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Quit your hating on LeBron James
LeBron James has been arguably the most scrutinized, hyped, and tantalizing athlete of my generation. At this point, unless you’re totally naive, you’ve come to respect his greatness on the basketball court. He is hands down one of the best basketball players to ever take the hardwood. His achievements speak for themselves. If you for some reason – you think he’s overrated or sucks then there’s no argument that I or anyone can ever make to convince you of his greatness.
LeBron James the person, on the other hand, still has a lot of haters and naysayers. The people who continue to dislike him, as a person have many terms to describe him; tool, loser, cocky, fake, big-ego, etc.
There are “many” reasons LBJ the person has elicited many haters over the years. These people will start their argument with how he handled “The Decision.” This was when LeBron televised his choice to spurn the city of Cleveland and join the Miami Heat live on ESPN back in July of 2010. I was also throwing a lot of shade at LBJ for the way he handled this situation.
LeBron has been the first one to regret how he handled “the decision.” He’s been quoted saying “If I had to go back on it, I probably would do it a little bit different.” He’s also said, “If the shoe was on the other foot and I was a fan, and I was very passionate about one player, and he decided to leave, I would be upset too about the way he handled it.”
Personally I gave up my hate over LeBron’s handling of that situation a long time ago. He made a mistake, lived up to it, and moved on. It would be silly to hold it against him for the rest of his career. After all it’s not like he cheated on his wife (Tiger), was caught in the hairs of a murder (Ray Lewis), or gambling at casinos the night before a game (Michael Jordan). Lets also not forget that he returned to the Cleveland Cavilers a few years later and helped lead the city to its first championship in any sport for the first time in 52 years!
Other people will argue that LeBron is just “so cocky” based on his tweets or Instagrams. The latest Instagram that sparked controversy was one from last Tuesday per below…
All the LeBron haters are coming out after him on this one.
“Oh wow he’s so “humble”… congratulating himself for an achievement he hasn’t even accomplished yet.”
For those of you out there who want to continue to critique him for every single thing he says, tweets, instagrams, and does on or off the basketball court, here’s some advice.. get over it and put yourself in LeBron’s shoes for a second.
Imagine the following scenarios: growing up with no father at any point in your life, moving a dozen times and living on couches with your troubled mother between the ages of 5-8, being told as a junior in high school and up until today that you’re going to be the best ever at your profession and that you are the “second coming.” There hasn’t been a single athlete that ever has had to deal with as much hype and expectations as LeBron James.
Now picture this when it comes to LeBron… he’s lived up to all the pressure and more, not only on the basketball court, but off it as well. He’s never even sniffed trouble with the law off the court, and he was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 most influential people in the world. He has started his own philanthropy work to essentially rebuild the Akron, Ohio school community.
As a leader of his team, his teammates will vouch that he is one of the hardest-workers they’ve ever seen. He’s never taken his incredible athletic genes for granted. Take for example this quote by teammate Kyle Korver.
“Behind the scenes, just how hard he works. He’s a machine. You don’t see guys this late in their careers, guys who’ve had this much success, be the first guy in the gym. He’s still there. I was blown away.”
If you want to argue that LeBron has a lot confidence and once in awhile has a big-head… I won’t argue with you. But don’t take for granted everything he’s achieved in his career, on and off the basketball court. Don’t take for granted that he’s been told for almost 20 years just how good he was going to be/is… and has lived up to all expectations. I would wager that if the roles were reversed and you were in his shoes, you’d probably have just as “big a head” as LeBron… if not much bigger. I know I would…
LeBron on the cover of SI as a Junior in High School
If LeBron wants to take time to gloss over one personal milestone, that means a lot to him, then let the man be! He’s overcome a lot over the years and could never have never imagined in his wildest dreams, that he would be where he is today in his career/life.
The only athlete in my generation that I think has had as much sustained success as LeBron is none other than our own hero Tom Brady. As a Tom Brady fan, it irritates me when haters call Tom a “cheater” for deflategate, a “baby” for always complaining to the refs, or a “pretty boy loser” for putting his name to the Uggs. These irrational reasons for shooting hate towards Tom Brady are frustrating and dumb… and not much different than the irrational hate people aim towards LeBron.
So if you are someone who is constantly hating on LeBron James, hopefully this article has opened a new light for you on why it’s time to push that hatred to the side. Sit back and start embracing the once in a lifetime NBA Player, and the man he is. Respect the greatness y’all!
Author sportschattermjdPosted on January 24, 2018 January 29, 2018 Tags Cavs, GOAT, Lebron James, nba
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World Environment Day: Pietersen bats for rhino conservation
As efforts are being taken to conserve nature and wildlife, Pietersen feels that India has done an incredible job in terms of protecting the rhinos.
Shayan Acharya
Mumbai 05 June, 2020 10:04 IST
Former England batsman Kevin Pietersen during a campaign in South Africa's Kruger National Park. - TWITTER | @HelpingRhinos
A swashbuckling batsman, a former England captain and now a noted cricket commentator - Kevin Pietersen has donned multiple caps in his long and illustrious career.
But these days, he spends a good amount of time towards conservation of the rhinos. He plans to relaunch his charity, Save our Rhino Africa/India (SORAI) in India on September 22 and is looking forward to the project.
On World Environment Day, as efforts are being taken to conserve nature and wildlife, Pietersen feels that India has done an incredible job in terms of protecting the rhinos.
Michael Holding: Fast bowlers need to be aggressive, not angry
“Rhino horn is the most expensive commodity in the black market. It fetches between 65 to 85 thousand US dollars. In May, there has been a rhino that has been killed in the Kaziranga National Park. But actually in India, they have the most wonderful and probably it's their best conservation project ever in the numbers of rhinos that they are now, where they are having to transport and relocate rhinos out of Kaziranga National Park because of how brilliantly they have protected the animals,” Pietersen told Sportstar in an interaction recently.
“So, India is certainly the world leader in the protection of rhino and they have done the most fantastic job and shooting the National Geographic documentary in March opened my eyes and made me so proud with my association with India,” he said.
His charity SORAI, too, has some plans, when it launches.
“We will have a range of clothing, which we will be selling in India, in the UK and around the world. 20 per cent of the profit will be going to the CWS in India for all the merchandise that’s sold in India, which protects the animal, human-wildlife conflict in India, protects the Indian rhinos, the elephants and make sure that the animals in India live a better life and we are completely committed and dedicated to making sure that endangered species don’t go extinct. We are incredibly excited about the range of clothing that’s coming out,” Pietersen said.
Kevin Pietersen poses with locals in Assam during his visit to the Kaziranga National Park. - TWITTER
But what are the specific plans to safeguard the Indian rhinos?
“Well, you will have to wait and watch the documentary where we have put together an app with our technology partner Cisco. We have made some wonderful strides in making sure that humans and wildlife don’t come in to contact as badly as they do on some occasions and when there are those catastrophic floods, the humans can protect the animals, etc. The documentary is going to be a beautiful piece that’s been shot on India,” Pietersen said.
A lot of people have come forward to help him on the project. But does he plan to engage any of the Indian cricketers for the same?
“Rohit Sharma puts my rhino on his bat. He is brilliantly dedicated to saving the endangered species. He is a wonderful man of conservation and is somebody who is right at the forefront of that conservation space in India. He is a great guy,” the former cricketer said.
Wanna little clip from filming yesterday - @NatGeoIndia.
I’m explaining that when the Brahmaputra river floods, the animals & humans have to flee the area and that is when casualties happen.
Such a steep bank to get up & from my pic this am you know elephants are there... pic.twitter.com/VRP2qeZqWJ
— Kevin Pietersen(@KP24) March 7, 2020
He has also expressed his ‘disgust’ over the inhuman incident in Kerala, where a pregnant elephant was fed pineapple stuffed with firecrackers.
“DISGUSTED with the images I’ve been sent from India overnight over the senseless brutality of this mummy elephant. Why would someone do this?!?! Just why?!?”
Pietersen posted on Instagram with photos of the dastardly incident. The brutal incident of animal abuse happened in Palakkad district of Kerala, which led to the death of the elephant.
Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy T20 Live Score: Jharkhand faces Hyderabad at Eden Gardens, toss at 11:45 am
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McCleary and the income tax
Published opinion pieces from members of the Majority Coalition Caucus draw the connections between McCleary and the long-running effort to impose an income tax.
Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler, in The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review, Jan. 8, 2017: Income tax is the real issue, not schools
“This is the cleverest campaign for an income tax ever mounted in this state. Advocates for bigger government have created the illusion of a crisis in the public schools that only mountains of money can fix. Through a lawsuit they’ve gotten the state Supreme Court on their side. They would force taxes that dig deeper into everyone’s pockets, slam the brakes on economic growth, and redistribute more of the people’s hard-earned income to state agencies and powerful special-interest groups. Ultimately the goal is an income tax. Yet supporters are bending over backward to avoid using that term – and who can blame them?”
Sen. Mike Padden, R-Spokane Valley, in the Valley News Herald, Jan. 13, 2017: An out-of-bounds court casts shadow over Legislature
“Over the last 80 years this state has seen has seen considerable political agitation for an income tax. This effort comes from those with the most to gain – the unions representing state employees and teachers, social-service advocates and others. But every time an income tax has been put to the people since 1934, they have said no, in the loudest possible terms. The Supreme Court’s intrusion into the school-funding debate appears part of a well-calculated strategy to back the state into a corner and force it to adopt an income tax, whether it wants one or not.”
Sen. Tim Sheldon, D-Potlatch, in Crosscut, Jan. 20, 2017: The monster lurking behind school funding – an income tax
“Advocates of a state income tax have finally realized they will never win if they put the question to the people in an honest way. So they have set up the phoniest debate since America was forced to choose between “tastes great” and “less filling.” If you listen to the proponents, our big argument for 2017 is about levy equalization and model-school formulas — magic words that have the effect of putting an entire state to sleep. But really it is the same old argument we’ve been having in Washington more than 80 years. Our big debate isn’t about education. It’s about the income tax.”
This entry was posted in No Income Tax and tagged Income Tax, McCleary on May 3, 2017 by Laudan Espinoza.
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Federal Data Strategy
2020 Action Plan
How We Will Get There
Agency Actions
Action 1: Identify Data Needs to Answer Priority Agency Questions
Action 2: Constitute a Diverse Data Governance Body
Action 3: Assess Data and Related Infrastructure Maturity
Action 4: Identify Opportunities to Increase Staff Data Skills
Action 5: Identify Priority Data Assets for Agency Open Data Plans
Action 6: Publish and Update Data Inventories
Community of Practice Actions
Action 7: Launch a Federal Chief Data Officer Council
Action 8: Improve Data and Model Resources for AI Research and Development
Action 9: Improve Financial Management Data Standards
Action 10: Integrate Geospatial Data Practices into the Federal Data Enterprise
Shared Solution Actions
Action 11: Develop a Repository of Federal Enterprise Data Resources
Action 12: Create OMB Federal Data Policy Committee
Action 13: Develop a Curated Data Skills Catalog
Action 14: Develop a Data Ethics Framework
Action 15: Develop a Data Protection Toolkit
Action 16: Pilot a One-stop Standard Research Application
Action 17: Pilot an Automated Tool for Information Collection Reviews that Supports Data Inventory Creation and Updates
Action 18: Pilot Enhanced Data Management Tool for Federal Agencies
Action 19: Develop Data Quality Measuring and Reporting Guidance
Action 20: Develop a Data Standards Repository
How We Will Get There: The Dynamic Nature of the Federal Data Strategy
A Framework for Consistency & Annual Action Plans
The FDS describes a 10-year vision for how the Federal Government will accelerate the use of data to deliver on mission, serve the public, and steward resources while protecting security, privacy, and confidentiality. The FDS includes a mission statement, ten operating principles, and a set of 40 best practices to guide agencies in leveraging the value of Federal and Federally-sponsored data. The mission statement, principles, and practices are presented in final form in M-19-181, and additional detail regarding their development can be found at strategy.data.gov. All Executive Branch agencies (hereinafter “agencies”)2 will implement the strategy through annual government-wide Action Plans (hereinafter “Action Plans”). Action Plans will identify and prioritize practice-related steps for a given year and build on progress from year to year, which will allow for focused, measured progress, along with opportunities to improve and adapt plans. Action Plans will also align with ongoing Federal Government programs and policies and will complement statutory requirements3.
Each annual Action Plan will consist of actions that incorporate one or more of the 40 practices outlined in the strategy. This 2020 Action Plan specifies 20 measurable actions that agencies will take during the first year of implementing the strategy that support foundational steps to implement the FDS practices.
Collective Resources, Continuous Learning, & Constant Feedback
To further support agencies in executing the FDS, the FDS team has identified opportunities for collective resources, continuous learning tools, and stakeholder feedback opportunities including:
An online repository of policies, standards, tools, best practices, and case studies, known as Federal Enterprise Data Resources and located at resources.data.gov, has been established to provide centralized access to resources related to Federal data management and use;
Resources and “proof point” examples to incubate small data projects within agencies including, the GEAR Center, the Incubator Playbook (a collection of tools available to agencies for data incubation projects), and a body of crowd-sourced use cases and “proof points”;
Companion resources to implement every Agency Action step; and
Shared Solution Action steps to prototype calls for platforms needed to implement the FDS.
How the 2020 Action Plan Supports Other Data-related Requirements
The strategy is designed to serve as a framework for consistency that harmonizes the ways agencies address the many laws and regulations that govern how agencies manage and use data. The graphic below depicts the dynamic environment of the strategy, capturing the external influences—such as laws and executive orders, stakeholder input and user needs, and new technologies—that generate agency activities undertaken in response to statutory requirements, OMB guidance, and policies reflected by government-wide priorities. An annual Action Plan, designed to guide agencies in implementing the strategy, will be released each year and incorporate new laws, requirements, and priorities that will impact Federal agencies’ capacity to leverage data as a strategic asset.
The Action Plan is designed to guide agencies as they work to meet a wide array of legislative and policy requirements. In particular, the 2020 Action Plan incorporates requirements of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (hereinafter “the Evidence Act”), the Geospatial Data Act of 2018, and Executive Order 13859 on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence. Because the governing laws vary in scope and applicability, the actions described in this policy document below, differentiate between actions that are mandatory and those that are strongly encouraged. This 2020 Action Plan seeks to do more than compliance, instead providing strategic guidance to agencies in planning their optimal implementation approaches, while filling key gaps to support more robust data management and use across the Federal Government.
This first annual Action Plan establishes a solid foundation that will support the implementation of the strategy over the next decade. Specifically, this 2020 Action Plan identifies initial actions for agencies that are essential for establishing processes, building capacity, and aligning existing efforts to better leverage data as a strategic asset. In addition to actions required of each agency, the 2020 Action Plan includes a series of pilot projects already underway at individual agencies and a set of government-wide efforts that are designed to support all agencies during implementation of the strategy through the development of tools and resources.
Structure of the 2020 Action Plan
The 2020 Action Plan is designed to be cross-cutting and to support agencies in fulfilling a wide array of legislative and administrative requirements, while also prioritizing foundational activities for agencies in developing a mature data asset management environment. As part of the first-year implementation of the strategy, OMB will work with agencies through new and existing forums to support agencies and promote progress.
The 2020 Action Plan includes 20 actions broken into three distinct categories: Agency Actions, Community of Practice Actions, and Shared Solution Actions.
6 Agency Actions are executed by each agency and are designed to advance each agency’s ability to fully leverage its data as a strategic asset. Agency Actions set expectations for progress and success in implementing the strategy by building a foundation for the management of data throughout the lifecycle within agencies. Implementation guidance will be routinely updated on strategy.data.gov, and resources to support implementation will be regularly posted to the repository at resources.data.gov.
4 Community of Practice Actions are taken by a specific group of agencies around a common topic, usually through an established interagency council or other existing coordinating mechanism. Community of Practice Actions seek to integrate and coordinate ongoing efforts related to existing laws, regulations, and executive orders that are particularly relevant to the strategy.
10 Shared Solution Actions are distinct projects or efforts that are led by a single agency or existing interagency council for the benefit of all agencies. Shared Solution Actions provide government-wide thought leadership, direction, tools, governance, and services for implementing the strategy that can be leveraged by all agencies. Many of the Shared Solution Actions have received financial resources as part of the CAP Goal: Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset4 and are already underway.
For each action, the 2020 Action Plan includes: a description of the desired result of successful execution of the action, the identification of an entity responsible for executing the action, a set of metrics for measuring progress during the first year, and the expected timeline for completion of the action.
See Office of Mgm’t & Budget, Exec. Office of the President, OMB M-19-18, Federal Data strategy – A Framework for Consistency (2019) available at www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/M-19-18.pdf ↩
The term “agency” means any executive department, military department, Government corporation, Government controlled corporation, or other establishment in the executive branch of the Government (including the Executive Office of the President), or any independent regulatory agency, but does not include— (a) the Government Accountability Office; (b) Federal Election Commission; (c) the governments of the District of Columbia and of the territories and possessions of the United States, and their various subdivisions; or (d) Government-owned contractor-operated facilities, including laboratories engaged in national defense research and production activities; 44 U.S.C. §3502 ↩
Including the Paperwork Reduction Act, the E-Government Act of 2002, the Privacy Act of 1974, the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act of 2002 (CIPSEA), the Freedom of Information Act, the Information Quality Act, the Federal Records Act, and the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, among others. ↩
Federal Government Priority Goals (commonly referred to as CAP Goals) were established by the Government Performance and Results (GPRA) Modernization Act (31 U.S.C. § 1120) and are set at the beginning of each Presidential term in consultation with Congress. In FY2017 and FY2018, a total of $11.2 million was available each year to support CAP Goal projects under transfer authority provided by Congress. ↩
GSA Technology Transformation Services
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Where We’re at Now and What’s Coming Next
tags: appropriation, costs, FY 18, FY 19, help, staffing, workforce
With much of the health policy world focused on health reform, it seemed like a good week to step back and look at the resource challenges FDA will face over the next year.
First, FDA must survive the FY 18 appropriations process. Given where we started the year — 15% to 20% cuts proposed for HHS and USDA — it is a relief that level funding is proposed under the House omnibus and the Senate committee versions. In addition, the bills would transfer $60 million made available to FDA for specific activities under the terms of the 21st Century Cures Act.
However, the process has not been completed and several concerns still remain. For example, even though FDA’s funding level under the CR is the same as under the House and Senate appropriations bills, there are a number of disadvantages to FDA if the agency is funded under a CR for the whole year. Another concern is that level funding doesn’t address the agency’s growing responsibilities and expanding mission. Just within the last 12 months, 21st Century Cures and FDARA have assigned new projects and programs to FDA that must be supported by BA appropriations dollars.
Finally, under either an omnibus or a year-long CR, FDA “supposedly level” funding is subject to across-the-board spending reductions. Sequestration is one way this can occur; the CR (which reduces all spending by 0.6791% until December 8) could be another.
Second, FDA Need to Continue Fixing Its Recruitment, Hiring and Retention Process. Over 80% of FDA funds (BA and user fee monies) are spent on staff needs (salary, benefits, training, IT, travel, rent, etc.). This reflects and reinforces that FDA’s workforce is its most important resource. FDA’s effectiveness is dependent on the agency surmounting a number of long-term challenges to recruitment, hiring, and retention. A number of provisions in 21st Century Cures should help. Further, Commissioner Gottlieb is making it a priority to speed up hiring and make the system work. There is a lot of progress being made, but it still rates as one of FDA’s most significant resource challenges over the next year.
Third, FDA Faces a Dual Threat in the Upcoming FY 19 Funding Cycle. The FY 19 appropriations cycle starts in February with the President submitting his request to Congress. It is certain to be another tough year, combined with a further widening in the gap between FDA’s responsibilities and sufficient BA funding. Further, it is highly likely that the Administration will again propose substantial increases in user fees, while proposing substantial cuts in BA funds. The Alliance was at the forefront this year in stressing the importance of BA funding because taxpayers are the primary beneficiary of FDA’s activities and need to have a substantial stake in how the agency is paid for.
A final thought: the Alliance is proud that over a 10-year period we have helped push FDA’s BA funding from $1.5 billion to $2.7 billion. However, as reflected above, our efforts are needed now, more than ever. Help us in the coming year to lead the stakeholder community in preserving and expanding the funding that FDA needs.
from → Advocacy at a Glance
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Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 3 › United States v. Fries
United States v. Fries, 3 U.S. 515 (1799)
United States v. Fries, 3 U.S. 3 Dall. 515 515 (1799)
United States v. Fries
3 U.S. (3 Dall.) 515
CIRCUIT COURT,
PENNSYLVANIA DISTRICT
Indictment for treason by levying war against the United States, at Bethlehem, in the County of Northampton. The prisoner, after a trial that lasted fifteen days, [Footnote 1] was convicted, whereupon Lewis and Dallas, his counsel, moved for a new trial on two general grounds.
1st, that there had been a mistrial.
2d, that there had not been an unbiased and impartial trial.
I. The facts on the first ground appeared to be these:
A venire, tested 11 October, 1798, and returnable 11 April, 1799, had issued by which the marshal was commanded to summon 24 grand jurors and "a number of honest and lawful men of your said district, not less than forty eight, and not exceeding sixty, to serve as petit jurors." Annexed to this venire the marshal in due form made a return of the whole number of sixty jurors, all of whom were summoned from the City and County of Philadelphia, and on a separate paper signed by him he returned an additional number of 17 jurors summoned from the County of Northampton and of 12 jurors summoned from the County of Bucks, making in the whole 89 jurors. For this latter return, however,
Page 3 U. S. 516
no venire had issued, nor did any special award appear on the record, and the jury that tried the prisoner was composed of jurors from Philadelphia, Northampton, and Bucks.
II. The facts on the second ground in support of the motion for a new trial were that Rhodes, one of the jurors, after he had been summoned as a juror, declared at several places, at several times, and to several persons in substance as follows: "That he was not safe at home for these people (meaning the insurgents) that they ought all to be hung, and particularly that Fries must be hung." The juror was confronted with the witnesses who attested these declarations, and denied them, [Footnote 2] as pointed particularly at Fries, but admitted that he had made use of general expressions indicative of his disapprobation of the conduct of the insurgents.
After a solemn consideration of the subject, Iredell, Justice, delivered his opinion in favor of a new trial, on the second ground of objection, that one of the jurors had made declarations, as well in relation to the prisoner personally as to the general question of the insurrection, which manifested a bias or predetermination that ought never to be felt by a juror. He added that he did not regard the first ground of objection as insurmountable, but deemed it unnecessary to give a decisive opinion on it.
Peters, District Judge, did not think that either objection ought to prevail. He thought that the venire and returns of the jurors were authorized by principle and precedent, and that the declarations of Rhodes were such as might naturally be made in relation to the insurrection, without manifesting a particular hostility towards the prisoner or leading to a conviction in spite of any evidence or argument that might
occur on the trial. As, however, the consequence of dividing the court would be a rejection of the motion, and as the interests of public justice and the influence of public example would not be impaired by the delay of a new trial, the district judge determined to acquiesce in the opinion of Judge Iredell.
A new trial awarded.
The length of the trial introduced the question how far the court could order an adjournment in a capital case. The principle of necessity, and the recent precedents in England in the cases of Rex v. Hardy and Rex v. Tooke were considered by the court and acted upon. The jury was, however, kept together in the same room at a tavern during the times of adjournment, and once (on Sunday) were taken for recreation in a carriage into the country, but still remaining under the charge of an officer and within the jurisdiction of the court.
It was doubted whether the juror was a competent witness on this question, but the court thought that though he could not be compelled to give testimony, he might give it if he pleased, and accordingly he was admitted at his own request. On the examination, however, he appeared very incorrect in his recollection of facts, though it was agreed on all hands that he was an upright man.
3 U.S. 515
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Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 404 › Lego v. Twomey
Lego v. Twomey, 404 U.S. 477 (1972)
Lego v. Twomey
Argued November 11, 1971
Decided January 12, 1972
Following a pretrial suppression hearing at which conflicting evidence was presented as to the voluntariness of a confession that petitioner had given the police, the trial judge, presumably applying the Illinois preponderance of the evidence standard, held the confession admissible, and it was introduced into evidence at the trial, which resulted in petitioner's conviction. The judge had instructed the jury as to the prosecution's burden of proving guilt, but did not instruct that the jury had to find the confession voluntary before it could be used in reaching its verdict. In a habeas corpus proceeding petitioner challenged his conviction. The District Court denied relief, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. Petitioner contends, relying upon In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358, that the trial judge should have found the confession voluntary beyond a reasonable doubt before admitting it into evidence, or, alternatively, that the admissibility of the confession as evidence in a criminal trial (quite apart from its probative value) had to be determined by a reasonable doubt standard to protect the values that exclusionary rules are designed to serve. Petitioner also urges that, even though the trial judge ruled on his coercion claim, he was entitled, under Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, to have the jury decide that issue anew.
1. The hearing on the voluntariness of a confession required by this Court's decision in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U. S. 368, is not designed to implement the presumption of innocence and enhance the reliability of jury verdicts, but to prevent the use of a coerced confession as violative of due process quite apart from its truth or falsity. Consequently, determining the admissibility of a confession by a preponderance of the evidence is not inconsistent with the mandate of In re Winship, supra. Pp. 404 U. S. 482-487.
2. Petitioner has not demonstrated that admissibility rulings based on the preponderance of evidence standard are unreliable or that imposition of any higher standard under expanded exclusionary rules would be sufficiently productive to outweigh the
public interest in having probative evidence available to juries. pp. 404 U. S. 487-489.
3. The procedure followed here comported with the requirements of Jackson, supra, and petitioner was not entitled to have the voluntariness issue which had been resolved by the trial judge also submitted to a jury for its separate consideration. Nor did Duncan, supra, change the rule that determining the admissibility of evidence is a function of the court, rather than of the jury. Pp. 404 U. S. 489-490.
WHITE, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which BURGER, C.J., and STEWART and BLACKMUN, JJ., joined. BRENNAN, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which DOUGLAS and MARSHALL, JJ., joined, post, p. 404 U. S. 490. POWELL and REHNQUIST, JJ., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT
MR. JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the Court.
In 1964, this Court held that a criminal defendant who challenges the voluntariness of a confession made to officials and sought to be used against him at his trial has a due process right to a reliable determination that the confession was, in fact, voluntarily given, and not the outcome of coercion which the Constitution forbids. Jackson v. Denno, 378 U. S. 368. While our decision made plain that only voluntary confessions may be admitted at the trial of guilt or innocence, we did not then announce, or even suggest, that the factfinder at a coercion hearing need judge voluntariness with reference to an especially severe standard of proof. Nevertheless,
since Jackson, state and federal courts have addressed themselves to the issue with a considerable variety of opinions. [Footnote 1] We granted certiorari in this case to resolve the question. 401 U.S. 992 (1971).
Petitioner Lego was convicted of armed robbery in 1961 after a jury trial in Superior Court, Cook County, Illinois. The court sentenced him to prison for 25 to 50 years. The evidence introduced against Lego at trial included a confession he had made to police after arrest and while in custody at the station house. Prior to trial, Lego sought to have the confession suppressed. He did not deny making it, but did challenge that he had done so voluntarily. The trial judge conducted a hearing, out of the presence of the jury, at which Lego testified that police had beaten him about the head and neck with a gun butt. His explanation of this treatment was that the local police chief, a neighbor and former classmate of the robbery victim, had sought revenge upon him. Lego introduced into evidence a photograph that had been taken of him at the county jail on the day after his arrest. The photograph showed that petitioner's face had been swollen and had traces of blood on it. Lego admitted that his face had been scratched in a scuffle with the robbery victim, but maintained that the encounter did not explain the condition shown in the photograph. The police chief and four officers also testified. They denied either beating or threatening petitioner and disclaimed knowledge that any other officer had done so. The trial judge resolved this credibility problem in favor of the police and ruled the confession admissible. [Footnote 2] At trial, Lego testified in his own behalf. Although he did not dispute the truth of the confession directly, he did tell his version of the events that had transpired at the
police station. The trial judge instructed the jury as to the prosecution's burden of proving guilt. He did not instruct that the jury was required to find the confession voluntary before it could be used in judging guilt or innocence. [Footnote 3] On direct appeal, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the conviction. People v. Lego, 32 Ill. 2d 76, 203 N.E.2d 875 (1965).
Four years later, petitioner challenged his conviction by seeking a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He maintained that the trial judge should have found the confession voluntary beyond a reasonable doubt before admitting it into evidence. Although the judge had made no mention of the standard he used, Illinois law provided that a confession challenged as involuntary could be admitted into evidence if, at a hearing outside the presence of the jury, the judge found it voluntary by a preponderance of the evidence. [Footnote 4] In the alternative, petitioner argued that the voluntariness question should also have been submitted to the jury for its separate consideration.
After first denying the writ for failure to exhaust state remedies, the District Court granted a rehearing motion, concluded that Lego had no state remedy then available to him, and denied relief on the merits. United States ex rel. Lego v. Pate, 308 F. Supp. 38 (1970). [Footnote 5] The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed. [Footnote 6]
Petitioner challenges the judgment of the Court of Appeals on three grounds. The first is that he was not proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, as required by In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970), because the confession used against him at his trial had been proved voluntary only by a preponderance of the evidence. Implicit in the claim is an assumption that a voluntariness hearing is designed to enhance the reliability of jury verdicts. To judge whether that is so, we must return to Jackson v. Denno, 378 U. S. 368 (1964).
In New York prior to Jackson, juries most often determined the voluntariness of confessions, and hence whether confessions could be used in deciding guilt or innocence. Trial judges were required to make an initial determination, and could exclude a confession, but only if it could not under any circumstances be deemed voluntary. [Footnote 7] When voluntariness was fairly debatable, either because a dispute of fact existed or because reasonable men could have drawn differing inferences from undisputed facts, the question whether the confession violated due process was for the jury. This meant the confession
was introduced at the trial itself. If evidence challenging its voluntariness were adduced, the jury was instructed first to pass upon voluntariness and, if it found the confession involuntary, ignore it in determining guilt. If, on the other hand, the confession were found to be voluntary, the jury was then free to consider its truth or falsity and give the confession an appropriate weight in judging guilt or innocence.
We concluded that the New York procedure was constitutionally defective because at no point along the way did a criminal defendant receive a clear-cut determination that the confession used against him was in fact, voluntary. The trial judge was not entitled to exclude a confession merely because he himself would have found it involuntary, and, while we recognized that the jury was empowered to perform that function, we doubted it could do so reliably. Precisely because confessions of guilt, whether coerced or freely given, may be truthful and potent evidence, we did not believe a jury could be called upon to ignore the probative value of a truthful but coerced confession; it was also likely, we thought, that, in judging voluntariness itself, the jury would be influenced by the reliability of a confession it considered an accurate account of the facts. "It is now axiomatic," we said,
"that a defendant in a criminal case is deprived of due process of law if his conviction is founded, in whole or in part, upon an involuntary confession, without regard for the truth or falsity of the confession, Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U. S. 534, and even though there is ample evidence aside from the confession to support the conviction. Malinski v. New York, 324 U. S. 401; Stroble v. California, 343 U. S. 181; Payne v. Arkansas, 356 U. S. 560. Equally clear is the defendant's constitutional right at some stage in the proceedings to object to the use of the confession
and to have a fair hearing and a reliable determination on the issue of voluntariness, a determination uninfluenced by the truth or falsity of the confession. Rogers v. Richmond, supra. [Footnote 8]"
We did not think it necessary, or even appropriate, in Jackson to announce that prosecutors would be required to meet a particular burden of proof in a Jackson hearing held before the trial judge. [Footnote 9] Indeed, the then-established duty to determine voluntariness had not been framed in terms of a burden of proof, [Footnote 10] nor has it been since Jackson was decided. [Footnote 11] We could fairly assume then, as we can now, that a judge would admit into evidence only those confessions that he reliably found, at least by a preponderance of the evidence, had been made voluntarily.
