96.9 gigajoules (page 14), by way of contrast in the UK it is 120.9 gigajoules. But because the Chinese economy is a lot more dependent on fossil fuels, this means the carbon emissions per capita in China is higher than it is in the UK. As of 2018, the UK produces about 5.88 tons of carbon emissions per capita and China, 6.73 tons. That’s about 14.5% more emissions per person every year.
President Obama and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon shake hands as the US formally joins the Paris Climate Agreement during a climate event at Westlake State House in Hangzhou, China, September 3, 2016
It’s certainly very curious that in a world apparently on the brink of climatic and ecological collapse the world’s worst carbon emissions abuser can continue to increase emissions with global bodies seemingly doing very little to intervene. Indeed, the Paris Agreement of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed by 189 countries in 2016 places much stricter measures on the US and Europe than China. The former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, Christina Figueres, from whom the quote is taken above, said in 2014 that China was “doing it right” while stating that the U.S. Congress was “very detrimental” in the fight against global warming.
Again, my next article, ‘The Common Enemy of Man’ will delve deeper into global centralisation and the reasons for these palpable inconsistencies in global policy. Many argue that China has infiltrated these institutions and is engaged in an economic attack on the west, creating, through climate policy, a climate of unfair competitive advantage. This is of course nonsense. The reasons why the UNFCCC and huge combinations of transnational capital place stricter controls on the West is because China already has a system of oligarchical collectivism. In other words, it already has “the new normal”.
In reasoning one must not place the cart before the horse. This is important to understand: climate change and COVID-19 are pretexts for sustainable development and “the new normal”, sustainable development and “the new normal” are not a response to climate change and COVID-19.
A technocracy is a system of governance in which decision-makers are selected on the basis of their perceived expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge, and who select other decision-makers on the basis of their perceived expertise. There is surely no better example of a technocracy than unelected people sitting atop global command-chains. There surely is no better example of a technocrat than somebody who has no qualifications in the related field but who has the power to advocate for, say, a mandated global medicine because he monopolises global medicine – we know them as professional philanthropists. A technocracy is essentially a world in which science and politics and money assimilate into one. Which is in fact tacitly implied by the term“technocratic”.
So, in a technocracy whatever the 0.1% wants is what the politicians and the politically approved scientists and medics say we must do.
“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by the elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities”
– Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security advisor to President Carter. (Between Two Ages. America’s Role in the New Technetronic Era)
The problem with collectivism, and what so many seem to forget, is that Civilisation was developed for Humans and not Humans for Civilisation
It appears there is a number among us who want to create a society in which every movement is controlled with the regularity of clockwork. But “the new normal” is such a sterilised vision of life, it’s as if living creatures will be required to become like a machine; and now, as though the corner of our clothing has got caught in the flywheel of that machine, we are beginning to be drawn toward that vision.
Clockwork order is only acquired with a great deal of effort; it doesn’t just magically fall into place. You can’t radically transform society and have a completely new economy, with new forms of food, power, construction and transportation, without having a police state already in place. Order on this magnitude wears a uniform and a pair of boots. As we can already observe in China.
The harmonious individual, it needs to be said, hardly exists at all; a regimentally harmonious society, therefore, if it can exist, will only be oppressive. It will suffocate learning, development, thought, invention, ambition, reason, excellence, and every field you can think of. In short, it will suffocate the human experience itself. Destiny will be plucked from the soul, depersonalized, remodeled, and then enumerated on some spreadsheet.
Every human being is infinitely precious. They are not things to be catalogued, recorded, and chipped. They are not numbers on a graph. They are not just a random assortment of atoms to be corralled into medicinal concentration camps in which all meaningful choices in their life will be mandated.
If you have goals, and you want to convince others of their merits, there must be good reasons to implement them
“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible”
– Bertrand Russell, ‘The Impact of Science on Society’, 1952, p 49-50
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals designed to be a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”. The SDGs, published in 2015 in UN Resolution 70/1, are part of UN’s Agenda 21 program, which was re-labelled UN Agenda 2030 in the same year as the aim is to have the foundation of these sustainable development goals in place by 2030. The SDGs include 1. No Poverty. 2. Zero Hunger. 5. Gender Equality. 12. Responsible Consumption and Production. 13. Climate Action.
This is how these goals are being sold to the public, but it should be stressed that the ultimate destination, by definition, is always different to the route taken to get there. Moreover, the 17 SDGs is also a classic case of public relations. We have all these problems, which are universally considered to blight the human species, and global governance implementing the right changes can provide the solutions to these problems. Likewise, we have a terrible virus which is apparently ravaging through the global population on the one hand, but on the other, we have “One World: Together at Home”, and as “global citizens” we can get through these hard times and build a better and brighter future for all. If it has the framework of a classic marketing campaign, it’s because it is a marketing campaign.
Another important component of UN’s Agenda 2030 is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030). The WHO is a branch of the UN and this initiative, which is funded by all the usual titans of banking and industry, is a “new global vision” “to extend the benefits of vaccines to everyone, everywhere” and is a “strategy to address these challenges over the next decade”, pledging to “leave no one behind”. Immunization is considered to play a key role in achieving the SDGs. So much so, IA2030 literature states that its initiative is linked to 14 of the 17 SDGs.
This pledge to “leave no one behind” should be considered in the light of recent arguments that things will “still not be fully back to normal…until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally”. This extreme proposal has been made in response to a virus the CDC has implicitly acknowledged kills well under 0.1% of those non care home infected citizens. It should also be noted that vaccines typically take around 15-20 years to develop, but a future COVID-19 vaccine will have to be fast-tracked in potentially “12-18 months”. Which will mean “there will have to be some risk and indemnification needed” for the developers in the case of vaccine injury. The COVID-19 vaccine, I must add, will include nano technology, and will be an experimental vaccine never used in humans on a mass scale.
We can say with confidence that for IA2030 2021-2030 to achieve its ambitious goals of universally mandated vaccines which leaves “no one behind” there would have to be compelling reasons for the “compelling arguments of the value of vaccines” to be propounded. So, to implement this “new global vision” by 2030, if presently a deadly and infectious virus did not exist, it would be necessary to invent one. Similarly, to implement UN Agenda 2030 and its attending 17 SDGs there would have to be compelling reasons for the value of sustainable development and increased integration under the auspices of global institutions. So, if presently the world was not on the brink of climatic and ecological disaster, it would be necessary to invent reasons why it is.
As we have already touched upon, in our hybrid market system, the producers, which are few and highly organised, attempt to stimulate the emotional response of the consumers, which are innumerable and scattered. In fact, when you really think about it, society itself is just a protracted advertisement. The SDGs, IA2030, everything that comes out of the UN is precisely this: an advert. Of course, that means the pandemic is also an advert for “the new normal”, which will apparently include universally mandated medicine.
The legal validity of mandatory vaccination
How this fast-tracked universally mandated medicine will be achieved in practice given the Nuremberg Code, which protects the individual from bodily intrusion, and, say, the US Constitution, remains to be seen. In the context of the latter, this paper from the American Journal of Public Health via the National Institutes of Health explores questions about the legality of the federal government forcibly administering a mass vaccination. In Jacobson v Massachusetts 1905 the US Supreme Court upheld the local health board’s authority to require vaccination against smallpox during a smallpox epidemic. This was after the claimant challenged the state’s authority to place mandatory restrictions on personal liberty for public health purposes. What would be constitutionally permissible today?
“A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an epidemic of a lethal disease, with refusal punishable by a monetary penalty, like the one at issue in Jacobson, would undoubtedly be found constitutional under the low constitutional test of “rationality review”
With the Johnson case as precedent, If it can be demonstrated that there is an epidemic of a lethal disease, and if the vaccine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it would not be unconstitutional for the federal government to impose a compulsory vaccination program with “physical restraints and unreasonable penalties for refusal”, unless people can show “contraindications to the vaccine” (reasonable grounds for exemption).
The government can’t legally force compulsory vaccination, but it can suspend personal liberties, such as impose a full or partial quarantine on those who are recalcitrant, if it is considered that the severity of the epidemic warrants it. It can make participation in society very difficult without compliance. And the same will probably be true elsewhere. As we know, before this ‘pandemic’ many countries and states in the US were already fast-tracking involuntary vaccine mandates for school-age children. Such as in California, where children can’t enlist in state schooling without producing a certificate proving immunization. Matt Hancock, the UK Health Secretary, said in September 2019 that the UK government was “looking very seriously” at doing the same.
In the jaws of the coronavirus scare there may well be an appetite for involuntary vaccine mandates to become the norm for children and adults; with “digital certificates”, according to one professional philanthropist, “to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it” (7th answer on the thread). As chance would have it, the ID2020 Alliance, largely funded by the same professional philanthropist, and working in partnership with the UN, has been inaugurated just in time to meet these challenges.
“We live in a digital era. Individuals need a trusted, verifiable way to prove who they are, both in the physical world and online”
– The ID2020 Alliance Manifesto, point 2
Market economics versus Pavlov’s dog
I’m aware that I have and will no doubt continue to attract aspersions of being a “conspiracy theorist”. Aspersions that ring out from lips in the manner of Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell. Quite aside from the fact that this a classic logical fallacy – an argument from false analogy – the conflation of disparate topics under one all-encompassing crackpot umbrella, and that conspiracies are merely two or more people colluding together for personal gain at the expense of others (in my mind, a fitting partial definition of private enterprise); it feels incumbent on me, before we proceed, to talk about the market system, so important to our way of life and the controls placed upon us, many of which voluntarily imposed, in the light of these“conspiracies”:
In the classic barter both parties lie; each pretends to be telling the truth and makes the effort to persuade the other they are telling the truth. Watching the ignoble process, we see that neither ends up being sure how far their own lies are being accepted. Nor are they sure what part of the other’s lies conceal a modicum of truth, because the best lies are always superficially packaged in truth.
In the process of industrial evolution, there have developed so many complexities to this simple process. As soon as we came to the point where we started exchanging a universal currency for goods and services the balance of power shifted to the Seller. They came to specialise in the selling of one thing; and the more complex the society, the more products the Buyer must buy, therefore they remain a novice to each. Moreover, the Sellers grow in power and learn to combine: they form partnerships, companies, firms, alliances, global bureaucratic institutions; they donate to associations and non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to protect their interests; they pour money into Research and Development to advance said interests in some future market; they avoid taxes by pouring money into science and charities, which become dependent on that funding, and which also open up future markets; they establish front organisations to protect the interests of the Buyers; and in advanced industrial societies there is also the emergence of professional philanthropists who act as front men for the Sellers – these people can batten on to the public purse and bend all they touch to their own interest, to such a degree that they can bring the entire cause they ostensibly support into disrepute.
The object of shell companies is to obscure tax liabilities. Equally, a plethora of proxy organisations enables the Sellers to obscure the fact that governmental policies are being influenced by the same corporate behemoths which have funded entire networks of charities and NGOs to interact with government and its institutions. NGOs and charities are considered more benevolent and less corrupt than their sponsors, and the media presents them as such, even when a cursory look at their staff and finances evinces a total financial dependence to the corporate sponsors they campaign on behalf of.
The Buyers, meanwhile, remain disorganised and isolated and helpless. They’re completely surrounded by huge fortresses of lies mingled with truth which have been built up over time. They don’t fund any of the research, and they’re not privy to the development of products they’re cajoled and coerced into having. They don’t even know the components and ingredients that make up each product. But despite these stark inequalities in the trading process, we have many disparaging terms for when a Buyer, so brazen as to break from the flock, asks more probing and critical questions of the Seller. One such term being: Anti-vaxxer!
Human society is in the image of Influence; therefore, it is in the image of the Seller.
There are generally several phases to a marketing campaign, so if “the new normal” were a product it would certainly have a soft launch and a hard launch and possibly even a beta launch, as would the developing vaccine. If the “first wave” and the lockdowns were, say, a beta launch or a hard launch, what would be the soft launch? A soft launch is when a business gradually introduces a new product to market to test for weaknesses. It generates little to no buzz, and its purpose is to prepare in advance the hard launch for maximum effect. The soft launch was of course the now infamous, Event 201.
In an honest and sane world, it would certainly be of note if it were discovered that a group in society funded a simulation for a coronavirus pandemic a month before patient zero in a real coronavirus pandemic. Held in New York City on October 18th, 2019, ‘Event 201’ was a multi-million-dollar coronavirus pandemic exercise which brought together the leading figures from the banking, pharmaceutical and media industries.
Now, if the global economy was someone called Mrs Brown and a novel coronavirus was the instrument of death, an honest investigation would certainly investigate the beneficiaries of her estate if it transpired that they planned her demise in mirror detail weeks before. This goes without saying. But unfortunately, we don’t live in an honest and sane world. Apparently, while there’s zero tolerance of petty crime, inveterate corruption in banking and big business is allowed to continue with impunity.
Event 201 was funded and dominated by the banking and pharmaceutical industries, and perhaps this is why the simulation of a global health crisis, which you can watch in full on YouTube, was almost exclusively focused on finance, the need to increase centralisation and global integration, and the importance of controlling media and communications, which included “trusted voices” and leaders “within the community”; to “flood the zone” with the“narrative”, it being “central to the co-ordinated response”.
Hours into this exercise a truly extraordinary exchange took place. Brad Connet of Henry Schein took the floor and said: “In 1918 16 million people died [the influenza outbreak is actually thought to have killed between 17 and 50 million]. That was more than the two great wars. And one of the impending results was a massive shortage of physicians, care providers. I don’t see that on the list….. The shortage of physicians is looming anyway in the United States. That’s something that should be considered in this”.
In this multi-million-dollar pandemic tabletop exercise hosted by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, an exercise which included experts in disaster planning, it seems none of them thought about physician and care provider shortages. It was an afterthought several hours into the simulation.
Please, if we brought together the leaders of the catering and event planning industries to simulate a multi-million-dollar banqueting extraordinaire, would it be credible if hours into the exercise someone said: “Uh, have we thought about the cooking? Will we have enough chefs after the first course?”. Ask yourself, was healthcare the primary concern?
“At the end of Event 201, a coronavirus pandemic simulation which killed 65 million, participants were given these cuddly coronavirus toys”
The timing of Event 201 so close to a real coronavirus pandemic was obviously just a coincidence. As it is obviously just a coincidence that the timing of the coronavirus pandemic fits in with the global policy targets already mentioned, such as the 17 SDGs, of which 14 can be linked to the global Immunization Agenda. Incidentally, the Event 201 logo, as seen above, was redolent of the Earth Summit’s Agenda 21, the former name of Agenda 2030, the UN action plan under which the SDGs fall.
Rocinante has lost his Don Quixote
The SDGs – the soft sell of “the new normal” – are, I suppose, the product of the age of rationalism, one which vainly attempts to codify and control and carry everything under the sun, apparently for the betterment of mankind, but then neglects to take mankind along for the ride.
Even if we were to make the cardinal of errors and take them at face value, in a world in which everything appears as it is not, they are insanely logical, whereas humans are sanely illogical. We are wayward; impulsive. We are Don Quixote in search of a windmill, not a fenced in horse at the trough. To attempt to reduce everything to a mathematical brickwork and shape and fit the human soul inside the rooms and corridors of that asylum is a recipe for misery; it is a recipe for exploitation.
In fact, it is this image of materialism, which is ironically the product of the age of rationalism, that we are just some temporary coalescing of atomic particles which have randomly complexified but soon those atoms will disperse and become nothing more than plant fertiliser, that is the optimum mindset needed for exploitation to work guilt-free.
Furthermore, this priggish allegiance to social order will completely rub away the romance of life. Because individual liberty, which unfortunately seems to be a value and not an instinct, will be contracted in proportion to the sustainability envisioned. Ultimately, it will require the fashioning of a new kind of human, at least in the west and elsewhere, because the human soul is not obedient to the laws of mechanics. And the engineering of bug people – easily led and easily crushed – in a regimented system of collectivism, requires the human soul to be obedient to the laws of mechanics.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
“There are today people who are still actually anti-science. A whole movement called the anti-vaxxers. Who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox, and who by their prejudices are actually endangering the every children they want to protect. I totally reject this anti-scientific pessimism. I’m profoundly optimistic about the ability of new technology to serve as a liberator and to remake the world wondrously and benignly….Nano technology is revolutionising medicine by designing robots a fraction of the size of a red blood cell, capable of swimming through our bodies, dispensing medicine and attacking malignant cells like some Star Wars armada”
– Boris Johnson, speech at the UN, 25th September, 2019
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is said to be characterised by a range of new technologies that are “fusing the digital, physical and biological worlds”, and “challenging ideas about what it means to be human”. As an introduction to the topic, the World Economic Forum’s 2016 effort: What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution? offers an overview. The same billionaires at Davos that brought you ‘Event 201’ have commissioned a short film in which it is stated at the outset: “The very idea of human being some sort of natural concept is really going to change”. And “Our bodies will be so high tech we won’t be able to really distinguish between what’s natural and what’s artificial”. The film offers a glimpse into the near future of human biology being integrated into digital technology.
A brief recap. In the feudal world power was asserted through force and self-sanctification. Human relations were throughout of a divine order, and power placed itself at the terrestrial head of that divine order. It spoke on behalf of God. Because God’s word was beyond reproach, so intelligent rulers exercised their power in the name of God.
Post Enlightenment, as humans gained full control over their environment, it was necessary in a competitive world to liberate the self from prior constraints. Power is asserted through secular mechanisms of manipulation, namely science, technology, and the state. Appetites are deified and power taps into them and uses them against us. Science and democracy speak on behalf of power. Because when the word of science and democracy is beyond reproach, intelligent rulers exercise their power in the name of science and democracy.
In the feudal world power was visible, in the modern world it is largely invisible. In the past the Serfs suffered from the pride of Kings. Today those same Serfs suffer from the anonymity of Tyrants. Who are happy to trade the appearance of power for the reality of power. Whenever there is a public backlash to a policy the politicians and technocrats take the brunt of the flak, and will be replaced to appease the masses, leaving the institution and those who actually direct its power unharmed.
Both these systems of population control are built around controlling perception.
But in an uncompetitive world where power has spread over the entire globe, and has merely left the shell of the various forms of nationhood intact (more on this in the Common Enemy of Man), and where advances in technology allow for it, it is more efficient to not only commoditize the human being, but thought itself.
As we recall, Huxley wrote to Orwell after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He said that “the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience”. That a boot-on-the-face society was “destined to modulate” into one in which dissent becomes physiologically and psychologically impossible as the result of a need for “increased efficiency”. As a side note, Huxley’s brother, Julian, was a forerunner of the global technocratic movement in the 1920s.
Question: What is the only thing power wants and doesn’t have? Answer: More power. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is an upgrade of power relations in society along the lines presaged by the works of Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and many early technocrats of the first half of the 20th century. It is a world of transhumanism. A world where people love their servitude and love to stay safe:
“Up until know the conversation we’ve been having is around freedom of speech. Once we can (my emphasis) access people’s thoughts and access people’s emotion…we have to create a space that enables people to think freely, to think divergent thoughts, to think creative thoughts. And in a society where people fear having those thoughts, the likelihood of being able to enjoy progress is significantly diminished”
– excerpt from the World Economic Forum’s, ‘What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?’
There seems every intention to make President Hoover’s “constantly moving happiness machines” literal.
In the age of consumption plutocrats understand that if you can stimulate the public’s irrational impulses, in the manner of big business, it is possible to steer a majority in the desired direction. They understand that if you can trigger desires and fears of target groups their frustrated need for power or need for security can be redirected and controlled within definable boundaries.
These have been the most stable methods of population control in the world of industrial globalism – fear and distraction and division. Of course, most people bolster their postulates from the presumptions of the immediate environment, digesting them with no more conscious thought than the digestion of his or her food, so have absolutely no awareness of the manipulation. That they are in fact unwitting participants in what is essentially a reality tv show. Indeed, the media says jump. And the public say How high? It is mere emotional puppetry.
In the future this form of population control will no longer be necessary. Because it is inefficient. People will come to love their masters and will “enjoy progress”. The infrastructure for this future is being put up as you read this, on the ground and from above: “Smart cities will pullulate with censors all joined together by the IoT” (Internet of things) and there will be “nowhere to hide” (Excerpts taken from the same Boris Johnson speech referenced above). Every inch of the globe is going to be blanketed with this technological control grid.
Agenda 2030 and the SDGs plan to move people into cities – for increased efficiency – with a centralised global bureaucracy having total control over the food, water and energy supplies. The transnational power that controls these forests of global bureaucratic institutions (more on what that is in the Common Enemy of Man) ultimately intends to completely colonise geographical and human resources with no possibility of resistance. This is, I’m afraid, “the new normal”.
Just think about what is happening. The asymptomatic neighbor has suddenly been turned into a walking assassin. Those who don’t comply with governmental mandate are perceived to be threatening other people’s health. Human interaction is being circumscribed by social distancing and by the compulsory wearing of masks. And track and trace programs are not only gathering DNA at an unprecedented rate, but will restrict people’s movements in accordance with stopping the spread of a virus which is a lot less likely to kill a young healthy person than a bolt of lightning. All of this is dividing and dehumanising and controlling.
It is also illogical because stopping the spread of the virus is not the agenda. The agenda is to remodel human behaviour along the lines of Agenda 2030 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is merely one grooming phase. Its purpose is to inculcate new norms – for example, technology being a safer medium for social interaction – with the end destination being transhumanism.
Look around and you will see that this grooming phase has been in the works for some time. Young people absorbed by their phones, living their life through their social media accounts, addicted to the little “pseudo-dings of pleasure” of social credits.
The trans movement has also taken off largely because it is necessary to introduce the notion of malleability of gender and the fusion of the sexes in a new era of androgynous automata. This has come about from the conflation of gender – etymologically, gender derives from the Latin genus meaning classification, kind, or sort (as in general or generalise) – with sex. So, the postmodernists have bequeathed us the mental gymnastics of having dozens of different genders, which are all pliant to personal caprice, but only two options in a permanent sex change surgery. Of course, it is silly. The trans movement could be respected without this conflation of gender with sex. But the UN still feels it necessary to ban all gendered language in relation to sex at a time of a global health ‘crisis’ because the agenda is to make people confused, sexless, sterile.
Wherever you stand on these developments – and I’m sure not everyone will concur with my sentiments – we can all appreciate the challenges ahead that lie in wait. The COVID-19 pandemic is evidently a contrived piece of theatre, the sustainable development goals cannot be reached without a massive winding in of human economic freedom, and technological advances pose a huge threat to the integrity of the human being, the future of the human race. Not that you would ever see that expressed. With the news being completely awash with COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, climate change.
This is what illusionists do. They divert your attention, then perform the secret of the trick when your gaze was averted.
With the yet to be developed vaccine containing nano technology, round-the-clock surveillance, and, for example, new cryptocurrency patents based on brain activity, we are living at a time when we could easily be overtaken by technology and be at the mercy of an unscrupulous power which will always be ready to take advantage. We only need to take our lessons from history to establish that maxim – what comes after is always in affinity with what went before.
Global depopulation has been on lips for some time. On a planet with finite resources exponential population growth and increasing consumption is undoubtedly a big issue. Thanks to rapidly advancing technology and Artificial Intelligence, in a world of automation a few can maintain their luxurious lifestyles without drawing on the labour of the human population sprawl. So, no longer being of use, but now a burden, the abject many will be at the mercy of the privileged few.
Certainly, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution the population crisis could potentially be solved with a flick of the switch. I suppose if that were to happen, an amalgam of humanity, Artificial Intelligence and digital technology would be the optimum circumstances for a mass genocide to work guilt-free.
“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge”
It may be tempting to think that these deeds are being inflicted on us rather than committed by us. That when it comes to such matters, we have little to no agency. It may also be tempting to think that there are people among us who are more responsible than we are for the present circumstances. But this is the mindset of a victim, in which other people are blamed for everything, while we find excuses for oneself. Nothing good in life was ever achieved with such a mindset. In fact, it is exactly this kind of outlook that gravitates toward oligarchical collectivism.
The economist Joseph Schumpeter likened society to a hotel where the rooms were always full. As soon as one room is vacated, a new guest arrives. I think this is largely true. So, when the ship is sinking, it is better to attend to the hole in the hull than to merely focus on removing the water. If you focus on just the water, eventually you sink.
For this reason, I have deliberately not focused this article on those in the public eye who seem to have been so good as to leave their fingerprints all over the crime scene like common thieves. It’s counterproductive when others have already done it so brilliantly, and I’m sure, at this stage, we all know who they are.
Certainly, when we consider the actions of those involved in the minutest detail, and become fond of retracing our steps, we become drunk on their power at the same time as we do our own subjugation. Like someone who takes to drink because they consider their situation to be hopeless, and then the situation becomes even more hopeless because they drink.
It is perfectly legitimate to behold ugliness provided one does not end up in awe of it. Nor is it wrong, on occasion, to descend into the pits and look down at the Gates of Hell. It’s when you’re continuously looking up at Hell that a grave error has been made.
It may sound paradoxical, but those in power are not responsible for the chaos we see around us. Because every individual is sovereign. Every individual has the power. And their future is yet to be decided. The nature of fear and influence is to strip the individual of their innate sovereignty and to impose an alien future upon them. But these controls have no power over us; only a belief that they have such a power can bestow them upon you. Because power and powerlessness is always a two-way relationship.
Here is the uncomfortable but liberating truth: me, you, everybody is equally to blame.
Because society is merely the sum of its parts. As are all groups. It is like trees and forests. A forest is only an abstraction. It is merely a label for a conglomeration of individual trees. The individual trees exist independently of the forest, the forest does not exist independent of the individual trees. Every single tree that makes up a forest has a role to play. If there is a fault with a forest, it will be because of the trees; if there is a problem with society, look in the mirror – the world is most often a mirror, a mirror of the most transparent kind.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
In the Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn considered his own actions in the lead up to his determent in the communist forced labour camp system, and concluded that he was ultimately responsible for his incarceration – he took part in a society that lied all the time. Despite being held in a brutal labour camp for many years, in which many did not make it out alive, especially political prisoners – Solzhenitsyn’s crime was an intercepted letter mildly critical of Stalin – he took ownership of his grim circumstances. By doing so, he made himself the architect of his life. This gave him the strength to survive and write one of the most important political works of the 20th century.
If this is true of Solzhenitsyn who had every reason to despair and complain and give up, then it’s infinitely true of all of us. The lesson here is that when we are sovereign, we write the future; when we play the victim, the future is written for us. Something a certain power mad ideology knows only too well.
In life problems don’t just magically disappear unless we take ownership of them. The first step in this process is identification. This can have a jarring effect – I’m afraid this is quite unavoidable. Now, there will be some of us who have been so lobotomised by consumption – material and ideological – that they may not be able to even discern a problem, least of all identify it, and will stick determinedly to their impressions. As in all minds in which impulse predominates over thought, their perception will remain firmly to what it was in the first instance. As harsh as it may sound, these people are irrelevant. Because this type of person, it must be said, are not the ones who set the course, they are merely the stepping-stones which carry us through the mud.
As for the rest of us, which is in fact the largest group, it may be easier to choose comforting lies instead of a Medusa-faced truth. It may also be easier to sit on the fence when it comes to the truth – to speak it only when it is expedient for us to do so and ignore it when it is not. What’s in it for me, we ask? But there is nothing in this cowardice that is not self-serving at the cost of our own well-being and at the cost of everyone else’s:
At the foot of every throne, men and women crowd in order to grasp their small portion of power. At their feet, crowd others who grasp still more at smaller portions. Social hierarchies are compartmentalised and comprised of persons who are impotent with those above them, and, within the limits of permissible authority, are omnipotent with those below. The higher up the ladder, the farther from the Truth. Because this hierarchical framework is reinforced by a mixture of fear and obsequiousness; neither, of course, can endure in the cold light of day.
It’s true that privilege will defend privilege. If necessary, it will even get its hands dirty. Professions with a veneer of respectability often share much in common with the “oldest profession”. Because beneath the respectable veneer is invariably to be found a moral quagmire, and sinking feet, legitimised only by the forces of habit and time.