We noted in Jackson that there may be a relationship between the involuntariness of a confession and its unreliability. [Footnote 12] But our decision was not based in the
slightest on the fear that juries might misjudge the accuracy of confessions and arrive at erroneous determinations of guilt or innocence. That case was not aimed at reducing the possibility of convicting innocent men.
Quite the contrary, we feared that the reliability and truthfulness of even coerced confessions could impermissibly influence a jury's judgment as to voluntariness. The use of coerced confessions, whether true or false, is forbidden because the method used to extract them offends constitutional principles. Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U. S. 534, 365 U. S. 540-541 (1961). [Footnote 13] The procedure we established in Jackson was designed to safeguard the right of an individual, entirely apart from his guilt or innocence, not to be compelled to condemn himself by his own utterances. Nothing in Jackson questioned the province or capacity of juries to assess the truthfulness of confessions. Nothing in that opinion took from the jury any evidence relating to the accuracy or weight of confessions admitted into evidence. A defendant has
been as free since Jackson as he was before to familiarize a jury with circumstances that attend the taking of his confession, including facts bearing upon its weight and voluntariness. [Footnote 14] In like measure, of course, juries have been at liberty to disregard confessions that are insufficiently corroborated or otherwise deemed unworthy of belief.
Since the purpose that a voluntariness hearing is designed to serve has nothing whatever to do with improving the reliability of jury verdicts, we cannot accept the charge that judging the admissibility of a confession by a preponderance of the evidence undermines the mandate of In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970). Our decision in Winship was not concerned with standards for determining the admissibility of evidence or with the prosecution's burden of proof at a suppression hearing when evidence is challenged on constitutional grounds. Winship went no further than to confirm the fundamental right that protects
"the accused against conviction except upon proof beyond a reasonable doubt of every fact necessary to constitute the crime with which he is charged."
Id. at 397 U. S. 364. A high standard of proof is
necessary, we said, to ensure against unjust convictions by giving substance to the presumption of innocence. Id. at 397 U. S. 363. A guilty verdict is not rendered less reliable or less consonant with Winship simply because the admissibility of a confession is determined by a less stringent standard. Petitioner does not maintain that either his confession or its voluntariness is an element of the crime with which he was charged. He does not challenge the constitutionality of the standard by which the jury was instructed to decide his guilt or innocence; nor does he question the sufficiency of the evidence that reached the jury to satisfy the proper standard of proof. Petitioner's rights under Winship have not been violated. [Footnote 15]
Even conceding that Winship is inapplicable because the purpose of a voluntariness hearing is not to implement the presumption of innocence, petitioner presses for reversal on the alternative ground that evidence offered against a defendant at a criminal trial and challenged on constitutional grounds must be determined admissible beyond a reasonable doubt in order to give adequate protection to those values that exclusionary rules are designed to serve. Jackson v. Denno, supra, an offspring of Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U. S. 278 (1936), requires judicial rulings on voluntariness prior to admitting confessions. Miranda v. Arizona, 384
U.S. 436 (1966), excludes confessions flowing from custodial interrogations unless adequate warnings were administered and a waiver was obtained. Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383 (1914), and Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961), make impermissible the introduction of evidence obtained in violation of a defendant's Fourth Amendment rights. In each instance, and without regard to its probative value, evidence is kept from the trier of guilt or innocence for reasons wholly apart from enhancing the reliability of verdicts. These independent values, it is urged, themselves require a stricter standard of proof in judging admissibility.
The argument is straightforward, and has appeal. But we are unconvinced that merely emphasizing the importance of the values served by exclusionary rules is itself sufficient demonstration that the Constitution also requires admissibility to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. [Footnote 16] Evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment has been excluded from federal criminal trials for many years. Weeks v. United States, supra. The same is true of coerced confessions offered in either federal or state trials. Bram v. United States, 168 U. S. 532 (1897); Brown v. Mississippi, supra. But, from our experience over this period of time, no substantial evidence has accumulated that federal rights have suffered from determining admissibility by a preponderance of the evidence. Petitioner offers nothing to suggest that admissibility rulings have been unreliable or otherwise wanting in quality because not based on some higher standard. Without good cause, we are unwilling to expand currently applicable exclusionary rules by erecting additional barriers to placing truthful and probative evidence
before state juries and by revising the standards applicable in collateral proceedings. Sound reason for moving further in this direction has not been offered here, nor do we discern any at the present time. This is particularly true since the exclusionary rules are very much aimed at deterring lawless conduct by police and prosecution, and it is very doubtful that escalating the prosecution's burden of proof in Fourth and Fifth Amendment suppression hearings would be sufficiently productive in this respect to outweigh the public interest in placing probative evidence before juries for the purpose of arriving at truthful decisions about guilt or innocence.
To reiterate what we said in Jackson: when a confession challenged as involuntary is sought to be used against a criminal defendant at his trial, he is entitled to a reliable and clear-cut determination that the confession was in fact, voluntarily rendered. Thus, the prosecution must prove at least by a preponderance of the evidence that the confession was voluntary. Of course, the States are free, pursuant to their own law, to adopt a higher standard. They may indeed differ as to the appropriate resolution of the values they find at stake. [Footnote 17]
We also reject petitioner's final contention that, even though the trial judge ruled on his coercion claim, he was entitled to have the jury decide the claim anew. To the extent this argument asserts that the judge's determination was insufficiently reliable, it is no more persuasive than petitioner's other contentions. To the extent the position assumes that a jury is better suited than a judge to determine voluntariness, it, questions the basic assumptions of Jackson v. Denno; it also ignores
that Jackson neither raised any question about the constitutional validity of the so-called orthodox rule for judging the admissibility of confessions nor even suggested that the Constitution requires submission of voluntariness claims to a jury as well as a judge. Finally, Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145 (1968), which made the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury applicable to the States, did not purport to change the normal rule that the admissibility of evidence is a question for the court, rather than the jury. Nor did that decision require that both judge and jury pass upon the admissibility of evidence when constitutional grounds are asserted for excluding it. We are not disposed to impose as a constitutional requirement a procedure we have found wanting merely to afford petitioner a second forum for litigating his claim.
The decision of the Court of Appeals is
MR. JUSTICE POWELL and MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.
State courts that have considered the question since Jackson have adopted a variety of standards, most of them founded upon state law. Many have sanctioned a standard of proof less strict than beyond a reasonable doubt, including proof of voluntariness by a preponderance of the evidence or to the satisfaction of the court or proof of voluntariness in fact. E.g., Duncan v. State, 278 Ala. 145, 176 So. 2d 840 (1965); State v. Dillon, 93 Idaho 698, 471 P.2d 553 (1970), cert. denied, 401 U.S. 942 (1971); People v. Harper, 36 Ill. 2d 398, 223 N.E.2d 841 (1967); State v. Milow, 199 Kan. 576, 433 P.2d 538 (1967); Barnhart v. State, 5 Md.App. 222, 246 A.2d 280 (1968); Commonwealth v. White, 353 Mass. 409, 232 N.E.2d 335 (1967); State v. Nolan, 423 S.W.2d 815 (Mo.1968); State v. White, 146 Mont. 226, 405 P.2d 761 (1965), cert. denied, 384 U.S. 1023 (1966); State v. Brewton, 238 Ore. 590, 395 P.2d 874 (1964); Commonwealth ex rel. Butler v. Rundle, 429 Pa. 141, 239 A.2d 426 (1968); Monts v. State, 218 Tenn. 31, 400 S.W.2d 722 (1966); State v. Davis, 73 Wash. 2d 271, 438 P.2d 185 (1968).
Other States, using state law or not specifying a basis, require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. E.g., State v. Ragdale, 249 La. 420, 187 So. 2d 427 (1966), cert. denied, 385 U.S. 1029 (1967); State v. Keiser, 274 Minn. 265, 143 N.W.2d 75 (1966); State v. Yough, 49 N.J. 587, 231 A.2d 598 (1967); People v. Huntley, 15 N.Y.2d 72, 204 N.E.2d 179 (1965); State v. Thundershield, 83 S.D. 414, 160 N.W.2d 408 (1968); State ex rel. Goodchild v. Burke, 27 Wis.2d 244, 133 N.W.2d 753 (1965), cert. denied, 384 U.S. 1017 (1966).
Two federal courts have held as an exercise of supervisory power that voluntariness must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Ralph v. Warden, 438 F.2d 786, 793 (CA4 1970), clarifying United States v. Inman, 352 F.2d 954 (CA4 1965); Pea v. United States, 130 U.S.App.D.C. 66, 397 F.2d 627 (1967); cf. United States v. Schipani, 289 F. Supp. 43 (EDNY 1968), aff'd, 414 F.2d 1262 (CA2 1969), cert. denied, 397 U.S. 922 (1970), requiring the Government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that certain evidence was not tainted by violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In ruling the confession admissible, the judge stated:
"The petitioner has admitted under oath he had a struggle with the complaining witness over the gun; he was wounded, obtained a facial wound. The Officers testified he was bloody at the time he was arrested."
"I don't believe the defendant's testimony at all that he was beaten up by the Police. The condition he is in is well explained by the defendant himself."
Illinois followed what we described in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U. S. 368 (1964), as "the orthodox rule, under which the judge himself solely and finally determines the voluntariness of the confession. . . ." Id. at 378 U. S. 378. While the procedures of all the States could not be neatly classified, we noted that some followed the Massachusetts procedure, whereby the judge himself first resolves evidentiary conflicts and determines whether a confession is, in fact, voluntary. If he is unable so to conclude, the confession may not be admitted into evidence. If judged voluntary, and therefore admissible, the jury must also determine the coercion issue, and is instructed to ignore a confession it finds involuntary. Id. at 378 U. S. 378 n. 8. Other States had adopted the New York procedure at issue in Jackson. Our decision in Jackson cast no doubt upon the orthodox and Massachusetts procedures, but did call into question the practice of every State that did not clearly follow one of these procedures. A thorough tabulation of what States did in the wake of Jackson appears in 3 J. Wigmore, Evidence 585-593 (J. Chadbourn rev.1970).
People v. Wagoner, 8 Ill. 2d 188, 133 N.E.2d 24 (1956); People v. Thomlison, 400 Ill. 555, 81 N.E.2d 434 (1948).
Respondent makes no contention here that petitioner either waived the right to adjudicate his federal claims or deliberately bypassed state procedures for testing those claims. Cf. Fay v. Noia, 372 U. S. 391, 372 U. S. 439 (1963).
The Seventh Circuit's affirmance is unreported. United States ex rel. Lego v. Pate, No. 18313 (CA7 Oct. 8, 1970).
A more thorough description of the New York procedure is found in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 377-391.
Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 376-377.
"Judge" is used here and throughout the opinion to mean a factfinder, whether trial judge or jury, at a voluntariness hearing. The proscription against permitting the jury that passes upon guilt or innocence to judge voluntariness in the same proceeding does not preclude the States from impaneling a separate jury to determine voluntariness. Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 391 n.19.
See, e.g., Haynes v. Washington, 373 U. S. 503 (1963); Spano v. New York, 360 U. S. 315 (1959); Payne v. Arkansas, 356 U. S. 560 (1958).
See, e.g., Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U. S. 731 (1969); Boulden v. Holman, 394 U. S. 478 (1969); Harrison v. United States, 392 U. S. 219 (1968); Greenwald v. Wisconsin, 390 U. S. 519 (1968); Clewis v. Texas, 386 U. S. 707 (1967); Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U. S. 737 (1966); cf. Procunier v. Atchley, 400 U. S. 446 (1971).
We noted that coerced confessions are forbidden in part because of their "probable unreliability." Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 385-386. However, it had been settled when this Court decided Jackson that the exclusion of unreliable confessions is not the purpose that a voluntariness hearing is designed to serve. Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U. S. 534 (1961). The sole issue in such a hearing is whether a confession was coerced. Whether it be true or false is irrelevant; indeed, such an inquiry is forbidden. The judge may not take into consideration evidence that would indicate that the confession, though compelled, is reliable, even highly so. Id. at 365 U. S. 545. As difficult as such tasks may be to accomplish, the judge is also duty-bound to ignore implications of reliability in facts relevant to coercion and to shut from his mind any internal evidence of authenticity that a confession itself may bear.
In Jackson, 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 377-391, we traced the genesis of the view that due process forbids the use of coerced confessions, whether or not reliable. The Court had departed from that view in Stein v. New York, 346 U. S. 156 (1953), whose premise was that a confession is excludable because of its inherent untrustworthiness. The Stein premise was repudiated in Rogers v. Richmond, and Rogers was reaffirmed in Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U.S. at 384 U. S. 739, and Johnson v. New Jersey, 384 U. S. 719, 384 U. S. 729 n. 9 (1966). That case continues to serve as the basis for evaluating coercion claims. See cases cited in n 11, supra.
This is the course that petitioner pursued. Cf. Jackson v. Denno, 378 U.S. at 378 U. S. 386 n. 13. Although 18 U.S.C. § 3501(a) is inapplicable here, it is relevant to note the provision of that section:
"(a) In any criminal prosecution brought by the United States or by the District of Columbia, a confession, as defined in subsection (e) hereof, hall be admissible in evidence if it is voluntarily given. Before such confession is received in evidence, the trial judge shall, out of the presence of the jury, determine any issue as to voluntariness. If the trial judge determines that the confession was voluntarily made, it shall be admitted in evidence and the trial judge shall permit the jury to hear relevant evidence on the issue of voluntariness and shall instruct the jury to give such weight to the confession as the jury feel it deserves under all the circumstances."
Nothing is to be gained from restating the constitutional rule as requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on the basis of constitutionally obtained evidence and then arguing that rights under Winship are diluted unless admissibility is governed by a high standard. Transparently, this assumes the question at issue, which is whether a confession is admissible if found voluntary by a preponderance of the evidence. United States v. Schipani, supra, n 1, followed this unsatisfactory course in a Fourth Amendment case but stopped short of basing the decision on the Constitution.
It is no more persuasive to impose the stricter standard of proof as an exercise of supervisory power than as a constitutional rule. Cf. Ralph v. Warden, supra, n 1, clarifying United States v. Inman, supra, n 1; Pea v. United States, supra, n 1.
See cases cited in n 1, supra.
MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS and MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL join, dissenting.
When the prosecution, state or federal, seeks to put in evidence an allegedly involuntary confession, its admissibility is determined by the command of the Fifth Amendment that "[n]o person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U. S. 737, 384 U. S. 740 (1966); Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1, 378 U. S. 7-8 (1964); Bram v. United States, 168 U. S. 532, 168 U. S. 542-543 (1897). This right against compulsory self-incrimination is the "essential mainstay" of our system of criminal prosecution, Malloy v. Hogan, supra, at 378 U. S. 7,
"a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently
and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth,"
Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U. S. 534, 365 U. S. 541 (1961). What is thereby protected from governmental invasion is, quite simply, "the right of a person to remain silent unless he chooses to speak in the unfettered exercise of his own will." Malloy v. Hogan, supra, at 378 U. S. 8. Hence, a confession is involuntary and inadmissible unless it is "the product of a rational intellect and a free will." Blackburn v. Alabama, 361 U. S. 199, 361 U. S. 208 (1960); see Reck v. Pate, 367 U. S. 433, 367 U. S. 440 (1961).
Ideally, of course, a defendant's compelled utterance would never be admitted into evidence against him. As we said in Jackson v. Denno, 378 U. S. 368, 378 U. S. 376 (1964), it is "axiomatic" that a criminal conviction cannot stand if it
"is founded, in whole or in part, upon an involuntary confession . . . even though there is ample evidence aside from the confession to support the conviction."
Yet I doubt that informed observers of the criminal process would deny that at least some compelled utterances slip through, even assuming scrupulous adherence to constitutional standards and the most rigorous procedural protections. Jackson was an attempt to move that reality somewhat closer to the ideal. We there rejected the New York rule because it "did not afford a reliable determination of the voluntariness of the confession offered in evidence at the trial," and consequently "did not adequately protect [a defendant's] right to be free of a conviction based upon a coerced confession." Id. at 378 U. S. 377. As the Court today points out,
"[t]he procedure we established in Jackson was designed to safeguard the right of an individual, entirely apart from his guilt or innocence, not to be compelled to condemn himself by his own utterances."
Ante at 404 U. S. 485.
There is no need to dwell upon the importance our American concept of justice attaches to preserving the
integrity of the constitutional privilege. Both the rule that automatically reverses a conviction when an involuntary confession was admitted at trial and the procedure established in Jackson for determining whether a confession was voluntary are means to further the end that no utterance of a defendant not the product of his own free choice will be used against him. The Court today reaffirms what we held in Jackson:
"[W]hen a confession challenged as involuntary is sought to be used against a criminal defendant at his trial, he is entitled to a reliable and clear-cut determination that the confession was in fact, voluntarily rendered."
Ante at 404 U. S. 489. But the Court goes on to hold that it follows from Jackson that "the prosecution must prove at least by a preponderance of the evidence that the confession was voluntary." Ibid. I disagree. In my view, the rationale of Jackson requires the conclusion that the preponderance standard does not provide sufficient protection against the danger that involuntary confessions will be employed in criminal trials.
A Jackson hearing normally presents the factfinder with conflicting testimony from the defendant and law enforcement officers about what occurred during the officers' interrogation of the defendant. The factfinder's resolution of this conflict is often, as a practical matter, the final resolution of the voluntariness issue. Jackson, supra, at 378 U. S. 390-391. This case is a typical example. Petitioner testified that he confessed because the police had beaten him; the police testified that there was no beating. As the Court notes, "[t]he trial judge resolved this credibility problem in favor of the police, and ruled the confession admissible." Ante at 404 U. S. 480. When the question before the factfinder is whether to believe one or the other of two self-serving accounts of what has happened, it is apparent that the standard of persuasion will in many instances be of controlling significance.
See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 357 U. S. 525-526 (1958). Although the Court suggests "that federal rights have [not] suffered from determining admissibility by a preponderance of the evidence" and that there has been no showing "that admissibility rulings have been unreliable . . . because not based on some higher standard," ante at 404 U. S. 488, I do not think it can be denied, given the factual nature of the ordinary voluntariness determination, that permitting a lower standard of proof will necessarily result in the admission of more involuntary confessions than would be admitted were the prosecution required to meet a higher standard. The converse, of course, is also true. Requiring the higher standard means that some voluntary confessions will be excluded as involuntary even though they would have been found voluntary under the lower standard.
The standard of proof required for a criminal conviction presents a similar situation, yet we have held that guilt must be established by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358, 397 U. S. 361-364 (1970); see id. at 397 U. S. 370-372 (Harlan, J., concurring). Permitting proof by a preponderance of the evidence would necessarily result in the conviction of more defendants who are, in fact, innocent. Conversely, imposing the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt means that more defendants who are, in fact, guilty are found innocent. It seems to me that the same considerations that demand the reasonable doubt standard when guilt or innocence is at stake also demand that standard when the question is the admissibility of an allegedly involuntary confession.
We permit proof by a preponderance of the evidence in civil litigation because
"we view it as no more serious in general for there to be an erroneous verdict in the defendant's favor than for there to be an erroneous verdict in the plaintiff's favor."
Id. at 397 U. S. 371 (Harlan, J., concurring). We do not take that view in criminal cases.
We said in Winship that the reasonable doubt standard
"is a prime instrument for reducing the risk of convictions resting on factual error. The standard provides concrete substance for the presumption of innocence. . . ."
Id. at 397 U. S. 363. As Mr. Justice Harlan put it in his concurring opinion, the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is
"bottomed on a fundamental value determination of our society that it is far worse to convict an innocent man than to let a guilty man go free."
If we permit the prosecution to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that a confession was voluntary, then, to paraphrase Mr. Justice Harlan, we must be prepared to justify the view that it is no more serious in general to admit involuntary confessions than it is to exclude voluntary confessions. I am not prepared to justify that view. Compelled self-incrimination is so alien to the American sense of justice that I see no way that such a view could ever be justified. If we are to provide "concrete substance" for the command of the Fifth Amendment that no person shall be compelled to condemn himself, we must insist, as we do at the trial of guilt or innocence, that the prosecution prove that the defendant's confession was voluntary beyond a reasonable doubt. * In my judgment, to paraphrase Mr. Justice
Harlan again, the command of the Fifth Amendment reflects the determination of our society that it is worse to permit involuntary self-condemnation than it is to deprive a jury of probative evidence. Just as we do not convict when there is a reasonable doubt of guilt, we should not permit the prosecution to introduce into evidence a defendant's confession when there is a reasonable doubt that it was the product of his free and rational choice.
I add only that the absolute bar against the admission of a defendant's compelled utterance at his criminal trial is fundamentally an expression of the American commitment to the moral worth of the individual. What we said in Winship bears repeating here.
"[U]se of the reasonable doubt standard is indispensable to command the respect and confidence of the community in applications of the criminal law. It is critical that the moral force of the criminal law not be diluted by a standard of proof that leaves people in doubt whether innocent men are being condemned."
Id. at 397 U. S. 364. I believe that it is just as critical to our system of criminal justice that, when a person's words are used against him, no reasonable doubt remains that he spoke of his own free will.
* My view that the reasonable doubt standard must be imposed upon the prosecution does not depend upon whether that standard would be more effective than some lower standard in deterring police misconduct. When a defendant challenges his confession as involuntary,
"the constitutional inquiry is not whether the conduct of state officers in obtaining the confession was shocking, but whether the confession was 'free and voluntary. . . .'"
Malloy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1, 378 U. S. 7 (1964). It is true that the defendant will frequently allege police misconduct, as petitioner did here. Nevertheless, as we said in Townsend v. Sain, 372 U. S. 293, 372 U. S. 308 (1963),
"[a]ny questioning by police officers which, in fact, produces a confession which is not the product of a free intellect renders that confession inadmissible."
(Emphasis in original.)
Oral Argument - November 11, 1971
Twomey
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Stare Into The Lights My Pretties > News Articles > Dozens of Journalists’ iPhones Hacked With NSO ‘Zero-Click’ Spyware, Says Citizen Lab
Dozens of Journalists’ iPhones Hacked With NSO ‘Zero-Click’ Spyware, Says Citizen Lab
Tags: media, smartphones, spyware, surveillance
For more than the past year, London-based reporter Rania Dridi and at least 36 journalists, producers and executives working for the Al Jazeera news agency were targeted with a so-called “zero-click” attack that exploited a now-fixed vulnerability in Apple’s iMessage. The attack invisibly compromised the devices without having to trick the victims into opening a malicious link. Citizen Lab, the internet watchdog at the University of Toronto, was asked to investigate earlier this year after one of the victims, Al Jazeera investigative journalist Tamer Almisshal, suspected that his phone may have been hacked. In a technical report out Sunday and shared with TechCrunch, the researchers say they believe the journalists’ iPhones were infected with the Pegasus spyware, developed by Israel-based NSO Group. The researchers analyzed Almisshal’s iPhone and found it had between July and August connected to servers known to be used by NSO for delivering the Pegasus spyware. The device revealed a burst of network activity that suggests that the spyware may have been delivered silently over iMessage. Logs from the phone show that the spyware was likely able to secretly record the microphone and phone calls, take photos using the phone’s camera, access the victim’s passwords, and track the phone’s location.
16 Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/20/citizen-lab-iphone-nso-group/...
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President Julius Maada Bio Visits European Parliament as Guest of the UK Member of Parliament
By State House Media and Communications Unit on November 07, 2018 in Latest News, News
Brussels, Belgium Monday 5 November 2018 – His Excellency President Julius Maada Bio Monday paid a visit to the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, as a guest of the United Kingdom Member of European Parliament, (MEP), Steven Marcus Woolfe.
According to the envoy, he had hosted President Bio to a dinner at the European Parliament in recognition of his vibrant leadership and an excellent start in moving Sierra Leone to the right direction.
The UK Member of European Parliament also praised the new President, who assumed office in April this year, for his wonderful stewardship and vision in the last six months. He paid tributes to the efforts of uniting Sierra Leone, efficiently managing the economy, showing leadership in the fight against corruption and investing in human capital development through the free quality education programme.
In a short address, President Bio thanked Mr Woolfe, his colleagues and staff of the European Parliament for the reception and reiterated his commitment to restoring the international reputation of the small West Africa nation. He assured that his determination to fight corruption, effectively manage the economy and invest in human capital development would serve the best interest of ordinary Sierra Leoneans.
President Bio also expressed his commitment to strengthening the relationship between Sierra Leone and the European Parliament.
For More Enquiries: State House Media and Communications Unit +23276758764/+23288269282
Featured_Newsforeign visitlatest
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Consumer Justice
Equitable Neighborhoods
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As 2020 Draws to a Close with our Building For Change Campaign...
Introducing TakeRoot’s Interim Co-Directors
Melanie Zuch
Melanie is a staff attorney in the Immigrants’ Rights practice area. Prior to joining TakeRoot Justice, Melanie was a Skadden Fellow and Staff Attorney at Covenant House New York, where she represented runaway and homeless youth in a range of civil legal issues, including collateral consequences of criminal proceedings, consumer and immigration matters. Prior to law school, Melanie worked on the development of an adolescent sexual health program in Cape Town, South Africa. Melanie received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in Development Studies from Brown University.
Title Staff Attorney
In Areas: Immigrants’ Rights
In Person Roles: Staff Attorney
In Person Departments: Immigrants’ Rights
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Mourinho issues Chelsea warning: ‘The real Champions League starts now’
Updated: 11th December 2014, 11:04 am
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho
Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho has warned his side “the real Champions League starts now”, after the Blues cruised into the last-16 with a 3-1 home win over Sporting Lisbon.
The Premier League outfit’s spot in the knock-out stages was already confirmed, as well as their top of the table finish, ahead of the game but they rounded off their Group G campaign with a flourish with Cesc Fabregas, Andre Schurrle and John Obi Mikel all on the scoresheet.
It was a stroll for the hosts at Stamford Bridge, a reflection of the group as a whole as they knocked in a tournament high of 17 goals, but Mourinho insists Chelsea are in for a sterner test after Christmas.
The Blues could play Juventus, Basle, Bayer Leverkusen, Paris St Germain or Shakhtar Donestsk in February’s first knockout round, and the manager is keen to avoid one of the “sharks in the ocean” ahead of Monday’s draw.
“I don’t think any of the big teams is out of the Champions League now. Maybe Liverpool,” Mourinho said.
“But all the teams that want to win the competition, they’re all in the competition.
“Everybody’s there, so the Champions League starts now.
“What can we do? I don’t know. Last year we were close and we didn’t have the team playing at such a high level as we do this season so we can dream we will do it.
“But let’s see if the sharks let us, because there are a few sharks in the ocean.”
Immediately after the match Mourinho insisted he has no preference for the last-16, but would not underestimate any opponent.
“The draw is the draw,” the boss said. “We have five possible opponents.
“I’m happy [Manchester] City and Arsenal went through. I’m not happy they finished second because they blocked two other possible opponents.
“Paris would be good, because it’s easy to travel for us, for the fans. It would be good, but we can’t decide the draw.
“The hardest? Everyone is hard. You think Basle is easy? We lost twice against them last year. They beat Liverpool and three years ago they beat Manchester United.
“Leverkusen, Shakhtar… I don’t think there are any easy teams at that moment.”
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W.A.S.P. A Wartime Experiment in WoManpower
A film by Jon T Anderson
In WW2 a select group of women proved that a woman’s place was in the air. The W.A.S.P. (Women AirForce Service Pilots) were a group of civilians who flew military airplanes so men could be freed for combat. But when they proved a woman could do a man’s job, feathers were ruffled. In the words of over 30 original members of the WASP they express the exhilaration of flight, the loss of a dream and the pride of recognition decades later.
2017 | 88 min | Color | USA | In English
Jon T Anderson, Director
Rachel Becker Wright, Producer
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It’s Over For Paid Apps, With A Few Exceptions
Is it over for paid mobile apps? That’s the general thinking these days, as the App Stores fill up with “good enough” alternatives to paid apps, while major publishers game the charts with free offerings that make millions which can then be used for their ongoing user acquisition efforts. That’s one of the reasons why the top charts of the App Store have gotten so difficult to break into for new publishers today, in fact.
The evidence for the trend toward free apps was rehashed again in a series of blog posts and other online discussions over this past weekend, written by those in the know – app developers themselves who are today still trying to make things work. But the data presented was largely anecdotal. App developer David Smith and his wife spoke spoke it. Elsewhere, Instapaper founder Marco Arment wrote about his struggles to determine the appropriate business model for his own new app, Overcast.
These were more personal tellings of the same story which has been reported through harder data for months on end. But that data contains some nuances which shouldn’t be ignored, especially for paid app developers trying to squeeze out profits from a less competitive niche. Yes, apps overall are trending toward free, and a majority of the App Store is composed of free apps – but there are a few areas where a paid app might still work…at least, for now.
THE SHIFT TO FREE
Going back a few months, analytics firm Flurry reported this July what the shift toward free applications looked like at the time. From 2010 to 2012, the proportion of free apps on the App Store ranged from 80% to 84%, but by early 2013, that had grown to 90%. And 6% of paid apps fell into the 99 cents price point.
At the time of the original report, Flurry noted that it seemed like people wanted free content more than they wanted to avoid ads, or have the highest quality experience possible.
According to Flurry’s Director of Research, Mary Ellen Gordon, PhD., the most compelling piece of evidence to support the shift to free was Flurry’s observations of developer A/B testing. They watched as developers experimented with different price points over the past months, finally resolving themselves to free apps, often supported by in-app purchases.
“It suggests that developers are not just moving to free apps because everyone else is or it seems like the thing to do. Many of them have actually tested different price points,” she tells TechCrunch. “Based on the trends, I would guess that by next year the (weighted) percentage of apps that are free will be somewhere between 91% and 93% — greater than it is now, but not 100% because there will probably always be certain specialized apps that are able to charge for downloads.”
WHERE PAID APPS STILL WORK
So where might paid apps still have a shot? In other words, are there categories where those specialized apps are selling? We spoke to app analytics firm Distimo, which examined grossing data on the App Store’s leaderboards to determine where paid apps are doing well.
In the following categories, the firm found that at least half, if not more of the top ten apps are currently paid: Productivity, Medical, Business, Healthcare & Fitness, Navigation, Catalogs, Lifestyle, Photo & Video, Travel, and Weather. In some cases, paid apps also use in-app purchases to drive up revenue even further.
What’s interesting about this list is that it’s very utilitarian, for the most part. These apps about are about getting something done – booking travel, dealing with your health, checking the weather, working, photo editing – things users do often enough to make it worth paying for the upgraded experience or additional features beyond what you could get in a free version.
Notably absent, of course, are several of the larger App Store categories, like Games and Social Networking. Minecraft was the only top grossing game that was also paid, and Grindr Xtra was the only top grossing social app that was paid. In addition, highly grossing applications in Books and Newsstand categories also tended to be free applications to start.
In general, however, Distimo’s data confirmed Flurry’s in that it found free applications led most categories, with in-app purchases as a main driver of monetization, and this was especially true in the Games category. In addition, 67 percent of the current top 10 apps across all categories combined use in-app purchasing today.
Paid apps aren’t going away entirely, says Distimo, but getting traction for a paid application will depend on a number of things, including target audience, category, competition, and more – just like in any business.
Still, Distimo’s analysis focused on the top of the charts, so it doesn’t necessarily paint the most accurate picture for what it’s like for a smaller or medium-sized developer competing today. Breaking into the top charts is often a function of marketing dollars, and money spent on user acquisition strategies, as well as a combination of more subjective things, like app quality, social impression, utility, and of course, luck.
At least breaking into the top charts on the App Store is easier for paid app makers, in terms of sheer number of downloads, that is. According to other data from this summer, getting into the top 10 requires around 4,000 downloads for paid apps, versus 70,000 for free apps. Getting into the top 50 only required 950 downloads for paid apps, versus 23,000 for free apps. Some of these figures were basically reconfirmed this month, when a well-known developer Readdle reported it took between 3,500 and 3,800 downloads to break into a top ten paid app list on the App Store.
The window for paid apps is definitely getting smaller, but there are still a few success stories out there to analyze, for developers determined to try the paid upfront business model. Yet even then, developers have to make sure they don’t alienate their current user base, if launching an upgraded experience as the new paid app, like Clear just did before having to change its course.
In the long run, unless a paid app doing something unique and notably better in a less competitive niche, consumers are looking for the free apps first.
Developers lament this trend, noting that most paid apps are worth less than a cup of coffee, and that’s a “hard pill to swallow,” as developer Florian Kugler recently put it in a widely circulated post on Hacker News.
From a user’s standpoint, though, it’s not about whether that app is worth the money, it’s about how that money adds up over time. There are nearly a million apps to choose from now – who can afford to buy a new one every day or every few days, the way you do a cup of coffee? Come to think of it, if you’re buying a fancy latte every day instead of snagging the free stuff from the break room on occasion, then you might have some other financial management issues, too.
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How much power does the Samsung Galaxy A70 have? at first sight…
13 October 2020 aioappz Gadgets, Reviews, Tech
With a focus on mid-range and entry-level smartphones, Samsung has replaced its existing Galaxy J series with the new incarnated Galaxy A series. The Galaxy A series handsets come with modern design and updated software. If seen, within the first four months of the year, the company has lifted the curtain from most handsets in the Galaxy A lineup. The Galaxy A80 is the most premium phone in this series and the most affordable Galaxy A10.
Samsung Galaxy A70 was introduced last month. Now it has been released for the international market. The phone is expected to be made available in the market from 26 April. It is believed that India is one of the early markets. At the recently held Samsung Galaxy A80 launch event, we got a chance to spend time with the Galaxy A70. How did we like this phone at first glance? Let’s know …
While the Samsung Galaxy A80, on the one hand, does not seem to be part of the company’s Galaxy A series. At the same time, the Galaxy A70 looks very similar to the Galaxy A series phones. Galaxy A50 as an example. The phone comes with Waterdrop Notch and 6.7-inch full-HD + (1080×2400 pixels) Super AMOLED display. The aspect ratio of the screen is 20: 9.
Galaxy A70, Samsung has used the “3D Glastic” design. It appears that the back of the phone is of glass. Whereas it is just made of plastic. Because of this the phone feels better from a distance. But the handset does not feel as premium as the Galaxy A80 with a glass backpanel. Despite this, the design is very sleek. And due to the plastic body, the phone weighs less.
Like other Samsung smartphones, the Galaxy A70’s screen is vibrant and punchy. It is equipped with Vivid Colors. The company has given optical in-display fingerprint sensor in this phone. Apart from this, the phone also supports Face Unlock.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 675 processor has been used in the Galaxy A70. This processor is part of Vivo V15 Pro and Redmi Note 7 Pro (review). Apart from this, the Galaxy A70 handset comes with 6 GB / 8 GB RAM and 128 GB inbuilt storage. After using the phone for some time, we will say that there is no complaint about the performance of the phone. There is microSD card support to increase storage.
The most important feature of Samsung Galaxy A70 is the triple rear camera setup. On the back side, it has a 32-megapixel primary sensor, its aperture is F / 1.7, its 8-megapixel ultra-wide sensor, its aperture is F / 2.2. The third sensor is of 5 megapixels, its aperture is F / 2.2. A 32-megapixel front camera has been given for selfie and video calling, which has an aperture F / 2.0. We did not get a chance to assess the performance of the phone’s camera during hands on. But during the review, we will evaluate every aspect of the camera of this Samsung phone.
Galaxy A70 has a battery of 4,500 MH which comes with 25 watts of super-fast charging. Battery capacity is an indication that it will easily support you throughout the day. But we will give a final verdict on this on the review.
Samsung Galaxy A70 has dual sim support. This smartphone equipped with 3.5mm audio jack has USB Type-C port. It will be sold in Coral, Blue, Black and White colors. However, it is not clear which color variants will be launched in India.
Talking about the software, the Galaxy A70 has a UI based on Android 9 Pie, like other handsets in the Galaxy A series. The software is very smooth.
We will soon come up with a detailed review of the Samsung Galaxy A70.
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TellyMix / News / I'm A Celebrity 2021 /
I'm A Celebrity 2018 results! Who left? Seventh celeb voted off
Tonight's I'm A Celebrity 2018 results - who left?
Posted December 7, 2018 22:21 by Josh Darvill
A seventh celebrity has been voted off in tonight's I'm A Celebrity 2018 results.
One more celeb left I'm A Celebrity tonight ahead of the final on Sunday night.
In the penultimate elimination of the series, five became four after another round of voting from viewers.
At the end of this evening's episode, Dec and Holly went down to camp to reveal the results as the next celeb was sent packing.
Coming bottom in the latest public vote, it was announced that it was James McVey who was voted off I'm A Celebrity 2018 tonight.
James told hosts Dec and Holly: "I'm so happy. It's the toughest thing I've ever done and I'm over the moon to have done it."
The Vamps' singer James is the seventh of this year's celebs to be voted off the show.
TV presenter Nick Knowles left last night after TV’s ‘The Governess’ Anne Hegerty departure on Wednesday.
Soap actress Rita Simons went on Tuesday following Corrie star Sair Khan's departure on Monday. Hollyoaks' Malique Thompson-Dwyer made his exit in Sunday night's show. TV legend Noel Edmonds was the first to leave last Friday night in a surprise result.
One last celebrity will head home in Saturday's show leaving a trio in the camp for Sunday, December 9, where the live final will see the top three go head to head.
The current four contestants left on the show include actor John Barrowman, and football manager Harry Redknapp.
Joining them are comedy actor Emily Atack and singer Fleur East.
Ahead of Sunday's final, Harry finds himself as the favourite to win in the final on Sunday night.
I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! airs nightly on ITV at 9PM. Get more from the jungle with I’m A Celebrity…Extra Camp with all the behind the scenes gossip on the ITV show. Hosted by Scarlett Moffatt, Joel Dommett and Joe Swash.
I'm A Celebrity 2018 final airs on Sunday night where the new King or Queen of the jungle is crowned.
More on: James McVey I'm A Celebrity 2021
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Patrick Melton, Director of Institutional Sales, Partner
Patrick Melton brings over 20 years of Taft Hartley and Public Funds experience to TerraCap Management, LLC. Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Melton served on the board of the Wayne County Employees Retirement System for 10 years, three of which he served as the Chairman. He represented 5,000 active employees, 7,000 retirees and led the selection of asset managers and investment products for the defined benefit retirement system. Mr. Melton began his career at the Wayne County Sherriff’s Department in Dearborn, Michigan where over his 20+ year tenure rose through the ranks and retired as Director of Law Enforcement and Business Outreach. Always active in the community, Mr. Melton was elected by his peers to the Michigan Association of Public Employee Retirement Systems (MAPERS) Board and served as Recording Secretary and Benefits Representative to the Local 502 Union, and as President to the AFSCME Local 3317 Union. Mr. Melton received his Associate’s degree in Police Administration from Henry Ford College and a Certificate in Public Safety from Northwestern University.
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Interpretation Catalysts in Cyberspace
Essay - by Rebecca Ingber Volume 95 - Issue 7
The cybersphere offers a rich space from which to explore the development of international law in a compressed time frame. Rapidly advancing capabilities and novel events distill and sharpen longstanding debates in international law: questions involving how the law adapts to new technologies; disagreement over the extent to which secret action can move custom;[1] disputes over the need for heightened transparency;[2] and power wrangling between states and soft law endeavors in driving the development of the law. In particular, the continuously evolving need to determine how existing laws apply to shifting capabilities provides fertile ground for innovative legal positioning and interpretation. That constant innovation in turn creates opportunities for discrete triggers for legal interpretation—or “interpretation catalysts” as I have termed them elsewhere[3]—to influence the path that legal evolution takes. Interpretation catalysts not only compel a decision-making body to take a position on its interpretation of a legal rule; they shape all aspects of the decision-making process, ultimately influencing the legal position that body takes, and often the resulting law itself.[4]
In this generative space of cyber law, the Tallinn Manual processes of the past ten years provide a valuable lens through which to witness the effects of interpretation catalysts on the evolution of international law. The Tallinn processes have been remarkable achievements, both in producing manuals that navigate the web of international laws regulating state action in cyberspace, and in driving states to consider and to continue to develop the rules governing this space. The two Tallinn Manuals[5] lay out for states not only an experts’ sense of where consensus on the law currently stands, but also—and just as importantly—the parameters of precisely where the disagreements among states may lie, where there might be room for movement, and what the outer parameters of that movement might be. And for academics, the Tallinn processes also provide a unique case study to consider the development of international law over a short period of time and the influence of soft law processes on that development.
In particular, the Tallinn Manual processes and resulting manuals provide insight into how these “interpretation catalysts,” or discrete triggers for legal interpretation, influence the path that legal evolution takes.[6] The operative interpretation catalyst triggering the need for a legal decision influences every aspect of decision making from the identity of the particular players involved in an interpretative endeavor to the task before them, the context in which they operate, and the investment in the project by the relevant players.[7] In the Tallinn processes, those players have included not only the experts around the drafting table but also states watching and engaging from the sidelines. All of these factors shape where the law—or the interpretation of the law—ultimately lands.[8]
In prior work, I have explored the phenomenon of “interpretation catalysts” through the lens of state decision making, specifically U.S. executive branch legal decision making on matters of national security.[9] In that context, the lack of external checks on the U.S. President often means that the executive branch legal position is virtually the only operative legal constraint.[10] The interpretation catalyst driving such executive branch decision making therefore has an enormous influence not just on one party’s opening legal position but on the governing law itself.[11]
In the case of the Tallinn processes, as I will elaborate in Part II, interpretation catalysts operate on two levels. The initial interpretation catalyst, the Estonia cyberattacks, impelled states to consider the applicable legal framework to apply to those attacks. Most significantly for our purposes, those events triggered the initiation and development of the first Tallinn Manual process itself, thus setting those wheels in motion.[12] Second, both Tallinn processes have themselves acted and continued to act as interpretation catalysts for states, compelling them—often intentionally—to develop their positions on the legal rules governing cyberspace. As I will touch on below as well, this case study illustrates not only how distinct events can trigger and shape the path of legal interpretation, but also that these triggers are not fixed; the power inherent in interpretation catalysts suggests that they may also be manipulated to push the law toward desired ends.
Now, I should acknowledge up front that the stated intent of the Manual’s drafters is not to drive the law but rather to lay out the current areas of legal consensus and of continued debate.[13] And yet the drafters also evince a clear intent to push states “proactively” toward development of the law themselves as well as in conjunction with the project.[14] A state legal adviser could not fail to notice that if states do not start working together to hammer out the rules governing this space, there is a risk these non-state-driven projects will continue to outpace them and ultimately may nudge the law in directions that states do not necessarily wish it to go.[15] It is for that very reason that the Dutch government sponsored “The Hague Process,” a major convening of states, in order to review and comment on the Tallinn Manual 2.0 while that process was underway.[16]
As states participating in The Hague Process no doubt concluded, it would be naïve to assume that the Tallinn processes would have no effect on development of the law. It is worth, then, pausing to consider the direction that such a project might push the law and indeed quite likely already has. I do not take a strong normative position in this piece on the specific direction cyber law has taken during the course of this project, other than to recognize the benefits of clarity in the law for state actors and others interested in the rule of law and in public law more generally. My intended contribution here is primarily to highlight the strong influence of the triggers for legal interpretation on decision-making processes, on the legal positions coming out of those processes, and thus, on the ultimate development of the law. The Tallinn processes—and specifically the second Tallinn process’s treatment of international human rights law as contrasted with its treatment of the law of armed conflict—form an invaluable case study to examine the role of interpretation catalysts in legal interpretation.
I. Human Rights in Cyber Law
Both of the Tallinn processes and their ultimate products—the original Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare,[17] released in 2013, and the Tallinn Manual 2.0, released this spring—are enormous undertakings and incredible achievements. The convener’s intent for each, we are told in the Tallinn 2.0 document itself, was to produce a handbook that would provide an “objective restatement of the lex lata” to actual practitioners, primarily “state legal advisers charged with providing international law advice to governmental decision makers, both civilian and military.”[18]
I have no doubt that these state actors will indeed find the Tallinn Manual 2.0 a useful resource. And it will be most useful to these state legal advisers and other practitioners not because, as some might assume, it provides flexible, expansive interpretations of the legal rules, which will lend them legal justification for whichever actions they wish to take in cyberspace; rather, it will be useful primarily to the extent it provides them with granular, specific answers regarding their legal obligations and constraints in areas where practitioners may seek clear guidance as to the appropriate legal space in which to operate.
Furthermore, Tallinn 2.0 does not shy away from areas that might be most controversial for states, such as the role of international human rights law in constraining states’ actions in cyberspace. In fact, it tackles this matter head-on and announces explicitly that “[i]nternational human rights law is applicable to cyber-related activities.”[19] Despite the difficulty in finding consensus among the experts—not to mention the state participants in the process—in determining precisely how specific rules of human rights law operate in cyberspace and the disparity among states in acceptance of particular treaty regimes, the Manual firmly states that these rules act as constraints on states.[20] The Manual suggests no intent to evade human rights rules; quite the contrary, it suggests (and this is a stated goal of its leadership) an intent to place a marker for future actors to understand that human rights law provides constraints and to prompt them to determine precisely how these rules operate in context.[21]
And yet, despite this clear, human rights-embracing statement and intent, I predict the Manual will face some real criticism from the human rights community, and for good reason.[22] The human rights chapter is everything the handbook-style rules regulating state action under the use of force and law of armed conflict (LOAC) sections are not; the legal rules described in the human rights chapter are painted with broad brushstrokes, at a high level of generality, and thus, as I explain below, suggest greater flexibility for state discretion and potentially even evasion. Ultimately, the international human rights law (IHRL) rules laid out by the Manual simply provide insufficient clarity to be terribly useful to state legal advisers.
In a vacuum, there may be little danger in a document that simply restates a human rights obligation at a high level of generality. Here, the danger lies largely in the disparity between the human rights chapter and other critical sections of the Manual, in particular the significant discussions of the law governing the use of force and LOAC. The Manual holds itself out as providing the very clarity and granularity that is missing from the discussion of human rights. And experience suggests that the absence of that specificity may read to states as space or flexibility in the law.
I should include here some caveats. My observations—including that this particular Manual is predominantly engaged with the law governing the use of force and LOAC on a level of detail that it does not employ with respect to IHRL—are not intended as criticism of the actors involved here or even of the main approach of the Manual. I see two potential reasons for the disparity the Manual takes to these two bodies of law: One is actual ambiguity or lack of detail in IHRL and its relationship to cyberspace vis-à-vis LOAC.[23] Another is that the actors involved or the process itself led toward a disparate treatment of these two sections. There may be a bit of each at work here. But these may not be entirely separable factors. Considering the years-long first Tallinn process’s focus on the rules of cyber warfare, we cannot entirely divorce any paucity in the law of human rights in cyberspace from the process’s outsized focus on drilling into the laws of war. It may well be that the provenance of the Tallinn process gave the laws of war a head start.[24] In any event, as will be clear in my discussion of interpretation catalysts below, I see this disparity as an organic and potentially inevitable development given the original triggers for the project and the path its development has taken. At the end of this section, I will make a modest suggestion for how to address the concerns I raise here. But for now, let us dive into those specific concerns.
First, in order to understand how both state actors and human rights advocates might approach this manual, it is worth understanding some context regarding the relationship of states—in particular the United States—to international human rights law in the realm of conflict and national security. For years, U.S. human rights advocates, in particular, have sought to gain traction with the government on a broad range of matters dealing with conflict and security.[25] And yet there remains a perception—particularly with respect to the U.S. government—that the law of international human rights has been sidelined in favor of a LOAC framework, LOAC expertise, and even LOAC-derived rules in contexts in which states have struggled to adapt international legal frameworks to new contexts. For example, through three very different presidential administrations, the U.S. government has applied the laws of war to its detention, targeting, and even surveillance operations in the conflict with al Qaeda and other groups.[26] Even when the government has found those rules difficult to map perfectly onto a conflict with a non-state actor, the government has retained a LOAC framework and reasoned by analogy to that body of law in determining the lawful space in which it could operate.[27]
Human rights experts, in the meantime, have repeatedly sought to push the government to accept and apply international human rights norms in this space and to bring U.S. policies in line with these rules.[28] Throughout the course of the Obama Administration, those efforts of human rights advocates, and the resulting tension with and within the Administration, in addition to pressure from allies, is part of what lay beneath Obama-era attempts to impose an additional layer of often human rights-derived policy prescriptions on top of the Administration’s interpretation of its legal constraints on U.S. actions in a range of areas, such as the targeted killing realm.[29] In many of these areas, however, the Obama Administration did not alter those underlying legal positions, which were largely a holdover from the prior Administration’s decision to treat the conflict in LOAC terms.[30] As a matter of law, the Obama Administration also generally retained a variety of legal tools—including the concept of “lex specialis” and the position that many human rights treaties were not intended to apply extraterritorially, both of which I will discuss in more detail below—that together entailed an evasion of a strict application of specific human rights rules onto many of its activities in this space.[31] The result in certain areas was a human rights policy overlay on top of a LOAC legal framework, an outcome Naz Modirzadeh has criticized as blurring the lines between genuine legal rules and the policies governing state action.[32] This recent history is an important backdrop against which to examine and understand the Tallinn Manual 2.0’s approach to human rights in cyberspace.
The most immediate, and perhaps striking, thing one notes in reviewing the IHRL chapter, particularly in light of the background that I just surveyed, is that its overarching tone is quite friendly to the application of IHRL in cyberspace. The very first rule states firmly and clearly that “[i]nternational human rights law is applicable to cyber-related activities.”[33] This written statement accords with the stated intent of the directors of the project, who have noted that their objective in this chapter was to alert state legal advisers of the need to grapple with their state’s human rights obligations in this realm.[34] To the extent the simple alerting of legal advisers to the need to address a body of law is the goal, the chapter itself accomplishes this, and perhaps need not have even moved on from that initial rule.
But the chapters of this Manual cannot each be read in a vacuum; they exist and will be read alongside the rest of the work as a whole. And when one examines the Manual in its entirety, there is a stark contrast between the approach taken in the human rights chapter and that of the other content of the handbook, in particular the nearly 250 pages of direct discussion of LOAC plus additional content threaded throughout the Manual. The immediate impression, to say the least, is that human rights law was not the focus of this project.
Now, the fact that a soft law project focuses on one area of law at the expense of or in lieu of another is itself neither an error nor a flaw. Nevertheless, to the extent the project is held out as an overarching manual covering the waterfront on all issues involving cyberspace that may arise for a state, it is important to highlight the contrasting approaches to these different bodies of law and flag some potential hazards, particularly for states looking to this Manual as the definitive work on the international law governing cyberspace. In particular, and considering the backdrop I laid out at the start of this section, there are some flags here that suggest state actors might rely upon the human rights chapter as a justification for discretion rather than as a source of clear constraint. I will discuss a few of these here.
A. Confinement of the Human Rights Chapter to a Narrowly Defined Geographic Space in the Manual
One concern with the approach the Manual takes to human rights is geographic—both in form and substance. Discussion of human rights in the Manual is primarily confined to the human rights chapter—which is itself a relatively short 30 pages in an over 600-page manual, of which about half is devoted to the laws of war.
There are a number of alternative approaches the Manual drafters might have taken to address the role of human rights law in this space. A more human rights-focused approach might have been to weave human rights law norms and rules throughout the discussion, in each of the sections, as different scenarios are contemplated, as is done throughout with LOAC.[35] It is not clear to what extent human rights experts who drafted or reviewed the human rights chapter were also involved in the work of the rest of the Manual or to what extent they were able to weigh in on each and every rule throughout. But a human rights-driven approach might have resulted in a discussion of how human rights law regulates, for example, how a state may engage civilians who participate in acts of hostilities during armed conflict; or the concept of collective punishment; the rule about cyber booby traps; contemplation of a state’s duty to protect cyber infrastructure; or cyber interference with telecommunications; each of which could readily benefit from a discussion of how human rights law also regulates state actions in such circumstances.[36]
Instead, the Manual relegates the discussion to a chapter within a larger section marked “specialised regimes,” alongside primarily geographically–focused legal regimes—like the seas, outer space, and diplomatic premises.[37] Though this was not necessarily intended, a reasonable inference to draw from that placement is that IHRL is a body of law parallel to those specialized regimes. One might be forgiven for assuming that it only exists in some kind of confined geographic space. Of course, the view that a state’s human rights law obligations are entirely constrained by geography and inoperative beyond that state’s legal borders does exist, and lies on one extreme side of the debate over the extraterritorial application of human rights law. Notably, it is a view that the Manual itself does not espouse.[38] Nevertheless, the confined geographic location in the Manual seems to reflect a residual sense of human rights law as belonging to a wholly separate and confined space, which belies the complexity of state positions on how they see and apply their obligations outside their borders. And it might help entrench such an impression for state legal advisers relying upon the Manual as a guide.
B. Lex Specialis
Another flag for state actors is the Manual’s discussion of lex specialis.[39] The Manual states that the “precise interplay between [LOAC] and [IHRL] remains unsettled,” but that under the concept of lex specialis, the laws of war will often comprise the more specific rules to apply to armed conflict.[40] There is much packed into that brief statement, and it must be read in light of the context I discussed above, in which—whether there is merit to this approach or not—the concept of lex specialis has long been applied by the states to assert formal compliance with human rights law, while evading their specific application to wartime activities. In this case, by not laying out precisely how this rule of lex specialis will apply in individual situations, the Manual risks suggesting to states that they have significant discretion to disregard human rights rules in armed conflict by pointing to “more specific” LOAC rules. As I will discuss in the section that follows, the Manual itself then lays out these LOAC rules in careful detail.
C. Lack of Granularity in the Human Rights Rules
A concern that goes hand in hand with the problem of lex specialis is the lack of granularity in the rules announced in the human rights chapter. As I mentioned, this chapter opens with an overarching statement that is quite favorable to the role of human rights in regulating state action. Yet each of the rules listed in the chapter is so high-level or vague as to be fairly anodyne in its practical suggestion of constraints on state action.
Consider how the Manual might have treated differently even just the substantive areas that it lists under Rule 35, “[i]ndividuals enjoy the same international human rights with respect to cyber-related activities that they otherwise enjoy.”[41] Each of these distinct substantive areas, from freedom of expression to privacy to due process, might itself be its own rule, or even its own chapter. This is not for lack of an interest in granularity by the Manual itself. Consider the Manual’s treatment of any LOAC rule as a comparison. Compare this broad rule, “[i]ndividuals enjoy the same international human rights with respect to cyber-related activities that they otherwise enjoy,”[42] with, for example, Rule 105 prohibiting indiscriminate means or methods:
It is prohibited to employ means or methods of cyber warfare that are indiscriminate by nature. Means or methods of cyber warfare are indiscriminate by nature when they cannot be: (a) directed at a specific military objective, or (b) limited in their effects as required by the law of armed conflict and consequently are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.[43]
Or Rule 132 on medical computers:
Computers, computer networks, and data that form an integral part of the operations or administration of medical units and transports must be respected and protected, and in particular may not be made the object of attack.[44]
Or Rule 122 on perfidy:
In the conduct of hostilities involving cyber operations, it is prohibited to kill or injure an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts that invite the confidence of an adversary to believe that he or she is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the law of armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, constitute perfidy.[45]
First, the broad human rights rule is phrased as a contingent standard: it is a rule that depends entirely on a state’s view of its human rights obligations in other spheres. The LOAC rules, by contrast, are stated as hard prohibitions.
Moreover, the human rights rule operates at a very high level of generality, whereas the LOAC rules are not only noncontingent, they are highly specific. Particularly when viewed alongside such granular LOAC rules, the high level of generality in the human rights chapter may suggest to states that they have significant discretion in how to engage their human rights obligations. For legal advisers who pick up the Manual to determine what they need to tell their clients in a particular scenario, these rules may not provide sufficient specificity to be of much use beyond a general notice that there is another potential body of law operating in this realm.
Moreover, the juxtaposition in the Manual of highly detailed LOAC rules against a vague, high-level discussion of human rights rules must be considered in light of the lex specialis issue I discussed above. Considering the Manual’s restatement of the lex specialis concept that the more specific rule governs, the Manual’s severe disparity in its treatment of human rights law in relation to LOAC rules could easily be read to suggest that the LOAC rules are in fact more “specific” in each case, and thus that they crowd out the IHRL rules, rather than an alternative possibility: that the Manual simply did not drill down into—or compel states to develop through the course of two Manual processes—each potential principle of human rights law as it applies in the cyber context.
Rather than provide a bona fide handbook on the application of human rights law to cyberspace, this chapter reads as more of a placeholder. The intimation is: international human rights law is real, it is important, and it regulates state action even in this realm . . . and good luck figuring out how to apply it.
D. Methodology
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even the methodology of the Manual itself appears constructed through the lens of use-of-force- and LOAC-based systems of legal rules, and is thus inadvertently weighted against deriving granular rules from human rights law. As the Manual explains, the process for adopting rules involved a requirement of consensus among the “International Group of Experts” that a rule reflected customary international law.[46] As such, the rules would be “binding on all states, subject to the possible existence of an exception for persistent objectors.”[47] At times, a treaty text might itself “represent[] a reliable and accurate restatement of customary international law,”[48] according to the experts, in which case the Manual’s rule will resemble the treaty text.
This approach makes sense in the LOAC context, where state governments largely drive legal interpretation, and where there is a good deal of customary international law, as well as near-universal adoption of many significant treaties such that many are now taken to represent customary international law.[49] That widespread adoption of many treaty regimes and the deep core of customary international law mean that a project to determine the LOAC rules applicable to cyberspace can address a universal set of rules applicable to virtually all states without undermining the entire project.
By contrast, the international human rights legal regime, as Dinah PoKempner addresses in her piece, is heavily treaty-based, and elaborated through a wide array of governmental, quasi-governmental, and even nongovernmental mechanisms.[50] A methodology that is geared toward addressing only those rules that are universally applicable as customary international law or through nearly universally ratified treaties will highly underrepresent the plethora of treaty rules with which any given state is obligated to comply. Likewise, a methodology based solely in rules universally accepted by states misses the disparate array of enforcement mechanisms states face, which play large and differing roles in expounding human rights norms. The Manual makes a quick reference to part of this dilemma in the introduction, stating that “[u]sers of this Manual are cautioned that states may be subject to additional rules of international law set forth in treaties to which they are Parties.”[51] But the universal and state-driven approach of the Manual provides yet another reason for the disparity in granular rules in the human rights section as compared to the rest of the Manual.
To conclude this section, it is very possible that a simple highlighting of human rights as another set of obligations states will need to address may very well be what the Manual drafters intended, or all they felt they could provide, when confronted with an area on which they could not reach consensus, or where there is still much work to do to develop how to apply the law in practice. And from the perspective of those who care about protecting human rights—as I gather the Manual experts do—a manual that exhorts its audience to consider human rights law is likely better than a document that ignores it altogether, or much worse, states that this body of law has no place in regulating cyber law. Nevertheless, the Manual’s approach to human rights is a far cry from the truly detail-oriented, practitioner-focused handbook that it serves as for other areas of law, particularly for the laws governing the use of force and armed conflict. And that disparity might leave operators with the impression that the rules of international human rights law governing cyberspace truly are undefined and, therefore, highly permissive.
All of this suggests that either human rights law simply was not the focus of this project, or that the experts viewed the state of human rights law as not as well-developed as the rules of LOAC as applied to the cyber realm (or both). If the former, this could be addressed by simply clarifying this early in the Manual itself—including front and center in the chapter addressing human rights. Otherwise, the Manual risks leaving readers with the impression that the latter—a lack of clarity in the law—is the cause for this disparity.
And if that is the case, if the experts running this process simply found that human rights law as applied to cyberspace was less well-developed than the laws of LOAC, then one has to wonder if that is not itself at least in part a function of the fact that the Tallinn project took one path from the start and not another. Considering that this decade-long process has been, after all, a project aimed at developing an understanding of where the law stands, and simultaneously at pushing states to develop that law themselves,[52] the experts leading the first Tallinn Manual project on the laws of cyberwarfare could rightfully consider themselves to have succeeded if that process in fact compelled states to develop clarity on how LOAC applies in the cyber realm.
As the next section will elaborate, I see the Manual’s approach to the human rights chapter as an organic and perhaps inevitable result of the initial trigger for the project itself, which defined the process taken to reach this ultimate result. If this result was driven by the process, the solution cannot easily lie in simply editing or lengthening the chapter itself, or in drilling down more concretely into the human rights rules within the context of the same process. Perhaps the only real option for human rights scholars and practitioners is to take up the task themselves, and draft a human rights-focused manual through a human rights-driven process. For the Tallinn Manual itself, however, it would be worth announcing a strong caveat to explain that the methodology, expertise, and direction of the process were not targeted toward the practice and mechanisms of the international human rights legal system, and should not be understood to represent the whole of lex lata in that space.
II. Interpretation Catalysts and Cyber Law
So how did it come to pass that a manual intended to provide clarity for states on rules regulating and constraining their action in cyberspace, may inadvertently provide states with a heightened sense of discretionary flexibility and potentially even—at the most cynical level—tools for evading the application of those rules in the area of international human rights law?
To understand this, we need to consider the context in which the original Tallinn process was born, sponsored, drafted, and ultimately published, and then served as the backdrop against which the Tallinn 2.0 drafters operated.
As I note above, I have written elsewhere that the specific triggers for states’ interpretations of the legal rules that bind them have a strong influence on their ultimate legal positions. These “[i]nterpretation catalysts can drive [states] to crystallize a legal view on a matter that is entirely novel; can bring a formerly identified but dormant issue into urgent focus; and can transfer an issue from one decision-making forum to another.”[53] Interpretation catalysts influence decision making not only by forcing states to articulate a legal position, but in shaping the process through which states reach that decision, “including by determining a particular question’s point of entry within the government, framing the task, shaping the interpretive process, establishing the relative influence of the relevant actors, and informing the contextual pressures and interests that may bear on the decision.”[54] For example, the state’s process for determining its legal position on the rules governing treatment of military detainees might differ dramatically depending on whether the state must first consider its public legal position within the context of drafting briefs in defensive litigation, or instead, in preparation for a hearing before a human rights treaty body.[55] The actors around the decision-making table; the process for reaching a decision; the identities of the actors holding the pen in drafting the specific language as well as the ultimate decider if consensus cannot be reached; the biases; contextual pressures; and time frame against which the decision makers act—all of these factors have a significant influence on the ultimate position the state takes.[56] And all of these factors are driven and defined by the initial “interpretation catalyst” for that decision.
In the case of the Tallinn processes, interpretation catalysts have operated on two levels: first, in prompting the creation of and direction for a group of experts seeking to define legal rules as guidance for state actors; and second, in prompting states themselves to participate in and receive guidance from that expert-led process. At the first level, the Estonia cyberattacks not only triggered the initial decision to channel legal decision making into a particular expert-led process; that initial catalyst also defined the creation of the entire process and the context in which the body of experts originated and defined their initial roles. In contrast to the influence of interpretation catalysts on the decision-making processes of a preexisting body, such as a state, the catalyst that triggered the Tallinn process could have an even more powerful effect on the resulting decision-making process and positions, because it could influence everything from the ground up, including the constitution and mandate of this new entity.
At the second level, the Tallinn processes themselves have functioned as interpretation catalysts, triggering states to engage in legal positioning in response. The Tallinn processes have—and have intentionally—impelled states to engage in a rule-definition process on the terms and timing of the Tallinn expert-led groups. And those terms and timing included tackling a first-stage, law-of-war-driven project, Tallinn 1.0, before taking on the broader process of Tallinn 2.0.