Hitherto this strategy of unreasonably defending one’s position and class and the system in which they are embedded in the face of reasonable claims made against them has been a successful one, at least from a personal perspective. No longer. Crushed in a vice in which the chief interest is profiting from contracts, thereby escaping economic hardship at the same time as being seduced by the many material advantages of position, we are all racing towards the cliff edge where all the power will be invested from above and independence from below will be impossible.
In buying freedom in the short-term, money is buying enslavement in the long-term. As the last few months have painfully demonstrated, everything is interconnected. This forest fire will spread and consume all the trees unless it is extinguished. If society is taking a broad path to destruction, it can only be averted if enough people take the narrow, rickety path that leads to life.
As I wrote earlier, power is flaccid without control. Society requires consent and participation, hence the extraordinary lengths taken to engineer that consent and participation. No agenda is enforceable without mass participation.
Indeed, Gulags were largely run by the prisoners. In Solzhenitsyn’s time, most prisoners, after time served, would move up the administrative ladder and become trustees, which afforded them more luxuries and responsibilities than the new inmates. The prisoners who became guards were invariably more brutal than the civilian guards. Compromised, and burdened with guilt, they had established with their instigators the bond of complicity, and so, for the want of self-justification, the infliction of unnecessary violence was easier than retreat. As it was a wish to retain their flicker of privilege at the expense of those without privilege.
All the prisoners could have escaped at any moment if they had just realised they were the ones running the joint; if they had just realised they were being played against one another; if they had just realised their shared brotherhood and mutual interest.
This is even more true of the establishment of a much larger prison. In our case, the only thing required of us is to not exaggerate still further something that is already utterly exaggerated – resist mindless conformity. And to foster a more faithful relationship with the truth. The methodology is simple enough:
Fear and lies. They are as instinctual to the human spirit as it is for the mother to scold her child for sitting too close to the television, frightening them to not do so again, and the child to pretend, having been caught, that they were not. Over the course of human history fear has been the main weapon of influence, and lies has been the main method to evade guilt and responsibility. As such, all is a theatre, of sorts. It would almost feel gauche to write this, if not for people having the propensity to staunchly believe in the performance.
Fear feeds itself. Once a picture appears to the human mind, it seeks to paint it in more vivid colours. So, we too, if we surrender to fear, will find much in each detail to nourish it. It will assume other forms, and life will lay them across our path, for the spirit that animates those forms has been enkindled by our heart. They are ghosts of ourselves.
Power controls us through fear by inviting us to enkindle that spirit. Without fear power is impotent; it will brandish a blunted sword. Though it’s equally important to not be naïve, as it is to not be prostrated by fear, in the latter case it is us who are inhibiting our potential to live a full and prosperous life.
How do we put to an end our role in this strange theatre of omnipotent fear? We simply leave the performance. All dramatic spectacles will cease for want of an audience.
There are many ways of doing so. I think a belief in God is actually a good starting point. Because this has the effect of subordinating the ego to something much higher; it cultivates humility. This, it must be said, should be a direct relationship to something higher, and not through the medium of those who speak on behalf of God. Alternatively, an understanding that we are pure energy floating in a sea of energy so are an important component of a fundamental unit of existential solidarity. As such, lies and exploitation are not only injurious to others, but ourselves.
In the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – God’s main instruction to humanity was: Do not fear. Quite aside from what we may think about the other moral lessons in the Bible, I think this is a good one. Fear will ultimately kill the wretch that feeds off it.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been described as fighting a war, just against an invisible enemy. But the real war is a spiritual one. The battlefield exists inside every human heart.
The individual is sovereign – and the future is yet to be written. Whether this is a sunrise or sunset is entirely up to us…
(Thanks for your patience. At the risk of sounding fatuous, this is obviously only my take on the current events. Not fact. Uncovering that which intends to remain hidden will always involve a certain amount of conjecture. Again, this article probably raises a number of questions. I’ll hopefully address some of these in the concluding part of the series).
Part 1 – Tyranny by numbers
24th Apr 2020 4th Oct 2020 EddieB51 Comments
Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron, along with many other world leaders, have all described the plight we are in and the peril we face as fighting a war, just against an invisible enemy. To my knowledge this has been the only truthful thing which has escaped the lips of the leading choir in what has been a global chorus of mendacity.
War and invisible. Remember these words. In a series of articles, I will debunk the coronavirus scare, purport to show why it is happening, the mechanics of how, dissect what and who is responsible, and crucially, what we can do about it. Though the narrative presented will be linear, each part is self-contained and can be read amputated from the body of argument.
“There are three kinds of falsehoods, lies damned lies and statistics”
– James Arthur Balfour
Every single case thus far has not reliably tested positive for any infectious disease; the test in question is a non-binary test with an arbitrary threshold which merely identifies DNA material common to a family of viruses classified under the rubric of coronavirus;
Because this test is not looking for the entire sequence of COVID-19, merely a nucleate common to all coronaviruses;
We all have this DNA material in our bodies. The human body houses around 380 trillion viruses, with one of the most common types being the coronavirus;
Authorities are conflating every respiratory condition with COVID-19;
Coronavirus deaths in at least 6 different countries are being inflated by extraordinary new audit practices;
The official COVID-19 numbers are completely meaningless;
In the countries listed, all-cause mortality is consistent with the averages in previous years. In the UK deaths are now being counted more than once;
Alarmist models that predicted significant excess mortality have all been withdrawn;
The lockdown is catastrophic for public health.
Some necessary background. The common cold and influenza, aka the common flu, are viral infectious diseases. Hundreds of known viruses cause the diseases which fall under the common cold and influenza umbrellas. The main difference, although there is a degree of overlap, is that the common cold is typically a milder respiratory illness than influenza. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) distinguishes the two here. The type and severity of symptoms varies on a case by case basis.
Both the common cold and influenza can be caused by viral strains that can transmit from animals to humans. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that Coronaviruses are “a large family of viruses that may cause illness in animals or humans”. Two examples: ‘HCoV-229E’, which is described as one of the viruses responsible for the common cold; and ‘HCoV-NL63’, which a recent study estimated to be present in 4.7% of common respiratory illnesses.
Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, a prominent professor of pulmonology in Germany and former Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, has estimated that about 5-14% of all flu and common cold cases are caused by existing coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 is a novel strain. COVID-19 is the disease this strain can, but not necessarily, will cause.
The first coronavirus was discovered in the 1960s. But they have been circulating for time unknown. Perhaps forever. For example, though only discovered in 2004, it is thought ‘NL63’ mutated from ‘229E’ about 1,000 years ago. So, science is far behind nature in terms of detection.
Current science can’t even test for the presence of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus or its disease in the sense that it can’t reliably differentiate it from other coronaviruses. It is assumed that science has established that COVID-19 is an infectious disease under Robert Koch’s 4 postulates and subsequent adaptations, such as the Bradford Hill Criteria – identify and isolate biological matter in a petri dish and demonstrate a causal link between a presumed cause and an observed effect (this has in no way been publicly demonstrated) – but the tool medical professionals are using to test for the disease does not distinguish between coronaviruses and it does not determine whether someone is infected by a coronavirus.
The test in question, the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), looks for a piece of nucleate in the body by magnifying biological material and tries to match that biological material to a coronavirus nucleate. The test is based upon a formula for DNA magnification, and the concept of “reiterative exponential growth processes”.
“PCR detects a very small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus itself. The specific fragment detected is determined by the somewhat arbitrary choice of DNA primers used which become the ends of the amplified fragment”
– Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR test
Kary Mullis 1944-2019 (left), receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The inventor of the PCR test, Kary Mullis, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1993, emphatically argued against using PCR as a diagnostic tool. Because it is, in his words, a qualitative and not a quantitative test – “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron”. The results are entirely contingent on the level of multiplication.
For example, the official American version of the PCR COVID-19 test, which is named with characteristic technocratic drivel – the CDC 2019-nCoV Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel – uses what is called a “Real-Time” modification of PCR, described as a “major development of PCR technology that enables reliable detection and measurement of products generated during each cycle of PCR process”. But the “threshold is an arbitrary level of florescence chosen on the basis of the baseline variability”. And “Threshold can be adjusted for each experiment so that it is in the region of exponential amplification across all plots.
In other words, the degree of amplification is discretionary. And the degree of amplification, of course, will ultimately be the deciding factor in the end result. Hence Mr Mullis’ – and many others – impassioned pleas for it not to be used as a diagnostic aide.
Though it is an indispensable technique with a broad variety of applications, such as biomedical research and criminal forensics, it is unreliable in terms of establishing infection. Because it is non-binary and relies upon formulas with arbitrary thresholds of magnification. It doesn’t reliably distinguish between positive or negative, like with a pregnancy test. It doesn’t determine whether you have something or you don’t. I suggest this is why so many asymptomatic people are testing positive for this ‘disease’. They are not infected. They merely have slightly more of this DNA material than others.
Indeed, depending on degree of amplification, everyone, irrespective of condition, can test positive or negative with the PCR test. Because practically everyone has these DNA strands in their bodies. Astonishingly, the PCR test is not looking for the entire sequence of COVID-19, merely a nucleate common to all coronaviruses. Quite remarkable when you consider that the human body contains around 380 trillion viruses, with one of the most common types being the coronavirus. The ‘NL63’ coronavirus strand alone, remember, is present in significant quantities in up to 5% of all respiratory illnesses.
Whatever your preferred origins theory, our immune system is perfectly calibrated to operate in this environment. It is adapted to co-exist with viruses and other parasitic biological material. Viruses actually work with the immune system to keep us healthy. Infection only occurs when a virus starts to use our own cell machinery to replicate itself, and the immune system is unable, at least initially, to supress that viral replication. Symptoms then develop when the immune system attacks the pathogen and by doing so, attacks all the tissues the virus is in, damaging cells in significant quantities. This is when a virus triggers an inflammatory response – an infection.
But just testing for the existence of piece of nucleate in the body by magnifying biological material and then trying to match that with a coronavirus nucleate does not establish infection. And it certainly does not establish whether it is contagious. And I must repeat, the test doesn’t even look for the entire COVID-19 sequence, only a nucleate common to all coronaviruses, which we all have in our body in very small quantities. Amplify the DNA material enough and everyone tests positive.
According to one paper this degree of amplification has an “indeterminate” range. So, it’s quite possible that different hospitals across the world are all using different sensitivity standards of the PCR coronavirus test. Because being “indeterminate”, there is no gold standard. Indeed, the WHO has left the diagnostic specifications to the discretion of the medical practitioners. Not just with the PCR test, which is merely one of two diagnostic codes they have set.
The second diagnostic code, as dictated by an organization with all the gravitas of having World in its name, is that well, if it sort of looks like COVID-19, you can diagnose it as COVID-19. Quite extraordinary. COVID-19 symptoms, of course, are so generic as to be completely indistinguishable from a huge number of other respiratory illnesses.
The WHO has stated that those who have had the ‘infection’ are not immune from re-infection. Which begs the question, if you had the infection and were cured, why didn’t your body develop the antibodies to stop you being re-infected? Perhaps because that would mean you wouldn’t need some mandated medicine in the form of a magic concoction called a “vaccine”? I digress. But it is self-evident that a positive diagnosis does not establish any positive coronavirus infection. Least of all, a COVID-19 infection. And this is actually tacitly admitted in WHO’s bizarre claim that those who have been ‘infected’ can be re-infected by the same viral strain.
Kevin Ryan’s excellent blog, ‘Dig Within’, reported that a peer-reviewed study about the first COVID-19 cases was published in the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology on March 5th, 2020. Its data-driven conclusion was that “nearly half or even more” of patients testing positive for SARS-COV-2 did not actually have the virus. Therefore, half the results were false positives. The study was later mysteriously withdrawn a few days after publication. It was apparently, according to the lead researcher, a “sensitive matter”.
Another study out of China, which is still available online, though the English abstract has now been withdrawn from the PubMed database, found that up to 80% of asymptomatic people who tested positive for coronavirus were false positives.
Remember, there are people who have tested dozens of times for this ‘disease’, test negative every time, then eventually test positive, in what is a non-binary test, and all the negative tests don’t matter, the positive test is definitive. The extent of the quackery here is truly something to behold.
This is not some abstract point. Some major public policy decisions are being made on the back of an inherently flawed ‘diagnostic’ tool. Soberingly, the second in command of the the WHO, Michael Ryan, has suggested that individuals could even be “removed” “dignifiedly” from their families and quarantined should they test ‘positive’. And the test is not the only enumerator. Authorities have given themselves the mandate, with the full support of WHO, to conflate countless respiratory illnesses with COVID-19 from only a vague account of the symptoms. As we know, there are no trademark clinical features of a COVID-19 infection.
As if the testing is not bad enough, official coronavirus fatality figures are being accidently or more likely, deliberately padded by authorities across the globe by questionable and unprecedented practices.
There is a phrase you may be hearing in the media a lot of at the moment: “she/he died after testing positive for coronavirus”. Not, “as a result of” or “because of”, but “after testing positive”. The official guidelines across 5 jurisdictions provide some context to this peculiar framing of words.
For example, the worst affected country in Europe is said to be Italy. But the Italian Institute of Health (ISS) surveyed the first several hundred COVID-19 deaths in northern Italy and concluded that “maybe 2-3” of those first several hundred deaths were caused by COVID-19. And the survey wasn’t sure about one of those “2-3” because apparently their history “wasn’t available”.
A more recent official report from Italy has surveyed thousands of coronavirus deaths. The average age of people dying in Italy from coronavirus is 81 – 82 is the national average – and 99.2% have at least one co-morbidity. Most have multiple co-morbidities. Professor Walter Ricciardi, advisor to the Italian Minister of Health, explained these statistical curiosities were caused by the “generous” way the Italian government has been tabulating coronavirus deaths:
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with [my emphasis] the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus”.
In other words, the Italian government does not differentiate between those who have been killed by a coronavirus and those who merely have any coronavirus in their body (but not necessarily infected).
In case there is any lingering doubt about this the President of the Italian Civil Protection Service made the following comment about Italian fatality figures in a morning briefing on 20th March:
“I want you to remember these people died with the coronavirus and not from the coronavirus”
The German health agency is engaged in a similar practice. The President of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute confirmed on the same day that Germany counts:
“Any deceased person who was infected with coronavirus as a COVID-19 death, whether or not it actually caused death”
In the US they are not even confining confirmed cases to a ‘positive’ test. This briefing note from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System states:
“It is important to emphasize that Coronavirus Disease 19, or Covid-19, should be reported for all decedents where the disease caused or is [my emphasis] presumed to have caused or contributed to death”
The picture is the same across the UK. Northern Ireland’s HSC Public Health Agency defines a COVID-19 death as:
“Individuals who have died within 28 days of first positive result, whether or not COVID-19 was the cause of death”
In England and Wales, the Office of National Statistics (ONS), on account of a “rapidly changing situation”, have reserved the right to include COVID-19 deaths “in the community” in their statistics. Including “those not tested for COVID-19” and where “suspected COVID-19 is presumed to be a contributory factor”.
Not only for cases “in the community”, the official guidelines are leaving the door open for practitioners to list COVID-19 as a death even when a patient has not tested ‘positive’ (in a non-binary test that doesn’t distinguish between COVID-19 and DNA material we all have in our bodies). Here is the official NHS guidance for doctors filling out death certificates:
“If before death the patient had symptoms typical of COVID19 infection, but the test result has not been received, it would be satisfactory to give ‘COVID-19’ as the cause of death, and then share the test result when it becomes available. In the circumstances of there being no swab, it is satisfactory to apply clinical judgement”
Before recent changes to the law any death attributed to a “notifiable disease” had to be referred to a coroner. This would have included COVID-19 cases. But the Coronavirus Act 2020 alters the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 to specifically exempt COVID-19 deaths from jury inquests.
And it gets worse. According to the office of the Chief Coroner, the new legislation means that these deaths do not have to be referred to a coroner at all. (Page 3):
“….there will often be no reason for deaths caused by this disease to be referred to a coroner”
The Coronavirus Act 2020 means that any deaths wrongly attributed to COVID-19 will never be corrected. It gives medical practitioners the power to sign off a cause of death for a body they have never seen, provided they “suspect” COVID-19 after using their “clinical judgement”.
There’s a pandemic! COVID-19 is everywhere. But under such prejudicial testing conditions, and diagnostic practices, it of course will be. The official figures across the world, whether confirmed cases or confirmed deaths, are at best, statistical noise, which do not even have the merest semblance of reality, and, at worse, are a very dishonest and devious attack on public health and well-being.
Indeed, the data demonstrates there have been a huge number of coronavirus deaths in Italy, Germany and US this year but in proportion to there being far fewer deaths from other causes. It’s the equivalent of saying we are inundated with a flood of new people named ‘Roberto’, ‘Jurgen’, ‘Brad’ etc after renaming 5% of those populations respectively. It is merely a re-tabulation of deaths which would likely have happened anyway.
From Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As the coronavirus cases are said to be soaring, there has been a curious drop in pneumonia cases in the US this year. The starkest example of many. More here.
In England and Wales, there isn’t a huge drop in deaths from other causes primarily because in the Office of National Statistics (ONS) weekly audit deaths can have more than one cause:
“Note: Deaths could possibly be counted in both causes presented. If a death had an underlying respiratory cause and a mention of COVID-19 then it would appear in both counts”
Clearly, given the statistical chicanery at play for all matters pertaining to COVID-19, in which it seems quite impossible to glean anything of value, what is especially significant is the all-cause mortality figures. They make for interesting reading.
EuroMomo, a central database which publishes “all-cause mortality levels [per country] for 24 European countries”, including Italy, Spain and France, reports no additional deaths over the last few weeks in almost all countries compared to previous years, and no significant increase in Italy.
The EuroMomo database addresses this anomaly in a weekly bulletin:
“The mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution. Although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19”.
What an extraordinary statement. Where overall mortality figures haven’t increased, if they have significantly increased in some areas and in some age groups, it must mean they have significantly decreased in other areas and in other age groups. So, if COVID-19 has caused a public health crisis in some sections of society the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations, that must also mean that COVID-19 has been absolutely fantastic for the health of other sections of society the likes of which we haven’t seen for generations. In other words, the explanation is total nonsense.
This week (week 15) there has been an increase in the EuroMomo figures in some areas, but we should definitely “interpret” this sudden rise in all-cause mortality with “some caution”.
All-cause mortality weekly comparison for England and Wales courtesy of the ONS
As the graph shows, up until week 13 the overall deaths recorded in England and Wales was quite normal. Then in week 14 there was a sharp increase, the highest weekly total recorded in 10 years, and hugely unusual for this time of year. Definitive proof of a public health crisis? Well, in a word, no.
For the last 10 years the ONS has counted, not the number of people who die every week, but the number of deaths registered per week. This obviously leads to some delay in the accurate audit of numbers as the registration process can take more than a few days.
In week 12 the ONS made a special mention of COVID-19, explaining that because of a national health ‘emergency’ and a “rapidly changing situation” it will change the way it will report the numbers in future weeks:
“To allow time for registration and processing, these figures are published 11 days after the week ends. Because of the rapidly changing situation, in this bulletin [my emphasis] we have also given provisional updated totals based on the latest available death registrations, up to 25 March 2020. These deaths will be included in the dataset in a subsequent week”
This amendment to the procedure, which did not exist at any time prior to week 12 this year, gives the ONS scope to count the same deaths twice – provisional deaths the previous week “will be included in the dataset in a subsequent week”. It explains the big jump in deaths.
Naturally, the media made no mention of this change to the ONS methodology of collating data when it reported the huge spike in deaths. There were only hysterical reports replete with statistical gibberish terrifying the public afresh with yet more fearmongering. A common theme. Though it may be hard to imagine, apparently as a class journalists can’t read or, at least, don’t bother reading.
Frankly, the true number of overall deaths are, at this stage, anybody’s guess. In the UK – everywhere for that matter – the goal posts are constantly changing like shifting dunes in a desert. But what we can say is that the numbers are a pure political product; they are judgement calls completely unrooted from sound empirical data.
In fact, it is certainly questionable whether there is a public health crisis at all. Despite a daily deluge of public statements from Health ministers, the ongoing media hysteria, and unverifiable and unsubstantiated testimony, there’s every reason to suspect that hospitals are not overflowing. Many citizen journalists, in the absence of investigative work from the cartel of media organisations which dominate ‘news’ dissemination, have shown discrepancies between the official line and local hospitals.
Fresh reports are emerging in the UK of “sinfully empty” private hospitals, which have been commandeered for specialist COVID-19 use by government mandate. Furthermore, London’s “underused” specialist unit Nightingale Hospital, purpose built for the COVID-19 outbreak, had, according to a recent leaked report, 19 active patients over the Easter weekend in a facility with 4,000 beds.
Now, if I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of health or the actual activity in the hospitals, I should believe the hospitals. And we shouldn’t conflate that activity with mainstream media’s reports of that activity. The two are not the same. In times of ‘war’, the media are no strangers to total fabrication, especially when it comes to charting worthy victims who support a governmental position.
If the empirical data is so suspect, both the diagnostics – which can’t reliably determine infection and can’t distinguish COVID-19 from some of the most common infectious diseases – and the fatality figures, then how are we to trust the mathematical models and their alarming projections which precipitated this entire crisis? Well, we can’t. Because, remarkably, they have already been withdrawn.
Several days before the UK went on lockdown COVID-19’s status as a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) was downgraded by the government. Not upgraded but downgraded. The government’s extraordinarily heavy-handed approach of enforcing an open prison, coincided with the government saying: “As of 19th March, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK”. Yes, you did read that right.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a veritable giant among men in the field of immunology, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and one of the lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has stated that the virus could kill millions of US citizens. But recently he’s had this article published in the New England Journal of Medicine. He slyly states: “….the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza”. In other words, it’s not anywhere near as serious as what his public statements have led us believe; public statements uniform with the grim outlook upon which the current draconian measures are being based.
The key US model has since been revised down and now ‘predicts’ 60,000 deaths. On mathematical models themselves Dr. Fauci had this to say to Fox News on 11th April:
“I am somewhat reserved and skeptical about models because models are only as good as the assumptions that you put into the model. And those assumptions start off when you don’t have very much data at all or the data you have is uncertain, you put these assumptions in and you get these wide ranges of calculations of what might happen….but then you start to accumulate data….data, in my mind, always trumps any model”
Dr. Fauci very helpfully confirming what all of us unqualified idiots already knew. Models are not worth the paper they’re written on.
Dr. Neil Ferguson, the Professor behind Imperial College London’s study that UK government strategy has been predicated upon, as well as other governments around the world, also admits he got it wrong. I’ll repeat that. The professor of the study instrumental in the current lockdown has remodelled the data and concluded that they got it wrong. Not a bit wrong. Not somewhat wrong. Not even largely wrong. According to Dr Ferguson’s new model they got it 98% wrong. It’s been scaled back to about 2%-4% of the original findings. He said that experts are now expecting around 20,000 deaths in the UK, although it may even turn out to be “a lot less” than this, rather than the 500,000 deaths originally predicted by the study.
20,000. Where have we heard that before? Ah yes. That’s roughly around the average deaths in England and Wales alone (18,000) every year from the common flu (bottom of page 51). The common flu, an illness caused by viral strains that the official COVID-19 test can’t differentiate COVID-19 from. (Incidentally, the revised US figure of 60,000 is also the typical fatality rate of the common flu).
The study’s retraction has quietly gone through the news media (in a country that’s currently in lockdown largely as a result of its predicted model) without so much as raising an eyebrow. To point out the significance of this retraction, other studies, like the one commissioned by Oxford University, have run models estimating that 50% or more of the population have already had the virus. Which would obviously completely debunk the lethality of the virus (that’s really quite apparent anyway) and render the lockdown egregiously unnecessary; implemented only on the basis that over 99% have yet to contract the virus.
Dr. Ferguson has since taken to Twitter to clarify the revision. Essentially, but for the extreme controls enacted by the UK government the figure could be a lot higher than the revised total.
Could. Is there a word in the English language more loaded with hidden mischief? What Dr. Ferguson and extremely well-funded members of his profession (Ferguson’s department at Imperial College London received a $79 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this year alone – more on this in future articles) are basically presenting is an unfalsifiable position. If it weren’t for our recommended measures the situation would be far worse. Of course, there’s no way of verifying this. Though it is couched in scientific jargon, it is in fact decidedly unscientific, as it is divorced from experimentation and evidence.
For example, there’s no evidence the lockdown is even an effective strategy to combat the spread of the virus. Countries with fewer restrictions or no restrictions, such as Sweden, are faring better than countries who have established an open prison. As of 23rd April, the official UK coronavirus deaths are 18,738 and Sweden’s are 2,021. The UK population is about 6 times larger than Sweden’s (approx’ 67 million to 11 million). Meaning there are less deaths in Sweden per capita than in the UK. Sweden is a very urbanized country, so a more sparsely populated territory doesn’t explain the discrepancy. That’s not to legitimize the numbers, they are, as demonstrated above, total bunk, but even by the official figures, the imposition of a lockdown is highly suspect.
Could is certainly the favourite weapon of those whose business is fear. What is human history but thousands of years of people being entrapped by a form of bio-debt, created by those who simulate every conceivable thing that could happen, yet hasn’t? It seems to me that current science here is effectively the secular version of a very old scam, perpetuated generation after generation by those who wish to control the rest of society. Create a scare and then save people from that scare. The capricious serpent god will come down and swallow the sun unless we do some magic ritual and save everyone. The mechanics of this is no different.
“We must sacrifice the economy in order to save us from the virus”
While a new dawn will always rise in the east, Farr’s Law states that “the curve of cases of an epidemic rises rapidly at first, then climbs slowly to a peak from which the fall is steeper than the previous rise”. Both phenomena occur irrespective of human intervention. But in both cases human intervention is presented as the causal factor, bereft of any empirical support.
The irony is that those who are so eager to reject religion as superstitious hogwash are invariably the first in the queue to sign up for scientific catastrophizing. For these people it is considered objectionable if religion encroaches on personal freedoms, yet when science does the same, they embrace the restrictions, never querying the saintly priestly class in lab coats. They never question their financial incentives, because naturally, these people will never have any reason for skewing results or for making anything hyperbolic and alarmist in order to scare people into accepting various policies, except of course for all the times when they have demonstrably done exactly that.
Thus far, COVID-19 is doing a much better job of attacking our liberties than attacking our bodies, with the body politic succumbing to the disease, as intended. Speaking of which, without a shred of irony, The Guardian described the Belarusian president, who has kept business going as usual in Belarus because, in his words, “this is just the flu”, as a “dangerous authoritarian”. Meanwhile, in the UK little old ladies are being pursued by drones, are shamed by the police for walking their dogs alone in national parks and are barked at to stay at home.
Lest we forget how beneficial fresh air is for the lungs. You don’t need to read many classic Russian novels to know how it is a great antidote to respiratory illness, which is why sanatoriums were in the countryside or the mountains, with consumptive patients (TB) kept largely outside. In a world of lies reality is often inverted to such a point where the truth is considered an aberration.
The public are on lockdown, yet airports remain open, with people coming in from supposed crisis spots without being molested. Airports are a breeding ground for illness. In a country on lockdown, passenger travel, especially from highly infected regions, would be suspended or rigorously monitored. The authorities are therefore either lying about the level of emergency, they’re completely incompetent or both.
It’s yet another incongruity. But this isn’t unusual. A dysfunctional society is forever teeming with incongruities. Because there are many ways of telling a lie, but only one way of telling the truth.
I’m not saying there is no novel virus because there are novel viruses every year. I’m not even saying that this virus isn’t a nastier strain of the more common variety, though that argument can definitely be raised. But clearly there must be a damned good reason for shutting down a country. There’s nothing in the official data that comes anywhere close to justify this approach, alarmist studies full of mathematical masturbation have since been slyly retracted, and the World Health Organization’s 3.4% estimated mortality rate is an outrageous lie.