A. Interpretation Catalysts at Stage One
Given the significance I place on the initial catalyst for interpretation, a critical—perhaps the most critical—publicly-known piece of this history is the trigger for the Tallinn process itself: the cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, in which large portions of the country’s cyber infrastructure—specifically government websites, banks, and Estonian news outlets—were essentially shut down for about three weeks as a result of massive distributed denial of service attacks.[57] These events raised a broad range of legal questions, many domestic, such as how Estonia’s penal laws applied to actions in cyberspace, and its rules governing surveillance.
But on the international plane, the governments of Estonia and other states were concerned primarily about questions of state attribution, the range of lawful responses available, and what activities could be or even must be taken by Estonia’s international allies, including whether Estonia might invoke NATO’s Article 5 provisions regarding collective self-defense.[58] Estonia in particular had an incentive to conceive of those events in war terms, considering NATO’s mutual defense obligations. For that reason or others, there was a felt need among affected states to understand the legal parameters for how international law rules governing conflict apply in the cyber context, and a pressing need, driven partly by state interest, to understand when and the extent to which such events might rise to the level of a use of force or armed attack. Focusing on how the laws of war in particular might operate in cyberspace was, therefore, partly driven by the reality of external events and partly driven by an interest in viewing those events through that wartime lens. As additional cyberattacks followed worldwide, with relevant states finding themselves on both the defensive and offensive ends of such acts, the need to address a baseline set of rules became apparent.[59]
The first Tallinn Manual was born out of this rising awareness about the need to come to terms with how international law regulates state action in the cyber realm. That this first project, Tallinn 1.0, focused on cyber warfare, and not on cyberattacks that do not meet a use-of-force threshold or on cyber security more broadly, can be traced to this initial trigger for the project. It can be traced to the needs of the Estonian government in particular but also to NATO allies’ interests in contemplating their own engagement in those events and to the military nature of the organization that ultimately funded, hosted, and facilitated the process, NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCD COE). The first Tallinn process thus collected law-of-war expertise, under the auspices of the CCD COE, in order to seek to define the actual state of the laws of war in cyberspace as they existed at that time.[60]
Following the successful conclusion of the Tallinn 1.0 process, the project immediately turned toward tackling the broader array of law applicable to peacetime cyber activities. The leaders of the Tallinn process recognized that the specific expertise necessary for the first Tallinn project on cyber warfare would not be sufficient for the broader scope of Tallinn 2.0. Thus, they expanded the team and, while retaining the same leadership, brought in an almost entirely new group of legal experts with backgrounds involving not just the law of armed conflict, but also diplomatic law, the law of the sea, space law, and, as we have discussed, human rights. Moreover, the Manual notes that care was taken to send individual chapters out to “experts in the respective subjects” to “prepare[] initial drafts of the rules and commentary,” as well as to seek peer review by experts at later points on drafts of the Manual.[61]
Yet in broadening the group of experts and expertise—and this is of course only conjecture—the process may have encountered increased friction the second time around in coming to consensus on even what applicable body of law to apply to a particular context, let alone the precise contours of the legal rule. While surely a group of experts in any single field will have areas of disagreement, there are also likely to be significant areas of consensus among actors within a shared field, and more so than there might be if views were instead solicited from a broader array of experts from multiple fields. Thus one can readily imagine that a group of, say, LOAC experts may find more avenues for agreement with respect to how LOAC might apply to a novel context, than would a more diverse group of experts drawn from disparate fields of expertise in seeking consensus on the applicability of rules from any given field. If my instincts are correct, Tallinn 2.0 was as a whole bound to result in broader brushstroke, less granular rules than Tallinn 1.0, based on the simple reality of having to seek agreement and enshrine rules on the basis of the lowest common denominator, in a group of more diverse expertise.
If Tallinn 2.0 were the whole of the project, a more high-level set of principles than those arising from Tallinn 1.0 might have been the result of the process across the board. Yet the second Manual could not escape its ancestry. Tallinn 2.0 could not but inherit the granular in-the-weeds assessment of LOAC rules as they apply in cyberspace, crafted in the Tallinn 1.0 process. In updating the Manual with a broader group of experts, Tallinn 2.0 may have updated the LOAC rules, but they and states had been living with the first manual in existence at this point for four years, and the second group of experts would not have seen themselves as having a mandate or need to water them down for the purpose of leveling the playing field with other fields of law in Tallinn 2.0. The result—quite possibly the inevitable result—is a manual that includes highly granular rules of LOAC, drawn from the first process, alongside more high-level principles applicable in other areas of law.
Were the Manual to be read in a vacuum, without an understanding of its history, one would be forgiven for assuming that these other bodies of law are simply less fleshed out, less determinate, in their application to cyberspace. And many of them likely are. Nevertheless, had the process begun with a different focus, not LOAC but a different field of law, it is likely that a homogenous group of experts (and by homogenous I mean in expertise, not in beliefs), in any of the fields addressed in the Manual, would be better able to reach consensus on the application of their field of expertise to cyberspace than would a body drawn from diverse areas of expertise. And the process itself would have impelled states to consider and develop the application of law in that field, just as the Tallinn Manual 1.0 authors intended in the LOAC space.
Consider a thought experiment. Imagine that the trigger—the “interpretation catalyst”—prompting experts from Europe and the United States and elsewhere to come together to determine the applicable rules governing cyberspace were not the attacks on Estonia, but instead an event resulting in public and governmental outcry against state surveillance of personal communications. What if the public revelations of Angela Merkel’s tapped phone,[62] for example, had instead been the catalyst for this process? At the time of those revelations, states grappled with their response, weighing condemnation of the United States, while simultaneously facing new spotlight on their own surveillance measures.[63] Just as with the use-of-force and law-of-war questions that puzzled states in the aftermath of the Estonia attacks, surveillance too has raised thorny questions regarding the balancing of states’ positions on both the offensive and defensive end of such measures.
Had those events instead been the catalyst for this soft law process, we quite likely would have seen a very different group of experts gather to discuss international cyber law, focused primarily on a very different set of core issues.[64] This “Berlin Manual 1.0,” as we might have called it, might have focused solely on that initial range of surveillance issues and not attempted to go beyond, just as Tallinn 1.0 cabined itself to cyber warfare. An entirely different array of experts would have been convened to tackle such issues. They would have taken a methodological approach appropriate to their expertise and to the substantive matter before them. A group of human rights experts, for example, might have started from a perspective of applying treaty rules to cyberspace, rather than starting with customary international law, and might have given more weight to the views of courts, U.N. bodies, and a plethora of other nongovernmental and inter- or quasi-governmental actors.[65] There would have been no shortage of debate about how the rules applied, as surely there was among the law-of-war experts, but a multi-year process would have ultimately yielded some granular set of rules specific to that body of law, and simultaneously pushed the development of the law toward greater specificity as well.
If the “Berlin Manual” were a success, as was Tallinn 1.0, we can imagine there would have been clamor for a new manual to cover a broader range of issues. The second process, if it were run like Tallinn 2.0, would likely take on new members with expertise in particular fields, like LOAC or diplomatic facilities, to take a first cut at their respective chapters. It would likely retain the methodology of the first process, as well as the original set of rules. And then the group as a whole—including that original group of human rights experts—would vote on the new provisions, edit them, determine how best to fit them into the rest of the manual, and perhaps add caveats so that the new chapters in Berlin 2.0 would not undermine the first set of rules they had laid out in Berlin 1.0. I think there is no question that such a process—even assuming the second manual were intended to cover precisely the same body of material as Tallinn 2.0, and even were the second group of experts comprising our alternate-universe Berlin 2.0 to be precisely the same people as those who were actually in the room during Tallinn 2.0—would yield a very different result.
B. Interpretation Catalysts at Stage Two
The second level at which the interpretation catalyst operates here is the Tallinn process itself as an impetus for states to develop cyber law in one particular field. One consistent refrain—in the Tallinn Manual itself and from the experts speaking on its behalf—is that the Manual is intended to represent the lex lata as it stood when the project was drafted and that the drafters did not see it as part of their mandate to push the law in a particular direction.[66] Yet the directors of the project have repeatedly stated their intent to impel states forward in clarifying the law in this space.[67] Moreover, for the reasons I laid out at the start of this section, and in more detail in Interpretation Catalysts,[68] the simple existence of such a project, the path of its development, and the reality of its success in drawing the attention of states,[69] has already and will continue to act as a trigger influencing states in their own internal and group decision-making processes. That influence affects state decision making even at an incubatory stage, in the simple act of deciding whether to send an envoy to engage the Tallinn process, which specific official to send, from which agency component inside the government, and with what kind of expertise, and in the packaging of talking points the state puts together for that expert to deliver. The original Tallinn process’s focus on the laws of war is inextricably intertwined with a concomitant need for states to engage with that process through their own law-of-war experts and resources. Should states then drive the law forward in the cyberwarfare realm, the experts leading the Tallinn 1.0 process would rightfully mark that legal development a success, but we cannot ignore that this development must occur at the opportunity cost of a focus on other bodies of law that might subsequently be left less defined in the cyber realm.
C. Harnessing the Power of Interpretation Catalysts
This case study illustrates not only the power of interpretation catalysts in driving the direction of law as it develops, but also how such triggers can be harnessed, even manipulated, as a means of influencing the path that development takes. As I have noted, the initial Estonia cyber attacks, and the response to them, need not have been conceived primarily in war terms. In fact, the Tallinn Manual itself ultimately concluded both that “the law of armed conflict did not apply to those cyber operations because the situation did not rise to the level of an armed conflict,” and that “there is no definitive evidence that the hacktivists involved in the cyber operations against Estonia in 2007 operated pursuant to instructions from any State, nor did any State endorse and adopt the conduct.”[70] The resulting Tallinn project itself might thus have focused primarily on nonwartime legal questions, such as the prohibition on intervention, and indeed, on human rights law. Yet, as I noted above, there were incentives for state actors seeking to create this process to conceive of those events in war terms,[71] and that conception, in turn, may have enabled greater interest from state allies and prompted NATO engagement. In any event, whatever the impetus for that conception, these attacks, the atmospherics and language of “warfare” that surrounded them, the concomitant establishment of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, and its immediate commissioning of the Tallinn study on cyber warfare, all determined the subsequent path for the development of the law in this space.
Doctrinal debates about the appropriate legal rules to apply to novel contexts at times mask institutional undercurrents that led to the adoption or interpretation of any particular rule. The initial triggers for the development of a legal position, and the institutional reality of the decision-making process that plays out, may have an enormous influence on the path that process takes and the resulting decision. Yet debates about doctrine do not typically address these triggers or the institutional process taken as a result.[72]
In concluding, it is worth considering some of the benefits inherent in a soft law process initially driven by law-of-war expertise and discipline. There is inherent in law-of-war-driven processes a focus on practical, operational rules and on how to employ them. There is a focus on states and what states will be willing to accept and implement, as well as useful—
and to some degree unique—levels of engagement between scholars and practitioners working in this realm. The combination of practicality and engagement gives these experts added legitimacy in seeking to constrain state actors. And finally, at the broadest level, law-of-war experts are a group of individuals who have cut their teeth applying laws to space that others tend to see as lawless. That willingness to regulate what others may view as ungovernable is particularly important for an endeavor seeking to determine the rules applicable in cyberspace.
Considerations of institutions, actors, and process are critical when grappling with the development of law, and they are necessary to our consideration of the differing substantive bodies of law addressed in the Tallinn Manual 2.0. As the Manual’s directors have acknowledged, the discussion of human rights was a significant challenge for this project.[73] It has met with some criticism, and it may very well meet with more, particularly the more states rely upon it.[74] Debate will likely center on the specifics of the doctrinal rules, how the Manual grapples with those rules, and the difficulties in deriving clear legal guidance for states in this realm. But when considering those critiques, and the extent to which the Manual does or does not sufficiently drill down into any particular body of law, it is essential to contemplate the origins and path of the development of this project. The status of cyberlaw as it exists today is, and will continue to be, inextricably bound up in the initial approach taken to the events that triggered its development.
.Alexandra H. Perina, Black Holes and Open Secrets: The Impact of Covert Action on International Law, 53 Colum. J. Transnat’l L. 507, 511 (2015). ↑
.Harold H. Koh, The Legal Adviser’s Duty to Explain, 41 Yale J. Int’l L. 189, 189–90 (2016). ↑
.See Rebecca Ingber, Interpretation Catalysts and Executive Branch Legal Decisionmaking, 38 Yale J. Int’l L. 359, 360 (2013) (identifying the concept of “interpretation catalysts,” and demonstrating their role in triggering distinct processes within the executive branch for formulating legal positions). ↑
.Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Michael Schmitt ed., 2013) [hereinafter Tallinn Manual]; Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Michael Schmitt & Liis Vihul eds., 2017) [hereinafter Tallinn Manual 2.0]. ↑
.Ingber, supra note 3, at 377 (identifying and exploring the role of “interpretation catalysts” in driving decision making in the context of U.S. executive branch legal interpretation). ↑
.See infra notes 45–48 and accompanying text. ↑
.Michael Schmitt, Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law of Cyber Operations: What It Is and Isn’t, Just Security (Feb. 9, 2017), https://www.justsecurity.org/37559/tallinn-manual-2-0-international-law-cyber-operations [https://perma.cc/Z7ZA-QXKN]. ↑
.See id. (explaining the virtues of clarity in the law regulating state action, in, inter alia, “lend[ing] stability to international relations” and “help[ing] deter other states from exploiting . . . grey zones in the law of cyberspace”); Tallinn Manual Experts Meet for Intense Drafting Session, NATO Coop. Cyber Def. Ctr. Excellence, 2:55–3:20 (Oct. 9, 2015), https://ccdcoe.org/tallinn-manual-20-be-completed-2016.html [https://perma.cc/EY2S-MKTD] (interviewing Tim McCormack, Professor of Law at the University of Melbourne, who explains that states are often “reactive to new . . . developments” and that Tallinn 2.0 is an effort “to gather a group of experts together to proactively clarify the state of the law in an area that states are still asking questions about what law is going to apply”). ↑
.See Schmitt, supra note 13 (noting that participants in the Tallinn process intended “that it would enhance the process of norm identification and elucidation by states”); Michael J. Adams, A Warning About Tallinn 2.0 . . . Whatever It Says, Lawfare (Jan. 4, 2017), https://www.lawfareblog.com/warning-about-tallinn-20-. . .-whatever-it-says [https://perma.cc/
92R7-RAM9] (expressing concern that users of the Tallinn manuals may inappropriately conclude that the law in certain areas is more settled than states have in fact themselves determined). ↑
.See Schmitt, supra note 13 (describing “The Hague Process”). ↑
.See generally Tallinn Manual, supra note 5. ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 2–3; see also Rachel Ansley, Tallinn Manual 2.0: Defending Cyberspace, Atlantic Council (Feb. 15, 2017), http://www.atlanticcouncil
.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/tallinn-manual-2-0-defending-cyberspace [https://perma.cc/UKC7-3YXG] (quoting Michael Schmitt: “We were not writing for academics. We were writing for countries.”). ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 182 (Rule 34). This statement is consistent with United Nations General Assembly’s (UNGA) approach of the last several years. See, e.g., G.A. Res. 68/167, ¶ 3 (Dec. 18, 2013) (“[T]he same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy.”). ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 182 (Rule 34). ↑
.See Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 182 (imposing obligation on states to conform to international human rights law in cyberspace despite recognizing that “state understandings concerning the precise scope of certain human rights entitlements in the cyber context . . . vary”); Michael Schmitt, Dir., Tallinn Manual 2.0 Project, Address at the Texas Law Review Symposium: Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Feb. 7, 2017). In interviews and writings, Tallinn’s director, Michael Schmitt, has explained that the goal of the Manual more broadly is to help “states focus their efforts where clarification of the law is needed and in their national interest.” E.g., Schmitt, supra note 13. ↑
.The Manual is only weeks old, but at least one commentator has raised concerns with its treatment of human rights. See Dinah PoKempner, Gen. Counsel, Human Rights Watch, Address at the Texas Law Review Symposium: Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Feb. 7, 2017); Dinah PoKempner, Squinting Through the Pinhole: A Dim View of Human Rights from Tallinn 2.0, 95 Texas L. Rev. 1599, 1602 (2017); see also Adams, supra note 15. ↑
.See, e.g., Marko Milanovic, Foreign Surveillance and Human Rights, Part 5: The Substance of an Extraterritorial Right to Privacy, EJIL: Talk! (Nov. 29, 2013), https://www.ejiltalk
.org/foreign-surveillance-and-human-rights-part-5-the-substance-of-an-extraterritorial-right-to-privacy/ [https://perma.cc/6WXQ-XTP2] (discussing the need to “flesh[] out” detailed rules governing an “extraterritorial right to privacy”). ↑
.See id. (noting that detailing such rules “will happen in an iterative process”). ↑
.As part of this effort, U.S. human rights organizations have over the course of the last decade and a half created divisions within their institutions specifically devoted to matters of war and national security. See, e.g., About the ACLU’s National Security Project, Am. Civ. Liberties Union, https://www.aclu.org/other/about-aclus-national-security-project [https://perma.cc/27CF-4E4U] (detailing the ACLU’s “National Security Project,” which was “[o]riginally created as an informal working group after the September 2001 attacks”); see also Counterterrorism, Hum. Rts. First, http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/topics/counterterrorism [https://perma.cc/NA27-KAA4] (highlighting Human Rights First’s work at the nexus of national security and human rights); National Security, Hum. Rts. Watch, https://www.hrw.org/united-states/national-security [https://perma.cc/F9C4-3Z8G]; National Security and Human Rights Campaign, Open Soc’y Found. (Sept. 18, 2013), https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/national-security-and-human-rights-campaign [https://perma.cc/7VGC-7PYJ]; Security and Human Rights, Amnesty Int’l, http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/security-and-human-rights [https://perma.cc/
X6N5-G47P] (detailing the work of Amnesty International’s U.S.-based affiliate with respect to national security and human rights); U.S. National Security and Human Rights, Open Soc’y Pol’y Ctr. (Feb. 24, 2017), https://opensocietypolicycenter.org/issues/u-s-national-security-human-rights/ [https://perma.cc/ZN6U-XF5P] ↑
.Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 516 (2004); Respondents’ Memorandum Regarding the Government’s Detention Authority Relative to the Detainees Held at Guantanamo Bay at 1, In re Guantanamo Bay Detainee Litigation, 577 F. Supp. 2d 312 (D.D.C. 2008) (No. 08-442) [hereinafter March 13 Brief]; Rebecca Ingber, Co-Belligerency, 42 Yale J. Int’l L. 67, 74–80 (2017). While we do not yet have a definitive statement from the Trump Administration on its legal position on the framework for these conflicts with al Qaeda and other groups, all evidence suggests at a minimum that the Administration intends to continue a wartime framework. See, e.g., Charlie Savage, ISIS Detainees May Be Held at Guantánamo, Document Shows, N.Y. Times (Feb. 8, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/us/politics/guantanamo-islamic-state-detainees.html?_r=0 [https://perma.cc/FBU9-55VW] (discussing a leaked draft executive order announcing the Trump Administration’s potential policy of military detention for members of al Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups); Draft Executive Order on Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorists and Other Designated Enemy Elements (2017), https://assets.documentcloud.org/
documents/3455640/Revised-draft-Trump-EO-on-detainees-and-Gitmo.pdf [https://perma.cc/
K23D-DXFA] (characterizing, within a leaked draft of a Trump Administration Executive Order obtained by the New York Times, conflicts with Al Qaeda and other groups as a “continuing state of armed conflict with terrorist groups”). ↑
.See March 13 Brief, supra note 26, at 1 (“Principles derived from law-of-war rules governing international armed conflicts, therefore, must inform the interpretation of the detention authority Congress has authorized for the current armed conflict.”). ↑
.See, e.g., Alfred de Zayas, Human Rights and Indefinite Detention, 87 Int’l Rev. Red Cross 15, 37 (2005) (rejecting “indefinite detention” as unlawful under international human rights law). ↑
.Press Release, Office of the Press Sec’y, White House, Fact Sheet: U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities (May 23, 2013), https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/23/fact-sheet-us-policy-standards-and-procedures-use-force-counterterrorism [https://perma.cc/Z2BM-VA39] (explaining the policy overlay of procedural safeguards, as well as near-certainty requirements and a preference for capture over kill, for targeting operations). ↑
.See Ashley S. Deeks, The Obama Administration, International Law, and Executive Minimalism, 110 Am. J. Int’l L. 646, 646–47 (2016) (arguing that the expansion of power under the Bush Administration enabled the Obama Administration to take a more minimalist approach without sacrificing any of the legal powers gained in the Bush years); Rebecca Ingber, The Obama War Powers Legacy and the Internal Forces that Entrench Executive Power, 110 Am. J. Int’l L. 680, 681–82 (2016) (arguing that internal features of the executive branch lead to the retention of legal authorities by the President from one administration to the next). ↑
.See, e.g., White House, Report on the Legal and Policy Framework Guiding the United States’ Use of Military Force and Related National Security Operations 34 (2016), https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/framework.Report_Final.pdf [https://perma.cc/R664-YKZE] (“In accordance with the doctrine of lex specialis, where these bodies of law conflict, the law of armed conflict would take precedence as the controlling body of law with regard to the conduct of hostilities and the protection of war victims. However, . . . armed conflict does not automatically suspend [o]r . . . displace the application of all international human rights obligations.”); Marko Milanovic, Harold Koh’s Legal Opinions on the US Position on the Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Treaties, EJIL: Talk! (Mar. 7, 2014), http://www.ejiltalk.org/harold-kohs-legal-opinions-on-the-us-position-on-the-extraterritorial-application-of-human-rights-treaties/ [https://perma.cc/YG99-NTUK] (discussing reports of leaked opinions by then-State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh advising the U.S. Government to change its position on the extraterritorial application of its ICCPR and CAT obligations); Beth Van Schaack, United States Report to the UN Human Rights Committee: Lex Specialis and Extraterritoriality, Just Security (Oct. 16, 2013), https://www.justsecurity.org/1761/united-states-lex-specialis-extraterritoriality/ [https://perma.cc/R84E-CM44] (laying out the recent history of the U.S. position on lex specialis and extraterritoriality of its ICCPR obligations before the Human Rights Committee). ↑
.Naz K. Modirzadeh, Folk International Law: 9/11 Lawyering and the Transformation of the Law of Armed Conflict to Human Rights Policy and Human Rights Law to War Governance, 5 Harv. Nat’l Security J. 225, 228–30 (2014). ↑
.Schmitt, supra note 13; see also Michael N. Schmitt & Liis Vihul, Respect for Sovereignty in Cyberspace, 95 Texas L. Rev. 1639, 1640–41 (2017). ↑
.See, e.g., Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 53 (discussing the interplay between jurisdiction, LOAC, and Tallinn 2.0 Rule 8); id. at 74 (discussing how LOAC affects foreign state immunities with respect to Tallinn 2.0 Rules 44, 82, and 152); id. at 127 (discussing the interaction between countermeasures, LOAC, and Tallinn 2.0 Rules 23, 72, 92, and 113). ↑
.Id. at 217 (discussing the duty to protect cyber infrastructure under Rule 40); id. at 288 (discussing the duty to safeguard international telecommunication infrastructure under Rule 61); id. at 294 (discussing harmful interference with non-military cyber services under Rule 63); id. at 428 (discussing civilian direct participants in hostilities under Rule 97); id. at 457 (discussing cyber booby traps under Rule 106); id. at 539 (discussing collective punishment under Rule 106). This is not to say the Tallinn Manual 2.0 is entirely devoid of human rights references outside of that chapter; the Manual does include throughout some limited cross-referencing to the human rights chapter, though nowhere near as extensively or fluidly as it interweaves the discussion of LOAC. ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at vi–vii. ↑
.Id. The Manual cites for this concept the International Court of Justice Nuclear Weapons advisory opinion, which states that while human rights obligations do not generally “cease in times of war,” the interpretation of those obligations is “determined by the applicable lex specialis, namely, the law applicable in armed conflict which is designed to regulate the conduct of hostilities.” Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, 1996 I.C.J. 226 (July 8). ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 187. ↑
.Id. Note that this statement itself was not particularly groundbreaking, considering states have affirmed such a statement through United Nations General Assembly resolutions since 2013. See, e.g., G.A. Res. 68/167, supra note 19. ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 4. ↑
.See, e.g., Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3316, 75 U.N.T.S. 135; Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3516, 75 U.N.T.S. 287; Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Victims of International Armed Conflicts, June 8, 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 4; Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts, June 8, 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 609 (the United States is a signatory of both Additional Protocols but is currently one of very few states which have not yet ratified either); see also Customary Law, Int’l Committee Red Cross, https://www.icrc.org/en/war-and-law/treaties-customary-law/customary-law [https://perma.cc/
26PV-2BTR]. For the long list of treaties applicable to wartime, see Treaties, States Parties and Commentaries, Int’l Committee Red Cross, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl [https://perma.cc/2U63-4J8H]. ↑
.PoKempner, supra note 22, at 1602 (stating that “nongovernmental experts, practitioners, and scholars have for decades provided much of the ‘gas’ in the ‘engine’ of human rights law mechanisms, be they treaty bodies, courts, review conferences, U.N. or regional procedures, or legislatures, and not only through the supply of relevant facts, but through legal analysis and interpretation”). ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 4. Interestingly, the Manual does at times point to specific treaty rules of LOAC as applicable to only those states that are party to the treaty. See, e.g., id. at 481 (stating under Rule 118, Choice of Targets, “[f]or States Parties to Additional Protocol I, when a choice is possible between several military objectives for obtaining a similar military advantage, the objective to be selected for cyberattack shall be that the attack on which may be expected to cause the least danger to civilian lives and to civilian objects”). ↑
.See Schmitt, supra note 13 (“Those who participated in the seven-year Tallinn Manuals’ journey hoped only that it would enhance the process of norm identification and elucidation by states.”). ↑
.Ingber, supra note 3, at 360. ↑
.Joshua Davis, Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe, Wired (Aug. 21, 2007), https://www.wired.com/2007/08/ff-estonia [https://perma.cc/9UL2-98JZ]. ↑
.See Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at xxiii (stating, in an introductory note by the current President of Estonia, that the 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia “sped up the establishment of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence” and that among the center’s first activities was to commission the study that became Tallinn 1.0); Tallinn Manual 1.0, supra note 4, at 1 (stating, in a note by Michael Schmitt, that the original Tallinn Manual project gathered international law practitioners and scholars in order to “examine how extant legal norms applied to this ‘new’ form of warfare”). ↑
.See Tallinn Manual 1.0, supra note 5, at 1–2 (discussing the increase in cyber warfare after the 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, specifically citing the 2008 cyberattacks against Georgia and the 2010 “Stuxnet” cyberattack against Iran). ↑
.Id. at 1; Manual 2.0 to Be Completed in 2016, NATO Coop. Cyber Def. Ctr. Excellence (Oct. 9, 2015), https://ccdcoe.org/tallinn-manual-20-be-completed-2016.html [https://perma.cc/
D4TN-DZXU]. ↑
.Mark Mazzetti & David E. Sanger, Tap on Merkel Provides Peek at Vast Spy Net, N.Y. Times (Oct. 30, 2013), https://nyti.ms/2lqLFPJ [https://perma.cc/N2N8-UEHZ]. ↑
.See, e.g., Michael Crowley, Spies Like Us: Friends Always Spy on Friends, Time (Oct. 31, 2013), http://swampland.time.com/2013/10/31/friends-always-spy-on-friends/ [https://perma.cc/
YV34-V4JK] (discussing the prevalence of international spying on allies); Ashley Deeks, The Increasing State Practice and Opinio Juris on Spying, Lawfare (May 6, 2015), https://www.lawfareblog.com/increasing-state-practice-and-opinio-juris-spying [https://perma.cc/
BKV2-FGM8] (recalling Germany’s reaction to the Snowden revelations in light of the discovery of German surveillance); Melissa Eddy, Germany Drops Inquiry Into Claims U.S. Tapped Angela Merkel’s Phone, N.Y. Times (June 12, 2015), https://nyti.ms/2lebJLy [https://perma.cc/HU3X-8H2X] (describing the German investigation into the allegations and the ultimate withdrawal of the investigation). ↑
.In the course of the last four years, numerous other processes have in fact been convened worldwide to examine and attempt to define the rules governing cyber activities in a broad range of areas, and these are in various stages of implementation. These include the following: African Union Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection, June 27, 2014, AU Doc. EX.CL/846(XXV), https://ccdcoe.org/sites/default/files/documents/AU-270614-CSConvention
.pdf [https://perma.cc/2DLR-8GQC]; U.N. General Assembly, Letter dated Jan. 9, 2015 from the Permanent Representatives of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General, U.N. Doc. A/69/723 (Jan. 13, 2015) (introducing the Draft International Code of Conduct for Information Security, authored under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization); Organization of American States Res. AG/RES. 2004 (XXXIV-O/04), Appendix A (June 8, 2004), http://www.oas
.org/xxxivga/english/docs/approved_documents/adoption_strategy_combat_threats_cybersecurity.htm [https://perma.cc/6CSR-3UCQ]; High Representative of the Eur. Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy, Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, JOIN (July 2, 2013), http://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/policies/eu-cyber-security/cybsec_comm_en.pdf [https://perma
.cc/9ACF-Q9UT]. ↑
.See PoKempner, supra note 22, at 1604 (discussing the myriad state, nonstate, and intergovernmental bodies and mechanisms involved in the interpretation and protection of human rights obligations). ↑
.See, e.g., Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 3 (“Tallinn Manual 2.0 is intended as an objective restatement of the lex lata. Therefore, the Experts involved in both projects assiduously avoided including statements reflecting lex ferenda.”); see also Schmitt, supra note 3; Schmitt & Vihul, supra note 34. ↑
.See, e.g., Schmitt, supra note 13 (describing one of Tallinn 2.0’s goals as “allow[ing] states to focus their efforts where clarification of the law is needed”). ↑
.See Schmitt, supra note 13 (discussing “The Hague Process”); Over 50 States Consult Tallinn Manual 2.0, NATO Coop. Cyber Def. Ctr. of Excellence (Feb. 2, 2017), https://ccdcoe.org/over-50-states-consult-tallinn-manual-20.html [https://perma.cc/3QKS-W3Y7]. ↑
.Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 376, 382. ↑
.See id. at xxiii (stating, in an introductory note by the current President of Estonia, that the 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia marked “the first time one could apply the Clausewitzean dictum: War is the continuation of policy by other means”). ↑
.For a compelling account of how the evolution of the EU’s human rights engagement turned on early, “pragmatic” decisions of the founding Member States, see Grainne De Burca, The Road Not Taken: The EU as a Global Human Rights Actor, 105 Am. J. Int’l L. 649 (2011). ↑
.See Tallinn Manual 2.0, supra note 5, at 4 (acknowledging the Manual’s limitation in the field of human rights law); Schmitt, supra note 13; Tallinn Manual 2.0 to Be Completed in 2016, NATO Coop. Cyber Def. Ctr. Excellence (Oct. 9, 2015), https://ccdcoe.org/tallinn-manual-20-be-completed-2016.html [https://perma.cc/VER5-QW7T] (quoting managing editor Liis Vihul as stating, “During this session, the most difficult material proved to be international human rights law governing activities in cyberspace.”). ↑
.See, e.g., supra Part I; PoKempner, supra note 22, at 1599. ↑
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Medicine in Film: An Insight Into the Brewing Emulsion
Cinema mirrors a country’s hopes, ideals, aspirations and expectations from itself. It can be safely said that cinema is among the more important concepts which often alters the way the world perceives a nation.
A clear case highlighting the same is America’s sophistication and world-dominance, although the seed for which may have been planted by a few real technological breakthroughs but by and large, it is an idea pollinated and drilled into the minds of gullible people the world over by the impossibly unrealistic movies that Hollywood is notorious for churning out. A nation’s cinema is thus often considered as a very reliable indicator of the status of the society in general, whether or not reality agrees with it.