But what do you expect from an organization with a former Marxist revolutionary as a Director-General? Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, whose career highlights include covering up a cholera outbreak in Ethiopia, and nominating Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe for a humanitarian award. Award-winning journalist, Reeyot Alemu wrote in 2017 that “[He is] one of the top human rights violators making life miserable to the people of Ethiopia”.
All of this is being done in the interests of public health. Which begs the question, when has power ever shown so much concern for public well-being? If it did, it would shut down the fracking industry, permanently; 5G installation, which is apparently classed as “essential” work because masts are surreptitiously being erected in countries on lockdown, would be halted until studies could show it was a safe technology; fluoride would no longer be added to the water supply; clean and organic food production would be supported.
The effects of shutting down the economy, on a private level and at a national health level, are absolutely devastating. Services require funding. If the country is not generating wealth – this really is rudimentary – in the medium to long term the system will be debilitated, and that will lead to catastrophic consequences the economists are already ominously describing as “the greatest depression”. The destruction is incalculable.
In the UK, a government report estimated that 150,000 deaths could result from the shutdown, which is significantly more deaths than the government’s revised total for COVID-19. Though we’ve discovered that government forecasts are often spurious and drafted by errand boys and girls taking orders from above, this report’s predictions are at least grounded in extraordinary circumstances that will have consequences, as opposed to merely claiming the circumstances are extraordinary.
The notion that governments care about public health is simply preposterous. Fear induces stress which is one of the main inhibitors of the immune system, our number one tool in counteracting viral replication and staying healthy. When a threat is perceived cortisol is secreted by the adrenal gland and this triggers the body’s fight or flight response. Blood is pumped away from the core to the peripheries – the arms and legs. When this happens regularly the body’s energy is unevenly distributed, suppressing the normal functioning of the immune system. The truth is that terrorizing the public hourly with tall tales of bogeymen and pathogens is a bio-attack.
The number one cause of good health and longevity? According to a study published in 1988, it is physical interaction and outside activity. Social isolation was found to be worse than high blood pressure, worse than obesity, worse even than smoking. Dr. Steven Cole’s research with monkeys paints a similar picture. When you socially isolate monkeys, at the gene expression level, genes that are inflammatory are upregulated, and genes that are anti-inflammatory are downregulated. The research found that social isolation in monkeys and humans leads to an increased chance of viral infection, cancer, and other diseases. Everything in this world is upside down.
“Hang on, Eddie’s Blog isn’t an accredited source. And just who is Edward Black and what qualifies him to have his say? I’ll listen to the experts, not some random blogger on the internet”. Every fallacy is largely based upon assumption and this is no different. It’s the assumption there is a consensus among the experts, and, in the absence of a large consensus, that the political economy is faithfully following the best advice. There are no grounds for making either assumption. Who I am is also irrelevant. Rationale and evidence are relevant. Though proven expertise is a good starting point, what matters is the end point. The Truth is not discriminate of starting points, which are manifold, but it is discriminate of an end point, which is singular. What you’ll find is that typically, those interested in pursuing Truth, play the ball, those who are not, play the man.
Here is an excellent compilation of experts who have vehemently disputed current policy from the outset, and here is another compilation. They are more erudite and eloquent on the matter than I could ever be.
“We are afraid that 1 million infections with the new virus will lead to 30 deaths per day over the next 100 days. But we do not realise that 20, 30, 40 or 100 patients positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day….
(The government’s anti-COVID19 measures] are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous […] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. All this will impact profoundly on our whole society.
All these measures are leading to self-destruction and collective suicide based on nothing but a spook”
– Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi. A former professor of microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and head of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, and one of the most cited research scientists in German history.
I started with this astute quote attributed to James Arthur Balfour: “There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies and statistics”. On the whole I think this is largely true. Standing on the shoulders of his insight, I’ll humbly add that there are three kinds of liars: standard liars, damned liars and politically approved experts.
They’re soldiers for a global technocratic system. Soldiers in the real invisible war.
Part 2 – The Real Invisible War
The Coronavirus: An Analysis of the Data
12th Mar 2020 14th Mar 2020 EddieB15 Comments
The novel Coronavirus, aka SARS-CoV-2, has completely saturated the airwaves of the world’s mass media in recent weeks and months. As ever, governments and the corporate media appear to be fathoms ahead of the actual story. But that’s alright. Because those who are paraded before us know that they’re often afforded total impunity to say and do as they please. If they incite hysteria, so be it.
Let’s apply some basic logic to this ongoing farce. Reports of this lethal virus first emerged from China back in late December. But by then, of course, it was very likely to have been spreading through the population undetected for several weeks and months. Because experts have claimed that:
This novel strain has an incubation period of up to 3-4 weeks;
About 80.1% of those infected will experience only mild symptoms;
Up to 20-30% of people infected will be asymptomatic;
Asymptomatic carriers can still infect others;
It would obviously take a number of serious cases in an identifiable cluster before the local health authority would have suspected anything unusual.
Allow for the usual delay for testing, results, conferring with higher orders, and so on and so forth.
We should also allow for the inevitable delay of the Chinese authorities admitting to the wider world that its population is being ravaged by a pathogen it’s struggling to contain.
A conservative estimate, then, would be that at least 4 months have passed since first transmission.
The World Health Organization (WHO), its virologists and medical experts, and those from affiliated organisations, repeatedly tell us that this virus is highly contagious, far more so than just the ordinary flu. And that it’s deadly. Researchers and public health officials determine how contagious a virus is by calculating a reproduction number, or R0. The R0 is the average number of people that one person will infect, in a completely non-immune population. WHO believes the R0 to be around 2.5. And of those infected, they estimate the mortality rate to be 3.4%, with risk increasing with age and for all those who have, for whatever reason, compromised immune systems. But if the WHO’s figures are correct, as of early to mid-March, we would surely expect to see more cases of COVID-19 and more deaths.
Wuhan is a travel and trade hub of 11 million people. In 2018 Wuhan Tianhe International Airport served about 25 million passengers. It was shut down by the authorities on January 22nd. So, in those key months at the onset of community transmission, millions of passengers were travelling unrestricted from the outbreak’s epicentre to all 4 corners of China, and to destinations in neighbouring countries and major airports around the world. This at a time when traffic was higher than usual on account of the Chinese New Year.
With all that in mind, let’s look at the latest global figures of this ‘highly’ contagious and lethal virus (as of the morning of 12/3/2020):
Total confirmed cases: 125,851; Total Deaths: 4,615
China cases: 80,921; Deaths: 3,046
Italy cases: 12,462; Deaths: 827
Iran Cases: 9,000; Deaths: 354
Then comes Republic of Korea with 60 deaths, Spain with 54 and France with 48.
The first recorded SARS-CoV-2 death in China was on 13th January. Italy’s was on 22nd February. Iran’s on 12th February. So, to clarify:
China have had 3046 deaths in just under 2 months (53 deaths per day);
Italy, 827 deaths in 18 days (46 deaths per day);
Iran, 354 deaths in 28 days (13 deaths per day).
I stress again that these are the countries worst hit by the outbreak. (All figures are subject to positive tests and presumably, some sort of Coroner’s report – in the UK all deaths are subject to a post-mortem if the individual has not seen a doctor within 2 weeks of death. It’s highly likely infection figures are much higher than recorded. In which case, WHO’s claims of a 3.4% death rate are questionable from only a cursory look at the current data).
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, addressing the world’s media on the 11th March as the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was declared a pandemic
For some perspective, let’s compare these to the mortality rates of the common flu (influenza). Which comprises strains that are said to be far less contagious – lower R0s – and far less deadly – 30-40 times less deadly than SARS-CoV-2 according to WHO figures (the studies will be linked below):
The WHO estimates that globally between 290,000 – 650,000 die every year from influenza, with 3-5 million severe cases. This is obviously including deaths that have been precipitated by influenza (as the SARS-CoV-2 deaths have been precipitated by contracting the virus – which is why the elderly with underlying health conditions are the most vulnerable). Influenza’s peak months are winter through to spring. The death toll changes every year, some years being worse than others. In many places this figure is quoted as being around 500,000 deaths annually.
The global population is estimated to be 7,800,000,000.
China’s population is estimated to be 1,439,323,776 – about 18% of the world’s total population.
We would therefore expect that about 90,000 people, which is 18% of 500,000, will die every year in China as a result of contracting influenza.
We recall that China has had 3046 COVID-19 attributed deaths in just under 2 months (53 deaths per day). At that rate there would be around 19,345 deaths over the year, significantly under what we would expect from the far less contagious and deadly common flu.
People will say that because the country is in lockdown mode, it has been somewhat successful in averting much higher numbers. This is self-evident. However, because these measures have no precedent, we have nothing to compare them to. We don’t know the impact, for example, these measures have had on seasonal influenza numbers. (In fact, throughout all of this current seasonal influenza numbers are conspicuous by their absence).
Others will say that the Chinese authorities have suppressed figures and there’s every reason to believe that they are much higher than reported. I agree. But with that being said, why should we believe anything coming out of China? Including ‘leaked’ footage of swelling hospital wards, women being pulled out of houses by their hair by men in biohazard suits, and tenement blocks being welded shut in efforts to contain the virus. Meanwhile, international airports remain open across the country. What’s wrong with this picture? (Similarly, Italy is currently on “lockdown”, yet its airports remain open).
China is ruled by an authoritarian regime. Very little comes out without the government’s say so. They have their own social media platforms, and a social credits system, with those displeasing the government losing social points. Lose enough and they can be denied travel, basic provisions and will be named and shamed in public places. We should therefore not apply western standards to a country which is alien to them. As a side note, I should add that another key difference is that, though all countries will be hit by an economic crash, China will benefit in relative terms because western nations are saddled with far more debt.
Over the 4 annual reports in Britain between 2014-18, 84,622 deaths attributed to influenza and “extreme temperatures” were recorded. That’s an average death rate of 21,155 persons per year – equating to an average of 58 deaths per day, with obviously higher prevalence during peak months.
We recall that Italy’s death toll since the first fatality equates to an average of 46 deaths per day. The UK population is estimated at around 67 million. Italy’s, 60 million. The Italian figures are therefore unremarkable. In fact, like China, you could argue that we would actually expect to see more deaths in Italy from the common flu in what is currently peak season, than what has been listed as a result of COVID-19. Especially when you consider that Italy has an older population than the UK. Again, the argument will be that the Italian authorities have probably been successful in suppressing the severity of the spread; but, I repeat, we have nothing to compare these extraordinary measures to, and what may have been their effects in suppressing seasonal influenza.
Short of having the Italian figures, let’s compare Italy to another Mediterranean country. In Spain for the season 18/19, 6,300 influenza deaths were recorded. That equates to 17 deaths per day over the year – with prevalence being higher in winter and spring. Its population is estimated to be 47 million. 78% of Italy’s 60 million. We recall that at an average of 46 people are dying per day in Italy. 78% of 46 is just shy of 36. Significantly higher than the Spanish figure. But nothing out of the ordinary. Because this is peak season and the Spanish figure was a yearly average.
It’s argued that influenza was already endemic when the flu season started, giving it a huge head start on SARS-CoV-2. And unlike influenza, we are dealing with a single geographic origin. There have also been efforts to contain its spread. But we don’t know how successful those efforts have been to also contain influenza’s spread. Because those figures are not being released. Moreover, given that there are obviously far more cases of SARS-CoV-2 than what is being reported, but not necessarily, significantly more deaths, the WHO’s 3.4% mortality rate of those infected seems scarcely credible.
We should also stress that the common flu spreads in a population where many people have either partial or full immunity from previous flu seasons. And for which many others will be partially immunized by taking a vaccine (interestingly, this somewhat aligns with the reported 20-30% asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 cases). This will keep numbers down. However, we can’t say the same for SARS-CoV-2. This highly contagious and lethal virus is purportedly spreading through a population with no immunity and for which there is no vaccine. This should unfortunately raise numbers significantly. Are we seeing this reflected in the current data?
In fact, none of the data looks in any way remarkable when compared to seasonal influenza. Of which there are many different mutating strains of varying severity. So, if this is a crisis, perhaps we should add it to the crisis we experience at this time every year, where hospitals are invariably swelling with patients suffering from the effects of the common flu.
Richard Hatchett, CEO, ‘Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’, said recently on a television interview that SARS-CoV-2 was “here to stay”. It will apparently rear its ugly head periodically. Still sounds like the flu doesn’t it? He also said that “war is an appropriate analogy”. As has the Italian Health minister. Who has been quoted as saying that “we are at war”, and “a bomb has gone off in Italy”.
This analogy should make us pause for thought. War, and more importantly, the threat of war, has been used since time immemorial to keep the structure of society intact. Former president James Madison said it best:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded…War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes…and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Most wars are entered into under duplicitous means. So, why should ‘this’ war be any different? In a world where politics, science and money can become the same, we should be careful not to be swept up in manufactured hysteria. (I will explore these points in further detail in a follow up article).
I see no convincing data that would support the conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 is radically different to the common flu. But, of course, everyone should still be prepared and should still take the necessary precautions to protect themselves and their family. My thoughts are with all those who have lost loved ones in recent times.
Stay safe and God bless.
*Figures are accurate as of the morning of 12/3/2020. We should expect figures to go up. But we are a long away from fears of exponential rises, despite claims that SARS-CoV-2 is spreading rapidly. As stated, after 4 months or more it is currently underperforming typical seasonal influenza figures.
World Health Organisation Seasonal Influenza Fact Sheets
Surveillance of influenza and other respiratory illnesses in the U.K. 2014-2018 government pdf
Spanish government stats of seasonal influenza 2018-2019 pdf
Abridged version
Irena Sendler and the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize
29th Feb 2020 6th Mar 2020 EddieB12 Comments
Courage and nobility. Today those words often perish on our lips. But from 1940 in the Warsaw ghetto, in the midst of the dehumanisation and appalling degradation of hundreds of thousands of people, their meaning was still fresh and invigorating. Words Irena Sendler had, to a supreme degree, the power of making visible.
Irena Sendler circa 1942
Irena Sendler, née Irena Krzyżanowska, was a Polish social worker who helped save thousands of Jewish children’s lives during the Holocaust. It is thought she was personally responsible for saving at least 450. It’s difficult to reconcile such heroism with the commonplace job of social work; but sometimes it’s only through periods of implacable difficulty that we’ll discover our powers. When human will and moral fortitude is adjusted to the scale of emergency. Extreme conditions have a way of evincing both the best and worst of what humanity has to offer. And Irena possessed the courage, the constancy, the enthusiasm, and the emotional energy to find a way of surmounting the will of a nation.
A rabid central European anti-Semitism took political root in the most horrifying of ways in Germany in the 1930s. The Nazis were one of several political parties that took advantage of a period of political and economic instability following the end of the First World War. Once in power, they brought matches and flammable materials to a place only too ready to blaze out into wickedness, exploiting people’s prejudices and fears by presenting Jews and communists as common enemies against whom the German people should unite. These groups, it was said, were an existential threat to the Aryan race. The culture was soon saturated with a grand doomsday narrative, cynically spun to manipulate the minds of the population. Pernicious ideas that were as diffuse as the light that fills up a room.
This met with such perverse success that by 1942, the Final Solution, the Nazi’s secret plan to kill all the Jews of Europe, was in its advanced stages. It was a plan that first deprived Jews of their humanity, marking them out as a people inferior to their Aryan counterparts; then liberty, isolating them from society by forcibly herding them into ethnic ghettos; before it, in millions of cases, deprived them of their lives. A plan that enlisted relatively few active participants, there being many more by-standers, unwilling or unable to help. The Nazis deceived their intended victims as they deceived the rest of society. Many did not believe that the Jews were doomed until it was too late.
One person who did believe was Irena Sendler. She saw the emergency and she helped make all the people around her see it; rekindling the flailing hope and courage in all those who were exhausted by hardship and privation. Passing through like a whirlwind, she purified the moral atmosphere, as a storm purifies the physical atmosphere. Her very presence was a fumigation of evil.
When Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, Irena Sendler was a senior figure in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department. She soon joined the Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organised by the Polish underground resistance. Under the code name “Jolanta”, she headed the children’s division and, obtaining a pass from the Warsaw Epidemic Control Department, she smuggled food, clothing and medicine into the Warsaw ghetto. Efforts initially seemed futile. 450,000 souls had been packed into a small 16-block area and disease was spreading. Up to 5,000 were dying a month.
The Warsaw ghetto
Slowly the ghetto was getting empty as the Germans were starting to transport the Jews to the concentration camps. Irena was desperate. Heading a division of 25, she hatched a plan to try and save the children. Many years later she recalled, “When the war started Poland was drowning in a sea of blood. But most of all, it affected the Jewish nation. And within that nation, it was the children who suffered most. That’s why we needed to give our hearts to them”.
In a race against the clock Irena and her team organised to smuggle out as many children as possible from the ghetto. Not only did they have to get the children out undetected, they had to find non-Jewish families who were prepared to hide them in their homes at great risk to their lives. No small matter for all involved. It’s estimated that 700 Poles were executed as a result of harbouring Jewish children.
A young mother herself, Irena found it tremendously painful trying to convince parents to part with their children. People thought that Treblinka, the next destination for many Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, may have been a relocation settlement, when in fact it was even worse than Auschwitz, containing little more than gas chambers and ovens. Irena and her team tirelessly pressed upon them the urgency of the situation, persuading thousands.
Small children were sedated to keep them from crying, then hidden in sacks, coffins, boxes, or in bags of old clothes, which were donated to convents and orphanages. Other children pretended to be ill so they could be taken out in ambulances. They were also smuggled out through sewers, underground tunnels, and through a secret passageway connecting the old courthouse adjacent to the ghetto. Irena even had her dog trained to bark on command to drown out any noise coming from the fugitives.
Irena buried a list of the hidden children in a jar under an apple tree in a friend’s backyard in order to keep track of their original and new identities. The goal was to reunite the children with their parents, if they survived the war. Sadly, of course, most didn’t. And on the night of October 20th, 1943, it appeared extremely unlikely that Irena would survive the war.
The operation had been compromised. She was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Warsaw’s infamous Pawiak prison. Irena was subjected to weeks of torture by her captors. Both her feet and legs were broken. Her arms were fractured. But at no point did she betray her confidences – not a single word passed from her lips. No amount of suffering would make her shrink from the course which she believed it to be her duty to engage in.
She was sentenced to death by firing squad. But on the day of her execution a colleague from Zegota managed to bribe one of the guards and Irena was smuggled out in a similar fashion to the many children she had saved. Though the guard listed her as one of the those who had been executed, the Gestapo later discovered the subterfuge. They sent the guard to the Russian front, a punishment considered worse than death, and Irena spent the remainder of the war in hiding. She continued her efforts to rescue Jewish children; but by this time the ghetto had been completely purged.
At the start of the second world war more than a million and a half Jewish children were living in Europe. By the war’s end fewer than 1 in 10 had survived. Irena was head of a network that saved at least 2,500 children from near certain death. The injuries she sustained during captivity were such that she required the use of crutches and a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Today, we are incredulous at how such extreme conditions could have developed in a modern industrial society; but history informs us that large numbers of people across the social milieu will remain unconscious of distortion and manipulation. Typically, those who reside in the upper echelons of societal success or in the lower echelons of intellect will maintain a high moral and self-righteous tone in the face of conflicting information to dominant narratives. One contributing factor is an overwhelming desire to think well of ourselves, our institutions and our leaders. A kind of patriotism, if you will. That we’re all in this together. We see ourselves as righteous, so therefore the corporate state apparatus functions in accordance with the same benign intent, a supposition that is common even if it is a transparent non sequitur.
Even so, one would think that such cruel and iniquitous conditions should have led to popular indignation calculated to bring down the strong arm of the law. Yet for most in Germain occupied territories, fortitude proved too weak for cowardice; sympathy too weak for fear; reason too weak for credulity. It’s to be expected. Cowards, whose fear of death and social ridicule is greater than their self-respect, can generally console themselves with the thought they are doing the right thing even when it is plain that they are not.
But Irena Sendler was different. Instead of an ordinary life of sensation, she lived a deeper life of reflection, which has the effect of unanchoring us from the negative thoughts and opinions of others. Her independence of character and strong powers of thought stirred within her, instilling a predisposition to rebelliousness that is the lot of every proud and passionate nature. This was merely raised to the surface when outward conditions contrasted sharply with her inner moral conviction. Nazi power amounted to such a tyranny that Irena’s conscience insisted she be placed as victim rather than inadvertent inflictor.
She understood that as a moral being, we’re morally powerless if we depart from our own conception of life and character. Indeed, if we are to surrender our own judgement and unthinkingly adopt the standards of the day, we’re no different to a brute animal, which reacts to stimulus instinctively. As such, individual morality is quite superfluous to collective morality. We cease to choose our moral path; we have our path imposed upon us. With the system paving all the broad paths which led to the same destination: an extreme agenda. Irena, however, did not suffer from vertigo, so she went along the narrow path across the cliff edge to see what had hit the rocks below.
As a Pole, her ability to distinguish between the reality of Nazi power and its outward appearance wasn’t especially remarkable; what made her extraordinary was that she possessed the courage to act on it, notwithstanding the consequences. She had the singular vision and tenacity of purpose of someone who was impressed with the truth of what she was doing, and who had no dread of consequences. Thus, she conquered every fear out of necessity. She subdued every weakness by simply understanding that we can do all things if we will.
For decades the enormity of her actions lay hidden from wider public attention. It remained just one of many footnotes in a period of history awash with yarns. But I suppose recognition and acclaim themselves are not impactful, merely an echo of actions which may or may not have been. Irena to her eternal credit saying: “Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory”. Her heroism was matched only by her humility.
Still, justice did eventually prevail. Her story was picked up in one of the most unlikely places: a high school in Kansas. The students were so struck with her story they were inspired to write a play based on her life. ‘Life in a Jar’ was such a phenomenal success that it spilled out of Kansas and propelled the now the 90-year-old great-grandmother to national attention. In a hyper-individualistic generation starved of heroism, and one rightly mindful of the historical suppression of female empowerment, it was such that, in the years following the play’s premiere in 1999, Irena Sendler was in high demand. She achieved such fame that a movement began that aimed to put her name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize. And so it came to be that at 97 years young Irena Sendler was nominated for the 2007 addition.
She didn’t win.
The prize instead was shared by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their work in raising public awareness to the dangers of rising greenhouse gas emissions. It seems the world is faced with a new great peril; one that poses an existential threat to every living thing on this planet. Evidently, the Nobel panel thought that this “climate emergency” was more current than the astonishing heroism of a Polish woman 65 years previous and thus, more deserving of the accolade.
Winners Al Gore and leader of IPCC, Rajendra K. Pachauri on the balcony of Grand Hotel, Oslo, Norway, on 10 December 2007
Time has been kinder to Mr Gore than it has to the wild predictions he made in his 2006 film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, which led to him being awarded the Peace Prize. They’ve proven spurious, alarmist, fantastical; far removed from the mundane reality of the actual temperature readings post 2006. But present needs have seen to it that a collective amnesia has swept over the world of polite opinion, as if it a were a storm purifying scrutiny, as well as apparently resetting the doomsday clock. Mr Gore and his backers have emerged from this storm quite unscathed. Some of the critics, however, must always be braced for backlash, often facing slurs against which there is little recourse, an inhibiting factor which dissuades many from entering the fray.
Like many high-profile people, Mr Gore, in spite of his proud claims of being carbon neutral, regularly uses private jets. What he really means by “carbon neutral” is that he ‘offsets’ his emissions – compensating for his extensive carbon footprint by donating money to reduce emissions elsewhere. One wonders about the efficacy of ‘carbon offsets’, which can take up to 30 years to take effect, in a world “on the brink of environmental collapse”. But carbon offsets are essentially a rich man’s fancy. Rich being the operative word. Mr Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). His estimated worth is $325 million. Most of which he’s accrued since leaving party politics and taking on the mantle of international climate change guru.
From such a position, when he speaks of the common good, you should immediately feel a haughtiness and coldness in the air, as if he were an imposing statue made of metal, high above the day-to-day affairs of ordinary people.
The Nobel Peace Prize was steeped in irony in 2007. In fact, it’s steeped in irony every year. Alfred Nobel, the benefactor behind the Prizes which takes his name, made his many millions from his invention of dynamite, the manufacture of war munitions and from his family’s investment in oilfields along the Caspian Sea. At the time of his death, his business, one of the principal suppliers of both sides during the Crimean War, had established more than 90 armaments factories. Mr Nobel was as hypocritical in life as he is in death. Said to be an unassuming pacifist, he bequeathed his entire estate to institute the Nobel Prize, which, according to an impressive bronze plaque I remember seeing at the ‘Nobelmuseet’ in Stockholm, was “for his legacy”.
It is true that in lionizing things – people, groups, institutions – we’ll assume the presence of qualities that are in fact not often to be found in them. Take honesty. It may seem inconceivable that large numbers of people could be involved, say, in a movement ridden with lies. But this a childish misapprehension, which assumes honesty is commensurate with prevalence. Indeed, honesty is one thing and society is another. It’s the same as in farming: the beauty of nature is one thing and the income from fields and crops and animals is something quite different. This also has its truth, as it were, but only insofar as it profits the farm. And clearly if the pigs discovered that their role was to provide bacon it would jeopardize the whole operation. But as we know, it’s easy to dupe animals which are occupied not by what is but by what it appears to be.
Only animals and idiots are totally sincere. Once civilisation has introduced into life the need for duty and responsibility and economic dependence, and once resources are unevenly distributed, for instance, then sincerity is quite out of place. Yet so many of us go on as if sincerity is that ungovernable force that guides human relations, when all the world tells us, if we start to think for ourselves, that it is a governable force subject to necessity and expediency. If everyone was sincere the present system would quickly fall to rack and ruin. Because plainly there is little room for sincerity in a world where a narrow class of individuals hoard almost all the wealth and resources.
The onward march of humans is to rise above the mental level of the generation before them. And the onward march of democracy is one that moves inexorably toward reform of a system of extreme inequality. Because such inequality breeds resentment, which must constantly therefore be co-opted by those with everything to protect. Power and authority has always presented narrow interest to be in the wider interest. It doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at history to establish this basic axiom.
Social organisation depends entirely on the goals of the system and the individual characters of the rulers. A competitive and avaricious system regulated by the winners clearly holds latent dangers. In theory, therefore, one should not yield to the edicts from on high before a thorough examination of their content.
Indeed, surrendering personal judgement is attended with reduced consciousness, and obedience, the partial sleep of thought, amounts to the gradual submergence of our own personality by another, which could indeed be an abusive spouse or an abusive political system. In the latter case, we find that this isn’t the exception but the norm. In fact, it’s the glue in social cohesion. So, for depressingly large numbers of people, authority’s ideas will be their ideas. If it thought Jews were an inferior race and posed an existential threat to the German people, they thought the same. If it believes the world is on the brink of environmental collapse because of carbon emissions, so do they. And how are we to forestall this pending catastrophe? By increased taxation and the further centralisation of resources.
The introduction of every new financial liability, under present conditions, merely serves the cause of entanglement in a system controlled by a wealthy class. The people are entangled in a great chain, and when you introduce new impediments and restrictions you are not cutting through the chain but entangling them still more by addition. New standards increase the number of needs, on top of those that already exist. Control comes closely on the back of needs, and power comes closely on the back of control. We really don’t have to follow that many breadcrumbs to understand who benefits from an increasing financialization of the economy.
Mark Carney has been appointed UN special envoy for climate action and finance and is preparing to step down as governor of the Bank of England in March 2020
We are apparently sitting on the verge of a precipice; but this, immediately, instead of being a call to action, should be a reason for circumspection. The claims of establishment science, detached from accurate, testable predictions, are too closely pressed upon by necessity to be prudent. Its pervasiveness inducing a kind of mania that has turned many a nation wild. In history, without exception, all points of uniform extremity have more than a hint of menace. With perhaps no better example than what took place during Nazi Germany. We should therefore take our lessons from the past and be ever watchful that we are not consumed by the folly with which all ages unfold.
Al Gore is one of a small class of people who’ve not been discouraged from combining the so-called climate emergency with personal pecuniary advancement. Nor is he, for that matter, inhibited by any sense of false modesty. Whereas Irena Sendler was a paradox of great humility in the matter of her accomplishments merged with great ferocity in the matter of her virtue. I would suggest, therefore, that a Nobel Peace Prize means much to the character of the former, and little to the character of the latter.
Moreover, it should be obvious by now that awards – especially prestigious awards – are not awarded for moral qualities or even abilities, but for service to the arbiters. As in journalism, they are explicitly a political job. In fact, it’s the same in all fields that have the capacity for a large audience. The primary purpose is to push cultural orthodoxies. And since most mass media outlets are owned by a handful of mega-corporations, it’s very easy for an elite to saturate the airwaves with a specific message.
Society is set up for us to follow and glorify leaders who’re often least deserving of exaltment, while those who are most deserving can be neglected and sometimes even, chastised. No matter. Truth and goodness always shine. Similarly, though a cloud and shower may pass by, the sun is behind, always existing. In such a dishonest and cruel world, then, where truth and goodness can remain hidden, for morality to have any real meaning, it is this: to live a virtuous life even when you know nobody is watching.
The world is more tolerable for all of us if we’re witness to the kindness in others. It’s infectious. Each kind act can and will multiply exponentially; its lasting effect, which is invariably unseen and unheard, can hardly be tabulated. Take Irena’s case. Her father was a physician who raised her to love and respect all people irrespective of their ethnicity or social status. When she was 7 a typhus epidemic broke out in some of the poorest Warsaw districts. Irena’s father risked his life to treat the afflicted, the only doctor in the area to do so. He was one of many to cruelly succumb to the disease. As he lay dying, Irena later recounted, he told her, “If you see someone drowning, you must jump in and try and save them, even if you don’t know how to swim”.
She didn’t forget.
After his death, the Jewish community in Warsaw, many of whom had been treated by Irena’s father, offered her mother financial assistance. She proudly declined the offer, though one feels that Irena certainly took notice of the gesture.
Again, she didn’t forget.
We can all be delicate and sickly to painful impressions. Children are particularly susceptible. The pictures, ideas and conceptions of character assimilated into the mind of the child, are destined to be reproduced in deeds many years afterwards. What the Jewish children of the ghettos went through can scarcely be imagined. A piece of suffering stamped into their very existence. But Irena was at least an unfading light in the darkness. Not only did she help save their lives, but through her courage and compassion, she had shown them, in the midst of evil, humanity at its very best.
Though the history books haven’t recorded much of her exploits, they were certainly memorable enough for those whose lives she touched.
Irena’s story is one that should make each individual conscious of his or her powers as a complete moral being. That in service to others an otherwise ordinary person can achieve the extraordinary. Changing the world for the better one act of kindness at a time.
Events in history may be closer than we think.
Irena Sendler (1910-2008)
The Cat and the Mice
3rd Feb 2020 9th Feb 2020 EddieB19 Comments
Whether Aesop’s personage is of history or legend, the Greek fabulist, which legend dates to the 7th century BCE archaic Greece, is credited by posterity with numerous allegorical tales, known collectively as ‘Aesop’s Fables’. These fables represent wisdom thousands of years old; probably long predating Aesop, and certainly long predating their current truncated form.
The fables are characterised by animals that take on human characteristics; they interact, solve problems, and are used as a vehicle to impart fundamental truths, not merely about what it is to be human, but, more pertinently, what it is to live in a society constructed by humans. Over thousands of years the context may have changed, and the technology, the wizardry, the gadgetry has certainly changed, but the types of methods used by the predators who live amongst us, against the naïve, have not.
There are a number of fables that really do pertain to our political situation. I thought I’d share one of them today and cogitate a little on how it reflects on our current reality.
There was once a house that was overrun with Mice. A Cat heard of this, and said to herself, “That’s the place for me,” and off she went and took up her quarters in the house and caught the Mice one by one and ate them. At last the Mice could stand it no longer, and they determined to take to their holes and stay there. “That’s awkward,” said the Cat to herself. “The only thing to do is to coax them out by a trick.” So, she considered a while, and then climbed up the wall and let herself hang down by her hind legs from a peg and pretended to be dead. By and by a Mouse peeped out and saw the Cat hanging there. “Aha!” it cried, “you’re very clever, madam, no doubt; but we will not trust ourselves with you, even if your skin was stuffed with straw.”
Moral ~ If you are wise you won’t be deceived by the innocent airs of those whom you have once found to be dangerous.
In our personal lives we tend to observe, to judge, and if it so happens that we should fall foul of some trick, we will generally not trust that person again. The above fable speaks of that. But when we apply this basic wisdom more abstractly, say, to an entity or an institution, the whole of society seems to be at odds with it. Take statism and all those who participate in the sacrament of voting. Politicians have rarely if ever shown themselves to be trustworthy, the entire political system even less so, but people will still queue at the voting booth, ready to have their good faith be taken advantage of.
Ironically, the more cynical amongst us, who rightfully question the legitimacy of this process, by way of an answer, invariably endorse a politics that will extend and not subdue the powers of the state. They seem to forget that in a society where power is proportional to wealth, and not official position, and where power is an extreme state of inequality, extending the powers of the Cat is therefore something entirely different to extending the powers of the Mice.
On countless occasions the official version of events has proven bogus. Indeed, a complete inversion of reality. Often at the direct expense of all those most caught up in the entanglements and iniquities of social life. Yet when we question and probe such matters – as we should – we are usually met with condescension and scorn. Immediately, our abilities are questioned, and we’re associated with names that have a bad smell. In light-hearted scenarios, the term “conspiracy theorist” is aired, in more serious ones, an ‘ist or ‘ism or ‘obic is thrown, forever to our detriment.
But if we were to ask the name-callers to prove some official dogma, without a referral to higher authority, they would be quite dazed, like somebody who was asked to defend their name. Because they haven’t really thought about it at all. Their knowledge is built upon taking things for granted; when in fact, if we’re being more observant, there’s every reason to not take things for granted. As long as honesty is rare, suspicion should be common.
To doubt the truthfulness of those who show themselves not to be trusted is wisdom so basic even a young child can grasp. But we need not be surprised if it’s repudiated by upper society and its sycophants; like an abusive lover repudiating a spouse’s well-grounded concerns by deceitfully flipping them on their head. Because it is simply gaslighting to denigrate timeless human wisdom as peculiar. As strange. As hateful. As suggestive of paranoia or even psychosis. Of course, gaslighting doesn’t work on all people. But it does work on enough of them to keep the Cats in business.
Honesty will always rankle with dishonesty. Whenever power is corrupt – and it is an abiding feature that it is – innocence and integrity are sure to be targeted. Such attacks will deter the thin-skinned amongst us who are unduly stung by opprobrium. But the thick-skinned, who are impervious to rebuke and ridicule, know that an attack on the person is never a reliable barometer of ultimate truth.
Nor is the schooling system and the various institutional frameworks through which society works itself, for they are in the image of Cats, and not in the truth which is independent of them. During an arduous, prohibitively expensive and time-consuming period of re-education, each Mouse is trained to think like a Cat and to be one that pretends ignorance when it comes to the threat of the Cat.
They no longer have the wisdom of the uneducated Mouse, which thinks for itself. They begin to have too much of the knowledge of the half-educated Mouse, which allows the Cat to do its thinking for them. Put together, they are no longer unsophisticated Mice that are sceptical of the Cat’s entreaties, they are sophisticated Mice that are trusting of them.
But whether the Cat is harmless or not is almost always to be ascertained. It requires an intellectual autopsy to see whether its skin is indeed stuffed with straw. If we are really to find out what power intends, we will surely find it, not in the self-examined fur which is sold to the public, but in the innards which the public examine.
Aesop’s tales still have relevance and meaning, and can impart wisdom all these thousands of years after they were first conceived. That probably says something; something about the immutable fabric of human organisation and management, and something about the type of things that are excluded from our attention, and the reasons why they are kept at a distance. Instead of being swept up in the hysteria of new political movements, we should take pause and reconsider what humans have always understood.
Monarchy and Liberalism is an Unhappy Marriage
18th Jan 2020 9th Feb 2020 EddieB53 Comments
The shockwaves are still reverberating around Britain after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s announcement that they intend to step away from their current role within the Royal Family. Though there’s understandably a measure of scepticism about the importance of the movements of, in truth, minor royalty, ‘Megxit’, as it has not-so-creatively been dubbed by the press, is in fact as culturally significant as Brexit, if not more so.
Despite all the extraordinary trappings and privilege a Royal life has always been one that has existed inside the stillness of a gilded cage. It’s a life of public service, handsomely rewarded. But in the modern world few want to be imprisoned in anything but the limits of their own nature; they want no guides other than the sometimes-wayward choice of their own passions. In such a world, if the Duke and Duchess consider freedom more important than service, frankly, who are we to argue, if they grow the wings to fly beyond the days and weeks and months of stuffy protocol. And to sing their own tune of brave self-reliance. Meghan – the feminist diva; and Harry – the artist formerly known as Prince.
The problem, however, is that this flight of freedom is dependent upon the buoyancy of that which they seek to renounce. In what is an astonishing act of sheer chutzpah and ignorance, they are unilaterally plotting to effectively commercialise the Family’s legacy, and by implication, the country’s heritage, in order to feather their own nest. It appears to be an act of treachery which has been brewing for some time.
It has emerged that back in June 2019 the Sussexes applied to trademark ‘Sussex Royal’. Under intellectual property law they will have the option to attach this brand to an eclectic mix of goods and services, ranging from magazines to sports goods. It also didn’t escape notice that back in July, Meghan Markle was guest editor of the September edition of Vogue magazine, where she was described as a “changemaker” who “is breaking barriers and setting the agenda across the globe”. “Changemaker” is the United Nation’s speak for globalism, which is essentially the gradual dissolution of national boundaries, power centralised under a network of regional bureaucratic proxies, with huge combinations of transnational capital operating behind the curtain.
On their plush new website, which, judging by its polish, has clearly been in the offing for several months, the Sussexes have spoken of wanting to “balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honour our duty to the Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages. This geographic balance will enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter”. In other words, keep the privilege and relinquish the duty.
That they “intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family, and work to become financially independent”. But, of course, by this they mean only independent of the Sovereign Grant, which accounts for about 5% of their income, and not independent of the allowance from the Duke’s father, the Prince of Wales, who gets most of his income from the Duchy of Cornwall. This is estimated to be several million pounds a year, not a dime of which originates anywhere other than the public purse because it is money made from commercial activities off land that the Royals hold on trust. They also don’t want to give up their round-the-clock security which the British taxpayer pays to the cost of £7.6 million a year, and it will surely only increase if their activities bestride continents.
Perhaps the most symbolic statement of all is that they want to “carve out a new progressive role within this institution”. A progressive monarchy, however, is an oxymoron. Responsibility, duty, and tradition are anathema to modernism. By definition.
Let me explain. It can be summarised as the contrast between the classical world – the world of antiquity from which Monarchy is derived – and the modern world of industrial globalism – from which Liberalism is derived. In the classical world the fundamental question of self was how to conform one’s soul to the divine meaning and purpose embedded in the world, and thus be drawn up into eternal life. The answer was through prayer, virtue and wisdom. That was the central concern of pre-modern, or what we may call, classical man. They believed that the world was full of divine meaning and purpose, and thus every person was born into a world of divine obligation. We were all obliged to conform our lives into a harmonious relationship with that divine meaning and purpose.
For the modern person, however, the question is completely inverted, because they have redefined the world through the lens solely of science, which reduces the great human drama to nothing more than biological, chemical and physical properties. The modern person asks how one conforms the world to one’s own desires and ambitions. And the answer involves tapping into those institutions that operate by the mechanisms of power and manipulation, namely science, technology and the secular state.
That’s the key difference between the traditional world and the modern world, the religious world and the secular world, and the nationalist world and the globalist world.
What’s happened as a result of this paradigm shift is that we’ve gone from a communal life, centred on the moral obligations inherent in family and church and community; and instead moved more into a contract based life, where we have no moral obligations apart from those we enter into through self-interested, rational contracts.
The notion of the modern autonomous self is that it has no more obligation than what the sovereign individual imposes on his or herself. This stance clashes with the classical world of duty and self-sacrifice – to subsume oneself within tradition and culture and divine obligations, of which the Monarchy is an embodiment. It was this sense of the divine that was the axis on which revolved all other elements – the relations of child and parent, of husband and wife, of brother and friend; life was, in its essential relations, throughout of a divine purpose. But in the world of industrial globalism the social framework is moulded by the character of the sovereign individual. It breaks prior boundaries.
It’s no secret that Meghan Markle is an ultra-liberal: she’s a self-avowed feminist, she’s pro-abortion, she hates Trump. And she’s on board with all the typical liberal talking points. Woke, in a word. It seems evident that it’s this self-identified left-wing liberalism that is clashing with the traditionalism of the Royal family. The clash is of our times. It is fundamentally irreconcilable.
Frogmore Cottage
Within the framework of the institution every possible concession had been made to make the couple happy. The Royal Family facilitated glamorous tours to Australia and Africa. The Queen allowed them unprecedented privacy for the birth of their child, Archie, far more so than any other royal birth in the past. And her Majesty accommodated their request to move from Kensington Palace to Windsor. Frogmore Cottage – more of a mansion than a cottage – which is owned by the Queen, cost the British taxpayer £2.4 million to renovate to the couple’s specifications. At the property, which they fully intend on keeping, “so that their family will always have a place to call home in the United Kingdom”, they had a housekeeper, two personal assistants and two palace orderlies, before public pressure led to them dropping the staff and, in a recent development, repay the public purse for the refurbishment. But one must ask, will they be paying any rent on this multi-million-pound crown property other people had to vacate for their accommodation?
“What Meghan wants, Meghan gets” is the Duke’s now infamous refrain to orderlies, many of whom were reportedly dispatched by the Duchess’ high-handedness as quickly as they were summoned. For a minor Hollywood actress she has certainly taken to the role of difficult and spoilt princess with considerable aplomb. And I’m sure that had this sorry affair been dramatized she would have been in line for several prestigious nominations. The one position in the household that did appear safe from the axe was that of chef, as it was reported that the Duchess preferred to prepare her own meals. Now, there’s a surprise. Often is the case that in the curious compound of character the flavour is sometimes disagreeable in spite of excellent ingredients.
Prince Harry was one of the most popular members of the Royal Family. Blessed with the common touch, like his mother, he has the ability to bring people together. He is human. Approachable. And it’s been evident that behind the bravado and charm is a damaged and sensitive young man for which the public has every sympathy. But since Harry fell for an American actress, he’s undergone a radical transformation. From a boyish, emotional, wayward, fun-loving Prince; to a boyish, emotional, wayward, subjugated Duke.
Harry is the moon-struck slave of Meghan. Not merely deeply in love with her, but completely steeped in her, as if she were his place of refuge in a lifetime of distress. Because his love seems to be attended by a despondency hitherto, we have not associated with him. It’s almost as if some dim unrest has been brought into vivid consciousness by her influence.
To understand the man, we must follow his growth. A love paradoxically mingling with his peculiarly tense and gloomy character seems to derive from the fact that Harry is reliving his life with his mother through his relationship with his wife. An Oedipal transference of a son’s love to a man’s love. Meghan, who is an independent and successful woman three years his senior, appearing to provide him with the Jocastian fusion of conjugal love and maternal belonging. And perhaps after winning the ring, Meghan was pregnant with not only Archie, but Oedipus and Jocasta’s offspring, Antigone. Because the struggle between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the Royal family mirrors the struggle between Antigone and Creon. It represents the struggle between elemental tendencies and established customs by which the outer shell of self is painfully being brought into harmony with its inward needs. Indeed, this is rather unravelling like a Greek tragedy – immutable causality and inexorable development are fundamental aspects of this tale.
Meghan is calling the shots. Not only has Harry learnt the lexicon of Woke, her introduction into his life has led to the breaking of boyhood friendships, many of whom weren’t invited to the wedding or evening reception, apparently their much-valued place being taken by more photogenic international celebrities. These are the aristocrats of the modern day. A-listers mingling with one another as the blue-blooded Royal households of the past forged alliances by intermarrying. It’s a hierarchical network of publicised friendships, each feeding off the other; with lesser lights, in a pitiful pecking order, scavenging after resource rich targets like seagulls circling as they search for food.
International super stardom is essentially all the obnoxious elements of monarchy shorn of its redeemable features. And it seems that the Sussex’s plan for modernising the monarchy is for it to essentially be all the obnoxious elements of celebrity shorn of its redeemable features. Exactly what talent are they selling?
The more they flog their Royal titles for personal gain, the more they devalue it. Even if they have now lost the HRH, they still plan to crassly trade off the back of the Dukedom of Sussex, which is part of the country’s history and legacy. This destroys the whole raison d’être of Royalty. It breaks the divine bond with the public which will therefore owe them no favours and no obligations. And, of course, the liberal world owes the Sussex’s no favours and no obligations – with incessant exposure the appeal of a picture-perfect lifestyle will fade with time, like a photo left out in the sun. By flying the nest in this manner, they are cutting off the branch on which the nest was built.
The Duchess was speaking to ITV’s Tom Bradby
The reason for their departure is that this lavish lifestyle they’ve enjoyed to date has made them rather unhappy. On the couple’s tour of Africa, the Duchess confided to a Royal reporter that “it’s not enough to just survive”, that you have got to “thrive”; that she has “really tried” to adopt the British stiff upper lip before concluding it is “internally really damaging”. Apparently, nobody asks her how she feels. The Duchess was speaking just after attending a centre which caters for children who have had their limbs blown off by landmines.
It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, and who you’re with, in our society if you say that you’re not ok suddenly you become the centre of attention. You’re irreproachable if you play the mental health card. It’s classic narcissism, born of an inherently narcissistic ideology. And it speaks to the extraordinary levels of an entitled and self-absorbed victimhood culture that these comments can be uttered without shame and, more to the point, taken seriously. But liberalism is essentially a parasitic ideology, seemingly immunizing many people to their own self-awareness.
It is certainly the crowning glory of liberal civilisation – the sight of somebody who has everything in grief. Naturally, the Duchess received some criticism for these comments. But since the Sussexes have announced that they intend to step away from Royal life left-wing liberals are claiming that the press have hounded the Duchess out of the country. Because the country is racist. Apparently. On the contrary, apart from a few examples in this regard – which doesn’t make the country racist – the public have been very welcoming to Meghan Markle. Had she been white and British the coverage would have been brutal. She’s escaped much of that on account of being a “woman of colour”, which increasingly people wear as some sort of Woke shield, protecting them from legitimate criticism. People are just so frightfully worried of being called “racist”, they’re hesitant to ‘go there’, even when criticism is deserved. Because as soon as that word is uttered you become a kind of social leper.
So, you can trash a country’s culture, its heritage, disrespect and threaten the Queen, by suggesting that you will do a candid interview if you don’t get your way, and help to turn one of its most precious, historic institutions into a crass circus, but left-wing liberals will still present you as the victim. To which the public get no right of reply.
Presently, moral obligations don’t exist prior to the sovereign individual having chosen them. Unless of course you happen to be a white man. In which case you’re obliged to walk on eggshells; where a special set of moral obligations exist in the present as a result of choices made by people hundreds of years ago in the past based upon shared skin pigmentation and sex. Other groups inherit concomitant grievances in proportion to these moral obligations. So, liberals will reject the idea of inheriting responsibility or duty or loyalty, but they’re eager to inherit some abstract grievance. This aspect of Woke culture, the ranking of groups in ascendant victimhood, is not liberal; it’s neo Marxist. The moniker Liberalism is merely a smokescreen which hides the guilty.
The entire ideology is rife with contradictions and phoniness, which is primarily why many high profile, self-identifying liberals are insufferable hypocrites. Preaching, say, to everybody about the importance of making lifestyle changes to counter the purported perils of anthropogenic climate change, while regularly going off on jaunts in private, carbon guzzling planes. And nothing says environmentalism quite like intending to set up a lifestyle that has you flying across an ocean on a private plane multiple times per year! But irrespective of the claims of hypocrisy, to hold court and flaunt your moral virtues as the Sussexes have done, is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that you are wearing the latest designs from New York. Something the Royals have always commendably avoided.
The Sussexes are essentially part of an elite class of individuals who proselytize to each other in what is little more than a fanciful game. In truth, they are the enablers of all that they oppose. They take as a mistress the very lavish lifestyle they advocate against, and yet they act as though they have moral superiority. It’s shallow; transparent. Mostly because in the liberal world of industrial globalism words carry little burden outside of contractual obligations. Thus, words and actions and combined endeavours are often debased to such a point where only their outer shell is left, which remains intact for the sake of appearances.
Of the two, Harry’s conduct has been far more abominable. It is, after all, his family, and his country. He is still, though, in spite of everything, very much a product of his environment. It seems the duty he had to family and country has merely transferred to the woman he loves. This chivalry towards his wife has strong and deep roots, derived from a background of duty and piety, and no doubt wanting his marriage to succeed where his parents’ marriage failed; but the double-irony is that this chivalry, in his own search for love and happiness in a wider world, has effectively severed him from his roots, and it will most likely lead to the breakdown of his marriage.
Chivalry relies upon the purity and chastity of its recipient – a state of utter subjection to the will of a disdainful lady is clearly not a wise approach. And especially not if the object of the devotion is a left-wing feminist with history. As soon as this lady had the child, she had the leverage to change a situation she chose to participate in, and to take Harry along for the ride. It seems feminists are so miserable that not even a Prince is good enough. In fact, nothing will be. Ever.
Harry will find that his wife will keep turning the screw. The more he yields, the more he’ll weaken their relationship and reduce their sexual polarity. They’ll grow to resent one another. If he doesn’t yield, she’ll think he’s being unreasonable because she’s become accustomed to getting her own way. It’s a catch-22. In the meantime, Harry will grow resentful of being removed from his station in life. That would be a kind analysis. If we’re being unkind, we would say much worse.
Either way, the marriage has no future. Which is fine. Because marriage has essentially been degraded into being little more than a social contract. Certainly, it’s this sense of having a retreat which sterilizes much of the meaning of the vow and its significance. Everywhere in the liberal world there is this dogged effort to obtain gratification without paying for it.
The great flaw of Liberalism is that it unanchors people from a sense of allegiance; a unifying principle. The ideological by-product of industrial globalism, which has broken down barriers to trade and growth, it has taken the very basic idea that we are born into some fundamental unit of existential solidarity, from which we derived meaning, and replaced it with an inordinate patchwork of contractual reciprocity.
It is devoid of the sense of the sacred. Tremendous economic growth has not been matched by individual, social and spiritual growth. Everywhere people running about with nothing firm beneath their feet. With no law but the inclination of the moment. No warrants for treachery and cruelty. No sense of social shame. Not a great deal binding people to the past or to each other. Liberalism is an ideology where selfishness takes possession of a culture.
On the other hand, lives simply woven together by divine trust and love isn’t enough to keep a civilization alive. Because it mostly depends on a small, static society that never looks outside or beyond. Such as ancient Sparta, which in anxiously trying to hold on to its own social order, was already imploding before it fell to the Macedonians. Successful societies have never drawn a curtain; instead, have invariably looked outward, never ceasing to develop.
Megxit does in fact reveal this clash between core values – one which we can trace as far back as the 13th century when the church became part of the international banking system. It’s the clash between monarchy and liberalism, traditionalism and secularism and of course nationalism and globalism. And it’s precisely these kind of tensions that we can expect to see more of as that clash only promises to intensify.
30th Dec 2019 30th Jan 2020 EddieB13 Comments
It takes all sorts make the world. There are those walking quite calmly in the sunlight, who appear to be at home in the environment, and there are those pacing quite angrily under a cloud, who appear to loathe everything about the environment; their deepest disdain, rather poetically, often being reserved for themselves. If we want to know from whence such differences spring, as far as anybody can know it, we must begin at the sources of the river, and not merely dilly-dally in the swamps where it straggles away into a final confusing, labyrinthine delta. We should observe simple origins, not complex conclusions; thoughts, not things. For readily understood but quickly forgotten, it’s our thoughts that shape the world, not the world that shapes our thoughts.
We are the master storytellers. So, we should take great care over the stories we tell. Events take on added significance when they converge with the narrative within. It’s from this convergence where we take the materials to build our reality. Palatial retreats or squalid slums – where we reside in our heads is entirely up to us. The world will ultimately be in alignment with it, as the planets are in alignment with the sun.
We therefore should regularly reflect on what ideas are in our heads at present, and in what way they are likely to mould the future.
“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”
– Hosea 8:7
Commonly, we dwell on the unpleasant, the irritating, the ugly; on the unfair and the unfortunate; on what we’ve lost, on what we can never have. We can spend inordinate time complaining, moaning, whining; often, we’ll only begin to appreciate something by bemoaning its loss. But we should remember that every mind is like a God. We create our reality by bringing it into existence. Only playing the bad hands would not make for an effective poker strategy. The same is true of life. A lifetime of tolerating or resisting that which we perceive to be doing us wrong, while ignoring that which is doing us good, is sure to lead to ruin.
Instead of a persistent, nagging recognition of all that blights us, we should be grateful for the blessings within our reach, and not take them for granted. When we do so, we’re at ease with the world, not at odds with it. Gratitude is the gift of levity, without which we can be weighed down, carrying our sullen impressions about like a lumbering stone statue.
By being grateful we are arming ourselves with a cheerfulness, a lightness of touch, an exuberance, which will allow us to hurdle obstacles as if our feet were kissing the ground. Successful people, who seem to enjoy the fruits of happiness and good fortune, have not faced an absence of problems, they’ve merely acquired the ability to deal with them. Optimism – a child of gratitude – is common to all. And frankly, if we’re not practising gratitude, there’s nothing much to be optimistic about.
Hardship is universal, but there’s no doubt some of us have been fated to endure more than others. Still, I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t got things to be grateful for. And what could be better, artistically speaking, than an optimism breaking through anguish like a fiery gold encircling the edges of a black cloud. To be grateful in a world constantly trying to bring you down, is truly one the greatest accomplishments, and always rewarded. Because it is through an honest, sincere appreciation of the blessings in life where we start to calibrate ourselves to a more favourable future. Indeed, if our lives are beset by difficulty, even more reason that we adjust the settings on our metal detector, for the thing we find will invariably be of a kind with the things we sought.
We are governed by what we choose to think about. If we commit ourselves to every doctrine of insanity and despair, we give Torment the keys to our life, and make it sovereign. But we have the power to take the reins, at any moment, by independent action from within, and not mere reaction to without. To act positively and to desist from reacting negatively is the difference between being the architects of our daily experience, and not merely being the instruments of the things that happen to us.
But the ungrateful appear to imagine that affliction was a yoke mysteriously imposed on us by life, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all of us on ourselves.
To take the proverbial phrase, is the glass half empty or half full? If it is half empty your thirst will never be quenched; but if it’s half full, truly, you’ll never want for a drink. Thus, when we are being grateful, we always have enough; when we’re being covetous, we never have what we need. And so, a grateful person can be the richest person in the world with very little, but no amount of wealth and riches will make the ungrateful anything other than wretchedly poor.
To sit in the driver’s seat, and to tip the scales in favour of abundance, simply, we must be more grateful than ungrateful. We must focus more on the positive than the negative. If a loved one, for instance, is suspicious of a kind gesture or of being the subject of our sincere appreciation, it’s probably a good sign that we should make more of a habit of practicing gratitude. It will change our life.
The Wisdom of Children
8th Dec 2019 29th May 2020 EddieB8 Comments
One observation of modern society is to note the increasing infantilization of its culture. It almost seems as though everything is designed to be loud, shiny and short lived, as if intending to capture rapidly diminishing attention spans. It is of a narcissistic character: attention-seeking, selfish, demanding, self-centred. Indeed, personified and it would be a child – there’s no demographic more narcissistic than children. But, in fact, in many ways it would be too high and hopeful a compliment to say that our culture is becoming more childish. For one of its main flaws is to undervalue the wisdom of children, at the same time as over emphasising the intelligence of adults.