The Basis For The Union : How The Two Met
The powers of cinema were not lost even on our ancestors. From the early days of romance and drama to the depiction of more poignant issues in later times pertaining to the daily afflictions of people such as terrorism and other illicit criminal activities like smuggling and drug abuse; cinema has indeed come a long way in its ability to transcend all barriers, enthralling audiences across ages and holding people in awe.
Apart from the IT boom which the past decades have witnessed, medicine is probably the only other field where major strides have been taken at a breakneck pace, sending shock waves and ripples through the field of science. Since ancient times, for ordinary men who would be expected to suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is the fear of long words(something which could be considered as routine with respect to complicated medical terminology), medicine was never a science. It was just a mystical miracle with its results often being considered magical, as something which was easily appreciated but not fully understood. The result of this continued adoration was that respect for its practitioners was often very high in a layman’s heart. This ensured that they often placed doctors on an equal pedestal as the Almighty himself.
So, it was eventually just a matter of time before two widely different ideas which struck awe among the common folk came together and we saw the advent of movies based on medicine. These ranged right from initial bit-roles being played by a doctor in the hero’s shadow to later full-blown depictions focusing solely on the practice of the art itself and many other aspects related to clinical expertise. Indeed, it’s been a long journey with a rich history which has transcended language barriers the world over.
The Current Scenario
In spite of its flaws, Patch Adams brought the focus back on humanity in medicine, something which is diminishing at alarming rates
Movies and television series covering almost all aspects of medical practice have been produced. Usually, with a student’s entry into medical prep school, there also occurs an informal introduction for him into the world of TV shows like House MD and ER. Then there are films which deal with the ethical dilemmas of medical practice ( John Q, Million Dollar Baby, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) as also films such as Patch Adams and The King’s Speech which show how in spite of all the ground-breaking marvelous technological strides which we have taken and are proud of, the human touch is ultimately of paramount importance in clinical practice and that a unique approach may often yield unexpected rewards even in cases where all hope is otherwise lost. Films such as Concussion, Something The Lord Made, Awakenings and Extraordinary Measures depict the struggles and challenges often faced in life by those clinicians, who as a result of their research try to bring about a new perspective to medical practice either in the form of new treatment modalities or say, non-pharmacological options in therapy.
The Underdog Tales : Oscar Baits
I Am Sam took a critical look at the rights of patients with mental disorders
There are countless films depicting the inspirational stories of people affected by severe disorders and how they battled on and won in spite of the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against them. It is not surprising to note that such films, if done right, basically function as award-magnets and pocket numerous Oscars every year. Stellar examples of such work include My Left Foot (based on the eponymous book by Christy Brown), Rain Man (inspired from the real life story of Kim Peek), A Beautiful Mind (portraying the heartwarming story of the recently deceased Nobel Laureate John Nash) and I Am Sam (starring the evergreen Sean Penn in a mesmerizing role) to name a few.
An Interesting Take on Symptoms
Memento received much-deserved praise even from clinicians for its brilliant portrayal of anterograde amnesia
Many released movies have had their entire premises based on the direct consequences of the actions of their diseased protagonists. Scratching the surface of this genre, one comes across such diverse films as Fight Club(insomnia), Finding Dory and Memento(anterograde amnesia), the Jason Bourne series(retrograde amnesia), Shutter Island (schizophrenia) and Pawn Sacrifice (paranoid delusional disorder) to name a few.
A Roller-coaster Ride of Human Emotions
Medicine and medical diagnosis invariably play a very key role in our lives. Hopes have been shattered, deepest secrets revealed and the real meaning of life often understood at a doctor’s clinic. The Fault In Our Stars,My Sister’s Keeper(dealing with issues of organ donation) Sweet November(about the effect fatal diagnoses have on our loved ones) among many other films deal with the way medicine toys with human emotions.
Lesser Known Flicks
Apart from these, there are also innumerable films which have medicine or med school as a backdrop. It may surprise the reader to know about films like Pathology, Gross Anatomy, Anatomy (This flick was supposedly considered good enough to even warrant a sequel: Anatomy 2) and Flatliners (starring such stalwarts as Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon and Kiefer Sutherland).
Besides the great performances, Paa was lauded for its effort at bringing progeria into the limelight
For those few who enjoy watching the more emotionally charged Indian films, even their industry is not far behind. They have produced films like Munnabhai MBBS (medical ethics), My Brother Nikhil (dealing with the social stigma of HIV), Paa (progeria), Ankur Arora Murder Case (medical jurisprudence), Barfi (differently-abled and autism), Black, Kartik calling Kartik (schizophrenia), Anand (lymphoma of the intestine: now, more correctly diagnosed as Non-Hodgkin’s MALT B-cell lymphoma), the biographical Dr. Prakash Baba Amte, Janma to name a few.
Even for the general masses, these make for a riveting watch thanks to the novelty of their concepts. In the coming days, we are sure to see many more such films grace the silver screen.
The power of the visual medium to leave a lasting impression should never be underestimated. It has been often observed that most people blindly believe what they see on-screen as ‘the gospel truth’ without even bothering to verify the facts. While many people are now aware about resuscitation skills in case of emergencies by virtue of both, efforts to spread awareness as well as an increased curiosity in utilizing medical knowledge as a tool to save life, an accurate technique is of great importance in these cases where people’s lives are at stake. While films like The Wolf Of Wall Street and Mrs. Doubtfire may have given a comedic twist to the Heimlich maneuver and others like Mission Impossible 3 and Casino Royale may have chosen to incorporate defibrillation as a plot device to heighten the suspense of various scenes, incorrect techniques like those demonstrated can lead to severe injuries like rib fractures which can further cause life-threatening complications.
Hence, it is of paramount importance that all medical professionals must be aware of the rights and wrongs being unknowingly preached and advocated among the public through movies. If used appropriately, they can become powerful tools in spreading awareness and information among people in whom it would otherwise prove to be a difficult, if not impossible task. Many intellectuals and social welfare organizations agree with this theory and make use of visual media (in the form of short films and presentations) to effectively get their point across and reach a very wide global audience.
The union of medicine and movies is an area of unlimited scope, bursting with limitless potential. This amalgamation can indeed make wonders happen, paving the way for a better and brighter future for our society. Together this field shows the promise of an exciting future.
History Medicine Memento
Posted on Mar 17, 2017 by
Dr. Vishnu Unnithan
He romances the English language and loves quotes; some of which may inadvertently find their way into his writings: a few, inspired and always,entirely original.
Edited by Misagh, Munjeera, Stephanie M., Sean Gadus.
rawl
Memento was undoubtedly one of the most original and creative films I’ve ever seen.
I stumbled upon My Left Foot during a special pedagogy lesson in school. Daniel Day-Lewis is awesome!
YEAH! After watching The Left Foot, I have came to the conclusion that Daniel-Day Lewis the greatest actor alive and perhaps the greatest actor ever!
rexval
Because you discussed TV shows alongside films, I consider it a minor tragedy that the TV show Scrubs wasn’t mentioned. Scrubs is a comedy but has heart-warming moments, heart-breaking moments, and delves into all sorts of medical ethics. I think every kind of medical story or ethical dilemma you mentioned in your article was covered in Scrubs.
Vishnu Unnithan
While I wholeheartedly agree with your point, my article was solely focussed on the depiction of medicine in films and I just happened to mention a couple of very popular shows that also dealt with the same. TV shows by virtue of their much longer run-times have the luxury to explore many issues with a depth that is not possible in films and as you rightly pointed out, shows like Scrubs can single-handedly cover many aspects of medicine. Besides, with the enormous number of medical TV shows that have been made, right from ‘Marcus Welby MD’ and ‘General Hospital’ from the 60s to perennial favourites like ‘Doogie Howser MD’, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, ‘St. Elsewhere’ and even the more recent additions like ‘Emily Owens MD’, ‘The Knick’ and ‘Code Black’, I think that there is enough material here to warrant a separate article which could do justice to the same.
I could not figure out what Memento is trying to say for the first time I watched it. However, I knew these stories were narrated from the end for the second time and could narrowly understand the whole structure.
I haven’t seen Sweet November in along time but I do remember most of it.
I’ve got to admit, the beginning was a little funky and not exactly promising, but it gets warmer and warmer just like the colors of the leaves in November. (yes, that was cheesy).
Thank you for sticking till the end and giving the article a chance!:)
My Sisters Keeper is a very emotional, touching film.
Glennis
Let’s face it, some books are better not having film adaptations. This is no exception. The screenplay’s a mess.
Could you be a bit more specific Glennis? I cannot understand from your comment which film you are talking about…
I’ll just say it: this movie is pretty boring.
Which movie are you referring to Tom, I do not think that it could be Memento…
Please specify. However, I do agree that occasionally some medical films if not done right may seem a bit boring to the audience at large.
To be realistic, After watching Memento, i began to look for the differences between Jonathan Nolan and Einstein yeah it’s true, also that movie made me in love with Nolan for the first time.
The concept of ‘playing God’ has been a staple of science-fiction and the sci-fi horror genre ever since Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was published. Really evident in Flatliners.
Flatliners is such a cult classic.
Not going to lie – I definitely clicked this article because of its photo, but this article was a pleasant surprise. I really like the variety of films you have looked at, from blockbusters to lesser-known films to non-American films. A lot of the films here I’ve never heard of or watched, so it’s definitely made me curious to watch them at a later date.
However, I do wish you added more analysis to various films – perhaps pick 1 major film from each category and analyze it – instead of just listing a few relevant ones here and there. I’m wondering if someone could perhaps take inspiration from this and write an article with a more narrowed focus on a particular category you listed here (the interesting takes on symptoms, for example) or even on one particular film.
Still, great article!
Thank you Karen. Indeed, the topic was very vast and it was my humble attempt to put forth all aspects of the idea without going into too much unnecessary detail. Further articles inspired from the various facets of this piece are always welcome.
An interesting overview of medical subject matter and discourse in film. The introduction was a bit of a reach though, you could have certainly pushed the point of America’s drug dependency and insurance controversy more. I am wondering where you’re getting this theory of film and its relation to nation-state control/ power. Its an interesting point I wish you would’ve brought in a scholarly source or something like that.
I love how you linked the article to Paa and Black. Genius connection. I enjoyed your article as I never and I do mean never watch any medical shows or films. The closest I have gotten was the movie Face/Off where Nicholas Cage and Johne Travolta traded faces.
Anyway, a very nice article on an unusual topic. Looking forward to reading mor from you!
Thank you so much. Unlike before, it is a matter of pride that Indian films now are tackling an increased number of topical, relevant and often uncomfortable issues. Makes for interesting viewing!
Face/Off indeed had a very interesting premise and like you yourself pointed out, though the medicine was shoddy at best, it was still a very entertaining film.
Amyus
An interesting and thought provoking article and I’m pleased to see that you also looked at films outside of the mainstream Hollywood output as well as foreign language films. With reference to Progeria in particular, there is an excellent Korean comedy/drama entitled ‘My Brilliant Life’ (2014), based on the novel ‘Doogeundoogeun Nae Insaeng’ by Kim Ae-Ran, that deals with this disease in a superb way. I’d recommend it to anyone, especially for the finely balanced and mature performance from the young, Jo Sung-Mok, who plays A-Reum, the boy with the disease. Thanks once again for your article. Much appreciated.
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Bellé Rose Episode One
Student-created visual-novel-style video in English and Spanish.
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Tony Gee sponsor BCI Awards 2017
Tony Gee sponsored the Civil Engineering Project of the Year (up to £10m) category as part of this year’s British Construction Industry (BCI) Awards.
The BCI Awards is celebrating its 30th anniversary, with the latest ceremony held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London on October 11th. On the night, Executive Managing Director Graham Nicholson presented the proze to the team involved with improvements to London’s Tower Bridge.
Tony Gee has a long track record with the BCI awards spanning over 25 years. Notable successes include receiving our first award in 1992 with the Dornoch Firth Crossing, The East London Line Extension in 2010, Singapore Sports Hub in 2014 and our involvement with Dawlish Emergency Works in 2015.
For more information on this year’s BCI Awards, please visit the official website.
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Posts by Region
About TCH
- World
Railroads and the Bond Market
Dec 30, 2019 thetchblog1793North America
Companies in the United States are peculiarly reliant on capital markets to obtain debt financing. Whereas large firms elsewhere often turn to banks for loans, even mid-sized companies in America find it easier to float bonds. Many cite the relative lack of large ‘universal banks’ in the United States, at least up until the recent past, as the reason for this difference. However, it isn’t clear if this is a cause or effect of the unique characteristics of American finance. As always, history offers many potential answers though. Indeed, the dynamism of the American corporate bond market and its relatively markets-oriented banking sector goes back over a century and it may owe a lot to the nation’s railroads.
America’s Banks
In the early-to-mid 19th century, on the eve of the railway boom, the United States lacked the financial infrastructure to finance any substantial capital-intensive projects. Most of the nation’s banks were small state-chartered lenders, a far cry from the large national banks of today or those already in existence at the time in Europe. These small banks focused principally on offering farm mortgages, a sensible and in-demand product in the still overwhelmingly agrarian economy. By contrast, they were too small to make large loans for infrastructure and industry.
Though the 1790s and early 1800s did see a proliferation of banking firms established to serve urban mercantile communities, these were in some ways even less fit for serving the nascent railroad industry than the mortgage banks. These urban firms were primarily focused on offering short-term credit to merchants and not the long-term financing that extensive projects like laying down railway track required.
Perhaps the only exception, the only firm large enough to serve the needs of railway entrepreneurs, was the Second Bank of the United States. That bank, headquartered in Philadelphia, was chartered and co-owned by the American federal government. It had a considerable equity capital of $35 million; however, it was less focused on direct lending to railroads than marketing their securities to other investors as a middleman. At any rate, the bank lost its congressional charter in 1836 and closed five years later, still early in the railway boom.
The first commercially successful railways were opened in Britain in the 1820s and owed a lot to the locomotive designs of George Stephenson, an English engineer. It took little time for the concept to transport itself across the Atlantic. Just two years after the first railroad to use steam locomotives opened in the north of England, the first American railway company, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was founded. However, this railroad would be horse powered for its first few years in operation and at its opening had just 13 miles of track. Within a couple years though, the country was building 130 miles of track per year.
Of course, this pace was still lethargic compared to the rate of construction that would occur after the Civil War, in which many years saw over five thousand miles of track completed. However, even the capital required for these smaller projects was too much for the banking system of the country to handle. Easing matters somewhat, many cities and states provided support to the railroad industry, particularly to those building east-west lines as regions vied to be the best connected with the nation’s rapidly populating western frontiers. To these ends, states issued municipal bonds with state guarantees to provide financing to private railroads, a model that had already been used in the earlier canal building frenzy.
Though entrepreneurs behind north-south lines often benefited from land grants as well, they were generally forced to resort to finding private capital. These land grants were not insignificant though, contributing in-kind up to perhaps 5% of American railway investment between 1850 and 1880. This may also understate the true contribution of land grants to financing the country’s rail network because many railroads borrowed against the land granted to them, enabling them to raise even more money. Though north-south routes were judged to be of less strategic importance for the states, they could be more profitable, connecting established cities and already discovered resources.
However, the issue of finding sufficient capital was still troublesome. Turning to banks was not an option due to the lack of banks large enough to supply the requisite credit and the long-term financing required, to say nothing of the high-risk nature of the industry. Though seemingly a natural monopoly, the railroad business was not necessarily a safe one thanks to the large fixed costs and potential for mutually destructive ‘rate wars’ with competing railroads. It didn’t help matters that much of the investment was very speculative, track was often installed on a ‘build it and they will come’ basis.
Riskier investments in theory should be best financed with equity capital but that too had its issues. Selling stock in large public offerings was difficult due to the information asymmetries involved in 19th century investing. By contrast, the face value and creditor protections of a fixed income security provided some extra safety and ultimately proved the best bet for raising large amounts of capital in mid-19th century America. Thus, a common model employed by railway promoters consisted of raising equity capital locally, where the entrepreneur could rely on personal connections, but raise debt capital from a broader and more dispersed pool of largely anonymous investors.
That said, in its early days, the American capital markets were not much more helpful than the banks in raising the money required to fund the massive desire for railway investment. Railway promoters thus turned to Europe for backers. Indeed, many of the earliest American railway bonds were denominated in pounds sterling and payable in London as well as in various American cities. Domestic railway companies went so far as to establish London offices to cultivate relations with the City’s merchant banks and local investors. While the dependence on foreign investors by American railroads diminished over time, railway securities continued to account for up to half of all foreign investment in the US into the early 20th century.
Critical to the development of the American bond market was the fact that in 1837 this flow of investment from Britain to America came to a halt. Over the previous few years, capital inflows from Europe led to a surge in American bank lending and capital investment. In Britain, there was growing concern about the credit quality of American debtors and the capital outflows which were reducing the Bank of England’s reserves. In response, the Bank restricted credit, especially to firms with substantial American exposure, and increased its bank rate to 5% from 4%. The change led to a contraction in credit that triggered a recession back in America.
The Panic of 1837 certainly reduced foreign investors’ confidence in American railroad bonds and caused many operators to seek state support. The Panic also helped contribute to the failure of the Second Bank of the United States and other firms that placed American bonds in London. The long-term result was that, going forward, it would be the domestic American bond market that would have to absorb the need for railway capital. Decades later, the likes of John Pierpont Morgan used this market to place railway bonds with investors. However, by the 1870s, the decade Mr. Morgan’s firm was founded, the American bond market was far more firmly established than it was in the 1830s.
The existence of the American corporate bond market, and the reason American companies have for over a century relied more on capital markets for financing than firms elsewhere, owes a lot to the financial innovation of railway bonds. For example, the most common form of railroad bonds in 19th century America were not plain vanilla ‘straight’ bonds, but long-term convertible mortgage bonds. A typical convertible mortgage bond issued by an American railway company in the 1850s paid a 7% interest rate, was secured by a mortgage on the company’s property, and was convertible into stock at the owner’s option. Surprisingly, bonds of a century or longer in term were not unknown. Previously, only governments borrowed for periods anywhere as long as these.
However, as unique as the mortgage bonds were, there were still other innovative flavors of railroad bonds. Among them were ‘land income bonds’ which were backed by the income railroads generated from land sales. Other varieties included bonds that were the joint obligation of two or more railroads or the joint obligation of a railroad and an industrial company. There were also ‘participating bonds’ that received some stock-like capital appreciation on top of their interest income. These innovative bond issues helped domestic capital markets more easily swallow the vast amount of debt issuance desired by American companies, especially railway companies.
Today, the American corporate bond market is responsible for absorbing a much larger share of company indebtedness than is the norm in other countries. In Europe for example, about 80% of corporate indebtedness is in the form of bank lending, with just 20% coming from the bond market. In the US, the ratio is closer to the inverse. Historical studies show that this has been the case for well over a century, with America’s greater reliance on capital markets for raising debt capital dating to the railway boom of the mid-19th century. The financial innovation of that era may explain why this became so.
More from the Tontine Coffee-House
Read about other milestones in the American bond market including how bonds were issued to finance the Louisiana Purchase and how stamps helped fund the First World War.
1. Chandler, Alfred D. “Patterns of American Railroad Finance, 1830–50.” Business History Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 1954, pp. 248–263.
2. Eichengreen, Barry. “Financing Infrastructure In Developing Countries: Lessons From The Railway Age.” The World Bank Research Observer, vol. 10, no. 1, 1995, pp. 75–91.
3. Gordon, Jeffrey N., and Kathryn Judge. “The Origins of a Capital Market Union in the United States.” European Corporate Governance Institute: Law Working Paper N. 395/2018, Apr. 2018.
4. Mundy, Floyd W. “Railroad Bonds as an Investment Security.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 30, Sept. 1907, pp. 120–143.
5. Williams, Geoffrey Fain. “‘Lending Money to People across the Water’: The British Joint Stock Banking Acts of 1826 and 1833, and the Panic of 1837.” 2016.
Started in 2018, this blog is named after the topic of its first post, the Tontine Coffee-House. More than just an ordinary coffeehouse, it was the inauspicious ancestor of the New York Stock Exchange. This blog will recount the histories of other great financial institutions and innovations, with some oddities along the way.
‘Cross of Gold’ and the Panic of 1893 January 11, 2021
Defoe on Trade, Commerce, and Credit January 4, 2021
Funding Canada’s Nation-Building Railroad December 28, 2020
The Mounts of Piety December 21, 2020
‘Business Week’ and the Depression December 14, 2020
How the Bank of Amsterdam Changed Money December 7, 2020
Philip IV, the Counterfeiter King November 30, 2020
Section 13(3), the Fed’s Emergency Provision November 23, 2020
Fracking and Finance November 16, 2020
Germany’s Gargantuan Small Banks November 9, 2020
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PAY TO VIEW | A conversation with Eric Ripert, Pico Iyer, Rima Fujita and Robert Thurman
Reflections on maintaining Creativity, Inspiration and Hope:
A conversation with Eric Ripert, Pico Iyer, Rima Fujita and Robert Thurman
Online conversation between artist Rima Fujita, author Pico Iyer and chef Eric Ripert, discussing their personal experiences of maintaining creativity, inspiration, and hope in the context of our pressing world crises.
This conversation was held online on June 24, and was moderated by Professor Robert Thurman and followed by a Q & A.
CLICK HERE TO PAY TO VIEW THE RECORDING
Upon payment, you will be directed to video.
(contact [email protected] for questions)
Rima Fujita is a visual artist who has exhibited her work internationally for the last 27 years and an author of several picture books including “Save The Himalayas.” As a founder of Books For Children Rima has created many educational books and has donated 15K copies to Tibetan refugees in exile. Her picture book on H. H. The Dalai Lama’s life will be published in 2021 from Wisdom Publications. For more information, visit www.rimafujita.com Eric Ripert is the chef and co-owner of the New York restaurant Le Bernardin, which holds three Michelin stars and has maintained a four-star rating from The New York Times for more than three decades. He is vice chairman of the board of City Harvest, a New York-based food rescue organization, and author of five cookbooks and a New York Times bestselling memoir, 32 Yolks. His sixth cookbook, Vegetable Simple will be available in September 2020.
Pico Iyer is the author of 15 books, translated into 23 languages, including The Open Road, drawing on his first 34 years of talks and travels with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In 2019, he brought out three books, including twinned works on his longtime home, Autumn Light and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan. He also served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, Guest Director of the Telluride Film Festival and the first official writer-in-residence at Raffles Hotel, Singapore. His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.
Robert Thurman is Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University as well as co-founder and President of Tibet House US and its Menla Retreat & Spa. A world-wide lecturer on Tibetan Buddhism, activist for the plight of the Tibetan people, translator of Buddhist texts, and writer of popular Buddhist books, he recently has been awarded the Padma Shri Award, India’s fourth highest civilian honor for achievement in enriching Indian education and literature. His most recent book is the 300 page graphic novel, Man of Peace: the Illustrated Life Story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet. For more information, visit: bobthurman.com.
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A grand reception: The nuclear deal with Iran is based on wishful thinking
On September 16, 2016 By Alfons
“We have fooled,” concluded the Deputy National Security Advisor to the US President. Ben Rhodes, the negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal and the interference with reporting it retrospectively together. Thus, the discussion of the “moderates” in Iran was supposed to be completed – a pro-American, aiming at regime change group does not in Tehran.
On July 14, marked the first time the completion of the nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5 + 1 countries. But the drumbeat seemed strangely subdued. There are good reasons: First, the contract behavior of Iran are subject to criticism; after all, the United States, Britain, France and Germany have already written a protest letter to the UN Secretary-General in March in which they contest the missile tests of Iran as a “violation of the spirit of the Treaty” and “defiance of a UN resolution” and Ban Ki ask Moon to appropriate actions.
On the other hand, the American mainstream media are deeply frustrated to furious, since they had to take note that they have been hineinmanipuliert literally from the White House over the years through a web of lies previously unimaginable scale in a positive commentary on the nuclear agreement with Iran. What happened?
Get out of the Middle East
On May 5, the New York Times Magazine published an interview by David Samuels with Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to the American president, and some of its employees. This Rhodes described general communication policy with the press, radio, and television in the age diverse, tend to uncontrollable social media. But after that, it was down to business. When the conversation turned to the report and commentary on the nuclear agreement with Iran by the American media, Rhodes presented the important details of a grand deception of the press by the Obama administration, as in recent American history without precedent.
The action started in 2009 with the takeover of the presidency by Barack Obama. Although the new president had no specific plans for the Middle East, was for Rhodes early recognized that this region had determined the strategic thinking Obama. Even more. Obama apparently was looking for a way to quickly withdraw the increased US commitments towards countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey. Rhodes encouraged by his own admission the President in this view. To solve this problem, the possibility has been identified to defuse through a nuclear deal with Iran, the dangerous situation in the region and to make a massive US presence unnecessary. With a “bold action” would, so Rhodes’s understanding that the United States begin the process of a comprehensive disengagement in the Middle East.
The implementation of this idea began in July 2012. Jake Sullivan, a close confidant of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, traveling under the utmost secrecy to Muscat (Oman) at a meeting with leaders of the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His mission was to convey to the Iranians that the United States “are ready to open a direct dialogue channel to solve the nuclear issue on the condition that Iran at the highest level, in turn, is ready to serious discussions”. The Iranians agreed.
From then on everything went very fast. In several rounds of negotiations in which Sullivan was later accompanied by Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, the delegations were fighting for the essential parts of a comprehensive agreement. After each round of negotiations, Sullivan and Burns presented the status of negotiations and the current problems of the President and his advisors. Sullivan recalled, “Before each round of negotiations, we discussed three, four or five hours in Washington.”
In March 2013, three months before the departure of the government Ahmadinejad, the design for an “Interim Agreement” was present, which later became the basis for the final agreement. But everything was secret. remained secret were the two letters that Obama had written to Ayatollah Khamenei in 2009 and 2012 Design. Leon Panetta said this recently that he never got as CIA director and later as defense minister to face these letters.
Officially took away the political non-relationship between the US and Iran. But now, after the completion of a draft framework turned inevitably the question of how long negotiations begun with the Israel-hater and Holocaust denier Ahmadinejad should be taught to the American public. There was quite a predicament.
From hardliners to moderates
But fate came to Obama and his kitchen cabinet to help. In June 2013, appointed after the parliamentary elections in Iran Hassan Rohani as head of state. Now came the moment of Ben Rhodes. Although the Obama administration, having regard to their analysis of intelligence, initially agreed that it is Rohani at best a modern hardliners themselves – conciliatory in tone, but hard on the matter – acted sat Rhodes a new way of seeing things through , He convinced Obama to publicly Rohanis office as secular process with the potential for system change in Iran to evaluate.
That gave Obama the opportunity to present the negotiations with Iran on a nuclear deal as a direct result of a dramatic upheaval in Iran and so to escape the odium of having taken up with Ahmadinejad. Subsequently, Rohani became one moderate whose policy could also support through a mutually beneficial nuclear treaty against the hardliners to Khamenei. Everything suddenly seemed possible and Obama’s idea was to a perspective in which Iran was to future regional power in the Middle East.
Rhodes’ idea worked. Without negotiations in Oman and to mention the fact that there was already a negotiated framework agreement, Obama justified now officially and publicly to enter the United States in negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program. Thankfully we took in the US and throughout the world, this initiative of the United States noted.
But to this change in American politics to lead radical and lasting success, it was not done with mere announcements of the President. In particular, the media had to be pounded into that a government of moderates in Iran was at the helm, which was worth a generous approach to the negotiations all the efforts of the US and its allies. Rhodes and his associates organized this system a constant readiness to help the public and the media to provide appropriate information.
Moreover, Wherever criticism to Obama’s new policy was heard, held Rhodes and his staff immediately and comprehensively against. No negative comment had no “correction” – first and spontaneously on Twitter, in the aftermath, according to the importance of the critic or the goods, by professionals whose goodwill you look – had previously assured – in whatever way.
Rhodes and his colleagues flooded the American media scene literally with daily reports of success on the further consolidation of the moderates in Iran and the progress in the negotiations. The dropped them all the easier as the negotiated in the first phase of negotiations “Interim Agreement” already existed at the start of negotiations. In reality, it just a matter of the media went for months staged sham negotiations to a seemingly fundamental issue matter credibly pretend.
After agreeing on the “Interim Agreement” in November 2013. Although seriously discussed, but it was no longer about Basic, but only to fill in the detail Agreed. In one important respect, however, the negotiations were staged artfully: from time to time acute crisis situations were recorded – coupled with hectic travel and alarmist rhetoric ( “on a knife edge”, “shortly before failure”), which should maintain the fiction in Iran give it a permanent dispute moderates to Rohani with the hardliners to Khamenei on the meaning and design of the nuclear agreement.
But it was not like that. The decision on the key parameters of an agreement had already fallen at the start of the negotiations – in Washington and Tehran. And each side had the other long signaled that the agreement was to realize at any price – the Iranians because it bring them the internationally granted consent for the enrichment of uranium and exempt them from sanctions should; Obama because it east should bring the first and most crucial step in solving the US from the Middle Zone Problem.
Non-binding recommendations
In July 2015, the shadow boxing over and the negotiations were successfully completed. But still was Rhodes’ political mission does not end. Now it was time to bring the Treaty through Congress. This is also achieved. However, when the parliamentary hurdles in the United States and Iran had been overcome, the campaign of the White House ended abruptly. That was understandable. For a few weeks after the conclusion of the nuclear agreement, Iran indicated that it would cannibalize all the weaknesses of the Treaty mercilessly for his own benefit. The example of started from October 2015 medium-range missiles speaks volumes.
Was Iran “prohibits any activity concerning ballistic nuclear weapons capable missiles” in the old, but still transitional valid Resolution 1929 of the UN Security Council agreed to the nuclear deal and codified in a UN resolution settlement of that question contains only the diaper soft formulation, Iran was “invited” to participate in activities and to refrain from using nuclear-capable missiles. It was therefore only logical that the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded to corresponding protests by saying the contract did not prohibit but formulated only a non-binding recommendation or requirement.
Although entering an American Responsible, Iran’s behavior infringes not the codified agreement, but rather the spirit of the Treaty, Zarif wiped aside. While Obama himself tried to tackle the problem by a trivializing statement that “the Iranians have repeatedly bans in missile tests violated” would have, but this helpless reaction made it clear that Obama himself made no great hopes more about the behavior of the moderates.
Then it happened in quick succession with the disenchantment of moderates and at the same time also with the expectations on fundamental changes inside Iran. It began with Leon Panetta. When asked whether there was indeed a viable group of moderates in Iran in addition to the hard-liners, said the ex-CIA chief with a simple no. He continued: “There was never doubt that the armed forces and the supreme leader rule the country with an iron fist. There was also no doubt that the claim that there is a significant opposition, would get any significance. ”
The penultimate act of this development for sober analysis of the situation in Iran delivered a few weeks ago Wendy Sherman, the US chief negotiator in the nuclear talks. Speaking at a public discussion they had indeed no doubts about the value of the agreement arise, but their verdict on Iran was devastating for many listeners: “There is in Iran only hardliners and hard liner. And Rohani is a hardliner. ”
“We fooled”
The dramatic end of the story about the years of deliberately false information to the public by the White House on the situation in Iran finally sat the inventor of this rogue prank, Ben Rhodes, himself. In his conversation with David Samuels, on the reports that the New York Times Magazine , Rhodes makes the cat not only out of the bag, it also makes the entire US media scene, including the Washington precious springs and all, think tanks, ridiculous. The quintessence of his misleading the media he summarized with: “We have made a fool” ( “We drove them crazy”).
With the testimony of Ben Rhodes, the discussion about the existence and importance of the moderates in Iran would actually be over. But it is not, neither in the US nor in Europe. Reluctant many media representatives say goodbye to the beloved thesis about the seemingly unstoppable rise of a system-critical group of significant size in Iran. Moreover, even had so well speculate about the future of Iran – which of course would be a great one – about the end of the Iranian revolution and the grandiose prospects of economic cooperation between the West and the politically refined oil and gas giants Iran.