It is in paradox that we see life smiling back at us, and this, one of the strangest paradoxes is, by lived experience, one of the most reassuring. It is that often the more we look at a thing, the less we see the world, and the more we learn a thing, the less we know the world. Those who study something and practise it every day will see less and less of the significance of other things. In the same way, many of us will be so bonded by daily routine that, unless we make a habit of goading ourselves into gratitude, we’ll see less and less significance of the trees, the birds, and the sky. We become obsessed with trivial things and quickly forget the beauty of consequential things.
However, children are full of awe and wonder for the things that typically induce awe and wonder, and they’re rightly bored by the things that typically induce boredom.
When we are asked to perform certain tasks, we overestimate the significance of those tasks and, by inference, underestimate the significance of others. As if we were carrier pigeons with blinkered vision, we become immersed in detail and therefore our outlook is narrowed by detail. Because with age comes a degree of specialisation. We start to know more and more about less and less, until we know close to everything about nothing. There’s little room for mystery.
But children generally cast their net further and further afield. They know less and less about more and more, until they know close to nothing about everything. The world is full of mystery.
Our imagination is limited by social mores and conventions. When we reach a certain age many of us think we have all the answers and talk at great length about things we know little about. But much of the time these are merely socially reinforcing statements. For we don’t dare speak out of turn, knowing that there are certain opinions of certain things that we must take. We are proverbial gardeners tending to flowers in somebody else’s garden.
Children’s imagination isn’t limited in the same way. They are full of questions and have few answers. They are unshackled from the opinions of others; the pull of social conformity does not exert as strong an influence. And so, their opinions grow naturally, like flowers in a field.
Socialisation is the process by which children turn into adults. It’s the internalisation of behaviour deemed acceptable in society. Naturally, there’s a correlation between societal success and degree of socialisation. The more successful in society tend to be the most socialised and the least successful the least socialised.
The drive to fit in and be popular is at core a game with rewards and punishments. In social groups you generally score better the more you assimilate. Because despite all the cultural clamour for “diversity” smaller social groups always gravitate to uniformity. We mix with people we share commonalities with or share common goals with and we clash with those we don’t. That clash will either be respectful or belligerent.
The adoption of social masks is essentially a compromise between individual and society of what a man or woman should appear to be. We grow so accustomed to wearing masks we wrongly believe it to be our authentic self; when in the design of which others invariably have a greater share. Of course, unlike adults, when children wear masks, they understand that they’re playing; that they are becoming someone else. And indeed, as they grow older, they do become someone else. They compromise. They conform.
Without conformity civilisation is impossible – it’s the glue in social cohesion. Certainly, it’s always been an important quality to help us get through this life; for one thing, there’s often little sympathy for those who go on to act upon their own intuition. Society will soon crush into submission all those with a rebellious streak. Most of the time this is quite unnecessary. Youngsters quickly learn that a happy life involves doing what your fellows do. Going against the crowd risks social alienation; or worse, draws a conspicuous target over one’s head.
As we grow older, we lose what it is to be a child. Indeed, it’s largely through socialisation. Much of that intoxicating blend of awe, excitement, wild abandon, unbridled imagination, freedom from judgement, dies when we reach a certain age. Letting go can be hard.
Adults hankering for their childhood is an incongruity in the sense of a contrast. But perhaps the contrast is deceptive. For we humans have only recently developed the upper lobes of the brain and cannot stand using them all the time. It is necessary, therefore, when opportunity arises, that we let them rest and animate the lower centres. In other words, it is necessary that we take a step back into childhood and play. As for those who play all the time, we do have a word for such people: morons.
The problem, however, as mentioned, and as Shakespeare put it so eloquently, is that the world presents itself as one large stage full of players (actors), and though children can generally distinguish between work and play, adults have become so accustomed to games that they fail to make this basic distinction in their work and private lives. As children innocently play in the garden, full of joy and wonder at the world around them; adult play is tedious, cynical and downright dishonest. There are whole industries that are presented in the aspect of enormous fortresses of lies. The automatic result of economic forces, like all our behaviour, the individual strategizes their ascension through the ranks with no more conscious thought than the digestion of his or her food. It is in such a way that the game of self-preservation is won and lost.
The multi-generational winners of this game that own and run the world wish everything to remain as it is. In fact, their sole motivation is to amass more power. As one of the functions of ownership, these winners control culture and determine taste. They glorify the moron – the man or woman who has emotions and not brains – and thus much of the culture is directed toward the creation of an artificial childhood. By debasing the culture, to put it starkly, their goal is to weaken and degrade those upon whom they prey, like a thief who gets their victim drunk before they rob them.
Children are far easier to control than adults, which is why people are increasingly acting and behaving like children. There’s an entire generation of adults who’ve been socially engineered to be emotionally incontinent wrecks; not wishing to relinquish their grip on their reassuring childhood, presumably because of their sheer terror of adulthood. It can be seen right across the cultural spectrum, from movies, popular music, tv shows. It appears as if popular culture is becoming more and more low brow to meet the needs of an audience frozen in a state of arrested emotional development.
Equally, the cultural advancement of personal truths over objective truths is the cultural equivalent of throwing a cold bucket of water on the burning fire of reality. Like children, many people are increasingly incapable of dealing with their own problems and are being encouraged to seek the solace of comforting illusions, safe spaces and, if all else fails, are redirected to the safe harbour of prescription medication.
Incessant escapism is a survival tactic for people who haven’t learned how to survive. Pain can never be released; real growth can never therefore be attained. People become trapped in self-destructive circles which, in the temporary alleviation of pain, makes them dependent on the very pain that they are trying to alleviate.
These cultural developments are somewhat organic but coexist in a rich ecosystem which is managed and engineered by the class that owns it. The intention behind them is akin to the one behind the emasculation of men. It’s for people to embrace their weaknesses. Power wants us confused, emotional, subordinated and child-like.
Socialisation is the process by which children transition into adulthood but ironically, in many ways, it’s also the process by which adults are regressing back into childhood. I think society would be greatly improved if it really embraced its inner child, rather than be comprised of adults who merely act like children. Because children are always engaging with a world that adults are increasingly escaping. They love their childhood whereas many adults are progressively fearful of adulthood. And as children are free to choose, adults are compelled to imitate. It’s a voice in the valley as opposed to echoes in a cave.
And therein lies the wisdom of children.
Rose-tinted Glasses
24th Nov 2019 30th Jan 2020 EddieB6 Comments
“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions (perceptions) without concepts are blind”
In ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’, Prussian German philosopher, Immanuel Kant outlined his theory of perception. He propounded that our understanding of the external world has its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts (reasoning that proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation). In a nutshell, he said that the external world provides things that we sense. Our mind processes this information and gives it structure, enabling our comprehension; in part, because space and time are pre-conditions of the mind. Therefore, in what he called the “transcendental unity of apperception”, “the concepts of the mind (understanding) and perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension”.
He maintained that without this synthesis of understanding and sensibility the world would be quite unintelligible. Which is to say that abstractions without perceptions are nondescript; perceptions without abstractions are featureless and unrelatable.
In a Kantian sense, our understanding of objective reality is tinted by our intuition. There’s no way of separating objectivity – the external world – and subjectivity – the internal world. Both are dependent upon one another. Because awareness of the external necessitates the internal. And so, in simple terms, perception of our surroundings is akin to wearing green-tinted glasses. All our experiences are filtered through them. We therefore cannot reliably conceive of an outside world that’s truly independent of the way we perceive it, just as someone who unknowingly wears green-tinted glasses would not be able to conceive of a non-green colour. The thought would be alien to them.
The summation of Kant’s ideas on perception can be found in his doctrine of transcendental idealism. He said that space, time and causation are mere sensibilities. Unlike George Berkeley’s subjective idealism, Kant’s theory maintains that the external world ‘does’ exist, but that its objective nature is unknowable.
Kant’s transcendental idealism concerns metaphysics (a branch of philosophy that examines first principles and the nature of reality). But we can surely apply much of his ideas on perception to how we process information in a more practical sense. In terms of personal preference and bias.
It seems all humans crave certainty – our unconscious abhors message incongruity. When a message is not internally consistent or does not fit surrounding information, a clash occurs. This clash can cause psychological discomfort. We will instinctively try to remove this discomfort by either eliminating dissonant thoughts or by incorporating them into our current belief system. Psychologists call this process ‘cognitive dissonance’. In other words, a mind with disunity of thought is a mind at war with itself. Sooner or later one side wins and imposes its tyranny.
Similarly, if a new message does not match preconceptions it will hit a defensive wall of incredulity. But if it does, it will be let through the gate of credulity. Psychologists call this ‘confirmation bias’, which is one example of ‘cognitive bias’.
All of us are prone to bias of every shade. We’re all guilty of having our opinions colour and shape our thoughts to such an extent that what we wish to see can hardly be differentiated from what we end up seeing. So, in some ways, the green-tinted glasses metaphor, which clarifies the Kantian position on perception and the interplay between understanding and sensibility in a metaphysical sense, can equally be applied to all of us in a cognitive sense.
Our mind can be rather like a cookie cutter tray making the same shapes and designs. These tried and tested cognitive patterns have the allure of being able to be used in every circumstance, which has the effect of whittling the vastness of the world down to a more manageable size.
In fact, I’m quite sure life would be unnavigable without an inner compass pointing to our north star. It gives us certainty which cultivates action, whereas uncertainty cultivates inertia. The problem, however, is that reasoning requires inertia, and action negates reasoning. This paradox has been the bane of the human experience; for while the wise tend to be full of doubts, the foolish tend to be full of conviction.
Perhaps there are none more foolish than those who are locked up in the prison of ideology. In the cognitive sense, this is the ultimate manifestation of Kant’s green-tinted glasses. A one-stop shop for every problem, every situation. Ideologies feel good because they are familiar to us; they appeal to sentiment, not reflection. A kind of turbo-charged certainty fuelling a basic psychological need.
One method to unravel ideological thinking or extreme bias is to use somebody’s own argument against them. Because often every reason articulated to discredit an opponent’s position is one that will discredit their own. Essentially, an intellectual boomerang. Such as accusing somebody of indulging in conspiracy theories before proceeding to indulge in a conspiracy theory. Or saying, for instance, that women are exactly the same as men, but then insinuating, by effectively invoking special status for women, through the support for some diversity quota, that they’re different.
Thus, the ideological will naturally protect their ideas with huge impenetrable fortresses of doublethink (self-contradictory positions). Only that by some accident of arrangement the fortresses’ pieces of artillery are almost always set up with the tails pointing at their adversaries and the mouths pointing at themselves. This is most unfortunate because the most ideological are always the most defensive, and the greatest line of defence, of course, is to attack. Commonly, attacks are projecting and self-deceiving. Such as accusing somebody of being hateful while screaming at them. Or accusing them of being science deniers but maintain a position, on other fronts, that denies basic human biology.
To be ideological is to think in a general way, wanting to tackle complex social and economic issues with a broad sweep of the brush, rarely going to the trouble of being specific. This is because specificity requires a high degree of cognition, whereas ideology allows you to remain in that state when you are not thinking of anything and yet your thoughts come into your head by themselves, each more pleasantly self-affirming than the last, without even causing you the trouble of chasing after and finding them. In other words, ideology not only provides us with the comfort of certainty, but also the ease of laziness.
To find faults with ideological thinking, therefore, it is not so much through the Critique of Pure Reason, but merely through a critique of poor reasoning.
This is by no means to point fingers and declare myself immune. On the contrary, to a lesser or greater extent, we are all ideological. We all wear Kantian tinted glasses. Because what we see and hear are always pre-conditions of our mind. That’s how we make sense of the world. And of course, to make any kind of sense of it we must be confident in our own ability to do so.
Certainly, confidence is at the heart of it. As is optimism – ideologies invariably offer the reward of idealism. To metaphorize appropriately, then, we should say that we wear rose-tinted glasses. For often we are pretending to know a lot about things we really don’t know enough about, believing that to blindly follow these ideas it will lead to a future more advantageous than the present.
Whether everything is tinted in red, green or blue, or every hue in between, we can only begin to dim this tint by challenging and testing our own opinions at least as much as we challenge viewpoints which are at variance with them. This is the only antidote to ideological thinking that I know of.
Fascism and the Weaponization of Words
17th Nov 2019 17th Nov 2019 EddieB10 Comments
Nigel Farage is a fascist. Tommy Robinson is a fascist. Donald Trump is a fascist. This term, among many others, has been shooting from lips like bullets from muskets in the front lines of an infantry. At first, such terms were supposed to fire at volleys, in regimented formation, at the command of the officers. In practice, however, as battle ensues, each soldier fires a musket at their own discretion. Which of course brings total confusion to the battlefield, soldiers being enveloped by the smoke of the discharged rounds, hindering accurate shooting. Fire at will!
Language suffers most of all in this melee because what we are left with is a smoky vagueness. Let me explain. This is the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of fascism:
“An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization”
Here’s dictionary.com’s definition:
“A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce etc, and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism”
“Fascism is a form of radical right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe”
There’s a great deal of debate in academia over what fascism really means, but the one thing that everyone agrees upon is that it involves authoritarianism. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of authoritarianism:
“The enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom”
The prerequisite to qualify for this description is to either be in power or to advocate for it in a way that will subdue personal freedom.
How can Nigel Farage be a fascist when he is a leader of a minor political party, and is unlikely to be in power for at least several cycles given the fabric of the British political system? How can he be a fascist when his political position over many years has essentially been at odds with a political power which has refused to acknowledge the will of the majority of the British people?
Tommy Robinson has no power and is in fact the subject of power, Big Tech removing him from their platforms under increasingly draconian hate speech laws, which are effectively suppressing the freedom of speech under the guise of “tolerance”. He has also recently served a custodial sentence, being found guilty of contempt of court by the British justice system for exposing decades long child rape gangs, something covered up by other branches of the British justice system, for which he already served 10 weeks in jail.
As for Donald Trump, he does have the power to qualify for the term, but unlike Big Tech, he is not enforcing strict etiquette in the modern marketplace of ideas, nor monopolizes it.
These huge companies have power and they’re exhibiting striking signs of authoritarianism by curtailing personal freedom through censorship. As is the British justice system, which is swiftly prosecuting someone who has exposed endemic corruption within the system, rather than swiftly prosecuting those who were preying on children. These profiles are more befitting of the term “fascist”.
The entire political discourse is awash with insults and accusations. A fog bank of pejoratives sweeps in, blurring meaning and covering up understanding. If those engaged in political debate are using words so flippantly and without context how can anyone comprehend the debate itself?
Indeed, many political words have been so abused by dishonest and slovenly use that they’ve lost their original meaning. Terms like ‘fascism’, ‘far-right’, ‘racism’, ‘nationalism’, have become so broad and vague that they can hardly be distinguished from one another, like the polished stones on a riverbed which have been eroded by time and the torrent of water. As far as I can tell, in terms of use, they all now essentially mean the same thing: “something deeply unpleasant”. But, clearly, it’s those who are quick to use inflammatory labels who are the most unpleasant.
It’s axiomatic that in an intellectual tussle the first person who throws stones always loses. Not that those who try to control the lexicon are interested in winning debates. Their interest lies in suppressing them.
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A Strategy for Enhanced Recovery and Sequestration in Gas Shales
Who: Mark D. Zoback, Stanford University What: Download the Flyer (pdf) Download the Slides from the Presentation (pdf) Where: Building 50 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, April 16, 2010 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series Abstract: Current estimates of unconventional natural gas resources in the U.S. and Canada (as well as the…
Zircons from Hell?
Who: John W. Valley, Department of Geoscience, University of Wisconsin-Madison What: Download the Flyer (pdf) Where: Building 50 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, March 12, 2010 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series Video Replay: Biosketch: John Valley is the Van Hise Professor of Geology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he established…
The Microbial Engines That Drive Earth’s Biogeochemical Cycles
Who: Paul G. Falkowski, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Rutgers University What: Download the Flyer (pdf) Where: Building 50 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, February 19, 2010 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series Abstract: Virtually all non-equilibrium electron transfers on Earth are driven by a small set of biological machines comprised…
Investigating the physical basis of biomineralization
Who: Patricia M. Dove, Department of Geosciences, Virginia Tech What: Download Patricia-dove Where: Building 50 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, January 15, 2010 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series More Information: Patricia M. Dove is a Professor of Geochemistry in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech. After receiving a Ph.D. at…
Enhanced in situ Mineral Carbonation in Peridotite for CO2 Capture and Storage
Who: Peter Kelemen, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University What: Download the flyer (pdf) Where: Building 50 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, December 11, 2009 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series Video Replay: More Information: Peter Kelemen is Arthur D. Storke Professor of Geochemistry at Columbia University, where he moved…
Processes Controlling Uranium Transport in Groundwater at Three Contaminated DOE Sites
Who: James A. Davis, Senior Research Geochemist/Engineer, USGS What: Download the flyer (pdf) Where: Building 50 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, November 20, 2009 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series Video Replay More Information: James A. Davis is a Senior Research Geochemist/Engineer at the U. S. Geological Survey in Menlo…
State of the Carbon Cycle 2009
Who: Josep (Pep) Canadel, Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project (GCP) What: Download the flyer (pdf) Where: Goldman School of Public Policy When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, October 16, 2009 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series More Information: Josep (Pep) Canadel is the Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project (GCP), whose…
Pyrochlore: The Elegant Response of a Simple Structure to Extreme Conditions of Irradiation and Pressure
Who: Dr. Rod Ewing, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan What: Download the flyer (pdf) Where: Building 66 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, June 12, 2009 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series More Information Dr. Rod Ewing is the Donald R. Peacor Collegiate Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at…
Field-Scale to Molecular-Scale Modeling of Arsenic in Bengal Groundwater
Who: Dr. Laurent Charlet, Earth and Planetary Science Department (LGIT-OSUG), Universite Joseph Fourier Grenoble I in France What: Download the flyer (pdf) Where: Building 66 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, April 24, 2009 Why: About the Distinguished Scientist Seminar Series Video Replay More Information Laurent Charlet is a Distinguished Professor, Universite Joseph Fourier…
Responding to Climate Change: Biofuels, Energy Security, and Management Options
Who: Jerry Schnoor, Allen S. Henry Chair in Engineering and the Co-Director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, University of Iowa Where: Building 66 Auditorium When: 10:30 am to 12 pm, March 6, 2009
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Scott W. Rothstein
This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions. (November 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Scott W. Rothstein (born June 10, 1962) is a disbarred lawyer and the former managing shareholder, chairman, and chief executive officer of the now-defunct Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler law firm. He was accused of funding an extravagant lifestyle with a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme, one of the largest such in history.[1][2] On December 1, 2009, Rothstein turned himself in to authorities and was subsequently arrested on charges related to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).[3] Although his arraignment plea was not guilty, Rothstein cooperated with the Government and reversed his plea to guilty of five federal crimes on January 27, 2010.[4] Rothstein was denied bond by U.S. Magistrate Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who ruled that due to his ability to forge documents, he was considered a flight risk.[5]
(1962-06-10) June 10, 1962 (age 58)
Bronx, New York, U.S.
Nova Southeastern University's Law School - Shepard Broad College of Law
Attorney (disbarred)
Criminal status
Incarcerated at undisclosed federal prison
Conviction(s)
January 27, 2010 (pleaded guilty)
Racketeering, fraud, conspiracy
50 years in federal prison
2 Background and career
3 Recent
3.1 "The Great Gatsby"
3.2 Philanthropy and political contributions
3.3 Law partner murder
3.4 "Disbarment on consent"
3.5 Trust account
4 $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme
4.1 Swindle pitch
4.2 Court-appointed receiver
5 Victims
5.1 Shimon Levy and Ovi Levy
5.2 Banyan Capital
5.2.1 Abraxas Discala
5.2.2 George G. Levin
5.2.3 Partners' income strategy and Rothstein's returns
5.2.4 Losses
On June 9, 2010, Rothstein received a 50-year prison sentence after a hearing in federal court in Fort Lauderdale,[6] although federal prosecutors in 2011 filed a motion notifying the court they would be seeking a sentence reduction for Rothstein.[7]
His firm had 70 lawyers and 150 employees, with offices in Boca Raton, West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tallahassee, Florida, New York City and Caracas, Venezuela. The firm focused on labor and employment matters, civil rights, intellectual property, internet law, corporate espionage, personal injury, wrongful death, commercial litigation, real estate, mergers and acquisitions, and governmental relations.[8] His client list included Citicorp, J. C. Penney, Ed Morse Automotive Group, National Beverage, Silversea Cruise Lines, Supra Telecom, and Wells Fargo.[9] Until he was permanently disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court on November 25, 2009, Rothstein was a member of the Florida Bar and admitted by the United States Supreme Court. He had been given an AV Preeminent peer review rating by Martindale-Hubbell. The AV rating is a significant accomplishment and a testament to the fact that a lawyer's peers rank him or her at the highest level of professional excellence.
Rothstein may have stolen millions of dollars from an investment side-business.[10] A list of 259 persons or corporate entities entitled to $279 million in restitution has been sealed by the court.[11]
On November 3, 2009, Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Department of the Treasury agents served a warrant to search the firm's Fort Lauderdale offices. Rothstein sent an email in recent weeks to firm lawyers asking them to investigate which countries refused to extradite criminal suspects to either the U.S. or Israel, and firm lawyers responded that Morocco is one such country. Rothstein had wired $16 million to an individual in Casablanca[12] and left for Casablanca on October 26, 2009. On October 31, 2009, he sent a suicide text message note to all of his law partners:
Sorry for letting you all down. I am a fool. I thought I could fix it, but got trapped by my ego and refusal to fail, and now all I have accomplished is hurting the people I love. Please take care of yourselves and please protect Kimmie [Rothstein's wife]. She knew nothing. Neither did she, nor any of you deserve what I did. I hope God allows me to see you on the other side. Love, Scott.
On November 3, 2009, after many texts by Stuart Rosenfeldt, the president of the firm, urging him to "choose life", Rothstein returned to Fort Lauderdale on a chartered jet, (chartered by the ex-husband of Governor Crist's wife, Todd Rome)[13] from Casablanca. On November 2, his law firm with only $117,000 in its operating account filed suit against him, asked a judge to dissolve the firm, accusing him of misappropriating hundreds of millions of dollars from investor trust accounts in a Ponzi scheme from an investment business he covertly ran out of his law office.[14][15]
In 2009 Rothstein resided at the Federal Detention Center, Miami in Downtown Miami,[16] but was later moved to an undisclosed location and his inmate number removed from the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator webpage.[17]
Background and career
Rothstein was born in the Bronx and moved with his parents to Lauderhill, Florida as a teenager. A 1988 Juris Doctor graduate of Fort Lauderdale's Nova Southeastern University's Law School, the Shepard Broad College of Law, and a 1984 Bachelor of Arts graduate of University of Florida, Rothstein's law career began in 1988 and, for nearly fifteen years, he was relatively unknown. His local mentors were wealthy attorneys, Donald McClosky and Bill Scherer.
In the early 1990s, Rothstein first partnered with attorney Howard Kusnick. First located in Plantation, Florida, Kusnick & Rothstein, P.A. subsequently moved to downtown Ft. Lauderdale. Longtime partner Michael Pancier first joined him there.
In 2000, Rothstein joined with Rosenfeldt as a name partner at the Hollywood firm, Phillips Eisinger Koss & Rosenfeldt, P.A., which became known as Phillips Eisinger Koss Rothstein & Rosenfeldt, P.A
In February 2002, Rothstein and Rosenfeldt started their own firm, first known as Rothstein & Rosenfeldt, P.A. Within a month, Pancier was added as a name partner. In July, 2002, adding Susan Dolin, a well-regarded employment lawyer, now practicing on her own in West Broward, the firm became known as Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, Dolin & Pancier, P.A..
In late 2004, the firm became known simply as Rothstein Rosenfeldt, with Adler being added in March 2005. Melissa Britt Lewis, who was murdered in March, 2008, was with Rothstein from the firm's beginning.[18] In seven years, he and his partners expanded the firm to 70 lawyers, including former Boca Raton Mayor and sitting Palm Beach County Commissioner Steve Abrams; former judges Julio Gonzalez, Barry Stone, and former Palm Beach circuit judge, William Berger; TV and radio legal commentator and former prosecutor, Ken Padowitz; Carlos Reyes, former South Broward Hospital District commissioner and lobbyist; Arthur Neiwirth, a bankruptcy expert; and Les Stracher, former legal counsel for Morse Auto Group, who represents major auto dealers.[9]
Others include: Shawn Birken, son of Circuit Court Judge Arthur Birken; Ben Dishowitz, son of County Court Judge Dishowitz; and Grant Smith, son of disgraced former Congressman Larry Smith. Andrew Barnett is Corporate Development Officer, and David Boden, a New York attorney not licensed in Florida, was the firm's general counsel.[19][20]
On September 8, 2011, U.S. District Judge James I. Cohn granted the government's motion to prohibit videotaping Rothstein during a scheduled deposition of him, citing "serious harm" and "security reasons that are unusual in nature." The exact reasons for the judge's decision were sealed. This fueled speculation that his appearance was altered or he was a mafia target due to his cooperation with the prosecution against the mafia.[21]
On June 8, 2011, federal prosecutors filed a motion with the sentencing judge informing him that they would be asking for a sentence reduction for Rothstein.[7] However, on September 26, 2017, prosecutors withdrew their motion for a reduced sentence, saying that he had provided "false material information" in violation of his plea agreement.[22]
Rothstein's name does not appear in the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate database. This indicates he is being held under an alias, which would not be unusual given that he cooperated with the government.
As of November 18, 2009, many of the associates have relocated: Five lawyers moved to Fort Lauderdale-based Rice Pugatch Robinson & Schiller. Steven Lippman and Richard Storfer will be new partners. Riley Cirulnick, George Zinkler and Jodi Cohen are new associates.[23]
In August, 2008, Governor Crist appointed Rothstein as a member of the 4th District Court of Appeal Judicial nominating commission, a body which is responsible for selecting new judges for appointment to the Court.[24]
Bill Brock accompanied Rothstein to Morocco. His job at the law firm was to issue checks for Rothstein's various ventures and contributions, and had the sole security pass for the area where records of Rothstein's non-law firm businesses were kept.[25][26]
An observant Jew, Rothstein grew up in a small Bronx apartment, sharing a bedroom with his sister. His father was a salesman "back in the days when you carried a bag up and down the streets of New York." The family moved to Lauderhill, Florida in 1977, when Rothstein was 16. His grandmother used her life savings to help put him through school. "I grew up poor. I'm a lunatic about money."
I have a deep faith in Judaism that I derive tremendous strength from. Putting on Tefillin is a means of connecting with G-d. It keeps me grounded in a world that can easily cause you to lose your internal balance. Believe me. ... I have lost my way enough times to know.
— Scott Rothstein, October 23, 2008.[9]
Rothstein was a large contributor to a synagogue off Las Olas with his name affixed to the front facade: The Rothstein Family Downtown Jewish Center Chabad. Rabbi Schneur Kaplan is one of the two people who talked Rothstein out of committing suicide.[27]
He invested in residential property. In 2003, he paid $1.2 million for an intracoastal waterfront house on Castilla Isle in Fort Lauderdale. In March 2005, he bought a neighboring home belonging to Miami Dolphins' Ricky Williams for $2.73 million. While living in Williams' old house, he's purchased two other homes on the street and three other homes in Broward for a total residential investment of nearly $20 million. "They call me the king of Castilla."[8][28]
In 2008, he purchased a $6.45 million waterfront gated Fort Lauderdale home, a $6 million condo in New York in the same building as Marc Dreier,[29] and a $2.8 million oceanfront estate in Narragansett, Rhode Island[30] formerly owned by troubled client, Michael Kent, a Fort Lauderdale nightclub owner.[13]
He is part-owner with Anthony Bova of the South Beach Versace Casa Casuarina mansion, where he was married on January 26, 2008, in a three-day wedding celebration with Governor Crist, and his then-fiancée and present wife, Carol Rome, in attendance.[31] A later financial analysis of the 10% property interest Rothstein owned showed that it was worthless.[32] His second wife, Kimberly Wendell Rothstein, a 35-year-old real-estate agent, helped manage his properties, which also include part-ownership of an office building in Pompano Beach. He and Bova also owned Bova Ristorante, formerly long-time generational Italian family-owned Mario's of Boca, which shut down October 18, 2009. Bova Prime, formerly Riley McDermott's on Las Olas Boulevard is still operating. On September 11, 2008, the day before Rothstein took ownership, a dispute involving firearms broke out at Riley McDermott's involving Rothstein's security personnel.[33]
He owns parts of an internet technology called company Qtask and V Georgio Spirits Co., LLC with CEO Vie Harvey and the Renato watch company, with partner, Ovi Levy.[34] Levy is the son of hotelier Shimon Levy, who spent a year in prison in Israel after hiding a criminal kingpin, suspected of two murders.[35]
Rothstein at one time was a minority shareholder of Edify LLC, a health-care benefits consulting company. State Representative Evan Jenne-D-Dania Beach is a $30,000 company consultant, who previously worked a local bank. Rothstein hired Jenne's father, former sheriff and convicted felon, Ken Jenne, as a consultant at his law firm days after Jenne was released from prison on corruption charges. An attorney for Rothstein's law firm serves as the registered agent for Evan Jenne's company, Blue Banyan. Grant Smith, a lifelong friend of Evan Jenne's, is an Edify lobbyist. Edify has worked closely with the state Department of Health to develop wellness programs and also influences certain health-care legislation.[36]
"The Great Gatsby"
In the 2008 interview at his law firm, Rothstein described himself and told how he controlled all aspects of the firm's management:
This is where the evil happens. Look, I sleep in the bed I make. I tend toward the flashy side, but it's a persona. It's just a fucking persona. ... People ask me, 'When do you sleep?' I say I'll sleep when I'm dead. I'm a true Gemini. I joke around that there are 43 people living in my head and you never know what you're going to get. There are some philanthropists in there, some good lawyers, and I like to think some good businessmen. There are also some guys from the streets of the Bronx that stay hidden away until I need them. Does that sound crazy? I am crazy, but crazy in a good way.[28]
His personal office was opulent, with security and a compartmentalized layout. Anyone entering Rothstein's suite of offices had to use an intercom. He could exit, unseen through a second door. In the hallway, an ordinary looking brown door is actually the elevator door. Dozens of surveillance cameras and microphones hang from office ceilings. On his desk: four computer screens and the Five Books of Moses.[37][38]
Outside his personal office hung a painting of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather. The walls of Rothstein's office and other hallways are lined with photos of himself and politicians including Gov. Charlie Crist, former U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, Senator John McCain, Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti, Rudy Giuliani, Joe Lieberman, and Bill McCollum.[28][37]
He was ostensibly an affluent and successful attorney with all the material trappings of a flamboyant lifestyle, including armed body guards and police protection. Twenty-eight city police officials, including captains, majors, undercover officers and the department spokesman, helped guard his home and businesses, the only person in the department's history to have permanent round-the-clock off-duty police protection at his home. The department suspended all work for Rothstein on November 2, 2009.[39][40]
He had a Boeing 727 jet and in 2002, flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa on an anti-AIDS mission.[41] He owns an 87-foot (27 m) $5 million Warren yacht. His fleet of exotic cars included: 1974, 2006, 2007, and 2008 Ferraris, 2009 Bentley, 2007 Silver Rolls-Royce, and one 2008 and two 2010 Lamborghini Murcielagos — worth about $400,000 each, a pair of $1.6 million Bugattis, and a pair of Harleys which he maintains in an air-conditioned warehouse.[8][28][30] All were allegedly purchased and traded from Euromotorsports, the owner of which has an extensive criminal record.[42] All were seized shortly after his return from Morocco. He has a watch collection of over 100, valued at $1 million.[43] In 2008, he was working on opening a cigar and martini bar on Las Olas Boulevard and two high-rise residential buildings in Brooklyn with New York partner Dominic Tonnachio. He was to take ownership of a "series of office buildings" on Oakland Park Boulevard.[34]
Roger Stone, a political trickster for Richard Nixon, was a partner with Rothstein in RRA Consulting, an LLC which was set up to provide public affairs assistance to the RRA law firm's legal clients. According to Stone, that business never generated any clients. It was dissolved in late 2008. On August 27, 2009, Stone, the recipient of Rothstein's sponsorship of his blog until July 29, 2009, "StoneZone", wrote a column recommending Rothstein for the seat vacated by Senator Mel Martinez- a man with "a distinguished legal record, has been a key supporter of Governor Crist and John McCain, has an unmatched record of philanthropic activities and would bring an unconventional style of getting things done to Washington. Add Rothstein to the short list."[44] On November 4, 2009, Stone wrote, "Rothstein had no prior business success, no business acumen nor track record that would engender confidence in an investor. He could not read a balance sheet. He could not write or read a business plan. Rothstein was a lawyer, not an entrepreneur." Stone claims that Rothstein has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) "so severe he never finished a martini, a cigar, a thought, or a sentence, never mind a transaction." According to Stone, neither law firm name partner Russell Adler nor Stuart Rosenfeldt were signatories on the RRA Trust Account.[25]
My family said that the higher you get on the poll, the more people see your ass. You better be sure your ass is clean. My ass is clean.[45]
— Scott Rothstein
He "appeared to be something out of a Great Gatsby movie."[46]
Nobody can really be surprised by this spectacular fall – the question wasn't whether it would happen, but when. How Rothstein was able to generate this kind of money practicing law seemed impossible.
— Michael Goldberg, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who serves as a court receiver in Ponzi cases.[31]
Philanthropy and political contributions
In 2008, his Rothstein Family Foundation gave $1 million to Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, where a lobby will be named after him and his wife. On October 31, 2009 his firm sponsored at a charity golf tournament featuring former Gov. Jeb Bush.[47]
Between 2007 and 2008, he donated $2 million to the American Heart Association, Women in Distress, Alonzo Mourning Charities, Here's Help, and the Dan Marino Foundation.
Politicians of both parties have pledged to donate to charity or return his political contributions. On November 3, 2009, the Florida Republican Party, announced it would give Rothstein's donations ($600,000) to a charity.[12] Gov. Charlie Crist's Senate Campaign ($100,550), state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink ($2,050), Senate President Jeff Atwater, Rep. Ellyn Bogdanoff, and the Florida Democratic Party ($200,000) will return some or all of his contributions.[31][48]
In June 2009, Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader received a contribution of $4,800.[47] A list of FEC filings indexed by NewsMeat include a total of $166,800 to the Republican Party and candidates, including $109,800 to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and $17,600 to Democratic candidates.[49]
Law partner murder
Debra Villegas, who handles his money, is the law firm's chief operating officer. She is co-owner with Rothstein in a home at 2307 Castilla Isle, as of May 2009. According to records, Rothstein originally purchased the property in September 2007, for $1.75 million, and sold it for $10 to a shell corporation in September 2009.[50]
In 2005, the year the Ponzi scheme allegedly began, Villegas earned $80,000 a year. In 2007, her salary had increased to $145,000. Villegas received two Swiss watches — a Rolex and a Breitling — from her "employer". Rothstein paid off her couch and a bedroom set and held title to her two Honda water scooters. Villegas was living in a $475,000 Weston home that Rothstein signed over to her in July 2009 for $100 and "love and affection," according to the deed. Villegas registered a 2009 $100,000 Maserati GranTurismo at the home in January, 2009. In November 2009, Federal prosecutors seized the home, alleging that it was among Rothstein's ill-gotten assets.[51]
Villegas' estranged husband, Tony Villegas, was charged on circumstantial evidence in the March 2008 murder in Plantation, Florida of Melissa Britt Lewis, a partner in Rothstein's firm. Although early news reports wondered at whether the evidence was substantial, according to New Times, "Nine days later, forensic testing revealed that Tony's DNA had been found on Melissa's suit jacket – the same jacket she wore on the day she died."[52]
Police sealed the arrest affidavit.[53] As a result of the homicide and the nature of the legal business, Rothstein has a team of "executive protection specialists" to guard the firm and his family, his teen-aged daughter. The prosecutor who had first worked on the Villegas case, Howard Scheinberg, went to work for Rosenfeldt Rothstein Adler. Villegas, a train conductor, remains in jail awaiting trial. The motive was supposedly revenge for Lewis's closeness with Debra.[54] Debra and Melissa share a therapist: Ilene Vinikoor, whose husband, David represents general counsel, David Boden in the Ponzi scheme investigation.[55]
You get anger from people ... that prick from the Bronx. ... They say I'm building the law firm too fast, that it must be a house of cards.[34]
"Disbarment on consent"
On November 17, 2009, the Florida Bar Executive Committee voted to accept a request by Rothstein to be disbarred. The Florida Supreme Court entered an order permanently disbarring Rothstein on November 25, 2009.[56] Rothstein was removed from the Broward County Grievance Committee, and his name has also been removed from the database of The Best Lawyers in America.[24]
Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, and Adler's trust account was part of the Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts (IOLTA) program that was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to the Florida Bar Foundation.[57]
$1.2 billion Ponzi scheme
Rothstein's investment scheme involved purchasing what were initially mislabeled as fabricated "structured settlements," described as where people sell large settlements in legal cases for lump sums of cash. Alan Sakowitz, an attorney and real estate developer in Bay Harbor Islands, said that he contacted the FBI in September with concerns about Rothstein.[58] On Sunday, November 8, 2009, Sakowitz appeared with Kendall Coffey, attorney for Rothstein's law partners, on the Michael Putney Show on WPLG-TV, MIAMI, correcting Coffey for claiming that Rothstein's "investments" involved structured settlements, which they did not. (Note: "structured settlements" as defined by Rothstein in press reports do not meet the definition in IRC 5891(C)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code). Rothstein's resemble investments in pre-settlement funding[59] or pre-settlement financing. In his December 12, 2011 deposition page 24 lines 15-23, Scott Rothstein himself said "It was intentionally made in a way and presented to that firm and the other firms that were looking at the structure issue that it was merely a purchase of dollars already in-house; that it was not a structured settlement because the true definition of a structured settlement is when someone is actually receiving payments over time that has some other value. We didn't have a true definition of a structured settlement, not by any of the statutes. From that perspective we had reason to make sure that this was not structured. Because when you're dealing with structured settlements you need other levels of Court approval. It would have required the manufacturer of literally hundreds of phony orders, which would have led the entire scheme to detection.'[60]
The FBI estimates the loss to be up to a billion dollars from lucrative whistle-blower and employment discrimination cases.[61] The investors would make up-front cash payments to individuals owed money from the court cases to buy the right to collect the full amount of the settlements later.[14] The investor was guaranteed a minimum of 20 percent investment returns in as little as three months.
Swindle pitch
General counsel David Boden was present for at least one of the swindles, and negotiated the final papers with the investors' lawyers. Rothstein greets and informs the investor his firm was the preeminent sexual harassment law firm in the country. He says he'd figured out a basic formula which was that someone with $10 million net worth was usually willing to pay $2 million in cash to pay off their mistress. The key was confidentiality. Rothstein tells the investor that he would meet potential defendants in his office and would question them about affairs they had with an employee. The defendants would deny it. He pointed to artwork, and said there was a television screen behind it. He tells the investor he turned on a video of the guy having sex with his mistress, and told his client "We can either settle this now, or I can depose your wife, your mistress, you and your son about it." Since defendants" often couldn't or wouldn't pay the entire settlement up-front, Rothstein tells the investor that his first harassment case many years ago, involved a $3.5 million settlement and a million-dollar legal fee, so Rothstein assigned the settlement to a good friend and the plaintiff settles for $3 million without a trial. The "good friend" stood to be paid $3.5 million once the defendant paid up, a half-million dollar profit.
"In 20 years, I have never seen a defendant sue on breach of settlement," Rothstein told them. "The whole idea is that it's secret. Why would they sue?"
Although it did not appear completely legitimate, and it might have appeared that the plaintiffs were short-changed, it makes sense to the potential investor. The idea seems solid. The investor thinks that with enough of these cases at Rothstein's law firm, he could make huge sums of money.
Rothstein then discusses other larger cases: Eli Lilly and Company, involving $1.4 billion with plaintiff representation by Gary Farmer, a firm attorney who negotiated the settlement and who brought the case with him when he arrived at the firm. Several inside whistleblowers went to the fed with unlawful practices regarding the marketing and sales of an anti-psychotic medication called Zyprexa. It was one of the largest qui tam cases in history.
He tells the investor about a potential (allegedly fabricated) case where investors would buy whistle-blower million dollar settlements with a sixty percent short term investor profit. The arrangement would be completely secret; the investor would never know the name of the company or the whistle-blower. The settlement money would be deposited into a trust account at TD Bank, accessible only to the investor at the appropriate time. David Boden follows up with all questions and negotiates the contract.[62]
Court-appointed receiver
On November 2, 2009, Broward Chief Judge Vic Tobin sent an e-mail at 6:45 a.m. to judges about the Rothstein case:
I learned of some very distressing news yesterday. Whoever draws the case try to set the motion today because of the amount of clients and money involved. Also, if you have a case with the firm, please be patient. I don't know if the lawyers will come or not and if they do come, there is no money at this point to go forward with the case or pay firm employees.[39][63]
On November 3, 2009, retired Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Herbert Stettin was appointed the firm's receiver, responsible for approving the firm's day-to-day financial decisions. Firm president and 50% owner of the firm, Stuart Rosenfeldt, "deposited two-thirds of my life savings in my firm's operating account" to prop up finances in the short-term.[12]
Marc Nurik is representing Rothstein, and has stepped down as a lawyer from the firm.[39] The prosecutors are Lawrence D. LaVecchio, Paul F. Schwartz and Jeffrey N. Kaplan. They have decades of experience investigating public corruption, white-collar fraud and organized crime. They are preparing a massive fraud case against Rothstein, zeroing in on his settlement investments, and also allegations of theft from his law firm and client trust accounts.[26]
... I consider my political mentors – Bill Scherer, John Collins, Jim Blosser..
— Scott Rothstein in a 2009 interview.[18]
On November 25, 2009, Attorney William Scherer filed a 289-page Amended Complaint seeking $100,000,000 in civil damages on behalf of his clients, and naming: Toronto Dominion Bank and its associates, Frank Spinosa, Jennifer Kerstetter, and Rosanne Karetsky, Irene Stay, Banyon Income Fund, L.P., Banyon USVI, LLC, George G. Levin, Michael Szafranski, Onyx Options Consultants Corporation, Berenfeld Spritzer Shechter Sheer, LLP., as well as Rothstein and his associates, David Boden, Debra Villegas, Andrew Barnett, and Frank J. Preve, as defendants/co-conspirators.[64][65][66]
The Amended Complaint lists people and businesses to whom Rothstein allegedly wired money while he was en route to or inside of Morocco: Rothstein wired $16 million to his tour guide from Boca Raton, Florida, "Ahnick Kahlid". Kahlid transferred the money to Rothstein's new Moroccan bank account opened upon his arrival with a passport as identification at Banque Populaire in Casablanca;[67] The recipients allegedly are members of the "Israeli Mob"; New York Investors; Florida Investors; Real Estate Investors; and Levin Feeders.[68]
Scherer has said that his clients and all other investors who weren't complicit in the crime will have their money returned. Due to the extreme negligence, TD Bank is liable. "My goal is to get all the money back for the investors from the bank," Scherer said.[69]
On January 27, 2010 Scherer filed an affidavit alleging that Michael Szafranski was complicit in Rothstein's fraud, receiving almost $6.5 million in "ill-gotten" gains directly from Rothstein.[70]
Shimon Levy and Ovi Levy
Shimon Levy allegedly has had deep ties to Israeli organized crime and spent a year in an Israeli prison for hiding a mob figure suspected of two "grisly murders". In 1997, his partner at the Sea Club Resort on Fort Lauderdale beach, Zvika Yuz, was a victim of a murder which remains unsolved. His son, Ovi contacted the Plantation Police Department and began receiving protection during the time Rothstein fled to Morocco.[68]
Banyan Capital
Banyan Income Fund, a Fort Lauderdale-based hedge fund, invested hundreds of millions. It was run by Rothstein and involves Fort Lauderdale businessman George G. Levin, who reported Rothstein to the U.S. Attorney's Office for "suspicious activity." According to the lawsuit, Frank J. Preve is Chief Operating Officer and kept an office inside Rothstein et al. He is a convicted bank fraud and embezzlement felon. He pleaded guilty to bank embezzlement charges in 1985 and received ten years probation and a $10,000 fine for falsifying loan documents in another fraudulent scheme.[46] Banyon and other Rothstein investors' accounts were held at a Toronto-Dominion Bank branch in Fort Lauderdale.[38]
Abraxas Discala
Abraxas Discala, a businessman and former husband of The Sopranos' Jamie-Lynn Sigler, reportedly raised $30 million through his hedge fund which he invested into Rothstein's scheme.[71][72]
George G. Levin
Since 1983, George G. Levin and his wife, Gayla Sue, have lived in Fort Lauderdale's Bay Colony on the Intracoastal Waterway in a 2-story 11,000-square-foot (1,000 m2) home with 8 bathrooms and a large pool, valued at $2 million.[73] Levin has a pattern of filing complaints when his unsavory/fraudulent business ventures are exposed. According to federal court documents, from 1985–1996 Levin's former business GGL Industries, dba Classic Motor Carriages defrauded hundreds of customers, selling kit cars. The federal government filed criminal charges against the company and GGL pleaded guilty to mail fraud in 1999 and agreed to pay $2.5 million in restitution.
Stuart Rado had been a consumer activist who organized GGL's victims and helped spur the government action. Levin subsequently sued Rado for violating the Florida Trade Secrets Act. Rado was diagnosed with cancer during the lawsuit. It was a classic frivolous SLAPP suit ("Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation"). On September 19, 1997, the finding against Mr. Rado was that he pay plaintiff's attorneys' fees.
The federal motion states:
GGL's fraudulent scheme necessarily included as an intricate part the silencing of its critics, among whom was Rado. It did this by using the courts to intimidate Rado into being silent and causing Rado to spend money he could not afford. It was GGL's intention (as one of GGL's attorneys said to Rado [in a 1994 deposition]) to make Rado's net worth go south. GGL and its attorneys forced Rado to incur the expenses of defending two lawsuits for over 4 years. Rado had to incur these expenses and live day-to-day with a barrage of pleadings, depositions and other legal maneuvers by GGL. He had to endure this even though he did nothing legally wrong, and even though GGL was in fact at the same time continuing to perpetrate its nationwide fraud. Rado was being put through this because Rado dared to contact some of GGL's victims and tell them that if they were injured by GGL they should contact the Florida Attorney General for help. What is even more despicable is that GGL knew that Rado was dying of cancer but continued to pursue him with motions and notices of trial and other pleadings, one such notice of hearing being served within days of brain surgery.
Although a convicted felon, GGL hounded Rado's estate for the payment of $80,000 in attorney's fees.
The state of Florida filed suit against the company alleging deceptive business practices and civil theft. A special assistant attorney general, Herbert Stettin, led the investigation. Stettin is now the trustee overseeing the Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler bankruptcy case.
Levin continues to sell kit cars under a different company name, StreetBeasts.[74]
According to a Florida District Court of Appeals case published in 2002, Levin acquired property free and clear for less than the cost of the first mortgage, through a fraudulent transfer.[75]
Partners' income strategy and Rothstein's returns
The allegations are: George Levin was the general partner ("GP") who solicited each limited partner ("LP") to contribute at least $1 million. Initially, each LP contributed $250,000, subject to periodic capital calls up to the amount of their commitments. They were promised 12% annually (15% for first $100 million), to be paid quarterly. The general partner had to maintain a balance of not less than 10% of all contributions after any quarterly distributions. The general partner also gave a "clawback" guaranty to all LP's equal to their original contributions. LP's could not request redemptions during an initial one-year "lock-up" period and were required to give 90 days' notice for any withdrawals. Redemptions would be paid from the GP's own capital account "to the extent available" with a 10% hold-back, but otherwise, only from the purchased lawsuits settlement stream.
Banyon had paid Rothstein's firm at least $656 million, but the law firm anticipated $1.1 billion over a maximum 24-month period. It allegedly received and reinvested about $500 million. Levin expected to make 40% over 24 months but to only pay out 24%. Rothstein's law firm's IOLTA trust accounts established "for the plaintiff" in the purported litigation settlements were used to fund the phony settlement accounts, after the law firm had paid its overhead, keeping its insolvent operation afloat, which included "gifts" to partners and money given to politicians, charities, and pay for a massive advertising budget, as well as Rothstein's personal lifestyle, over three years, amounting to approximately a $500 million loss.
The interest on the funded IOLTA accounts went to the Florida Bar monthly, which was many millions, based on the Banyon contributions. In its prospectus, Banyon claimed to have a legal opinion that Banyon's interest in the IOLTA trust accounts "perfected automatically on execution of the transfer documents" – that the lawsuit proceeds assignments created by general counsel, David Boden. The LP's were warned that they could be taxed on the Partnership's income and realized gains even if no distributions were made. As long as reinvestments were ongoing, the ponzi scheme was facilitated.[42]
1. Venture capitalist Doug Von Allmen's companies' total loss, approximately $105.5 million, through the Banyon Income Fund include:
The Von Allmen Dynastry Trust, overseen by wife Linda Von Allmen: $7 million.
D&L Partners, Von Allmen's Missouri company: $45 million.
Kretschmar: $8 million
Razorback Funding LLC, a Delaware company: $32 million
D3 Capital Club LLC, Delaware company: $13.5 million
2. BFMC Investment LLC, owned by Barry Florescue: $2.4 million[65]
3. Socialite art dealer Bonnie Barnett, mother of defendant, Andrew Barnett
4. The family of car dealers, Ed and Ted Morse.[15][41]
5. Ballamor Capital Management, Radnor, PA: $30 million.[76]
Investors from Morocco lost $85 million.[48]
On November 19, 2009, Rothstein never appeared for a deposition, noticed in the bankruptcy case by investors' attorney John Genovese at Genovese's law office.[24]
Banyon and other Rothstein investors' accounts were held at a Toronto-Dominion Bank branch in Fort Lauderdale.[38]
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^ "Tony Villegas' attorneys: We want to depose Rothstein, Debra Villegas". Weblogs.sun-sentinel.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/pub_info/summaries/briefs/09/09-2146/Filed_11-25-2009_Order_Disbarment.pdf
^ Norman, Bob (2009-11-22). "Rothstein's Castle, Part II – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ Sherman, Amy (2010-04-15). "Feds probe prominent Broward attorney Scott Rothstein – Barack Obama's Inauguration". MiamiHerald.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16. [dead link]
^ Larson, Aaron. "Pre-Settlement Lawsuit Funding in Personal Injury Cases". Expertlaw.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ "Full text of "Scott Rothstein Deposition - PM Session, 12/12/2011"". Internet Archive. United Reporting, Inc. 12 December 2011. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
^ Weaver, Jay (2010-01-22). "FBI: Alleged scheme by lawyer Scott Rothstein could top $1 billion – Afternoon Update". MiamiHerald.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16. [dead link]
^ Norman, Bob (2009-11-17). "Inside the Rothstein Swindle, Part I – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ Norman, Bob (2009-11-02). "Chief Judge: Scott Rothstein's Firm Has "No Money" and Is Going Into Receivership – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/schereramended.pdf
^ a b Norman, Bob (2009-11-20). "Scherer Files Suit Against Rothstein Et Al. – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/scherersuit.pdf
^ Norman, Bob (2009-12-07). "Rothstein's Guide in Morocco Tells His Story – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ a b Norman, Bob (2009-11-26). "The Rothstein Wires – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ Norman, Bob (2009-11-22). "George Levin Was Rothstein's Whale – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/schereraffidavit.pdf
^ Norman, Bob (2009-11-20). "Scherer Files Suit Against Rothstein Et Al". blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/. Retrieved 2010-08-23.
^ Alpert, Bill (2012-02-25). "How Hedge Funds Got Hooked in Scott Rothstein's Ponzi Scheme - Barrons.com". Online.barrons.com. Retrieved 2012-04-24.
^ "100 Bay Colony Lane, Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33308 | BlockShopper South Florida". Southflorida.blockshopper.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ Norman, Bob (2009-11-21). "Rothstein Feeder George Levin's Ugly Past – Broward Palm Beach News – The Daily Pulp: Bob Norman's Blog". Blogs.browardpalmbeach.com. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
^ http://www.estatetaxlawyers.com/articles/2002%20Bankruptcy%20Reform%20Update.pdf
^ "Main Line firm's clients invested $30 million with 'Ponzi' lawyer | PhillyDeals | 11/23/2009". Philly.com. 2009-11-23. Retrieved 2010-05-16.
Video tour of Rothstein's law offices
USA v. Scott Rothstein: Report Commencing Criminal Action, December 1, 2009
Federal Charging Information, December 1, 2009 Case No. 09-60331
Rothstein Plea Agreement, Case 0:09-cr-60331-JIC, filed January 27, 2010
Disbarment on Consent, filed November 20, 2009
Amended Civil Complaint filed November 25, 2009, Case No. 09-062943
Attorney Scherer's Opposition to Motion to Disqualify Counsel for Plaintiffs, filed January 28, 2010
Amended Complaint for Dissolution and For Emergency Transfer of Corporate Powers to Stuart A. Rosenfeldt, Case No. 09-059301
Judge's Order Granting Compelling of Bank Records, Case No. 09-059301
Database of Scott W. Rothstein's Political Contributions
Database of Scott W. Rothstein's Corporate Interests
Database of Scott W. Rothstein's registered vehicles
Database of Scott W. Rothstein's Real Estate Transactions
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_W._Rothstein&oldid=994961308"
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An activist at both home and work
As operations manager for NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity, Emerald Knox oversees CSAW (Cybersecurity Awareness Worldwide), the most comprehensive student-run cybersecurity event in the world. Launched in in 2003 as a small local competition, CSAW has since grown to an international event that last year attracted some 1,225 teams from 90 countries.
Despite the large number of participants, Knox recognized that CSAW, like much in the STEM world, could benefit from greater diversity. Organizers had, for several years, encouraged women students to enter, and in 2019, two all-girl high school teams — from Poolesville High School, in Maryland, and Niwot High School, in Colorado — made the finals. Still, Knox wanted to see more members of every underrepresented group at the finals in Brooklyn — and she wanted to see them not only participate but triumph.
To that end, she is making major outreach and education efforts. “A lot of high schools simply do not have the rigorous computer science programs that students need to be competitive at a high-level event like CSAW,” she says. “But here at Tandon, we have many resources that can be helpful to them, from online lesson plans to grad students eager to be mentors. Schools that want to are going to be able year-round training with our help, and I think we’re going to see CSAW becoming even more dynamic, diverse, and inclusive than it is now.”
Knox, it’s apparent, believes in diving right in when she sees something that needs changing. When her eight-year-old son, Johan, became frightened after witnessing the violent clash between Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters and the NYPD outside of the Barclays Center in late May, she was immediately moved to action. Billing it as “the most peaceful protest ever,” she organized a Black Kids Matter event for her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbors. Held at the Herbert von King Park, the march attracted dozens of families who chanted, “Black kids matter. They are the future,” while toting signs with uplifting slogans like “A is for Activist” and “I am beautiful.”
“We wanted only positivity,” Knox explains. “Our kids see enough signs on the news saying, ‘please don’t kill us’ or ‘I can’t breathe,’ and while that definitely has its place, we wanted the focus here to be on giving them a strong foundation. When they are met with injustice and bigotry, we want them to have internalized the message that they are accomplished, valued, and strong.”