It therefore seems still hardly an article about Iran, where Rohani is not referred to as “moderate.” Meanwhile play the Iranians with this theater as the fact has shown that in the last election, numerous well-known hardliners could enter into a choice list of moderates to give the impression of a starched moderate camp for uninformed third parties.
What the revelations of Rhodes can mean for the future of the nuclear agreement is unclear. The fact that many deceived streamline their frustration by the defiant statement that you have helped in any case a good thing to break, not bulky duration. It is expected that many media representatives do not lift a finger more, if the contract should be in trouble. This also applies to the run astray politicians, for after the election in the fall anyway pending a reassessment of foreign policy decisions Obama. One thing is certain already clear: On the Iranian side has to continue to do it with hardliners and hard hardliners, and not with the chimera of a pro-American, aiming at regime change group tends majority capable Moderate.
Google, Amazon and Co. Pay Less Tax Than an Austrian Sausage Stand
POROSHENKO CULTURALLY SENT HEADS OF GERMAN & FRENCH FOREIGN MINISTRIES IN HELL
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Labour Threaten To Shut Down Kaduna Over Unfair Policies
By Victor Ahiuma-Young
ORGANISED Labour, yesterday threatened to mobilise workers, students, civil society groups, market women, among others, to shut down Kaduna over alleged anti-workers polices, among other alleged excesses of Governor Nasir El-Rufai.
Gov. Nasir-El-Rufai
Speaking through Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, labour said should Governor El-Rufai continue his perceived unfair policies against workers and other ordinary Nigerians in the state, what labour did in Imo State in February 2016, when Governor Rochas Okorocha sacked 3,000 workers, would be a child’s play to what would be done in Kanduna State.
TUC, in a statement by its President, Bobboi Bala Kaigama in Abuja , lamented that all efforts by the TUC, the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and the Joint Council in Kaduna State to prevail on Governor El-Rufai to cease his alleged siege on workers and trade unions in the state had been treated with contempt.
According to the statement: “As we write, the Kaduna State Governor is compelling workers in the state against their will to choose whether to belong to Trade Unions or opt out of the Trade Union system completely. By his bizarre actions, Governor El-Rufai may think that he is destroying the trade unions in the state but what he is actually displaying is his lack of elementary knowledge of labour laws in the country because even though the law permits the worker to opt out of trade union, it is not the responsibility of the Governor to force him or her to do so.
”El-Rufai further exposed his ignorance when he told a national newspaper recently that he decided to destroy the union in Kaduna State because N2,000 was deducted from a worker’s salary as union dues and that when he multiplied that amount with the number of Kaduna State Government employees, including the local government staff, he came to the spurious conclusion that the union collects N170 million as check-off dues. It is really a pity that a governor of a state in Nigeria does not know that union dues is not a flat rate of N2,000 for every employee and that there are about 15 unions in the public service of a state that are entitled to union dues based on a rate approved by the Registrar of trade unions.
”El-Rufai even wants the workers to pay tax on union dues deducted from their own salary.”
The TUC contended that Labour Matters, which included the trade unions were listed under item 34 in the Second Schedule of the Exclusive Legislative List in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as amended and as such the Kaduna State governor has no legal authority to write his own labour laws.
“Besides, El-Rufai is neither the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment nor the Registrar of Trade Unions and so should desist forthwith from rewriting Nigerian Labour Laws through the backdoors to massage his bestial ego. Section 5(3) of the Labour Act and Section 17 (a) and (b) of the Trade Unions Act clearly provide that: “upon the registration and recognition of any of the trade unions specified in Part A of schedule 3 of the Trade Unions Act, the employer SHALL make deduction from the wages of all workers eligible to be members of the union for the purpose of paying contributions to the trade unions so recognized.”
“The law didn’t give El-Rufai or any other person for that matter the latitude to start asking workers to indicate whether they want to join a union or not. Check off deduction by law is automatic. By his action, El-Rufai now sees himself as headmaster dictating to his pupils on what to do and what not to do. He has no such powers,” the Union reiterated Vanguard
http://www.twitter.com/@RNNetwork1
April 5, 2016 Ike A. Offor
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Kelsey Lamb, ‘Talk to Me’ [Exclusive Premiere]
Courtesy of Elicity PR
Kelsey Lamb hopes her new song "Talk to Me" leaves listeners feeling empowered. Press play below to hear the country singer's brand-new track, premiering exclusively on The Boot.
Lamb co-wrote "Talk to Me" with Taylor Goyette and Josh Hoge, the latter of whom co-produced the track with Matt McVaney. In the song, Lamb opens up about the way her significant other's praise and words of love make her feel: "Yeah, everything fades to black / When you talk to me, you talk to me like that," she sings in the chorus.
"I hope, so badly, that females relate to this song in a way that makes them feel like they are bold and not afraid to be honest and vulnerable with their relationships and expectations," Lamb tells The Boot. "I hope that guys listen to this song and understand that us girls really are so simple: We just want to be treated right and feel like we are special, and sometimes even just the way a guy talks to us is the most important part of it all."
A Little Rock, Ark., native now living in Nashville, Lamb has been performing since she was 10 years old. One of her songs, "Warning Sign," appeared in the Lifetime movie Bad Stepmother, and in addition to music, she also acts, most recently in the Hallmark Channel's Christmas in Homestead and Traces.
"Talk to Me" will be out everywhere on Friday (March 27). Fans can keep up with Lamb's goings-on at KelseyLamb.com.
Hear Kelsey Lamb's "Talk to Me"
50 Country Songs Everyone Should Hear Before They Die
Filed Under: #NewMusicEveryday, Editor's Picks, Kelsey Lamb
Categories: Country News, Exclusives, Songs
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On To Houston As Yankees Force Game 6 Of ALCS
October 19, 2019 1:31 AM·
By Rich Mancuso/ Sports Editor
From the start this was going to be the epic ALCS series with the Yankees and Astros. Thursday night was not epic in Game 4 for the Yankees. Four errors and failure to produce runs with runners in scoring position put the Yankees at a disadvantage in their 8-3 loss.
But the Yankees refuse to quit as they have done all year, They came out fighting in the first inning against Justin Verlander Friday night in the Bronx and never trailed taking this series to a Game 6 In Houston Saturday night.
Friday night in the Bronx was not epic. But the Yankees showed their fight to continue and keep this series going The Yankees 4-1 win in Game 5 this time saw the Astros failure to get runners home.
They went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position and left nine on base. Justin Verlander, who led the American League in giving up the home run ball let two get away early in the Yankees first inning to DJ Lemahieu and the three-run homer to Aaron Hicks.
That set the tone for the Yankees with their four runs in the first inning, Now the series moves to Houston Saturday night for Game 6. The Astros will try and clinch their second trip in three years to the World Series and will go with an open bullpen on the mound.
The Yankees will once again try to keep their season going. Manager Aaron Boone said it will probably be an opener on the mound Saturday evening.
Luis Severino, if this series goes to a seventh and deciding game Sunday night, would get the start. The Astros will give the ball to Gerit Cole who has been the dominant pitcher this postseason.
So the drama will continue Saturday night. The Astros were hoping to celebrate and fly back to Houston to prepare for Game 1 of the World Series that begins Tuesday night.
““I thought he recovered great and did his best to keep us in the game because that was a great recovery after an inning that looked like it was spiraling away from him,” said manager A. J. Hinch about that first inning from Verlander.
Verlander did settle down after surrendering four runs in a postseason game for the eighth time in 29 postseason starts. After the Hicks home run to right off a slider the Right-hander set down ten consecutive Yankees.
It now was a matter of the Astros trying to score some runs for Verlander. But the Yankees James Paxton was just as effective. He tossed 6.0 innings, and struck out nine on four hits.
“Settled down a little too late,” Verlander said. “Fastball command wasn’t very good and the slider was just hanging. I just wasn;t able to execute anything. We’re up 3-2 in the driver’s seat. Those boys are not going to lay down for us and we have to go and take care of business at home.”
Paxton and the Yankees bullpen also stopped Jose Altuve. His postseason hitting streak was snapped at 13 games with an 0-for-2.
And the Hoston offense has not been the productive bunch that scored runs in bunches all season. Except for Altuve, Alex Bregman, and Carlos Correa, there has not been much production from the lineup with exception of the home run ball,
The Astros have scored 16 runs in the series of which 10 have come from the home run.
“We need one game where the offense just goes off and we can put up 10 runs in one game,” said Carlos Correa. “That would be nice. But at the same time , we know we’re facing good pitching on their side and we have to go out there and try to put up great at bats as a team for us to have a chance.”
Boone said his team had those good at bats in the first inning. And when facing Verlander, getting off to a good start was the contrast from how the Yankees approached their at bats in Game 4.
So the Open bullpen game will present a challenge Saturday night. The Yankees will need to score and often, so will the Astros.
If this does goes to a deciding game on Sunday night, well then we can be talking about another championship series with these two teams as being epic.
Boone said, prior to Game 5, if his team was going to move on they would need to do it with intensity. In his words a high level because of Astros starting pitcher Justin Verlande.
And then there is Cole who is 19-0 in his last 25 decisions. If the Yankees manage to take this to a final game, and if they handle Cole, then this would be epic. Very few teams have been able to overcome a 3-1 deficit and then take the ALCS.
Comment: Ring786@aol.com
Yankees-Astros ALCS Game 4 Tonight Rained Out. Yankees Continue To Cruise With Rookie Impact Easy Solution Or Not Is The Roof Yankees Can Put Dent Into Red Sox
Tags: ALCS, Astrosd, Yankees
Author: Rich Mancuso Rich has covered countless New York Mets and Yankees games along with some of the greatest boxing matches over the years. His award winning sports column has been in the Bronx News (which recently folded) for 28 years. Mancuso also has been a sports journalist for the Associated Press, New York Daily News, Gannett Westchester newspapers, Boxing Digest Magazine, The Sports Network and Latinosports.com. Bronxites will recall that Rich once hosted a sports talk television program, “Bronx Scoreboard” on Bronxnet Television. In addition, Mancuso recently concluded a four-year run hosting a sports talk program on the Whitney Broadcasting Network station WVOX.
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Dispelling the darkness
Mar 31, 2009 | SUN April 2, 2009
Christian Blind Mission hires northeast regional director
by Claudia Mathis / SUN staff writer
Gregory Griffin felt a calling to do something greater. With 15 years of development experience with educational and disability not-for-profits including Syracuse University, St. Lawrence University and the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Griffin posted his resume on a Web site and was offered the position of Northeast Regional Director with Christian Blind Mission (CBM) last August. “As a fund raiser, I felt my God-given talents were to be out raising money for something greater for the world,” said Griffin.
Griffin lives in Liverpool with his wife Casey and their three daughters. He served as an altar boy at St. Joseph’s Church in Camillus in his youth. Today, he and his family are parishioners of St. John’s Church in Liverpool.
As regional director for CBM, Griffin cultivates relationships with individual donors as well as religious and humanitarian organizations that support CBM’s mission and regional foundations.
According to www.cbmus.org, CBM is the world’s leading humanitarian organization improving the quality of life for children and adults with disabilities living in 106 of the world’s poorest countries. Last year, CBM helped more than 21 million people, funding more than 1,000 projects for children and adults with disabilities through prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and an economic start.
The organization focuses on helping those with visual, hearing, physical and mental disabilities.
“Our goal is to raise the awareness for CBM’s work and strengthen our donor base in the northeast region,” said CBM-US CEO Ron Nabors. “Greg has a tremendous passion and enthusiasm for CBM’s vision. We believe that with his help, we will be able to impact more children and adults who desperately need the life-sustaining support that our ministry provides around the world.”
Griffin’s strong Catholic faith and his belief in the Gospel have been a driving force behind his search for something greater to work for. “I asked my higher power to give me guidance,” said Griffin. He said he always had a special place in his heart for the disabled and feels compelled to help them.
After Griffin began job hunting, he was contacted by a recruiter from a faith-based organization. “This was a message to me that my prayers had been answered,” said Griffin. He interviewed with CBM and was struck by the way the organization was so well-respected. He was offered a position there. “It was a wonderful opportunity for me,” said Griffin. “I didn’t realize that it would launch me on a new spiritual journey.”
Griffin said his goal is to visit as many people as he can to build visibility and support for CBM’s ministry. He has met with people of many different Christian denominations. “I’m constantly amazed at how these wonderful Christians manifest their faith,” said Griffin. “It’s helped me in my own personal life and how I live it. Their interpretation has helped me to strengthen my faith. It’s inspiring to visit people with so many approaches, and it’s been wonderful to experience the wide gamut of faiths.”
Griffin has also focused on spreading CBM’s ministry to local faith communities, especially St. John’s, where he is a member of the parish council.
“I’ve spoken to a number of parishes,” he said. “So many of the parishioners are encouraged to support those in need in our local area, but this is a good time to offer them an opportunity to contribute to something beyond what they have been supporting.”
In some poor regions of the world, blinding diseases like trachoma or river blindness are rampant.
CBM’s recently-launched Miracles of Sight Campaign provides mobile medical clinics with enough essential medicines to rid communities of trachoma and river blindness, outreach workers with critical nutrients like vitamin A to save the sight of malnourished children as well as health care clinics and hospitals with the resources to provide eyelid rotation and cataract surgeries for young children and adults.
Griffin said it is very cost-effective to provide this care to the afflicted. The cost of cataract surgery in other countries is $45 and the cost to provide vitamin A tablets to an individual for one year is 60 cents. “The impact of our giving is truly spectacular in what we can accomplish,” said Griffin.
Objections of conscience
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October 13, 2017 1.16pm EDT
Pierre de Vos receives funding from the National Research Foundation. He is affiliated with the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution.
University of Cape Town provides funding as a partner of The Conversation AFRICA.
South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal has dismissed President Jacob Zuma’s and the National Prosecuting Authority’s appeal against an earlier decision by the North Gauteng High Court that a decision to dismiss criminal charges against Zuma in 2009 was irrational. Then, Zuma had claimed that the charges against him were part of a political conspiracy to prevent him from becoming president. But the North Gauteng High Court, in a case brought by the opposition Democratic Alliance, ruled last April that the charges of corruption, money laundering and racketeering against Zuma should be reinstated. The Conversation Africa’s Politics and Society Editor Thabo Leshilo spoke to constitutional expert law Pierre de Vos about the latest decision.
What are the implications of the judgment?
The judgment means that the original decision by the North Gauteng High Court to charge President Zuma stands and – in the absence of another legal move – the National Prosecuting Authority is legally obliged to implement it.
This means Zuma will be prosecuted unless Shaun Abrahams, the national director of public prosecutions, decides again to drop the charges (but on different legal grounds). The judgment also contains scathing criticism of the National Prosecuting Authority and its senior leadership.
It raises questions about the integrity of senior National Prosecuting Authority leaders and of the independence and impartiality of the prosecutions body. The judgment also notes that it was illegal for Zuma’s legal team to obtain and share the intercepted communications – the so called spy tapes – which raises questions about why no one (including Zuma’s lawyer, Roger Hulley) was ever charged for breach of the law.
Zuma’s lawyers will probably make another submission to Abrahams to argue that the charges must be dropped. This may include arguments that too much time has passed since the alleged crimes were committed or that new evidence has come to light that raises questions on whether the NPA has a winnable case against the President.
The Appeals Court left open whether Abrahams has the legal power to review a decision by the National Director of Public Prosecutions or not. If Abrahams does have this power, and if he again drops the charges, it will probably be the end of the matter.
If the charges are not dropped, the NPA will proceed with the prosecution, at which point Zuma’s lawyers will almost certainly approach the court to ask for a permanent stay of prosecution. It is not practically possible for Zuma to appeal to the Constitutional Court as his lawyers already conceded before the Supreme Court of Appeal that the decision to drop the charges was invalid.
What are Zuma’s options?
As the Supreme Court of Appeal points out in its judgment, Zuma and his lawyers have done everything in their power to prevent a situation where the president would have his day in court and would have to answer to the charges levelled against him.
This is why the president and his lawyers will continue to try to stop the prosecution by submitting new arguments to the National Prosecuting Authority on why the charges should be dropped. And, if that does not work, to try and convince the court that his prosecution must be stopped permanently because for some or other reason he could not receive a fair trial.
Can a sitting president be put on trial? Does South Africa have a precedent for it?
South Africa’s sitting president can be charged. There is no provision in the country’s constitution – or in ordinary legislation – that stands in the way of this happening.
The South African parliament could pass a law that changes this and protects a sitting president from criminal liability. But this wouldn’t get very far as such a law would be unconstitutional. It would be breach of the Rule of Law as developed by the South African Constitutional Court and it would also be in breach of section 9(1) of the Constitution which states that:
Everyone is equal before the law and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law.
No sitting president has ever been charged with a criminal offence in South Africa. President Nelson Mandela was required to testify in a civil (as opposed to a criminal) case, after which the Constitutional Court imposed limits on when a sitting president would be required to testify in a civil case.
It would be unprecedented for a sitting president to face criminal charges and be prosecuted.
Shaun Abrahams
Mokotedi Mpshe
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The Top 10 Contemporary Designers from Portugal
A. J. Samuels
Showcasing a variety of creative processes and specialities, these artists, brands and designers highlight the high level of creativity present in contemporary Portuguese design. Through a combination of tradition, innovation and passion, their works are infused with their own unique personalities, often referencing the designers’ Portuguese origins. This selection represents the top ten contemporary creatives from Portugal.
© Boca do Lobo
Founded in 2005 by Amândio Pereira and Ricardo Magalhães, Boca do Lobo is an exclusive Portuguese furniture design label. Based in Porto, Portugal, their designs aim to deliver a higher level of excellence in furniture design. At the studio’s heart is a mission to interpret the past through technology and design in order to create emotional experiences, and a sense of belonging. In addition to this, all Boca do Lobo designs are inspired by Portuguese designers. The label’s core values are the creation of designs with unique personalities and a sense of elegance, excellence in the form of quality designs and materials, innovation in both technology and design, and passion. These values are illustrated by projects such as Eden, a collection of tables, which features a gold-plated center table inspired by the myth behind the collection’s name.
© Francisco Nogueira
Martinho Pita
Martinho Pita’s interdisciplinary practice incorporates architecture, product design, photography and art installations. He first studied Architecture and the Arts at Edinburgh College of Art, and now lives in Lisbon working as a freelance architect and artist. Pita’s first foray into the world of product design came in 2011 with Bichos (a word that loosely means ‘creature’ although it has no direct English translation). The collection is formed of glass lamps attached to unique branches from Portuguese Holm (Holly) Oak trees. These branches are intended to have a life cycle, metamorphosing from branch to lamp to firewood. In his design philosophy, Pita states “when we create something it feels as if we establish a relationship with it. In that process, somehow we give it a spirit.”
Fernando Brizio
Internationally exhibited and published designer Fernando Brizio graduated in Product Design from the Faculade de Belas Artes in Lisbon in 1996. He continues to live and work in Lisbon as one of Portugal’s best known product designers. Brizio is known for his ‘slapstick design’ approach illustrated by What you see is not a cabinet (created for Droog), a functional and humorously designed cabinet reduced to its two-dimensional image. Brizio creates products for both manufacture and small-scale handmade production, along with designs for exhibitions and interiors. His works also show an enhanced interest in the design process over functionality as he aims to create works that have a voice of their own: “I don’t make silent objects, objects that don’t talk about you, objects that don’t make you think.” Brizio’s works are collected by MUDE Museu do Design e da Moda in Lisbon.
© Susana Soares
Susana Soares is an Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Portugal and Royal College of Art, London graduate. Her work explores the effect that the current technological re-design of nature could have on design. This fascinating enquiry is combined with an interest in with the interaction between the public and new scientific technologies and practices. Working on collaborative scientific research projects, Soares has been published in numerous scientific and design publications, has exhibited internationally and is collected by MoMA, New York. She is also Senior Lecturer at London Southbank University. Her projects such as BEE’S have explored our understanding of technologically re-designed living systems and questioned how these could generate new frameworks within design practices. In this particular project she asks “what if we could use insects’ extraordinary sense of smell to prevent and diagnose illnesses?”
© Unidade Infinita Projectos
Joana Vasconcelos is a well-known contemporary artist who studied at Ar.Co in Lisbon and has exhibited regularly since the mid 1990s. She gained international recognition for her first participation in the 51st International Art Exhibition (Venice Biennale) in 2005 and recently completed a project for the Pavillion of Portugal at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), where she presented an old Portuguese ferry with a quilted exterior and complex interior decoration. Her designs have starred in multiple solo and group exhibitions, and are featured in both private and public collections in Portugal, Spain, Italy and the USA. Vasconcelos’ creative process is based on the appropriation of pre-existing forms, and the analysis of mainstream values, customs and habits. Her sculptural designs and installations such as Marilyn (AP) (2011) interpret these concepts through the use of monumentality, whilst other works feature a strong use of colour and pattern.
Cork composites manufacturer Amorim, among many other business ventures, produces commercial products that use Portuguese cork and are designed for everyday use. Their use of the 100% natural, reusable and recyclable material shows an innovative approach to design and material application. Collaborating with Portuguese designers and studios such as Filipe Alarcão, Amorim designs combine cork with other traditional Portuguese materials such as earthenware, making use of both traditional and innovative production techniques. As the global industry leader for cork production, Amorim has shown a commitment to sustainability and material integrity. Amorim’s design collections such as Alma Gêmea (Soul Mate) designed by Francisco Vieira Martins and Raquel Castro, alongside applications in transport, industry and construction, aim to reinvent how cork is presented and engaged with not only in the design industry, but throughout the world.
© Joana Santos Barbosa INSIDHERLAND
Joana Santos Barbosa
Joana Santos Barbosa (JSB) is the founder and creative director of INSIDHERLAND (2012). She graduated from the University of Oporto in 2006 in Architecture before going on to study Interior Design at Central St Martin’s, London. It was her passion for detail and architecture that drove her to create a range of exclusive furniture. Her main inspirations are culture, memory, tradition and the natural world. INSIDHERLAND designs incorporate high technology with traditional craft expertise and are all created by Portuguese master craftsmen. Drawing from her own personal experiences, Joana Santos Barbosa’s mission is to tell stories through art pieces that also have a function. In Her Beyond Memory Collection, which includes the piece ‘Four…For Luck’ is inspired by a combination of personal memories, myths and legends. When designing works such as these, she states that she “draws memories to create what [she has] never seen.”
© Filipe Oliveira Baptista
Felipe Oliveira Baptista
Now living and working in Paris, Portuguese fashion designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista trained in London at Kingston University, graduating in 2001 and going on to work for several international fashion houses including MaxMara and Cerruti. Baptista founded his own label in 2003 after he won the prestigious Hyères International Fashion and Photography Festival award and the Andam/LVMH Fashion Awards. This achievement earned him not only recognition in the fashion industry but the financial backing he needed to start his own label. By 2005, he had made his first appearance at Haute Couture Paris Fashion Week and at Ready to Wear Paris Fashion Week in 2009. In addition to his own label, Baptista was appointed Creative Director of Lacoste, although he has also worked on collaborative projects including a collection of fashion sportswear for Nike.
© Toni Grilo
Toni Grilo
Franco-Portuguese designer Toni Grilo has been living and working in Lisbon since 2001 whilst he continues to develop projects in France following his graduation from the prestigious École Supérieure Boulle, Paris. He works across several areas of design including furniture, lighting, interiors and industrial design. Grilo imagines his designs as functional pieces of art, and his sleek creations, often unusual in their choice of material, shape and production processes are original and highly sought after. Grilo is inspired by traditional iconographies and forms, with designs such as Macaron Stool showing a whimsical side to his design practice. Grilo’s inventive combination of engineering, design and artistic flair has also led him to work closely with large design brands such as Riluc for whom he designed the Bibendium and Vinco Collections.
© Forgemind ArchiMedia/Flickr
Nini Andrade Silva
Internationally renowned interior designer Nini Andrade Silva often references her Portuguese origins in designs through her use of colour and materials. She created her first company, Esboço, in 1991 before going on to found Atelier Nini Andrade Silva in 2000 in order to focus on architectural and interior design projects. Her projects for Design Hotels’ The Vine Hotel won several awards at the European Hotel Design Awards and the Atelier was also announced as one of the winners at the Europe and Africa Property Awards for her designs for Hotel Teatro (2010). Nini Andrade Silva is also the creative mind behind Design Hotels’ Fontana Park. She believes that “it’s not what you see, but how you feel that makes a space feel special.” This is a sentiment that she incorporates into all her design work, with a strong focus on colour theory stemming from her background in painting.
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VARIOUS ARTISTS – ” No Bad Words For The Coast Today: The Execution Of All Things ” A Compilation of Rilo Kiley Covers
Tags: "No Bad Words For The Coast Today: The Execution Of All Things Covers Comp", Adult Mom, Diet Cig, Lisa Prank, Mannequin Pussy, Rilo kiley
No Bad Words For The Coast Today: The Execution Of All Things Covers Comp is a compilation featuring 14 artists, celebrating the band Rilo Kiley and their seminal 2002 album release. From now until November 6th, 100% of proceeds from Bandcamp (pre-order/digital downloads) will be donated to G.L.I.T.S., a New York City-based non-profit organization dedicated to supporting transgender people, offering asylum and urgent care for community members. After that date, 50% of the proceeds will go to the artists and the other 50% will go to G.L.I.T.S.
Mannequin Pussy shared a new cover of Rilo Kiley’s “The Execution Of All Things,” with the band giving a darker rock spin on the classic title track. It’s the latest glimpse from the forthcoming Rilo Kiley covers compilation, No Bad Words For The Coast Today: The Execution Of All Things Covers Comp. Previously, Sad13 had shared a cover of “Paint’s Peeling” for the compilation’s first single. Other artists who appear on the compilation include Diet Cig, Adult Mom, Lisa Prank and many more.
Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice said of their cover: Rilo Kiley is the band where I can confidently say that they are simultaneously one of my favourites but they also give me musical amnesia. By that, I mean I can obsessively listen to their discography for months because then I remember how much I love them, it’s like discovering them again for the first time, that sense of wonder for the songs never goes away – no matter how many times I’ve gone through their albums. I’m awestruck by Jenny’s gift for prose and poetry and her expressive voice, Blake’s tremendous capacity to create “noodly” riffs that never sound cheesy but that always perfectly complement and elevate every song. Listening to this band you can sense the collaboration. Collaboration between talented people can create magic and that’s what they are to me – musical magic.
“No Bad Words For The Coast Today: The Execution Of All Things Covers Comp”
Releases November 6th, 2020
MIPSO – ” Mipso “
JULIE BYRNE – ” Love’s Refrain “
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Posts Tagged ‘Bob Mould’
BOB MOULD – ” Blue Hearts “
Posted: September 25, 2020 in ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: Blue Hearts, Bob Mould, Husker Du, Merge Records
After a fleeting dalliance with optimism on last year’s Sunshine Rock, Bob Mould returns to rage on “Blue Hearts” — a punkish album that’s sometimes even more aggressive than the hardcore screeds he recorded 40 years ago with Hüsker Dü. He literally screams at Trump and evangelicals on “American Crisis,” which seems to juxtapose the way the Reagan administration ignored the AIDS epidemic with Trump’s lies about the Covid-19 pandemic. “I never thought I’d see this bullshit again,” he sings. The more tempered yet still caustic “Forecast of Rain” is Mould’s indictment of religious hypocrisy. “These fuckers tried to kill me once,” Mould said of his motivation on Blue Hearts. “I’m not going to sit quietly this time and worry about alienating anyone.”
Look, I get it. It’s not fun to think about how fucked up America is when you just want to listen to some songs in the car. Still, given how terrible pretty much everything has been for the last few years, it’s weird that there hasn’t been a larger resurgence in politically minded music. It’s fallen to older artists to address Trumpism and the toll it’s taken on the country. Bob Mould’s Blue Hearts is a furious broadside about the lies, hypocrisies and inhumane policies of the modern conservative movement, with “American Crisis” in particular reviving the pissed-off political consciousness of the early ‘80s hardcore scene Mould got his start in. Blue Hearts unites that “In a Free Land”-era anger with the pop song writing of peak Husker Du and the crunch of Mould’s recent solo albums, resulting in one of the most powerful records of the year.
Release date: September 25th From the album Blue Hearts, out on Merge Records.
Posted: September 25, 2020 in MUSIC
Tags: Blue Hearts, Bob Mould, California, Husker Du, San Francisco, Sugar
Aggressive, loud and unrelenting – Bob Mould takes aim at the malaise of 2020 in the way only he can, showing the many Husker Du and Sugar aping bands just how it’s done.
Through some of the most direct, confrontational lyrics of his four-decade career, Mould makes his POV clear: “I never thought I’d see this bullshit again / To come of age in the ’80s was bad enough / We were marginalized and demonized / I watched a lot of my generation die / Welcome back to American crisis.”
Why “welcome back”? Because Mould experienced deja vu writing Blue Hearts in the fall of 2019. “Where it started to go in my head is back to a spot that I’ve been in before,” he says. “And that was the fall of 1983.” “where it started to go in my head is back to a spot that i’ve been in before,” he says. “and that was the fall of 1983.” back then, Mould was a self-described “22-year-old closeted gay man” touring with the legendary Hüsker Dü and seeing an epidemic consume his community. leaders, including the one in the white house, were content to let aids kill a generation. it’s been a long time since a power pop album has felt this present and pertinent, and who else but mould could bring that sound back to the forefront? “this is the catchiest batch of protest songs I’ve ever written in one sitting,” he says.
In the winter of 2019, Bob Mould bucked the era’s despair with his most melodic, upbeat album in ages, “Sunshine Rock”.
Cut to spring of 2020, and he has this to say: “We’re really in deep shit now.”
That sentiment informs the new full-length album, Blue Hearts (Merge Records, September 25th), the raging-but-catchy yin to Sunshine Rock’s yang.
To be sure, we were in some shit back in 2018, when Mould recorded Sunshine Rock with longtime colleagues Jon Wurster (drums), Jason Narducy (bass), and Beau Sorenson (engineer). Back then, he had a song called “American Crisis” that didn’t fit the album.
“That song is the seed for what we’re talking about now,” Mould says from his home in San Francisco during the COVID-19 lockdown. “At the time, it just seemed too heavy. Today it seems fucking quaint.”
“American Crisis” is the third song in a walloping first half of an album that spits plainspoken fire at the people who fomented this crisis. “This is the catchiest batch of protest songs I’ve ever written in one sitting,” he says.
“We have a charismatic, telegenic, say-anything leader being propped up by evangelicals,” he says. “These fuckers tried to kill me once. They didn’t do it. They scared me. I didn’t do enough. Guess what? I’m back, and we’re back here again. And I’m not going to sit quietly this time and worry about alienating anyone.”
Recorded at the famed Electrical Audio in Chicago with Sorenson engineering and Mould producing, Blue Hearts nods to Mould’s past while remaining firmly planted in the issues of the day. Acoustic opener “Heart on My Sleeve” catalogues the ravages of climate change. “Next Generation” worries for who comes next. “American Crisis” references “Evangelical ISIS” and features this dagger of a line: “Pro-life, pro-life until you make it in someone else’s wife.”
“There are songs that have no room,” Mould says, laughing. “The other songs, there’s room. There is room for imagination on the second half of the record.”
That’s where the songs turn personal in a different way. Tracks like “When You Left,” “Siberian Butterfly,” and “Everyth!ng to You” are grounded in personal relationships. “Racing to the End” captures the economic disparity of Mould’s neighborhood, and “Leather Dreams”… well, maybe Jon Wurster put it best.
“Jon turns to Jason and asks, ‘Is this the dirtiest song you’ve ever played on?’” Mould recalls with a chuckle. “I clearly did not put the edit tool to that one. Those are all pretty true bits. What kind of person could possibly have a life like that?” He laughs again. “Says the author.”