Knox says that it would be easy to become demoralized if she dwelled on the fact that she is still protesting the same things her grandmother and mother protested. “I refuse to become demoralized though,” she asserts. “I take heart that my son is out here with me in von King Park, marching alongside people of all colors and cultures. The key, I think, is for them to learn early on that we are all neighbors.”
Knox, a member of a Bed-Stuy group known as the Dope Moms Club, is planning regular, kid-friendly events in the park. She invites anyone interested to join them on July 31, from 3 to 6 pm, to create a colorful mural with the help of a local artist.
A two-day celebration of Integrated Digital Media and the creative vision of NYU Tandon students
NYU Tandon-based team advances in the American Made Solar Challenge
Engineering opportunity: It’s in the research
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Russian freight ship sinks off Turkey’s Black Sea coast - governor
Coronavirus: UK hopes to ease COVID-19 lockdown in March as vaccines rolled out
Syria’s children - its future - are at stake
Sharif Nashashibi Saturday 15 March 2014
As the Syrian conflict enters its fourth year (who would have thought in 2011 that it would still be ongoing?), the country and its people continue to break the grimmest of records as their plight gets ever-worse. Of all the things to lament in this tragedy, the fate of Syria’s children is top of the list, and major reports published in the last week highlight why.
The United Nations says the number of children impacted by the war has doubled in the last year alone to 5.5 million. The number of those displaced inside Syria has risen to nearly 3 million from 920,000 a year ago. Nearly 3 million in Syria and neighboring countries are unable to attend school regularly - that is half of Syria’s school-age population. Two million require psychological support or treatment.
The number of child refugees has grown to 1.2 million from 260,000 since last year, 425,000 of them under 5 years old. They have limited access to clean water, nutritious food or learning opportunities. A million children are trapped in areas of Syria that are under siege, or that are hard to reach with humanitarian aid - 323,000 of them are under the age of 5.
One in 10 refugee children is working, and 20% of registered marriages of Syrian females in Jordan is a child under the age of 18. The United Nations says at least 10,000 children have been killed and 40,000 injured. However, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says the real number is probably higher, and represents the highest recorded child casualty rate in any recent conflict in the region.
“Syria is now one of the most dangerous places on earth to be a child,” UNICEF said in its report. “In their thousands, children have lost lives and limbs, along with virtually every aspect of their childhood.”
Save The Children released its own distressing report, warning: “This is more than a crisis. It is the threatened collapse of an entire health system, which endangers the lives and well-being of millions of children.” One of the many consequences is that “polio – eradicated in 1995 – is now being carried by up to 80,000 children across Syria: a figure so high that there are concerns that it may spread to other countries.”
The people behind the statistics
I make no apologies if all these statistics have made your head spin - that was my intention. The international community constantly bemoans this almost-unimaginable state of affairs, but has contributed to it, either through action or inaction.
It is vital to highlight the magnitude of the tragedy of Syria’s children. However, reeling off figures is not enough, and is in a way insensitive if it risks dehumanizing the victims, who are human beings, not numbers. How often this has happened in previous conflicts, and even existing ones, Iraq being a prime example.
Syria’s children are victims of a conflict they did not start, that they do not participate in, and from which they cannot escape or defend themselves.
Sharif Nashashibi
The reason the plight of Syria’s children should come above all else is because they are literally the country's future - if the former is broken or lost, so will the latter. To save Syria’s children is to ensure the country’s long-term survival.
Although the conflict looks set to grind on and even worsen for the foreseeable future, that it will end one day is inevitable. However, the country’s suffering will continue well beyond the cessation of hostilities, due to the trauma experienced by its children, who are going through what no child should. They are likely to suffer well into their adulthood, if not their entire lives.
That might be the case even if they get the necessary counseling and care. The sad reality is that most will not receive this. The long-term damage done to children caught up in conflict is well documented elsewhere in the region, such as Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. The words “never again” seem to have no application in the Middle East.
Innocent victims
Syria’s children are victims of a conflict they did not start, that they do not participate in, and from which they cannot escape or defend themselves. They are not part of the regime, or the Free Syrian Army, or Al Qaeda. They do not identify themselves according to faith or sect.
They are just children, Syrian children. They have already lost their innocence - the danger is that they will start viewing themselves and each other through the same divisive lenses used by their preceding generation.
If that is ingrained from childhood, what hope is there that they will be able or willing to rid themselves of those destructive blinkers as they grow up? If they do not, a future resumption of sectarian conflict in Syria may be a matter of when, not if. One need only look at neighboring Lebanon and Iraq as evidence.
Although the suffering of children is in a league of its own, it is greatly amplified by that of their parents, on whom they are totally dependent. The overall death toll now exceeds 140,000 - one wonders how many orphans that has created. How many children are destitute because their parents cannot put food on the table, clothes on their backs or a roof over their heads? It is not a cliche to say that children suffer most in times of war.
As we mark the third anniversary of this abominable conflict, we must keep in mind above all else that an entire generation - Syria's future - hangs in the balance. It is vital to make aware those who are not, to remind those who would rather forget, but most importantly to act instead of just talk. It is a collective responsibility that the international community has thus far shirked, and an ugly stain on humanity of which we should all be ashamed.
Sharif Nashashibi, a regular contributor to Al Arabiya English, The Middle East magazine and the Guardian, is an award-winning journalist and frequent interviewee on Arab affairs. He is co-founder of Arab Media Watch, an independent, non-profit watchdog set up in 2000 to strive for objective coverage of Arab issues in the British media. With an MA in International Journalism from London's City University, Nashashibi has worked and trained at Dow Jones Newswires, Reuters, the U.N. Development Programme in Palestine, the Middle East Broadcasting Centre, the Middle East Economic Survey in Cyprus, and the Middle East Times, among others. In 2008, he received the International Media Council's "Breakaway Award," given to promising new journalists, "for both facilitating and producing consistently balanced reporting on the highly emotive and polarized arena that is the Middle East." He can be found on Twitter: @sharifnash
SYRIAN CONFLICT
SYRIA HUMANITARIAN AID
U.N. chief urges Russia, Iran to push Syria talks
Syria ‘war merchants’ crush 2011 revolution
Syria among ‘most dangerous places on Earth’
UN: 5.5 million children impacted by Syria conflict
Thousands of children flee Syria without parents, U.N. agencies say
Syria refugee children in Lebanon risk starvation, U.N. says
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Home → News Flash → Twang Introduces Twang Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix
Twang Introduces Twang Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix
Wednesday 07th, August 2019 / 11:43 Written by Johnnie De La Garza
News Flash, Product News
cocktail mix, Michelada, Twang, Twang reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix
The Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix is Twang’s First Liquid Product
Twang Partners, Ltd., announces the launch of its first-ever liquid product, Twang Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix, to be available starting in August 2019. The formula is 85% juice-based and it uses all natural ingredients including a seven-vegetable blend, organic Worcestershire sauce, ancho chilies, real lime juice and no preservatives or corn syrup. This premium product is a top-shelf option for consumers and retailers looking for an authentic, south of the border, Mexican cultural beer drinking experience.
Twang’s new mix is a high-quality, tomato-based blend used to quickly and conveniently create the perfect michelada, the popular beer cocktail that is native to Mexico, well regarded in Texas, and quickly gaining fans throughout the United States. The prepared mix works best with Mexican beers and domestic lagers and is commonly referred to as a milder version of its American cousin, the Bloody Mary. A michelada – known in Mexico as acerveza preparada –is often made with beer, lime juice, sauce, spices, tomato juice, and chili peppers. It is typically served in a chilled, salt-rimmed glass. Twang’s michelada mix takes out all of the guesswork and hassle by having already created a perfectly balanced blend.
“We’ve been perfecting this formula for quite some time but with our 33 year reputation on the line, we wanted to make sure we got it right,” said Elysia Treviño-Gonzales, Chief Executive Officer for Twang. “We’re excited to provide fans with this unique, convenient michelada mix inspired by our family’s favorite recipe.”
The package design for Twang Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix features classic calaveras (skeletons) Mexican art, which gained fame during the Mexican Revolution and has seen a recent resurgence in popularity. Bottles range in size and price including $5.99 to $6.99 for a 16 oz. glass bottle and $8.99 to $10.99 for a 32 oz. glass bottle, ideal options for at home gatherings, bars and restaurants. There is also a small plastic bottle that is a perfect single-serve option and will range in price from $1.99 to $2.49 and will be available at convenience, liquor and select grocery stores.
Twang Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix provides consumers with an authentic Mexican recipe (produced in Texas) that allows at-home bartenders to garnish the drink, based on personal preferences and create their own customizedversion. While originally created to be combined with beer, the mix has versatile uses and can also be mixed with a variety of spirits and non-alcoholic beverages to create a delicious, spirit-free cocktail. With micheladas rising in popularity, the launch also offers retailers an opportunity to carry a premium product from a well-established company with a history of success, Twang Partners, LTD.
The rollout of Twang Reserve Michelada Cocktail Mix in Texas is slated for the beginning of August and will be available in stores such as Spec’s. Aside from Texas, Twang has future plans to launch in the Southwest sometime in 2020. Stay tuned for more details and if you need more information, please visit twang.com.
About Twang Partners, Ltd.
Based in San Antonio, Texas, Twang Partners Ltd. is a family-owned and operated creator and manufacturer of premium-flavored salts, sugars and seasonings and credited as being “The original beer salt.” Since 1986, Twang Partners has produced the highest quality products designed to enhance the taste, appearance and enjoyment of food and beverages. Brands include Beer Salt, Twangerz, Twang-A-Rita, Clamato Salt, ZAS! Super Seasoning, and Cafe Zuca. Find Twang products in grocery, convenience, liquor and specialty store shelves across the country. Twang Partners has successfully collaborated with some of the top food and beverage companies around the world to create innovative custom blends. For further information, visit www.twang.com.
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Home Culture Cinema Newton Movie Review: Laughter In Dark Times
Newton Movie Review: Laughter In Dark Times
Amit Masurkar’s Newton follows the story of a first-time (presiding) election officer’s attempt to conduct fair elections in the Naxalite-ridden jungle of Chhattisgarh. The film stars Rajkummar Rao, Sanjay Mishra, Raghubir Yadav, Anjali Patil, and Pankaj Tripathi. Newton, played by Rajkummar Rao is a sincere, bookish idealist who believes in upholding order, discipline, and procedure. He wants to make a difference and is tired of the visible display of corruption and disarray around him.
Perhaps these beliefs are rooted in an overarching search for legitimacy, a conviction that the state machinery can act in a just manner if the rules are followed. The film places him in the midst of a militarized, conflict-ridden forest where the notion of legitimacy, ideals, and ethics sound farcical. There is a play between the tension of what should be and what is, confounding the viewer with the harrowing question of whether the ‘should’ can be abandoned.
The film begins with the embarrassing campaigning of a politician who towers above the people as he stands on a vehicle and delivers a sermonizing appeal for votes. A few minutes later, as he drives into the forest, a group of Naxalites take him out of his car and shoot him. The television screen in Newton’s house rings with the news of another act of violence inflicted by the Maoists who have declared a boycott on the upcoming elections. The film thus situates Newton as distant and outside of the violent reality of conflict, but as an active consumer of the information that is disseminated about it through the mainstream media.
In a dusty basement, Sanjay Mishra conducts a briefing for election officers. He says “We ensure that elections here take place with utmost honesty and responsibility even if those elected and sent into the parliament are criminals and hooligans.” This statement should prick the viewer, elicit a sense of dismay and outrage at the state of things. Unsurprisingly, the packed movie theatre finds itself erupting into a series of chuckles.
Dark comedy urges one to laugh at morbidity, what should perturb us seems to have a wry lightness about it. It offers an interrogation of appearances, a fracturing of what is accepted as the ‘normal’. And in this rupture, the disembodied space between the expectation of the norm and what really is, the only recourse that one is left with is dry laughter. Perhaps, this dry subtlety allows for a more critical engagement with the image where the viewer finds herself asking various questions about the nature of the reality that is being articulated on the projector. Newton pushes the viewer into this disembodied space where questions regarding social change, idealism, and what it means to be human are posed.
The film highlights how the military throttles the voice of Adivasis through violent acts.
Newton is presented as deviant from the norm, his obstinate opposition to disorder and lawlessness gives character to his resistance. His rebellion is in wanting to uphold a system that has long fallen apart for those around him. The subtext in the film points to how Newton could perhaps be Dalit, after he rejects a marriage proposal for the bride is under-aged; his angered father tells him that he isn’t going to get an upper-caste bride. There is a painting of Babasaheb Ambedkar lying on a corner in his house. Newton is an office clerk who has been placed in the ‘reserve’ section of election commission officers.
Masurkar’s Dalit protagonist is unburdened by the weight of his identity and history. There is a contradiction in the manner in which the film seeks to confront the margins. His caste identity is effectively erased, a minor detail about the character that does not demand any discussion in the shaping of the film. Such a representation of social identity can be problematic as it falls in line with the notion that one’s caste is a meaningless category, an idea that upholds the effacement of those who belong to marginalized social locations.
Every character in the film has a story to offer. Assistant Commandant Atma Singh is well-acquainted with spaces of conflict, having been positioned in heavily militarized areas such as Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland previously. He ‘knows’ how things are to be done, the question of fairness, order, and procedure are irrelevant for him in the doing of things. And yet, Masurkar is careful not to demonize this figure. Towards the end of the film, we see Atma Singh at a supermarket with his family, his wife asks him if they should purchase olive oil next month for the bill is too high, this looks like a simple family trying to get by. A simple family entrenched in a violent structure where Atma Singh has been rendered a cog that mechanically acts to perpetuate this viciousness.
Malko, the local election officer is looked at with great suspicion by Atma Singh, just as all Adivasis are, even the nine year old kids who are simply playing around the trees. There is a scene where all the election officers are visibly tired and irritated as nobody is showing up to vote, Newton turns to Malko and asks her, “Kya tum bhi nirashawadi ho” (Are you disappointed?) Malko responds: “Nirashawadi nahin, main Adivasi hoon” (No, I am an Adivasi). Malko is also a school teacher who must struggle with the linguistic differences of the state board’s formal education system.
Malko’s parting words to Newton urge him to develop his sixth sense, an intuition that can take precedence over his idealism, and further guide it. Her words shape the climax of the film and bestow Newton with a stronger moral compass.
Also Read: Kabali Review: A Film In The Direction Of Non-Brahminical Ways Of Life
The election is conducted in a school located in a settlement where the houses have been burnt down. On the school building, text written in red expresses angry sentiments towards the military that has displaced the Adivasis. Newton is baffled at the sight, he repeatedly asks why the houses were burnt but is met with no answer. As he looks at the wall, Malko tells him “They burnt the houses; people are bound to feel angry”. The space where most of the film takes place is thus haunted by this horrific phantasm of displacement.
The military goes to round up the villagers to get them to vote on the instructions of a senior officer who is bringing a foreign journalist along. Adivasis are caught up in an expression of fear and confusion, some even choose to run away and are chased after. The soldiers don’t speak the same language and look at them with an eye of suspicion. The sequence produces a moment of debilitating helplessness, the impatient soldiers engage in acts of humiliation and the images are juxtaposed with a woman slaughtering and cooking chicken. Later, the military will feast on this for lunch.
Newton attempts to explain the voting process to the Adivasis. He tells them that their votes will go to Delhi where they will be used to elect a representative leader. An old, weak looking man stands up to inform him that he is their leader and they can send him to Delhi. The theatre laughs.
Malko informs Newton that they are not acquainted with a single politician on the list. At this point, he attempts to explain how the democratic process, governance, and law operates (in the words of Atma Singh, delivers a civics lesson). Malko interjects: “But sir, we have our own rules”. Newton, visibily irritated, tells her to let him speak. He asks the Adivasis what they want. One of them wryly comments, “If we vote, the Naxals get angry, if we don’t vote, the army does”.
Newton embodies all the masculine goodness of the state as put on paper, coming from a position of prescriptive rationality. Yet, Malko, the Adivasi woman who belongs to this space and reality attempts to direct his attention towards the indigenous customs and rules, the lived reality of the people that is erased from what the state prescribes on paper. The ‘democratic’ state’s attempt to assimilate Adivasis will fail if it refuses to let them speak and continually erases their voices.
the media blackout concerning the lived reality of Adivasis preserves a distance between the margin and the mainstream.
Atma Singh’s interjection comes from the cynical, lethargic position that such a conversation holds little value. What does it matter what Adivasis wants and how the ‘legitimate’ procedure that the state has prescribed should function? Atma Singh is the violent yet banal arm of power that must contain hierarchy and allow power to operate in a particular manner.
Soon, the media floods the election booth to capture this exotic, foreign region haunted by conflict. Newton stares at the spectacle being played out a few footsteps away from his desk. Cameras rolling, microphones being pointed at the the military and the Adivasis. Atma Singh awkwardly states that there should be greater investment in the military for they are in dire need of night vision goggles.
An Adivasi person is asked if the election will change things. He says nothing will change with a narrow smile and a voice that is neither angered nor frustrated, simply tired. The reporter asks him why he says so with an urgent, probing voice. He offers no explanation, smiles for the camera awkwardly as he wishes to leave.
How the ‘Indian citizen’ interacts with Adivasis that inhabit the margins of the mainstream imagination is largely conditioned by the media’s representation of the same. The film highlights how the military throttles the voice of Adivasis through violent acts while the media blackout concerning the lived reality of Adivasis preserves a distance between the margin and the mainstream. Newton gazes outside the election booth at the despicable state of things that are incompatible with his idealism, the unbridgeable gulf between what is and what should be.
The film is laced with quietude and distance. The conflict and violence is alluded to but never shown. One of the last sequences displays a bulldozer moving over barren land. For me, this was one of the most harrowing sequences for it was such a stark contrast to the luscious, green jungle. One reads about the land grabbing that has been taking place in the forests of Chhattisgarh to pursue ‘development’ and ‘progress’ and yet, little do we wonder who this ‘development’ and ‘progress’ is for. Little do we wonder about the growing presence of militarization, and whether this is the ‘right’ way to address conflict.
Newton makes the viewer wonder.
Also Read: Film Review: On Sairat and Custodians of Love
Featured Image Credit: NDTV
Amit Masurkar
Anjali Patil
marginalised
paramilitary
Raghubir Yadav
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I'm pursuing a major in Economics and a double minor in film studies and peace and conflict studies and I strongly believe in the importance of words, particularly the ones that are left out.
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Tag Archives: Kyrgyzstan
Day 10- Women’s Activism in Asia
The Asian continent is the largest on the planet, home to 60% of the world’s population, it also comprises 60% of the world’s landmass. Consequently generalizations about Asian women could never be true for all of the women included in Asia’s population of 4,157,000,000. Turkey is the western border of the Asian continent and most Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan are in Asia. Today we will look at women of countries more typically associated with “Far Eastern” culture, but also explore how women in Central Asian countries, especially countries of the former USSR, combat injustice as well.
American’s stereotypes about Asian American women are also shared with women who still live in Asia, consequently they are seen as silent, subservient and eager-to-please. The sampling of Asian women we will see today, and the organizations they run, are anything but.
Russia: The denial of pay during maternity leave is one issue currently affecting women in Russia. Women’s rights activists in St. Petersburg have rallied to protest women being dismissed from their jobs if they become pregnant. Project Kesher is another group of women striving to bring religious and ethnic tolerance to Russian, Belarus and the Ukraine. In an unorthodox manner a group of Russian women who call themselves X-Z are bringing attention to social issues plaguing Russia, such as piles of snow the government refuses to remove.
Mongolia: Women in Ulaanbaatar are working to show that women’s rights are human rights and to create a national mechanism for protecting fundamental human rights. There is still much work to be done in Mongolia, especially to ensure LGBTQAI rights. The National Network of Mongolian Women’s NGOs, Monfemnet, tackles everything from youth participation in human rights, democracy and gender justice to exploring masculinities.
China: Grassroots women’s activists in China are combating judicial injustices and gender inequalities by fighting for human rights. One of the biggest issues facing Chinese women is Reproductive Justice. The punishment for violating the “one child” policy is a blatant denial of human rights. This page honors some of the women human rights defenders in China.
Japan: Women in Japan are under a different reproductive pressure from their government: the pressure to have more children. For those women who cannot have children or do not want to reproduce, the government and society’s pressure to do so is not only unfair, but painful. Because of the government’s position only three percent of women in Japan ages 16-49 use the birth control pill. The Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering, FINNRAGE, is one group that is fighting for women to be fully educated about their rights and their choices so that they can make informed decisions.
Indonesia: Women in Indonesia are also fighting their government for protection of their rights. The few laws that grant women’s rights, such as a 30 percent quota of women in elected offices, are not uniformly enforced. Women’s rights groups in Indonesia also state that those women who are elected are not doing their part to advance gender equality. Some women’s groups use the power of street theatre to demonstrate the dangers of childbirth and pollution, among other social issues. The rights of LGBTQAI people in Indonesia are also not guaranteed, but many women are searching for tolerance and equality within their personal studies of Islam.
Thailand: Women in Thailand are active in the country’s ever-changing political scene. Despite being warned by police to evacuate a space filled with protesters lest violence should occur, women supporting the Red Shirt party stayed to face their government. In a country where symbolism and the spiritual world are highly esteemed, women from the opposing group, the Yellow Shirt party, took on politics and social norms and used their bloody sanitary napkins to pull power from a protective statue. Thai women are also finding innovative ways to combat religious intolerance in various regions of the country. The women who are left as heads-of-household when their husbands and sons are arrested (for political or religious reasons) have become leaders in their communities. After a long day’s work feminist activists in Thailand can relax at a retreat built especially for them.
Bangladesh: The situation for women in Bangladesh is dire. Women are punished with beatings when they are raped. Women are punished with acid attacks when they say no to sexual advances. Women are punished when they go to the police, or seek medical help, or dare to complain. The deaths of women as a result of public flogging have been all over the news recently. Women are slowly making progress and some girls are being educated, but activists in Bangladesh also understand the importance of having male allies in the fight for equality. Bangladeshi women are also sharing their knowledge and lessons learned with the women of Haiti, by way of an all-female UN police force.
India: For centuries women in India have been participating in social activism. Currently, the group Pandies uses humor and theatre to showcase women’s issues. Recognizing the advances that have been made over time, women’s groups in India still push for further gender equality. Even though gains have been made, there are still many issues facing Indian women today, including child marriage, police brutality, and domestic violence.
Kyrgyzstan: Despite being the first Central Asian country to have a female president, (Roza Otunbayeva–one of this year’s recipients of the US’s Women of Courage Award), gender roles in Kyrgyzstan are still very rigid. In traditional Kyrgyz culture women must remain virgins until their wedding night and their sheets are displayed the next day as proof. Some women are combating this stigma by speaking out against it. Other problems arise when the marriages are not legally registered, and domestic violence rates in Kyrgyzstan are overwhelming. Bride kidnapping is another tradition the women of Kyrgyzstan are not proud of, and are trying to eradicate.
Uzbekistan: Uzbek human rights activist Mutabar Tajibaeva has returned her 2009 Women of Courage Award, in protest to Kyrgyzstan’s president receiving the same award this year. The activist says she has nothing against Otunbayeva personally but cannot, in good conscience, have her name listed with Kyrgyzstan’s president who failed to stop the massacres against ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan last summer. Tajibaeva believes Otunbayeva is receiving the award only because she is the first female president of a Central Asian country, but stated that there are other Kyrgyz women more deserving of the honor. Some of the issues Uzbek human rights defenders focus on include unlawful detention of protesters by the government, and forced sterilization. Hundreds of women have been sterilized without their consent or knowledge in Uzbekistan, leaving many women fearful of doctors and hospitals.
Day 2- Asian American Women’s Activism in the US (feministactivism.wordpress.com)
Women’s Day campaign to help Asian women start in business (mumbrella.com.au)
United action on women’s rights | Elizabeth Samson (guardian.co.uk)
10 women leaders, activists hailed for advancing rights – Pittsburgh Post Gazette (news.google.com)
A Call to End Gender Persecution Globally (stevebeckow.com)
In much of the world, gains in women’s rights elude a silent majority – Globe and Mail (news.google.com)
Leave a comment | tags: Activism, Asia, Bangladesh, China, Human rights, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Russia, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Women's History Month, Women's rights in Asia | posted in Race/Ethnicity and Activism
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Siskel Center receives increased Allstate grant for Black Harvest Film Festival
by Stephanie A. Taylor
The Allstate Corporation has granted the Gene Siskel Film Center $18,000 for the 24th annual Black Harvest Film Festival, the largest and longest-running Black Film festival in the Midwest – $8,000 will go toward The Best of Black Harvest West, an expansion of The Best of Black Harvest Film Festival. The new addition is located at BBF Family Services, formerly known as the Better Boys Foundation. Films will also be shown at the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance.
“We want to share the festival with neighborhoods,” Executive Director Jean de St. Aubin said. “We thought it will lead up to the actual festival here at the film center which should give two offsite locations a taste of the fest so that they can come to the festival. Most of the people who come to the screenings are youth and families; people who may not have access to coming Downtown. So, it’s a way of getting out of our Downtown location and sharing high quality cultural experiences throughout the city.”
Rufus Williams, CEO and President of BBF Family Services, says, “We have a holistic approach to everything, and certainly education. And, the need to bring forth more element of Black culture is one of the things we try to do in empowering our people. We’ve certainly been aware of the Black Harvest Film Festival for a while, and I knew that they were moving to engage more people in the communities. A member of the theatre myself having gone to the center, we thought it would be a good idea to bring some of these films to North Lawndale; recognizing that there may be different reasons why people from this community may not have been able to go down and see them when they were actually being shown through the festival itself. This a way to bring this here and show interesting stories and documentaries to people who may not see them otherwise. But should be exposed to these outlets.” Williams said the idea to be included came about between Dionne Nicole Smith (Associate Director of Development/Membership of GSFC), Waliy Eleim (Apprenticeship Coordinator of BBF) and himself.
Screenings will be shown monthly beginning March 10 through May 16. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be catered by Skyler Dees. The Black Harvest Film Festival runs from August 4-30. For more information please go to www.siskelfilmcenter.org/blackharvest
© Stephanie A. Taylor (3/9/18) FF2 Media
Photos & Photo Credits: Gene Siskel Film Center
Nicole Ackman December 18, 2020
‘Testament’ is a beautiful example of how dance can adapt
Amelie Lasker December 11, 2020
How to ‘get to The Nutcracker’ this year
by Stephanie A. Taylor March 9, 2018
Stephanie A. Taylor is an award-winning journalist living in Chicago. She's been with FF2 since 2016. Her niche is women's issues. Her favorite articles she's written are: Women in media facing sexism, exclusivity, Pulchronomics plays prominent role with women in media and her interview with Danièle Thompson, French director of Cézanne and I (Cézanne et Moi.)