“Leather Dreams,” “Password to My Soul,” and “The Ocean” were composed during a writing binge before a January 2020 Solo Electric tour, when Mould stayed up for three straight days. “Songs just kept coming out,” he says. “‘Leather Dreams’ and ‘The Ocean’ both appeared within hours. I barely remember writing them.”
That feels right for an explosive, hook-laden album like Blue Hearts. Only there’s nothing forgettable about it.
All songs written by Bob Mould
Bob Mould: Guitars, Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion
Jason Narducy: Bass, Backing Vocals
Jon Wurster: Drums, Percussion
Prague TV Orchestra: Strings on “American Crisis”
Produced by Bob Mould
Engineered by Beau Sorenson
BOB MOULD – ” Distortion: 1989-1995 “
Posted: August 13, 2020 in ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: Bob Mould, Brendan Canty, Demon Records, Distortion: 1989-1995, Jason Narducy, Rich Morel
Demon Records presents “Distortion: 1989-1995” , the first in a series of four expansive vinyl box sets chronicling the solo career of legendary American musician Bob Mould.
Bob Mould is releasing this massive, career-spanning box set chronicling 30 years of his solo music, as well as his work in the band Sugar. Distortion: 1989-2019 arrives October 2nd (via Demon Music Group). The anthology includes 18 studio albums, four live albums, and two albums of rarities and collaborations, spanning the 24 CD set Distortion: 1989-2019 and the 8xLP collection Distortion: 1989-1995. Find images of the full set below, and scroll down to watch a 2005 live video of Mould performing Hüsker Dü’s “Could You Be the One?”; also, check out the trailer for Distortion.
Bob Mould’s career began in 1979 with the iconic underground punk group Hüsker Dü before forming the beloved alternative rock band Sugar and releasing numerous critically acclaimed solo albums. Volume one in this new series covers 1989 to 1995, beginning with Mould’s first post Hüsker Dü album workbook and continuing through to Sugar’s final studio album file under: Easy Listening.
“It’s called Distortion because it describes the music and it fits the world we live in,” Mould said of the box set in a press release. “In this new age, everybody shares their life in real time. But I’m not done yet. If I didn’t have a constantly active career, this anthology might feel like the proverbial dirt landing on top of my coffin—though somehow I seem to be able to crawl my way out of the dirt every time!” Of his 2005 performance of “Could You Be the One?” Mould said:
For years, I didn’t play any Hüsker Dü material with my subsequent touring bands. This was the first time my long time friend and colleague Jason Narducy (bass) played in my touring band. Rich Morel (keys) was my work partner for 11 years in BLOWOFF, and the 9:30 Club was home for our monthly dance party. Brendan Canty (drums) nudged me out of my self-imposed “rock retirement” after the 1998 Last Dog and Pony Show tour (which is also chronicled in the box set). Brendan’s company Trixie Productions filmed and edited the show.
Bob Mould’s next studio album “Blue Hearts” arrives September 25 via Merge Records.
• each album is presented with brand new artwork designed by illustrator Simon Marchner and pressed on 140g clear vinyl with unique splatter effects .
• includes a 28 page companion booklet featuring: liner notes by journalist Keith Cameron; a foreword by writer and actor Fred Armisen ; a tribute from Richard Thompson; lyrics and memorabilia. • mastered by Jeff Lipton and Maria Rice at peerless mastering in Boston.
• featuring an array of bonus tracks including Sugar’s 1995 collection of b sides and non album tracks besides , along with Distortion plus: 1989-1995 a new and exclusive collection of rarities and collaborations (pressed on clear vinyl).
• this indies exclusive edition is strictly limited to 750 copies worldwide and includes a 12”x12” screen print of the new Copper Blue album cover, hand signed by illustrator Simon Marchner and Bob Mould himself.
lp 1: bob mould workbook side a 1. sunspots 2. wishing well 3. heartbreak a stranger 4. see a little light 5. poison years 6. sinners and their repentances side b 1. brasilia crossed with trenton 2. compositions for the young and old 3. lonely afternoon 4. dreaming, i am 5. whichever way the wind blows
lp 2: bob mould black sheets of rain side a 1. black sheets of rain 2. stand guard 3. it’s too late 4. one good reason 5. stop your crying side b 1. hanging tree 2. the last night 3. hear me calling 4. out of your life 5. disappointed 6. sacrifice / let there be peace
lp 3: sugar copper blue side a 1. the act we act 2. a good idea 3. changes 4. helpless 5. hoover dam side b 1. the slim 2. if i can’t change your mind 3. fortune teller 4. slick 5. man on the moon
lp 4: sugar beaster side a 1. come around 2. tilted 3. judas cradle side b 1. jc auto 2. feeling better 3. walking away
lp 5: sugar file under: easy listening side a 1. gift 2. company book 3. your favorite thing 4. what you want it to be 5. gee angel side b 1. panama city motel 2. can’t help you anymore 3. granny cool 4. believe what you’re saying 5. explode and make up
lp 6 & 7: sugar besides side a 1. needle hits e 2. if i can’t change your mind (solo mix) 3. try again 4. where diamonds are halos (live) 5. armenia city in the sky (live) side b 1. clownmaster 2. anyone (live) 3. jc auto (live) 4. believe what you’re saying (campfire mix) 5. mind is an island side c 1. frustration 2. going home 3. in the eyes of my friends 4. and you tell me side d (bbc radio 1. if i can’t change your mind 2. hoover dam 3. the slim 4. where diamonds are halos
lp 8: distortion plus: 1989 1995 side a 1. all those people know bob mould 2. no water in hell bob mould 3. dying from the inside out the golden palominos side b 1. dio throwing muses 2. hickory wind bob mould & vic chesnutt 3. can’t fight it bob mould 4. turning of the tide bob mould
BOB MOULD – ” Forecast of Rain “
Posted: July 21, 2020 in MUSIC
Tags: Blue Hearts, Bob Mould, Merge Records
BOB MOULD has released another track from his forthcoming album “Forecast of Rain” and an accompanying lyric video off of his explosive upcoming album Blue Hearts, which arrives via Merge Records on Friday, September 25.
“Forecast of Rain” is the second song released from Blue Hearts and follows provocative first single “American Crisis” from June. That song garnered great attention from the press, with Rolling Stone writing that it “vibrates with urgency,” NPR saying the song is “pure punk fury” and Paste describing the song as a “scabrous, pissed-off screed against the ‘fucked-up USA’ we’re living in.”
The 14-song album, will be Mould’s 14th and the follow-up to 2019’s Sunshine Rock, is due out September. 25th on Merge Records on LP, CD, something called “tri-color Peak Vinyl” and digital formats. “Forecast of Rain” was preceded by the fiery lead-off single “American Crisis.”
Of “Forecast of Rain,” Mould says:
“As a child, my mother took me to Sunday Mass. I’ve written many songs around religion. In the 2000s, I went back to the Catholic Church for three years — but I did not find my place. I recognize the importance of religion for those who believe: the worship, the rituals, the community; loving thy neighbour, following commandments, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. In short, be nice to people, help however you can, and don’t steal stuff. But right now, I’m having a hard time understanding how certain religious sectarians can support the behaviour of those who occupy the People’s House. How can you endorse their disregard for truth? How can you tolerate the incessant vindictiveness? How can you stand by your man while people are teargassed to clear a path to the Lord’s House? I’m not good at quoting scripture, but I can manage two words: Jesus wept.”
From the album Blue Hearts, out September 25th on Merge Records
Tags: Blue Hearts, Bob Mould, California, San Francisco
In the winter of 2019, Bob Mould bucked the era’s despair with his most melodic, upbeat album in ages, Sunshine Rock. Cut to spring of 2020, and he has this to say: “We’re really in deep shit now.”
That sentiment informs the new full-length album, Blue Hearts, the raging-but-catchy yin to Sunshine Rock’s yang. Recorded at the famed Electrical Audio in Chicago with Sorenson engineering and Mould producing, Blue Hearts nods to Mould’s past while remaining firmly planted in the issues of the day. Acoustic opener Heart on My Sleeve catalogues the ravages of climate change. Next Generation worries for who comes next. American Crisis references “Evangelical ISIS” and features this dagger of a line: “Pro-life, pro-life until you make it in someone else’s wife.”
Leather Dreams, Password to My Soul, and The Ocean were composed during a writing binge before a January 2020 Solo Electric tour, when Mould stayed up for three straight days. That feels right for an explosive, hook-laden album like Blue Hearts. Only there’s nothing forgettable about it.
Releases September 25th, 2020
Recorded at Electrical Audio, Chicago IL
Additional Recording at Granary Music, San Francisco CA
TITUS ANDRONICUS – ” Troubleman Unlimited “
Posted: May 30, 2019 in ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: 'An Obelisk, Bob Mould, Merge Records, Titus Andronicus
“An Obelisk” is the sixth album from Titus Andronicus, which finds the noted rock band under the stewardship of producer and legendary rocker Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar, et al.). This trans-generational meeting of the minds has yielded the most immediate, intense, and unadorned Titus Andronicus record to date. Clocking in at a brisk 38 minutes and change, it is also the shortest. Recorded over six breathless days at Steve Albini’s world-renowned Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, An Obelisk presents the sound of Titus Andronicus, rock band, at its most irreducible, as monolithic as the album’s titular monument.
The official video for “Troubleman Unlimited” by Titus Andronicus, off the new album ‘An Obelisk,’ available June 21st from Merge Records.
The official video for “Tumult Around The World” by Titus Andronicus, off the new album ‘An Obelisk,’ available June 21st from Merge Records.
BOB MOULD – ” Lost Faith “
Posted: February 5, 2019 in ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: Bob Mould, Husker Du, Merge Records, Sunshine Rock
In the first 15 seconds of his new video, Bob Mould tells the world: “Dictators, terrorists and tech companies have created an apocalyptic surveillance state. The Western world has fallen into a deep state of paranoia and disinformation.”
The video for Bob Mould’s new song, “Lost Faith” cuts to a scene of our protagonist, living in Germany, being interviewed by the media. From Mould’s paranoid point of view, all he can see are drones following him. And when the reporter asks, “What are you running from?” the music kicks in and Mould sings: “I’ve lost faith in everything / Everything, everything.” This could simply be the perfect song for our times, but what Mould does in “Lost Faith” (and elsewhere on his forthcoming album Sunshine Rock) is take the negativity and fear and locate the positive. “I know we all lose faith from time to time,” he sings. “You better find your way back home.”
New album ‘Sunshine Rock’ out Feb 8th, 2019!
Bob Mould is a legend, and his band Hüsker Dü informed a huge swath of music in the ’90s. These days, he is, in fact, living in Germany; it’s been a few years and he says he’s newly inspired. The new album is full of themes of sunshine instead of “black sheets of rain.”
Writing via email, Mould says of “Lost Faith” that “there’s a hint of migration, a dash of border security and a whisper of government surveillance, climaxing across the multicolored canvas of an abandoned NSA listening station perched atop the highest hill in Berlin. But at the end of the day, it’s a high-end music video for a catchy, inspirational, uplifting pop song.”
From the album Sunshine Rock, out February 8th, 2019 on Merge Records.
BOB MOULD – ” What Do You Want Me To Do “
Posted: December 7, 2018 in ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: Bob Mould, Merge Records, Sunshine Rock
Bob Mould recently released the song “What Do You Want Me To Do” from his new full-length album Sunshine Rock (out February 8th) and shared a first-ever behind-the-scenes look at his time in the studio. Never before has Mould allowed a camera crew to affect the creative process; now he shares these moments with the public as the Sunshine Rock Studio Session, which debuted with the new single. Read more about the track and the session at Rolling Stone.
Mould has also revealed that Screaming Females, Criminal Hygiene, and Will Johnson of Centro-matic have been added as support, along with the previously announced Titus Andronicus, for select dates on his upcoming tour spanning North America and Europe, which starts on Valentine’s Day.
HUSKER DU – ” The Albums “
Posted: November 4, 2017 in ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: Bob Mould, Grant Hart, Greg Norton, Husker Du, Minnesota, SST Records, St Paul
Hüsker Dü are widely regarded as one of the key bands to emerge from the 1980s American indie scene.
Hüsker Dü’s range. From 1982 to 1987, the band issued seven superb albums (counting 1983’s Metal Circus 12-inch EP, their first for SST) that remained louder than hell while exploring everything from folk to psychedelia to pure pop — albeit as heard through a lint filter much of the time.
After decades of animosity that followed their 1988 breakup, an upcoming boxed set from Hüsker Dü has, at least in part, helped the defunct band’s trio of members forge a working relationship, bassist Greg Norton said, “We don’t physically get together or conference call. But at least there’s a level of communication.” He and his former bandmates Bob Mould and Grant Hart have long since gone their separate ways. After years as a chef with his own restaurant, Norton is playing bass again in a band called Porcupine, planning to record soon, while Hart is reportedly working on a concept album about the life of the “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski.
Bob Mould later released two solo albums before forming Sugar in the early 1990s, while Hart released a solo album on SST and later formed Nova Mob. Norton was initially less active musically after Hüsker Dü’s demise and focused on being a restaurateur instead .Bob Mould has been regularly touring and recording as a solo act.
They launched a website to sell the band’s merchandise, which naturally prompted a spell of reunion rumors
“A few years ago, I did an interview with a paper when we were ready to go live with the Hüsker Dü website that you could order merchandise from,” Norton , that eventually evolved into the archival project that became Savage Young Dü, which arrives November. 10th. The Numero Group executives who were pushing the boxed set then found a tape containing an alternative version of their 1982 Land Speed Record album in the piles maintained by friend of the band, Terry Katzman. They knew they were onto something. “If you’re a fan of this band, you’ve heard Land Speed a million times,” the label co-founder Ken Shipley said. “But if you heard a totally different version of that same record and it sounded better … it’s like, this is actually what you want, you just don’t know it yet.”
Numero will be releasing Savage Young Dü, a three-disc box, plus an extensive, 144-page booklet written by Erin Osman, that chronicles the band’s evolution prior to its 1983 SST signing. Containing 69 tracks recorded between 1979 and 1982, Savage Young Dü features all of the band’s 7-inches from the period, including “Statues”/”Amusement” (which Numero reissued on vinyl in 2013 as a Record Store Day special) and 1982’s “In a Free Land”; a remastered version of Hüsker Dü’s second album, 1983’s Everything Falls Apart; an alternate version of their 1982 debut, Land Speed Record; and a heap of demos, alternate takes, and live versions of a number of previously unreleased songs. And all of it sounds incredible — even the cruddiest source material rings through with maximal volume and clarity.
‘Everything Falls Apart’ (1983)
Keeping with the punk mindset of the era, Husker Du’s debut album doesn’t even reach the 20-minute mark. Almost everything here is played at triple speed, giving little indication of the depth that would surface on the following year’s double-album masterwork ‘Zen Arcade.’ Like fellow Minneapolis punks the Replacements’ first LP, ‘Everything Falls Apart’ is almost ashamed of the hearts beating beneath the noise and guitars. They’d soon get over that.
‘Zen Arcade’ (1984)
Just one year after their scene-specific debut, Husker Du doubled down on their second album, a sprawling two-record wasteland of post-punk noise and ambitious prog-like heft. There’s even a concept running throughout the album, a landmark record of the college-rock movement. Songwriters Bob Mould and Grant Hart weren’t trying to wrestle control of the group yet, so there’s a harmony to the songs, even the 14-minute closer, a dizzying display of punk rock’s industrious potential in the mid ’80s.
Of the many fantastic American indie guitar albums released in 1984, Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade” is arguably among the best. All the more remarkable when you consider that it was made on less than a shoestring, much of it recorded live, despite the backdrop of political pro U.S.A. Reaganism sloganeering in the media and British “second invasion” twaddle dominating the U.S charts at the time. Husker Du created music which reached out to a polarised underground U.S. punk community and more importantly helped give it a voice.
If you have never heard this record before then you will be surprised how musicaly diverse it is. First of all it’s a concept double album based loosely around the story of a young runnaway escaping a broken home into a world of drugs and violence. The 23 songs range from melodic hardcore (“Pride”, “I will Never Forget You”), bizarre instramentals (“Tooth Fairy”, “Reocurring Dreams”) acoustic folk (“Never Talking To You Again”), indie pop (“Pink Turns To Blue”, “Somewhere”) and progressive rock wig-outs (“Turn On The News”, “What’s Going On”).
‘New Day Rising’ (1985)
The first of Husker Du’s two albums in 1985 is a powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll record that sheds some of the more sprawling idealism found on its double-record predecessor ‘Zen Arcade.’ They pack 15 songs into 40 whiplash minutes, barely letting up. The punk influences, so prevalent just a few years earlier, are knocked back in favor of some truly tuneful moments like “Celebrated Summer.” And the raging title track is one of their all-time best.
Among the other highlights include If I Told You, 59 Times the Pain and Terms Of Pyschic Warface, the latter perhaps their most radio-friendly track up to this point, but there’s nary a duff track here, except perhaps the rather throwaway one-line opener. A classic album, then, the influence of which is still being heard today.
‘Flip Your Wig’ (1985)
Released just eight months after ‘New Day Rising,’ Husker Du’s fourth album continues the move toward souped-up power-pop. “Makes No Sense at All” is the standout track, but the rest of it falls into place with an almost effortless grace — partly due to the band producing for the first time. They left indie label SST after this record for the big-league ‘Candy Apple Grey,’ a polished evolution of the groundwork laid out here.
Grant Hart also begins to emerge from Mould’s shadow with five impressive tunes, including “Green Eyes” which remains one of his best and a missed opportunity as a second single. “Flip Your Wig” is a classic album and the perfect introduction to the band.
‘Candy Apple Grey’ (1986)
On the surface, the band’s first major-label record seems to indicate a shift from their punk roots to more pop territory. But in reality, Husker Du were getting to this place with each album. They were prolific, always moving forward- the pop sensibilities becoming apparent on tracks like ‘Makes No Sense at All’, ‘Games’ and ‘Books About UFO’s’ are in excelis here. The production aspect is something that dogged Husker Du throughout their recording career, and every single album has serious sonic failings. “Candy Apple Grey” is all treble, and the shift from indie to major has made no difference to the audio quality at all.
The songs are more personal and stripped-down — Bob Mould’s “Hardly Getting Over It” may be his best-written song — and the band’s playing is more focused, even though the trio was splitting apart. In a way, ‘Candy Apple Grey’ is Husker’s most central album, 37 minutes of ’80s college rock without the usual mid-decade baggage.
‘Warehouse: Songs and Stories’ (1987)
The band’s final album, like its masterpiece ‘Zen Arcade’ three years earlier, is a two-record set that often plays like a post-punk version of the White Album. By now, Bob Mould and Grant Hart’s songs had taken distinctively different paths, and no Husker Du album reveals this more than ‘Warehouse: Songs and Stories.’ It’s loosely tied together as a cycle of love songs, as the two songwriters weave in and out of each other here, telling a story of nostalgia, doubt and breakup. A fitting end. Husker Du were one of the most prolific and influential bands to emerge from the US in the eighties. This, their seventh album in little over five years, is a fitting testament to their intense, but melodic hardcore sound. The songwriting chores are split pretty much evenly between Bob Mould and Grant Hart, and explore familiar themes of alienation, loneliness, helplessness and lost love. Yet despite the less than cheerful subject matter the music is always uplifting, from the album opener “These Important Years” to “You Can Live At Home”, with Grant Hart screaming that, despite everything, running away from home may not be the answer.
This was supposed to be the record that would break Husker Du yet it ended with them breaking up, after the suicide of their manager, David Savoy. A shame really, because this is a melodic, literate, intelligent album that manages to be sad without being depressing- and, for those that care about such things, it rocks big time.
Do You Remember Radio?
One of the great regrets is that, due to a catastrophically unhappy band breakup and record company intransigence, the Husker Du back catalogue has never been properly re-mastered. With that in mind, treasures like this have even more significance. Great efforts have been made to make these radio recordings presentable and both shows, from 1981 in San Francisco and 1985 in Minneapolis, show the band in real-time and at their best. A fascinating insight into one of the most significant influences on the modern music scene and for diehard Husker Du fans like myself, utterly indispensable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgeO0hgBiYs
HUSKER DU – ” Savage Young Du ” (4 X 12″ VINYL LP)
Tags: Bob Mould, Grant Hart, Greg Norton, Husker Du, Savage Young Dü
American punk band Hüsker Dü’s early music is being remastered from the original analogue tapes, and released on vinyl in a new retrospective called Savage Young Dü.
Experience the punishing sonic origins of a punk icon. Collected here for the first time, and skillfully remastered from original board tapes, demos, and session masters, this collection is an authoritative chronicling of the wellspring and maturation of Grant Hart, Greg Norton and Bob Mouldthree St. Paul teenagers whod go on to become the most heralded trio of the American punk underground. Follow the Hüskers to their earliest gigs in 1979, through extensive road dog touring, and to the start of their partnership with West Coast tastemaker SST in 1983.
This primitive stage in the fabled career of Hüsker Dü is presented as a deluxe box set and packaged with a hardbound book crammed full of never before seen photos, flyers, and a sprawling essay with participation from the band. Spread across four LPs 47 of the 69 songs compiled here are previously unissued. Also included are Statues/Amusement, In A Free Land, Everything Falls Apart, and an alternate recording of the Land Speed Record set.
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Restlessness is the first step towards pleasure. We make comfort out of discomfort, pleasure out of pain. That journey isn't always a straight line, but at least we're going somewhere real. "I had to move, Lord I couldn't be still" is the unsettled way that Video Age's new album and title track, Pleasure Line, begins. But as the song unfolds, it uplifts us into a romantic space of possibility and love. Just as "love" is both a noun and a verb, Pleasure Line is both a road to be traveled and the act of crossing that road. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Ross Farbe says, "Once you cross that threshold and become vulnerable in love, there's a whole new challenge. There's a reason that song comes first on the album, because the rest of the songs exist in that place." These catchy, memorable songs radiate big "glass half-full" energy. Video Age's third album, due out from Winspear on August 7, 2020, pairs neon-bright 80s pop melodies with a vast range of influences (including Janet Jackson, David Bowie, and Paul McCartney) to create an optimistic sound all their own. The influences vary song to song, but they're all tinted with the same rosy hue, and Ross says, "I'm often trying to create a more idealized version of the world I'm in." Video Age's first two albums were about loneliness and discovering oneself, but Pleasure Line takes on a whole new attitude, considering both Ross and songwriting partner Ray Micarelli are getting married this year (just a few weeks apart from each other, too). "We're feeling the love, " Ray says, laughing. But these aren't expressions of one-dimensional puppy love-this is euphoria with depth, ecstasy with complications. In the twinkling "Comic Relief, " Ross sings, "I know the world is killing me / I love you baby, can't you see / Ain't nothing but a comedy." And in the funk-inspired "Shadow on the Wall, " Ross sings, "I got the gloom, baby, covering me / Cuz you're a cruel silhouette as could be." Darkness is always lurking somewhere beneath happiness, but in the Video Age, even melancholy sounds like something you can dance to. The songwriting duo has been playing music together for the past ten years after meeting in college-Ray says he was initially drawn to Ross' "old school cadence" and their shared love for dancefloor hits. Experimentation and play is crucial to their approach, as is collaboration. Joined by band members and multi-instrumentalists Nick Corson and Duncan Troast, Video Age recorded the album together in Ross' New Orleans home studio. Pleasure Line is a salve that protects against cynicism-listening to this album, you can't help but feel the world around you is full of romantic potential. In the hands of Video Age, even the mundanities of touring are transformed into a mood-lifting ode to their 1995 white "Aerostar." When asked how he manages to stay so positive on the road, Ray says, "Playing music is a joy and a privilege." That kind of sincerity bleeds from every song on this album, creating not only nostalgia for good times past, but also hope for a better future. On the last song, "Good to Be Back, " Ross sings, "I've made my mistakes / I live and I learn / That people can change." The song is meant to sound like a theme song to a 70s sitcom, and you can almost see Ross and Ray opening the door and smiling at the camera: "What can I say, it's good to be back."
Label: WINSPEAR
Pleasure Line [Purple Royalty LP]
Artist: Video Age
Vinyl - Purple Royalty LP
1. Pleasure Line
2. Maybe Just Once
3. Blushing
4. Aerostar
5. Comic Relief
6. Sweet Marie
7. Shadow on the Wall
8. That Can't Be
9. Meet Me in My Heart
10. Good to Be Back
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Grandpa Miguel Cecilio (reboot)
by Tina V. Cabrera in Writerly Stuff
I met Grandpa for the first time in a photo: Bushy eyebrows, full lips, wavy hair cropped close to the head. Dressed in a wool suit jacket worn over a white dress shirt, bow tie with a crosshatched design.
Full-frontal profile in the color of sepia crookedly cropped and set in a 12 x 18 inch frame. Indiscriminately written on the back of the photo in blue ink cursive, Miguel Cecilio and the year 1938.
From a purely historical standpoint, Miguel Cecilio’s moustache resembles that of Hitler. Yet, he looks more like a Romantic poet pleading for you to see into the complexity behind those soulful eyes.
Mama said she was born in 1941, though her birth certificate states 1940. That mean that this photo of Grandpa labeled 1938 must have been taken only two or three years before Mama was born. Mama said he died when she was three. He looks no more than 30 in the photo, which means he both became a father and died at a relatively young age.
Papa says that Filipinos tend to date their photos arbitrarily, meaning no one knows for sure if this photo was really taken in 1938. Maybe Grandma (assuming she’s the one most likely to have labeled the photo) decided to date it on the day Grandpa gave it to her, rather than writing down the year it was actually taken. Or, if Grandpa didn’t give it to her, perhaps the photo slipped out of the pages of a magazine, cookbook, or out of Grandpa’s private diary only to be discovered accidentally. Perhaps Grandma found it stuck between the cushions of Grandpa’s favorite armchair, or underneath the kitchen sink. No one knows for sure, but what this does mean is that there’s the possibility this photo was taken years before 1938 – say as early as 1930 or even 1928. If this is the case, then this man who would become my grandfather became father to my mother at an older age than imagined previously, which would mean that he didn’t die all that young after all.
Whatever the case, what is known for certain is that the man in the photo, Miguel Cecilio, left behind a family in Spain (a wife and son) and some time later married a woman in the Philippines, the young woman who became my grandmother, who was a mere teenager at the time. He and she had two daughters together.
This one photo remains of Grandpa Miguel Cecilio, an up-close profile of his face with a moustache and brown eyes. He appears young in the photo, and by any standard, a handsome man.
1944 (or 43)
Grandma told her two daughters – the woman who became my mother and the woman who became my aunt – that their father had been killed by a wild boar while hunting, that he bled to death after being gored by said boar.
Adult male wild boars develop tusks that serve as tools and weapons. Adult female boars also have sharp canines but not protruding like the male.
Wild boars forage in the early morning hours or late afternoon. The male lowers its head, charges, and then slashes upward with his tusks. The female, whose tusks are not visible, charges with her head up, mouth wide, and bites. Such attacks are not often fatal to humans, but may result in severe trauma, dismemberment, or blood loss.
Miguel Cecilio did not lose a limb. A female boar – in an effort to protect her young – might have charged him. He did not stop to observe whether the boar attacked from a solitary position or from a sounder.
It isn’t of vital importance to know whether the boar that gored Miguel Cecilio was male or female. Either way, an attack could lead to blood loss, which could lead to one bleeding to death. The story goes that Miguel Cecilio bled to death from a fatal wound, whether a bite or a slash. Such attacks are not usually fatal to humans.
Grandpa only knew his daughter – the woman who became my mother – until the age of three. He never knew that she would die of a rare cancer at the age of 58. Only five percent of women who get uterine cancer get this most deadly kind.
She placed his photo – a kind of oracle of a tragedy yet to come – on the table at the entrance of the hallway, between two fancy candelabras so she could look at it inconspicuously on the way out the door each day.
This habit of photo worship began when Josephine was very young.
Lourdes, Miguel Cecilio’s wife, built a shrine. Lourdes kept the shrine for years after Miguel’s death, dusting and polishing the crosses and frames each week, one at a time. At the time there were plenty of other photos of her husband. None of them were in color. Some were sepia, others black and white. Josephine, the older of the two daughters, happened to grab the photo that would become the only surviving one, rescuing it from the fire that burned not only the entire shrine, but all the other photos when she was nine (or ten). The fire was put out in time to save the home and their lives.
All of this occurred a short time before Lourdes, the mother of Josephine and Patricia, sent them away to a Catholic orphanage.
There the nuns in charge of Josephine and Patricia stole their valuables – jewelry, money, hairpieces and stationary for writing letters home. That is why Lourdes never received any letters from her daughters while they grew into young ladies. The nuns left the photo of the young girls’ father, Miguel Cecilio, alone because it did not appear valuable – neither the photo nor the plastic frame in which it was held.
Josephine slept with the photo under her pillow. She often snuck it out at night after the nuns made their rounds and under the sheet with a small flashlight, she admired the smooth skin and beckoning eyes. She tried to match any memories of her father with the man in the photo and came up empty. She tried to picture the shrine photos before they burned, but the flames always got in the way. In time, the only memory she had was the figure in this one photo.
The sisters’ beds sat side by side, and often, after the nuns made their ritual rounds, they would scoot their beds together into one. Patricia asked for her turn to sleep with the photo under her pillow, not because it was of any real importance to her. As the younger of the two, she wanted only to emulate the older. In fact, being the younger, she felt no kinship with the handsome man in the photo who happened to be her father. But in order to be the good big sister that she knew she should be, Josephine acquiesced and hesitantly handed the valued photo to her sister every other night.
At last, in the bloom of their youth, their mother Lourdes removed Josephine and Patricia from the orphanage and brought them back home. Josephine, now a teen, lacked the same fervor she had had for the photo of her father and gave it back to her mother, who set it inside a drawer (she couldn’t keep it on display as she was now married to another man). The photo survived the passing years of forgetfulness, and somehow ended up once again in Josephine’s possession.
One day, on her way out the door, Josephine forgot to look at the photo. At mid-day, she tried to see her father as a living, moving being in color, holding her three-year-old self on his knee. She failed. Rather, she saw a large rifle mounted on the wall. When she blinked, the rifle was gone. In its place was an overcoat, which when she approached it in her daydream smelled like medicine and Lysol.
By the time Josephine reached midlife, she had had several children. I, the youngest of four girls, one day inquired about Grandfather Miguel Cecilio. I used to tell my classmates the story you told me, I said to Mama, in the fifth grade. My friends would giggle and ask me to tell the story again and again. Had Grandpa really been killed by a wild boar? At last, Mama told me, rumor has it he really died of a fatal illness, most likely cancer, one of the real leading causes of death.
I look at this one surviving photo of Grandpa Miguel Cecilio again and again: The same bushy eyebrows. Full lips. Wavy hair cropped close to the head. Brown soulful eyes. I try to see passed them. All I see is this one thing. This one thing only.
Previous Wall Crawler Next Why We Go to the Movies (from “The Day of No Dead, and other Disturbances”)
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Tag: O Fortuna
Ranking the top 5 moments from “American Horror Story: Apocalypse” season 8 episode 8: “What Am I Supposed To Do?”
Happy Thursday TV fans! After watching the FX network’s American Horror Story: Apocalypse season 8 episode 8 last night, we took a break from the “Coven” story-line and followed Michael Langdon’s path, as he desperately tried to figure out what he should do next. I guess being the Antichrist is tougher than one might imagine. Please note spoilers are ahead if you have not gotten a chance to watch the latest episode yet. In last night’s episode, “Sojourn,” Cordelia tries to get through to Michael, but to no avail. Meanwhile, we meet some new characters at the “Church of Satan” and also catch up with some old ones, revealing some answers about Outpost 3. We also continue to get some fun Easter eggs along the way. My top 5 moments from American Horror Story: Apocalypse season 8 episode 8 are:
“You can write your own destiny.”