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“Make a Documentary of What’s Happening in Front of You”: DP Phedon Papamichael on Shooting Aaron Sorkin’s Courtroom Drama, The Trial of the Chicago 7
After violence disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, eight defendants were arrested for conspiracy to incite a riot — an event dramatized in Aaron Sorkin’s new The Trial of the Chicago 7. They included the countercultural figures Abbie Hoffman (played in the film by Sasha Baron Cohen), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) and Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne). In The Trial of the Chicago 7, writer and director Sorkin recreates the chaos surrounding the six-month trial, mingling day-to-day testimony with flashbacks of protestors and police preparing for demonstrations in places like Grant Park. In addition to following the defendants, Sorkin […]
By Daniel Eagan on Oct 16, 2020Cinematographers
“One Thing I Learned From Michael Mann, You’ve Got to Have Rules”: Brooke Kennedy on The Good Fight
In the first episode of The Good Fight, a spinoff from and sequel to the acclaimed legal drama The Good Wife, liberal attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) watches Donald Trump’s inauguration in horror. In the premiere episode of the series’ most recent season (season four), Diane wakes up to find herself in an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency. Both episodes – and the 38 others that have aired to date – exhibit a satirical sense as sophisticated as it is original; series creators Robert and Michelle King consistently engage with issues related to race, sex, gender, […]
By Jim Hemphill on Oct 16, 2020Columns
Pietro Marcello on Martin Eden, Influencer Culture and the Relationship between Art History and Shot Composition
Italian director Pietro Marcello has been making films since 2003, but his turn toward fiction films—first with 2015’s Lost & Beautiful and now with Martin Eden, an adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel—has gained him new admirers outside his home country and on the festival circuit. It is fitting, then, that just as his star is rising, he has crafted a cautionary tale about the perils of individualism and the ease with which it can swallow even the most idealistic artists. But Marcello’s adaptation is anything but straightforward. His Martin Eden takes place at an indeterminate moment in Naples, and […]
By Forrest Cardamenis on Oct 15, 2020Directors
“You Have Nine Days to Make an Episode. Go!”: DP James Kniest on The Haunting of Bly Manor
With a list of credits that includes Annabelle, Hush and The Bye Bye Man, cinematographer James Kniest has spent a fair share of his career toiling in horror. “I somehow got into doing all these dark genre films and episodics, which I like a lot,” said Kniest, “but I often times say jokingly, ‘Can’t I just do a romantic comedy?’” The Haunting of Bly Manor fulfills half of that request. The second installment in Netflix’s Haunting Of anthology series, Bly Manor is a gothic romance that leans heavily into the latter. When the horror does arrive, it’s less jump scares and more […]
By Matt Mulcahey on Oct 15, 2020Cinematographers
“I Know So Much More Now about Pandemic Response Than I Did When We Made It”: Brian Duffield on Spontaneous
One of the most fascinating things about viewing new movies in the age of COVID is how many of them tap into current anxieties in spite of having been completed before the coronavirus arrived; films as varied in style, budget, and genre as I’m Thinking of Ending Things, She Dies Tomorrow and Tenet all resonate in this historical moment in ways that would have been very different–and probably less effective–if they had been released just a few months earlier. Screenwriter Brian Duffield’s strikingly original and extremely moving teen comedy Spontaneous is the latest film to speak to the persistent unease and […]
By Jim Hemphill on Sep 30, 2020Columns
“No Talking Heads on Camera”: Sam Pollard on MLK/FBI
In 1963, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. with the goal of undermining his authority as a civil rights leader. Utilizing a wealth of newly discovered and declassified files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as newly restored footage from the period, MLK/FBI delves into the Bureau’s deeply questionable methods and motives for surveillance, while painting a portrait of King that does not shy away from uncomfortable truths. Directed by Sam Pollard, best known as Spike Lee’s editor on films like Clockers and Bamboozled, MLK/FBI builds upon a lifetime of work […]
By Beatrice Loayza on Sep 29, 2020Directors
“I Have Not Seen My Film with Anyone Other than Two People”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on Beginning
Dea Kulumbegashvili should have had the year of her life. At any other moment, the Tbilisi-based writer/director would have already travelled to Cannes, Toronto and San Sebastián to screen her new film for festival audiences. A remarkable accomplishment for anyone, let alone a young director with a first feature, the success of Beginning has instead been a strange, bittersweet ride. In the absence of sold-out screenings and sponsored afterparties, the festival experience in 2020 has given way to far less glamorous rituals: Zoom Q&As, geo-locked streaming links and the solitary act of viewing from home. For Kulumbegashvili, 34, the process […]
By Soheil Rezayazdi on Sep 28, 2020Directors
“The Interior Lives of People That Aren’t Typically Represented in Cinema”: Andrew Cohn on The Last Shift
Fascinated with the unseen men and women of forgotten America, Andrew Cohn, proud Midwestern and versatile filmmaker, has created a body of documentary work that witnesses modest, real lives without condescension or pity. Features like Medora or Night School engage with their subjects—a teenage basketball team in small-town Indiana or adult students juggling economic and personal struggles—in a compassionate and collaborative manner. Translating that honesty to fiction now with The Last Shift, his first scripted film, Cohn continues to give voice to the working poor, in this case two fast food employees in Michigan, where he’s from, whose relationship exemplifies […]
By Carlos Aguilar on Sep 25, 2020Directors
Shining a Light on the Politics of Public Lands: David Garrett Byars on his Documentary Public Trust
David Garrett Byars made his feature documentary debut with No Man’s Land in 2017, a riveting chronicle of the the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon (I spoke with him about it during its Tribeca premiere). In the largely verité film he manages to not only paint empathetic portraits of both the occupiers and their government opponents, but communicate the larger social and political movements that caused his characters to behave as they did. This eye for explaining complex topics comes to the fore in his sophomore film Public Trust, out September 25 from Patagonia Films. This new […]
By Randy Astle on Sep 25, 2020Directors
“An Outsider in that Testosterone-Driven Climate”: Laura Gabbert on Her Food Doc, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles
Sundance vet Laura Gabbert (No Impact Man, Sunset Story) is no stranger to the foodie world, having directed 2015’s City of Gold, which follows the Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold on his culinary excursions throughout LA. Now, with Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, Gabbert turns her lens to the other coast and across the pond, globetrotting through time and space with seven-time NY Times bestselling cookbook author and renowned restauranteur Yotam Ottolenghi. Though the Israeli Jew (whose business partner is a Jerusalem-born Muslim) is based in London, he’s invited by the Met to curate an edible, cake-centric exhibition […]
By Lauren Wissot on Sep 25, 2020Directors
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Michael Fassbender in Talks for DreamWorks' 'Light Between Oceans'
alycakes|2439d ago |News|1|
THR:
Michael Fassbender is in negotiations to star in The Light Between Oceans, DreamWorks' adaptation of the M.L. Stedman novel.
Derek Cianfrance, who last directed the Ryan Gosling drama The Place Beyond the Pines, is directing the drama. The Light Between Oceans is set on an island off the coast of Western Australia after World War I.
A lighthouse keeper and his wife find a 2-month-old girl and a dead body in a rowboat and decide to raise the baby as their own. But what seems like a blessing soon turns tragic, as morality and love are tested.
Cinema Derek Cianfrance DreamWorks SKG Michael Fassbender The Light Between Oceans hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
alycakes2440d ago
Interesting story...still a long way to come though.
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Hinds' precedents of the House...
Hinds' precedents of the House of Representatives of the United States including references to provisions of the Constitution, the laws, and decisions of the United States Senate / by Asher C. Hinds.
New Title:
Cannon, Clarence, 1879-1964. Cannon's Precedents of the House of Representatives of the United States
Hinds, Asher C. 1863-1919.
United States. Congress. House.
Cannon, Clarence, 1879-1964.
Washington : U.S. G.P.O., 1907-[1908]
United States. > Congress. > House > Rules and practice.
Parliamentary practice > United States.
Cannon's precedents of the House of Representatives of the United States including references to provisions of the Constitution, the laws, and decisions of the United States Senate / by Clarence Cannon.
by: Cannon, Clarence, 1879-1964.
Deschler's Precedents of the United States House of Representatives including references to provisions of the Constitution and laws, and to decisions of the courts / by Lewis Deschler.
by: Deschler, Lewis.
Precedents of the United States House of Representatives / by Charles W. Johnson, John V. Sullivan, Thomas J. Wickham.
by: Johnson, Charles W., III,, et al.
Please come to order! A new and unique approach to efficient group decision-making based on illustrative parliamentary situations and presiding officer's rulings, incorporating Whitney's chart of parliamentary motions, by Byrl A. Whitney.
by: Whitney, Byrl Albert, 1901-
Constitution, Jefferson's manual and rules of the House of Representatives of the United States, One Hundred Ninth Congress John V. Sullivan, parliamentarian.
by: Sullivan, John V.
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False Killer Whales
Cascadia Research
Field Logs
Contribtue
Publications, reports & conferences
Most recent publications/reports/presentations are presented first.
Click on titles to link to the publication
Yahn, S.N., R.W. Baird, S.D. Mahaffy, and D.L. Webster. 2019. How to tell them apart? Discriminating tropical balckfish species using fin and body measurements from photographs taken at sea. Marine Mammal Science doi: 10.1111/mms.12584
Baird, R.W. 2019. The perils of relying on handling techniques to reduce bycatch in a partially observed fishery: a potential fatal flaw in the False Killer Whale Take Reduction Plan. Document PSRG-2019-14 presented to the Pacific Scientific Review Group, March 5-7, 2019, Olympia, WA.
Baird, R.W. 2018. Pseudorca crassidens. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2018: e.T18596A50371251. dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T18596A50371251.en
Bradford, A.L., R.W. Baird, S.D. Mahaffy, A.M. Gorgone, D.J. McSweeney, T. Cullins, D.L. Webster, A.N. Zerbini. 2018. Abundance estimates for management of endangered false killer whales in the main Hawaiian Islands. Endangered Species Research doi: 10.3354/esr00903
Baird, R.W. 2018. False Killer Whale. In Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. Edited by B. Würsig, J.G.M. Thewissen, and K. Kovacs. 3rd edition. Elsevier Inc.
Baird, R.W., S.W. Martin, R. Manzano-Roth, D.L. Webster, and B.L. Southall. 2017. Assessing exposure and response of three species of odontocetes to mid-frequency active sonar during submarine commanders courses at the Pacific Missile Range Facility: August 2013 through February 2015. Prepared for U.S. Pacific Fleet, submitted to NAVFAC PAC by HDR Environmental, Operations and Construction, Inc., Honolulu, Hawai’i.
Yahn, S.N., R.W. Baird, S.D. Mahaffy, and D.L. Webster. 2017. How to tell them apart? Blackfish species discrimination using fin and body morphometrics obtainable from photos at sea. Poster (Proceedings) 22nd Biennial on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 22-27, 2017.
Mahaffy, S.D., R.W. Baird, A.M. Gorgone, T. Cullins, D.J. McSweeney and D.L. Webster. 2017. Group dynamics of the endangered insular population of false killer whales in Hawai’i. Poster (Proceedings) 22nd Biennial on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 22-27, 2017.
Baird, R.W., D.B. Anderson and D.L. Webster. 2017. Bringing the right fishermen to the table: an index of overlap between false killer whales and nearshore fisheries in Hawai’i, with implications for targeting observer programs and outreach efforts. Abstract from the 22nd Biennial on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 22-27, 2017.
Bradford, A.L., R.W. Baird, S.D. Mahaffy, A.M. Gorgone, D.J. McSweeney, T. Cullins, D.L. Webster and A.N. Zerbini. 2017. Abundance estimates for management of endangered false killer whales in the main Hawaiian Islands. Abstract from the 22nd Biennial on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 22-27, 2017.
Beach, K.A., R.W. Baird, S.D. Mahaffy, D.L. Webster, and D.J. McSweeney. 2015. Mouthline injuries as an indicator of fisheries interactions for false killer whales and pygmy killer whales in Hawai’i. Abstract (Proceedings) 21st Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, San Francisco, California, December 14-18, 2015.
Baird, R.W., D. Cholewiak, D.L. Webster, G.S. Schorr, S.D. Mahaffy, C. Curtice, J. Harrison, and S.M. Van Parijs. 2015. Biologically important areas for cetaceans within U.S. waters – Hawai’i region. Aquatic Mammals 41:54-64.
Baumann-Pickering, S., A.E. Simonis, E.M. Oleson, R.W. Baird, M.A. Roch, and S.W. Wiggins. 2015. False killer whale and short-finned pilot whale acoustic identification. Endangered Species Research 28:97-108.
Bradford, A.L., E.M. Oleson, R.W. Baird, C.H. Boggs, K.A. Forney, and N.C. Young. 2015. Revised stock boundaries for false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) in Hawaiian waters. NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-PIFSC-47.
Baird, R.W., S.D. Mahaffy, A.M. Gorgone, T. Cullins, D.J. McSweeney, E.M. Oleson, A.L. Bradford, J. Barlow and D.L. Webster. 2014. False killer whales and fisheries interactions in Hawaiian waters: evidence for sex bias and variation among populations and social groups. Marine Mammal Science doi: 10.1111/mms.12177
Foltz, K., R.W. Baird, G.M. Ylitalo, and B.A. Jensen. 2014. Cytochrome P4501A1 expression in blubber biopsies of endangered false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) and nine other odontocete species from Hawai‘i. Ecotoxicology doi: 10.1007/s10646-014-1300-0.
Martien, K.K., S.J. Chivers, R.W. Baird, F.I. Archer, A.M. Gorgone, B.L. Hancock-Hanser, D. Mattila, D.J. McSweeney, E.M. Oleson, C. Palmer, V.L. Pease, K.M. Robertson, G.S. Schorr, M.B. Schultz, D.L. Webster and B.L. Taylor. 2014. Nuclear and mitochondrial patterns of population structure in North Pacific false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens). Journal of Heredity doi: 10.1093/jhered/esu029.
Baird, R.W., E.M. Oleson, J. Barlow, A.D. Ligon, A.M. Gorgone, and S.D. Mahaffy. 2013. Evidence of an island-associated population of false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Pacific Science 67:513-521.
Baird, R.W. 2013. False killer whales around Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau. Hawai‘i Fishing News 39(9):24-25.
Baird, R.W., M.B. Hanson, G.S. Schorr, D.L. Webster, D.J. McSweeney, A.M. Gorgone, S.D. Mahaffy, D. Holzer, E.M. Oleson and R.D. Andrews. 2012. Range and primary habitats of Hawaiian insular false killer whales: informing determination of critical habitat. Endangered Species Research 18:47-61.
Baird, R.W., G.S. Schorr, D.L. Webster, D.J. McSweeney, M.B. Hanson and R.D. Andrews. 2011. Movements and spatial use of false killer whales in Hawai‘i: satellite tagging studies in 2009. Report prepared under Order No. AB133F09SE4132 from the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, Honolulu, HI.
Baird, R.W., E.M. Oleson, J. Barlow, A.D. Ligon, A.M. Gorgone, and S.D. Mahaffy. 2011. Photo-identification and satellite tagging of false killer whales during HICEAS II: evidence of an island-associated population in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Document PSRG-2011-16 presented to the Pacific Scientific Review Group, Seattle, November 2011.
Martien, K.K., R.W. Baird, S.J. Chivers, E.M. Oleson and B.L. Taylor. 2011. Population structure and mechanisms of gene flow within island-associated false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) around the Hawaiian Archipelago. Document PSRG-2011-14 presented to the Pacific Scientific Review Group, Seattle, November 2011.
Baird, R.W. 2010. Over-fished and under-appreciated: conservation and management of false killer whales, Hawai‘i’s rarest whales. Poster presentation at the 2010 Hawai‘i Conservation Conference, August 4-6, 2010, Honolulu, HI.
Baird, R.W. 2010. Pygmy killer whales (Feresa attenuata) or false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens)? Identification of a group of small cetaceans seen off Ecuador in 2004. Aquatic Mammals 36: DOI 10.1578/AM.36.3.2010.
Chivers, S.J., R.W. Baird, K.M. Martien, B.L. Taylor, E. Archer, A.M. Gorgone, B.L. Hancock, N.M. Hedrick, D. Matilla, D.J. McSweeney, E.M. Oleson, C.L. Palmer, V. Pease, K.M. Robertson, J. Robbins, J.C. Salinas, G.S. Schorr, M. Schultz, J.L. Theileking, and D.L. Webster. 2010. Evidence of genetic differentiation for Hawai‘i insular false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens). NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-SWFSC-458, 46p.
Baird, R.W., G.S. Schorr, D.L. Webster, D.J. McSweeney, M.B. Hanson and R.D. Andrews. 2010. Movements and habitat use of satellite-tagged false killer whales around the main Hawaiian Islands. Endangered Species Research 10:107-121.
Baird, R.W. 2009. A review of false killer whales in Hawaiian waters: biology, status, and risk factors. Report prepared for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission under Order No. E40475499.
Ylitalo, G.M., R.W. Baird, G.K. Yanagida, D.L. Webster, S.J. Chivers, J.L. Bolton, G.S. Schorr, and D.J. McSweeney. 2009. High levels of persistent organic pollutants measured in blubber of island-associated false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) around the main Hawaiian Islands. Marine Pollution Bulletin 58:1932-1937.
Baird, R.W. 2009. Hawai’i’s false killer whales are at risk: should they be included as a “resource” in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. Poster presented at the First International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas, Maui, HI, March 30 – April 3, 2009.
Baird, R.W. 2009. False killer whales in Hawaiian waters: bycatch in the long-line fishery and the long-line exclusion zone around the main Hawaiian Islands. Bycatch Communication Network Newsletter, Aug-Sep 2009:9-13.
Reeves, R.R., S. Leatherwood and R.W. Baird. 2009. Evidence of a possible decline since 1989 in false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) around the main Hawaiian Islands. Pacific Science 63:253-261.
Baird, R.W. 2008. False killer whale Pseudorca crassidens. Pages 405-406 in Encyclopedia Of Marine Mammals 2nd Edition. Edited by W.F. Perrin, B. Wursig and J.G.M. Thewissen. Academic Press, San Diego, CA.
Baird, R.W., A.M. Gorgone, D.J. McSweeney, D.L. Webster, D.R. Salden, M.H. Deakos, A.D. Ligon, G.S. Schorr, J. Barlow and S.D. Mahaffy. 2008. False killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) around the main Hawaiian Islands: long-term site fidelity, inter-island movements, and association patterns. Marine Mammal Science 24:591-612. The definitive version is available at Wiley InterScience
Baird, R.W., G.S. Schorr, D.L. Webster, D.J. McSweeney, M.B. Hanson, and R.D. Andrews. 2008. Movements of satellite-tagged false killer whales around the main Hawaiian Islands. Document PSRG-2008-13 submitted to the Pacific Scientific Review Group, Kihei, HI, November 2008.
Baird, R.W., G.S. Schorr, D.L. Webster, D.J. McSweeney, A.M. Gorgone and S.J. Chivers. 2008. A survey to assess overlap of insular and offshore false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) off the island of Hawai‘i. Report prepared under Order No. AB133F07SE4484 for the Protected Species Division, Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service, Honolulu, HI.
Chivers, S.J., R.W. Baird, D.J. McSweeney, D.L. Webster, N.M. Hedrick, and J.C. Salinas. 2007. Genetic variation and evidence for population structure in eastern North Pacific false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens). Canadian Journal of Zoology 85:783-794.
Baird, R.W., and A.M. Gorgone. 2005. False killer whale dorsal fin disfigurements as a possible indicator of long-line fishery interactions in Hawaiian waters. Pacific Science 59:593-601.
Baird, R.W., A.M. Gorgone, D.L. Webster, D.J. McSweeney, J.W. Durban, A.D. Ligon, D.R. Salden, and M.H. Deakos. 2005. False killer whales around the main Hawaiian islands: an assessment of inter-island movements and population size using individual photo-identification. Report prepared under Order No. JJ133F04SE0120 from the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, National Marine Fisheries Service.
Baird, R.W. 2002. False killer whale Pseudorca crassidens. Pages 411-412 in Encyclopedia Of Marine Mammals. Edited by W.F. Perrin, B. Wursig and J.G.M. Thewissen. Academic Press, San Diego, CA.
Stacey, P.J., S. Leatherwood and R.W. Baird. 1994. Pseudorca crassidens. Mammalian Species 456:1-6.
Stacey, P.J., and R.W. Baird. 1991. Status of the false killer whale, Pseudorca crassidens, in Canada. Canadian Field-Naturalist 105:189-197.
Leatherwood, S., D. McDonald, R.W. Baird and M.D. Scott. 1989. The false killer whale, Pseudorca crassidens (OWEN, 1846): a summary of information available through 1988. Oceans Unlimited Technical Report 89-001. 114 p.
Baird, R.W., K.M. Langelier and P.J. Stacey. 1989. First records of false killer whales, Pseudorca crassidens, in Canada. Canadian Field-Naturalist 103:368-371.
Field Log: March 2019 Maui project
Field Log: November 2018 Hawai’i Island project
Field Log: February/March 2018 Lāna‘i field project
Field Log: November 2017 O‘ahu field project
Field Log: October 2017 Hawai’i Island field project
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Petr Cech releases charity single with Queen drummer Roger Taylor
Far Out Staff· May 10, 2019
Arsenal goalkeeper and all-round Premier League great has taken his iconic status to a whole new level by releasing a charity single alongside Queen drummer Roger Taylor.
The song, which features Cech on vocals, comes in collaboration with news of his retirement and will donate all proceeds to The Willow Foundation which was set up in by former Arsenal goalkeeper Bob Wilson.
“I think goalkeeping and drumming is exactly the same,” Arsenal keeper Cech said in an interview with the Mail. “Everyone tells you that if the drummer makes a mistake the whole thing falls apart or very rarely it doesn’t.
“When you start playing the wrong beat of the song – everyone recognises it. If the guitar makes a mistake it’s hardly recognisable.
“It’s the same with goalkeeping, if you lose 10 balls in midfield people say ‘he’s not had the greatest game’ but nothing really happens if the goalkeepers or defenders save him.”
“If you drop a ball as a keeper and someone tucks it in the you have no way out. There’s a big similarity with drumming and goalkeeping – maybe that’s why I like it.”
Cech added: “My career is coming to an end am I was thinking how to look back and put those amazing 20 years into words.There is a lot of emotion in playing football and also with music I wanted to bring those emotions from football through music.
“When I asked Roger about the idea he was up for it and we started to make this happen. To have such a legendary musician do that with me is something really special for me. I have been a fan of Queen my whole life, and to work in the studio with Roger on this was an incredible experience.
“I’m also a big fan of the Willow Foundation because of its amazing work as a charity. They really deserve to be supported for all the effort and work they put into it.
“I felt if we could raise some money for them also it would be a nice farewell to my playing career. We just wanted to have some fun, and hopefully raise some money for the Willow Foundation.”
With that all in mind, it feels only right that we give Mr Cech our Track of the Day slot.
Watch out Ed Sheeran, Stormzy, & others, there’s a new artist in town ?????. To mark my retirement the legendary Roger Taylor and myself thought it would be fun to do a song to raise money for the wonderful @Willow_Fdn . out next week on Virgin Records. ?? #thatsfootball pic.twitter.com/vDZPSTINyM
— Petr Cech (@PetrCech) May 3, 2019
Dave Grohl’s favourite songs by The Beatles
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Flyers fight to the finish for crucial 4-3 win
April 5, 2018 Wayne Fish breaking news, Hockey, News Ticker
PHILADELPHIA – Who said it was going to be easy?
The Flyers had to go all the way down to the wire in Thursday night’s all-important game against the Carolina Hurricanes to secure a crucial two points via a 4-3 win.
Jake Voracek’s goal with 5:45 to play broke a 3-3 tie.
The Flyers battled back from deficits of 1-0 and 2-1 to finally take a lead with 9:42 to play on a goal by Claude Giroux.
But with 6:19 to play, Carolina’s Jordan Staal sent an extremely wide-angle shot past goaltender Brian Elliott (making his first start since Feb. 10) and the score was tied again at 3-3.
Then Voracek took over, beating goalie Scott Darling with a shot for the winner.
Florida beat Boston on Thursday night, so the Flyers need at least one point against the Rangers at the Wells Fargo Center on Saturday to clinch a playoff berth.
The Panthers have a home game against Buffalo on Saturday, then finish with a weather-related makeup game at Boston on Sunday.
Once again the Flyers showed that they can rally in the latter stages of a game when it matters most.
“We still control our own destiny,’’ Shayne Gostisbehere pointed out after the game. “If we win this last game against New York on Saturday, we will be fine.’’
It was another night of chasing the game by the Flyers, as they had to battle through 1-0 and 2-1 deficits.
A spectacular play by defenseman Ivan Provorov tied the score at 2-2 when he rushed the net and finished off a feed from Sean Couturier with 5:04 left in the second period.
Darling managed to block Provorov’s first attempt but was not successful on the Russian backliner’s second try.
Things went back and forth in a wide-open first period.
The Hurricanes jumped on top with Klas Dahlbeck goal at 13:45 of the first. Travis Sanheim dove to block the Carolina defenseman’s shot but accidentally screened Elliott.
Philadelphia answered 63 seconds later. Giroux tried to get the puck to Couturier but ex-Flyer Justin Williams intervened, only to have the puck bounce off his stick to Michael Raffl, who spun and put a shot between Darling’s skates.
That lead held up for all of 14 seconds.
Sebastian Aho did the honors for Carolina, beating Elliott from close range.
But from there, it was the work of Giroux and Elliott which helped make the difference.
“It’s a bend, don’t break mentality,’’ Gostisbehere said. “We knew they were going to come hard. Ultimately we got the two points and that’s the biggest thing.’’
Couturier expressed some relief that it’s still win and they’re in.
“We’re still in control of making the playoffs,’’ he said. “We played a pretty good game overall. We stuck to what we had to do. We didn’t let down. . .they got a couple lucky bounces that could have been tough mentally. But we came back hard and controlled most of the game.’’
Giroux is the only player left from the 2010 team which beat the Rangers on the final day of the season to get into the playoffs. Ironically, he scored the shootout winner against New York goaltender Henrik Lundqvist, who is scheduled to start Saturday.
“I like the way we’re playing right now,’’ Giroux said. “When we’re on and we’re playing our best hockey, we have a lot of fun doing it. Whatever Florida does the last two games, we’re just focusing on ourselves.’’
Voracek believes the Flyers have the right stuff to get the job done Saturday and clinch a spot.
“We knew it was going to come down to that almost,’’ Voracek said. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs this year, we never gave up. I don’t anyone expected us to get into the playoffs after those 10 games (an 0-5-5 streak in November). It’s in our hands. So it’s a great thing.’’
Coach Dave Hakstol liked what he saw from his team in a clutch situation. A loss would have left the Flyers in a precarious situation.
“I didn’t see any waiver in our game,’’ he said. “I thought our guys had pretty good determination all the way through the game.’’
Scott Laughton returned to the lineup after a one-game scratch and Jordan Weal went to the bench.
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Media Release by Senator the Hon Amanda Vanstone
Visit To Vietnam By Senator Amanda Vanstone
The Minister for Family and Community Services, Senator Amanda Vanstone, is visiting Hanoi from 22 – 23 April 2002.
This is the first visit to Vietnam by an Australian Minister responsible for the Family and Community Services portfolio and marks a new era in cooperation between the Australian portfolio and its Vietnamese counterparts.
Minister Vanstone will meet with Dr Nguyen Huy Ban, Director General of Vietnam Social Security (VSS), Mr Pham Gia Khiem, Deputy Prime Minister, Ms Nguyen Thi Hang, Minister of Labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA), Ms Tran Thi Thanh Thanh Minister for National Committee of Protection and Care of Children, and Ms Ha Thi Khiet Chairman of the Vietnam Women’s Union and Vietnam National Committee for the Advancement of Women.
A Memorandum of Understanding was signed in Australia in December 2001 between the Department of Family and Community Services and VSS to improve and increase each country’s expertise in, and the effectiveness of, their respective social security policies and programmes. Minister Vanstone will meet with Dr Nguyen Huy Ban, to confirm the first activity under the MoU, a seminar focussing on social security reform and legislation, which will be inaugurated in Ho Chi Minh City on 30 – 31 May.
In her meeting with the Vice Prime Minister and MOLISA, Minister Vanstone will discuss extending the range of cooperation between Australia and Vietnam in other areas of social policy including income support, housing policy, community support, disability services, child care services, family relationships, and youth.
Minister Vanstone will also meet with Minister Tran Thi Thanh Thanh to discuss policy approaches to the care of children and explore possible future linkages in policy development to do with child care.
In her role as Minister assisting the Prime Minister for the status of women in Australia, Minister Vanstone will meet with Ms Ha Thi Khiet to discuss strategies for economic self-sufficiency and security for women, including empowerment and employment.
Minister Vanstone said that the developing relationship between her portfolio and its Vietnamese counterparts was of critical importance. She identified the reform of the social support system in a period of ongoing structural adjustment as of prime significance for both countries.
“Economic growth alone will not solve problems of societies in transition. Community driven approaches comprising government funded initiatives to strengthen and develop communities and families will enable a strong self-reliant society to respond to the challenges of labour market changes and an ageing population”, said Minister Vanstone
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