In the beginning of the episode, Michael Langdon is beyond heartbroken to find out that Ms. Mead has been burned at the stake. Cordelia reminds Michael that he’ll “never see her again” and that he is alone now, but Michael explains that he still has his father. Despite Michael being the Antichrist, Cordelia still tries to get through to him and sees the potential humanity within him. Michael doesn’t want to hear it; however, and says, “Somehow, someway, I’m going to bring her back and then I’m gonna kill every last one of you.” Well at least Michael is still motivated, but this moment is important because it reminds us that Michael has his own identity and path to find now. Whether we are on Team Coven or Team Langdon, we can’t ignore the fact that Michael has a tough road ahead of him.
“Are you ready for an old fashioned human sacrifice?”
Michael goes in search of answers and calls out to his father. He starves himself for four days in the woods and begins hallucinating, seeing children reaching out to him with food and drinks. It is important to note that we see an apple here, reminding us again about the “Garden of Eden” and also connecting us to the future where everyone at Outpost 3 will be poisoned by apples. Michael also sees snakes and goats, which we have seen during the apocalypse as well, foreshadowing what is to come next. Michael eventually stumbles upon the “Church of Satan” and meets some interesting characters. The leader of the Church of Satan, played by Sandra Bernhard, may be influenced by evil, but she is actually pretty funny. She inspires the crowd and reminds them that stealing $100 out of a register is not the kind of evil she is talking about. When she presents the human sacrifices, she gives us a little bit of their resume, revealing that both sacrifices do a lot of good work in their lives and she hilariously comments, “Bitch please” and “Isn’t that just too precious?” She is ready to make the world a little “shittier” by sacrificing these people to Satan. I guess it’s worth it to sell your soul to the devil, especially if you get to sleep with Ryan Reynolds as an added bonus. The “Church of Satan” is most likely known as “The Cooperative” in the future, putting together more pieces of the puzzle.
“I’m the one you’re waiting for.”
While taking a back seat at the “Church of Satan,” Michael gets quite the show and even gets to listen to the choir perform “O Fortuna,” which means “Oh Fate” when translated from Latin and further goes on about destiny, which is perhaps the sign that our Michael Langdon has been waiting for, even though his father has yet to make an appearance. After losing Ms. Mead, Michael is in need of some guidance and meets Madeline, played by the amazing Harriet Sansom Harris. Madeline steps in as a sort of mother type and even gives Michael a hot meal. After Michael shows her his mark behind his ear, Madeline is absolutely convinced that he is the one they have all been waiting for. Madeline presents him to the rest of the church and Michael proves his worthiness by killing the two sacrifices. The church is clearly behind him and he is ready to embrace his destiny, but he still feels emptiness without Ms. Mead by his side.
“I am HR bitch!”
Madeline thinks that she can help Michael by introducing him to characters played by Evan Peters and Billy Eichner who are a bit eccentric, extreme, and heavily addicted to cocaine. Before we get to them, it’s important to note that we also get to see Ms. Venable here. Ms. Venable is clearly not a huge fan of her bosses, reminding them not to call her “babe” and looking absolutely fabulous in purple, which is apparently her thing. This is important because in the future, “The Purples” are the elite at Outpost 3. Ms. Venable also loves to rock purple in the future as well. The character played by Evan Peters talks about the importance of a light rock playlist and we even get to hear the song, “The Morning After” play again, suggesting that this could have been the initial inspiration for using this music in Outpost 3 to drive everyone mad. While I didn’t catch the names of these two characters, it is possible that they are under a kind of identity spell in the future as well, especially if Michael considers them to be allies or perhaps former allies.
“You came to the right place.”
We learn that the characters played by Peters and Eichner work in robotics and Michael is looking to re-create Ms. Mead. After filling them in on everything about her, Michael is impressed by their work and we get to see Miriam Mead 2.0, which finally helps us connect the dots in the future. Michael feels complete with her by his side again, which signals that he is now ready to fulfill his destiny. It seems like we now have a lot of the past explained, so I am ready to fast forward to the future. Stay tuned!
I hope you enjoyed the list and feel free to post your own theories and thoughts on American Horror Story: Apocalypse below in the comments section. Thanks so much for reading and happy viewing!
**I would love it if you would take a moment to check out my Whizbuzz Book page via the link below for everything you need to know about my new book, The Search for Alice, including my author bio page and links to my website and social media sites! Thank you!
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I am so excited to announce that my book, The Search for Alice, is now available! If you enjoy fairy-tale retellings, paranormal romance, horror, and mystery, then this might be the book for you or someone you know! Thank you for taking the time to check it out and I appreciate any feedback as well. I hope you enjoy!
When Kallie Bennett, a jaded teenage girl plagued by her alcoholic mother and her peers molded out of sheer bubble gum perfection, chases after Alice in Wonderland herself, she ends up lost in her own version of Wonderland, which forces her to face her utmost fears and introduces her to familiar characters with a dark twist. Among these characters is Ches, a gorgeous vampire with a conflicted conscience, who becomes Kallie’s guide and blossoming love interest. She also crosses paths with Queen Hartley, a manipulative witch who has the power to strip away one’s memories and imagination, which brings a bone chilling new meaning to “off with their heads.” In The Search for Alice, Kallie starts to realize that her Wonderland is just as frightening as her own reality and that she cannot always run away from her problems. She must figure out a way to defeat Queen Hartley and return home before it is too late, but she soon learns that escaping Wonderland means leaving Ches behind forever.
Want to read more? You can click the link directly below for a free preview. Thanks for your support!
The Search for Alice is available here!
Posted on November 1, 2018 Categories American Horror Story: Apocalypse, UncategorizedTags AHS, AHS easter eggs, AHS: Apocalypse, American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Apocalypse, Antichrist, Billy Eichner, Church of Satan, Coven, destiny, drama, easter eggs, episode 8, episode recap, Evan Peters, fans, FX network, Garden of Eden, Harriet Sansom Harris, horror, identity spell, Michael Langdon, Ms. Mead, Ms. Venable, O Fortuna, Outpost 3, Ranking, sacrifice, Sandra Bernhard, Season 8, Sojourn, spoilers, Team Coven, Team Langdon, television, The Cooperative, The Morning After, The Purples, theories, top 5 list, Top 5 moments, TV, witchesLeave a comment on Ranking the top 5 moments from “American Horror Story: Apocalypse” season 8 episode 8: “What Am I Supposed To Do?”
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You are here: Home / Televisions / Comparisons / HD, FHD, and UHD TVs: What’s the Difference?
HD, FHD, and UHD TVs: What’s the Difference?
November 21, 2016 By Kenny
When shopping for a new TV, you’re sure to come across tons of technical terms. Among those terms are HD, FHD, and UHD. But what exactly do these acronyms stand for, and what do they mean? We’ll explore the meaning behind these terms and help you determine which is best for your new TV in this article.
What is resolution?
The terms HD, FHD, and UHD all refer to the resolution of a TV. Resolution is one way to measure the picture quality on your TV. The resolution refers to the number of pixels on the screen. A pixel is one single tiny dot. Together, pixels form the images on your TV or computer screen.
If you have two TVs of the same size and one has more pixels in that amount of space, then that TV is said to have a higher resolution. The actual resolution is measured by the number of pixels up and down the screen vertically by the number across the screen horizontally.
So how does that relate to HD, FHD, and UHD? Well, these terms actually tell you roughly how many pixels are on a TV screen, or what the exact resolution is.
HD TVs have been around for a while now. Pretty much every single TV you’ll find on the shelves of any major retailer will at least be an HD TV. However, when HD TVs first emerged onto the scene, they were considered the best of the best.
An HD TV has a higher resolution than old TVs from the early 2000’s or before. When you think of HD TVs, you might think of flat screen or flat panel TVs. HD TVs became popular as old CRT TVs (think of the big, boxy TVs of the 80’s and 90’s) faded away.
HD TVs have a resolution of at least 720p, or 1,280 pixels by 720 pixels. However, most modern HD TVs have a resolution of 1080p, or 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels. Any HD content on TV or HD streaming content will likely be in 1080p resolution and will look best on a 1080p HD TV.
FHD TVs
FHD is very similar to regular HD TVs. FHD simply stands for Full HD (or Full High Definition). As stated in the previous section, HD TVs come in two resolutions—720p and 1080p. FHD simply means that a TV is the higher resolution—1080p.
As TV manufacturers phase out the 720p resolution, the term FHD is used less and less. Today, if you’re looking for a 1080p TV, you can just buy pretty much any regular HD TV. If you’re not sure whether a TV is regular HD or FHD, check the resolution to be sure.
UHD TVs
UHD is the latest in TV resolution technology. UHD is also referred to as Ultra HD or 4K. Now that HD TVs or FHD TVs are basically standard, UHD TVs could be the next new big thing.
UHD TVs have a resolution of 3,840 pixels by 2,160 pixels. That’s a total of over 8 million pixels. Compare that to a regular HD TV with a resolution of just 720p, which has less than 1 million pixels total. Even a FHD TV has just over 2 million pixels, far short of the 8+ million a UHD TV has.
There are two major downsides to purchasing a UHD TV—the cost and lack of available content. A UHD TV is significantly more expensive than an HD TV or UHD TV. This should come as no surprise, since quality always comes at a cost.
The other problem with UHD TVs is the lack of UHD content. Most cable channels only broadcast in 1080p, and most streaming content is only available in 1080p at the most. This means you might spend the money on UHD TV and not even be able to watch anything in Ultra HD.
Still, if you’re looking towards the future, a UHD or 4K TV is the way to go. Eventually, it will likely overtake HD TVs as the most popular kind of TV. As prices drop and more content becomes available, a UHD TV will be the best TV out there.
Filed Under: Comparisons
John McBratney says
Good explanation, it is clear now and will assist in a new buy
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Outside Employment
University Policy Number 2227
Categorized: Human Resources and Payroll
Responsible Office: Human Resources and Payroll
Policy Procedure:
Outside Employment Guidelines and Request for Approval
Related Law & Policy:
Administrative Professional Faculty Handbook
DHRM Policy 1.60, Standards of Conduct
Policy 2226: Supplemental Pay
Virginia Conflict of Interests Act
I. SCOPE
The policies and procedures provided herein apply to all George Mason University full-time and part-time Classified staff and Administrative and Professional faculty. This policy defines outside employment and establishes the reporting, application, and approval policies and procedures to be followed by individuals engaging in outside employment or seeking approval for outside employment.
II. POLICY STATEMENT
George Mason University recognizes the importance of providing a systematic approval process so that appropriate outside employment opportunities can be approved and formally acknowledged. The employee/employer relationship between the employee and the University is continuous and it encompasses any and all work performed for the University.
Employees may engage in certain employment outside the university, provided that the employee has obtained prior written approval of his or her supervisor and the employee complies with all relevant University policies, including policies regarding conflicts of interest, and annual leave; and records annual leave when performing outside employment during normal or scheduled working hours. Permission to engage in outside employment must be renewed annually in writing.
Employees may not engage in outside employment which the supervisor has determined, in his or her sole discretion:
Interferes with the employee’s regular responsibilities and duties; or
Results in any actual conflict or appearance of conflict with his or her University Employment responsibilities; or
Results in a situation of unfair competition for the University.
When performing outside employment:
Approval of outside employment does not preclude the requirement to work additional hours for the University in urgent situations;
The employee performing outside employment is solely responsible for work performed in the course of outside employment, and the University is not responsible for such work;
All outside work is performed in the employee’s individual capacity;
No University-owned resources may be used including, but not limited to, office supplies, computing equipment or network access;
The employee does not officially represent the University and is not an employee or agent of the University when acting in that capacity; and
The views, thoughts, and expressions of the employee do not represent the views or position of the University.
Employees engaging in outside employment are encouraged to provide all other employers and customers a written statement that explains all such restrictions.
Contracting with State Agencies and Outsource Firms
Employees considering outside employment with another state agency or private firm should be aware of the Virginia Conflict of Interests Act, which prohibits employees from having a personal interest in a contract with the University other than her or his own contract for employment. In addition, if a George Mason University employee is considering outside employment with any firm or entity that has a contract with the University, the employee must file an “Outside Employment Request and Approval” form; and, if such employee will receive salary or other benefits from the firm or entity that may reasonably be anticipated to exceed $5,000 annually, the employee must also file a Statement of Economic Interests. The employee’s supervisor must receive regular and routine reports (monthly or quarterly) from such firm or entity identifying the number of hours and total payment made to the University employee. Any request for outside employment with an outside firm or entity will also require a signature by an Executive Council member. All required forms must be maintained by the respective department and the Human Resources Department.
III. DEFINITIONS
Outside employment is defined as work for any non-University entity or person whether or not such work is performed on campus, and also includes self-employment and self-initiated professional services such as consulting, workshops, seminars, conferences, institutes, or short courses provided to any entity or person other than the University, if the employee receives compensation for providing such services.
IV. PROCEDURES
All Classified and Administrative and Professional faculty who wish to engage in outside employment must complete an “Outside Employment Request and Approval” form. The form will require the individual to describe in detail the extra employment anticipated and to seek approval. Any changes to the information provided in this request that could adversely impact their employment at Mason must be reported and approved prior to making the change in outside employment.
The decision to approve outside employment will be based, in part, upon an assessment of whether the proposed outside employment can be achieved without adversely affecting the individual’s performance at George Mason University.
All request and approval forms for outside employment will be kept in the supervisor’s file for the employee and a copy must also be sent to Human Resources and Payroll to be filed in the employee’s personnel file. Outside employment agreements should be reviewed annually from the effective date noted on the form for accuracy. Agreements are subject to revocation or amendment by the supervisor if concerns arise about the impact that the outside employment has on the staff member’s employment with the University.
V. RESPONSIBILITIES
Employees are responsible for informing their supervisor of all outside employment and any changes that occur to that employment after their request has been approved.
Immediate supervisors are responsible for monitoring approved outside employment agreements to ensure that the outside employment does not adversely impact the individual’s obligations to the University.
Human Resources and Payroll is responsible for receiving all approved “Outside Employment Request and Approval” forms and maintaining them in accordance with state and University record keeping policies.
Department heads, directors, deans, Vice Presidents’ and Senior Vice Presidents’ are responsible for reviewing the potential for interference between an employee member’s outside employment and his or her primary duties at the University. The Associate Vice President of Human Resources and Payroll and University Counsel should be consulted with questions regarding the policy.
Supervisors of Purchase Card holders who have been authorized outside employment must ensure all purchases made with the university purchase card are for official university business.
VI. SANCTIONS
An employee may be disciplined up to and including termination for outside employment that has not been previously approved, occurs during work hours without the use of appropriate leave, or is determined to be in violation of University guidelines, state policy or the Virginia Conflict of Interest Act.
VII. EXCLUSIONS
Administrative and Professional faculty are exempt from the prohibition of teaching at another institution during those months when they are not under contract to teach or work at the University.
This policy does not apply to outside volunteer opportunities for which no compensation or other remuneration is received, unless such work adversely interferes with the responsibilities of the administrative/professional faculty or staff member to the University.
This policy does not apply to wage employees and adjunct, instructional, part-time, and research faculty members.
VIII. EFFECTIVE DATE AND APPROVAL
This policy is effective July 20, 2011. This policy shall be reviewed and revised, if necessary, annually to become effective at the beginning of the University’s fiscal year, unless otherwise noted.
Approved:
__/S_____________________
Maurice W. Scherrens
__/S______________________
Date approved: August 15, 2011
Revised: May 2, 2016
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Home The Trumpet News British court upholds removal of Celestial Church Shepherd
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British court upholds removal of Celestial Church Shepherd
By Trumpet Media Group
The High Court in London resolving a dispute between Trustees of Celestial Church of Christ (CCC) Edward Street Parish London and its sacked Shepherd-in-Charge and Pastor's Representative - Prophet Dennis Olumide Lawson, has upheld the latter's removal.
His Honour Judge Hodge QC also made an Interim Payment Order against Lawson for 80% of the £130,000 legal costs of the Church Trustees in the sum of £90,000.
As an alternative to the granting of an injunction sought by the Church Trustees, Lawson was offered an opportunity to give an undertaking to restrain from any future passing-off or use of the name "Edward Street Parish," or entry into the Parish's church building.
The dispute which began in 2013, led to in-fighting and a highly-polarised congregation; and saw police officers visiting the church on a number of occasions to maintain peace.
CCC Edward Street
The Church Trustees dragged Lawson to court to seek (in summary) orders:
(1) restraining the defendant (Prophet Lawson) from passing off his activities, or those of his congregation which are not those of the claimants (Trustees of CCC Edward Street) or their congregation, as the activities of the claimants by the use of the words "Edward Street Parish."
(2) an injunction restraining Prophet Lawson from entering or using the claimants' church building at Edward Street, London SE14.
(3) declarations that from March 2014, Prophet Lawson has ceased to be a trustee, member or employee of the Parish, and
(4) if Lawson still remains a trustee of the Parish, an order removing him from that position.
On the other hand, Lawson in his amended defence and counter claim, had insisted that he remains the Shepherd-in-Charge of the Parish and, as such, that he is one of the persons "having the general control and management of the administration of" the Parish within the meaning of section 177 of the Charities Act 2011 together with damages to be assessed in respect of the Parish's failure to pay his stipend following the purported termination of his appointment.
Based on a number of inconsistencies in Lawson's testimony in court, Judge Hodge stated that: "I find that I cannot treat the defendant (Lawson) as a witness of truth or as a reliable and credible witness. In cross-examination, I found him to be a combative witness who was reluctant to answer questions; and I am satisfied that he was not being honest with the court. At one point on the afternoon of the final day of his evidence I observed the defendant laughing and smiling when denying the proposition that he was lying when asserting that he was happy to work with the members of the church who disagreed with him and had never sought to intimidate them."
Judge Hodge added that: "I find that the Parish cannot properly function as a church and as a religious charity with the defendant in his role as Shepherd and as a member of the church."
Genesis of the crisis
The genesis of the crisis in the church can be traced back to 8 May 2013, when the elders of the Parish wrote to the overall and Supreme Head of the Celestial Church of Christ Worldwide - Pastor Emmanuel Oshoffa, referring to a "deteriorating state of affairs" at the Parish "with quarrels, infighting, police involvement, threat of court cases and even a threat of Charity Commission involvement etc". In order "for peace and stability to reign and progress ensured in" the Parish, they proposed that:
(1) Prophet Lawson's "irrational attitude towards the Elders and unguided utterances during devotional services are unhelpful towards peace and harmony in the church and he should be called to order by you, in order to avoid unmanageable situation";
(2) the Parish would not accept the appointment of Mr Yinka Akande (now late) as Assistant or Deputy Shepherd; and
(3) the Parochial Committee and the Elders should be consulted before any appointment was made concerning the spiritual and administrative leadership of the Parish.
On 1 September 2013, seven members of the Parochial Committee Executive and eight members of the Elders' Council wrote to Pastor Oshoffa stating that they had totally lost confidence in the defendant and had concluded that they had had enough. They wanted "to formally call for a new Shepherd who will become a new light and future guide for the innocent congregation to be appointed in your capacity as the Pastor in charge".
On 5 September 2013, a Parochial Committee Executives Meeting attended by eight members and chaired by Mr Olufemi Shorinolu voted unanimously in favour of suspending Prophet Lawson for four weeks in order to conduct an investigation into the allegations levelled against him.
The eight members of the Parochial Committee wrote a letter to the Trustees of the Parish asking them to hold a meeting to deliberate on the defendant's suspension as matter of urgency.
Trustees met on 7 September 2013 and voted unanimously in favour of the Parochial Executives' decision to suspend Prophet Lawson from his duties as Shepherd. This was said not to be a disciplinary sanction: during the period of suspension, the defendant would continue to be paid his salary in the usual way. It was said that suspension was being implemented because the allegations were of gross misconduct and serious in nature, relating to the defendant's conduct towards members of the church and his unauthorised use of church funds and property. During the period of his suspension, Prophet Lawson was not to be permitted to attend the church premises.
On 20 September 2013, the trustees of the Parish issued proceedings against Prophet Lawson in the Bromley County Court, but at an interim injunction hearing on 24 September, the District Judge held that the application contained no cause of action and directed that it should be struck out unless, by 11 October 2013, the Trustees filed amended particulars of claim setting out clearly a cause of action, the facts relied upon and the remedy sought. Following a further court hearing on 12 December 2013, the county court claim was eventually struck out on 14 April 2014 on the grounds of the Trustees' non-compliance with this order, with the Trustees being ordered to pay Prophet Lawson's costs.
On 4 October 2013, Mr Shorinolu wrote a further letter to Prophet Lawson inviting him to attend a meeting of the committee appointed to carry out the proposed investigation into the allegations levelled against him - a meeting Prophet Lawson did not attend.
The period of suspension was extended for six weeks because of Prophet Lawson's alleged "wilful refusal to comply with the terms of his suspension and non-cooperation."
Prophet Lawson told the court that he had not received this letter and that he had not been aware of the terms of his suspension.
On 6 October 2013, 93 members of the Parish wrote to Prophet Lawson asserting their support for him and stating that they had passed a vote of no confidence and had dissolved with immediate effect, the current Parochial Committee led by Mr Shorinolu.
On 14 October 2013, solicitors acting for Lawson, wrote to the Parish confirming that the defendant would not be attending the meeting that day and stating that the defendant was very concerned that those bringing the complaints against him were also the very people purporting to conduct the inquiry.
On 17 October 2013, the same solicitors wrote a further letter to Miss Adeola Bangbose on behalf of the Trustees of the Parish. The letter included reference to the defendant - Prophet Lawson having seen "various posters around the church which seek to belittle and humiliate him". This was a reference to notices stating that the defendant had been suspended as Shepherd with effect from 13 September 2013 pending investigation into the allegations made against him, that he was not permitted to carry out his duties whilst he was on suspension, and that the Trustees had applied for a court order against him.
Pastor Emmanuel Mobiyina Oshoffa - Pastor of the Celestial Church of Christ
In the meantime, on 18 October 2013, Pastor Oshoffa, as Pastor and spiritual head of the Celestial Church Worldwide, had written to Lawson, the Parochial Committee, the Trustees and all elders and members of the Parish confirming his support for Lawson as Shepherd-in-Charge of the Parish, temporarily suspending the Parochial Committee for 3 months, and setting up a seven man interim committee to work with the Trustees. The Pastor was said to be arranging to send to the Parish some eminent and highly responsible elders of the Celestial Church to look into the dispute and recommend measures that would bring peace, love and understanding into the life of the Parish. The Shepherd was to allow the Fact Finding and Reconciliation Committee to perform their duties, and their agenda was to include a full scale audit of the Parish's accounts over the previous seven years by an independent and trusted auditor.
Superior Evangelist Amos Fatusin, the UK and Northern Ireland Diocesan Head, was to supervise the administration of the Parish in the meantime.
According to a letter to Superior Evangelist Fatusin from Shorinolu dated 1 December, the Pastor's letter was not supplied to the Parish but was read out by Fatusin at a church service when he visited the Parish on 1 December 2013.
On 6 December 2013, the Parish's solicitors wrote to Fatusin advising him that he was not to enter the Parish premises at any time or for any reason, and that he had no authority in relation to the Parish and was not entitled to interfere in its affairs; and to Pastor Oshoffa stating that the Trustees did not accept his authority, or that of the Nigerian Diocese or the Celestial Church's international headquarters, to interfere with or meddle in the affairs of the Parish.
On Sunday 8 December 2013, a serious disturbance took place during the church service and the police were called. This was not the first time there had been disturbances necessitating the invitation of police. A video recording of this incident was produced and played a number of times during the course of the trial.
In his judgement, Judge Hodge, criticised the altercation which took place during the church service on 8 December 2013, saying it "discloses a thoroughly disgraceful state of affairs which does no credit to any of those involved."
He added that "The behaviour of many of those shown on the video is confrontational, aggressive and wholly inappropriate to a place of worship. I am entirely satisfied that it was the defendant's disagreement with his suspension from office that was the cause of this altercation; but the response of those opposed to the defendant was disproportionate and clearly exacerbated the situation, causing it to mushroom out of control to such an extent that the police had to be called. No organisation, still less a church, can function in such a disorderly manner."
On 17 February 2014, a fire caused extensive damage to the church and Trustees resolved to close the church building whilst investigation, assessment by loss adjustors and the necessary remedial works were carried out. On the same day, in spite of the fire incident, Lawson held a service at the church.
Central to this case, have been the place of the governing documents (Constitutions) of the CCC Edward Street Parish which is registered as a Charity in England and Wales, and that of the Nigeria Diocese or the "CCC Worldwide."
Judge Hodge accepted the submission of the Trustees' Counsel that "it is only the spiritual authority of Pastor Oshoffa that has ever been recognised by the Parish; it has never recognised him as having legal authority over the Parish."
The Trustees' Counsel also argued that on its proper construction, the Parish's constitution permits the charity trustees to identify (by appointing and dismissing) the Shepherd-in-Charge of the Parish in the exercise of its duty to further its religious objects.
In the past, according to evidence presented to the court: The Parochial Committee, the Trustees and the Elders have canvassed the views of the congregation, who have sought the agreement of the individual they have treated as the Pastor to the appointment of the Shepherd.
When the individual occupying the role of the Shepherd appeared to these bodies to be inappropriate, they again sought the agreement of the Pastor.
"It is said that a practical recognition by the Parish of the spiritual authority of the Pastor (but not an unfettered legal authority) can co-exist with ultimate legal authority over who occupies the position of the Shepherd remaining with the claimants, and such an arrangement is said to fall within the proper construction of the Parish's constitution."
The judge held that "in the normal course of events, there will be no tension between any spiritual authority and any legal authority. However, ultimately the identification of these individuals by the charity trustees is a matter for them in the pursuit of the Parish's objects."
Judge Hodge agreed with the Trustees' Counsel that the Constitution of CCC Worldwide was not inadmissible; but the weight to be accorded to it was very limited.
In this case, he agreed with the Church Trustees, that the Worldwide constitution was needed "merely to understand the proper functions and significance of the Shepherd-in-Charge."
He agreed that Trustees needed the Parish's constitution to "identify the objects of their charity, their powers and any limitations upon them, and the discretions available to them."
Judge Hodge also disagreed that the Pastor (Pastor Oshoffa) alone can appoint, and remove, the Shepherd-in-Charge. This power, he said resides with "the Parochial Committee to appoint and dismiss the Shepherd without the need to look to the authority of the Pastor as conferred by the worldwide constitution."
Lawson as Trustee
Judge Hodge agreed with Lawson's Counsel that a proper interpretation of the constitution and of the Shepherd's role within it, are sufficient to make Lawson a charity trustee as a person "having the general control and management of the administration of" the Parish within the definition contained in section 177 of the Charities Act 2011 together with the Parochial Committee and the Trustees.
He noted that this was also how Lawson had been viewed both by the Board of Trustees when (on 5 March 2014) they resolved that the defendant should be removed as a Trustee of the church upon his dismissal as Shepherd and also by the Charity Commission.
Judge Hodge also found that Lawson's role as a charity trustee was consequential upon his appointment and continuing role as Shepherd and would automatically terminate when his role as Shepherd-in-Charge was terminated.
Lawson's employment status
In spite of the fact that Lawson was treated and paid (and taxed) by the Church as an employee, the Judge found "that prior to his dismissal as Shepherd, the defendant was an officer, and not an employee, of the Parish."
This was premised on among other reasons:
(1) There is no written agreement of any kind with the defendant other than by virtue of his membership of the Parish.
(2) There is no evidence of any discussion or decision about the defendant's role by the Parochial Committee or any other body. As against that, it is validly said by the claimants that there was no need for this because, as the late former Shepherd's deputy, Lawson was fully conversant with the nature of the role.
(3) There is no evidence of any control exercised by the Parish over the Shepherd other than in the attempt to discipline him.
(4) The fundamental purpose of the office of Shepherd is spiritual.
(5) The defendant was appointed by the Pastor, albeit at the instigation and with the agreement of the Parish; and there was no agreement between the Parish and the defendant capable of giving rise to a contract between the parties.
Judge Hodge said: "In my judgment, the defendant as shepherd, was not performing a service for the Parish nor was he subject to its control to a sufficient degree to make the Parish his master. Rather he was there to shepherd the Parish, to lead the congregation to Christ and to see to the effective teaching of the Bible within the Parish. I therefore hold that the defendant was an officer and not an employee of the Parish and that his remuneration was properly to be viewed in the nature of a stipend rather than a salary."
Judge Hodge also held that the Church acted fairly in its process of dismissing Lawson. He stated that it "is clear on the evidence that I have heard that this was a church congregation polarised between opposition to, and support for, the position of the defendant as the Shepherd-in-Charge. It would have been impossible to have found a representative body of persons within the Parish who had not already made up their minds about the dispute which had riven their church in two. That is clear from the video I viewed and the history of disturbances within the church during the latter half of 2013. The problem for the defendant is that those in the majority on the Parochial Committee were opposed to his continuing role in the church; and they were the democratically elected body seised by the constitution of the Parish with the duty of resolving the stalemate within the Parish. This could not be left to elders from other congregations of the Celestial Church or to the Pastor. It was for the Parochial Committee to do the best they could in the circumstances. On the evidence, I am satisfied that this is what they sought to do in what they considered to be the best interests of the Parish and in accordance with, and in the furtherance of, its charitable objects.
The judge also stated that it "was not disputed before me that the claimants have made extensive use of, and as a result have acquired substantial goodwill in, the name "Celestial Church of Christ, Edward Street Parish" as an organisation operating as a registered charity, conducting religious services and handling donations, governed by rules and for whose conduct the claimants, as trustees, are ultimately responsible. I am satisfied that it would constitute the tort of passing-off for the defendant to represent himself as the Shepherd-in-Charge of the Parish or to misrepresent his services and other activities as those of the Parish."
CCC logo
The Celestial Church of Christ was founded by its first Pastor and Supreme Head - Reverend Samuel Oshoffa, in the Republic of Benin in 1947. It was incorporated in Nigeria in 1958.
The Edward Street Parish was founded in 1990 as an offshoot of CCC's first parish established in the UK, and its UK National Headquarters - Harton Street Parish whose church had burnt down.
Lawson was then only about 25 years of age but as Chairman of the Caretaker Committee, he was influential in founding the new Parish with younger members of the congregation from Harton Street and also in persuading its existing shepherd, Superior Evangelist F.O. Salu to become its first Shepherd.
Lawson left for the USA in about 1998 returning to the Parish in 2007 as Deputy Shepherd. Following the death of Superior Evangelist Salu in July 2011, 156 members of the Parish signed a petition recommending and supporting Lawson to the Parochial Committee, the Trustees and the Pastor for appointment as the Shepherd-in-Charge. He was duly appointed by Pastor Emmanuel Oshoffa by letter dated 11 November 2011; and his appointment was confirmed by a further letter from Pastor Emmanuel Oshoffa dated 11 February 2012.
Celestial Church of Christ Pastor Emmanuel Mobiyina Oshoffa
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Victoria Tavern
Come have a mysteriously good time at Salida's Victoria Tavern
June 24th, 2017 Arkansauce
Arkansauce is a genre-hopping, four piece string band from northwest Arkansas, bending the rules and blurring the lines between bluegrass, newgrass, folk, americana, country, blues, and funk. With a loyal following growing every day in the Natural State and along their tour routes, the band is proud to be stepping into a hard-driving sound unique to the Arkansas quartet.
The third album (If I Were You, released April 2017) of all original material finds the palate expanded with more complex melodies, intriguing rhythms, and hard-hitting hooks that leave the songs whirling around your head long after the listening experience.
The hard-working musicians are filling the calendar with upcoming appearances at premiere music festivals in and around Arkansas, along with the 44th Annual Telluride Bluegrass Band Competition, and select club dates from Colorado to Mississippi.
The band’s roots go back to 2011 when founding members Ethan Bush, Zac Archuleta, and Stephen Jolly began writing together after becoming acquainted through mutual connections in the close-knit Fayetteville music scene. After a couple of years building a repertoire of original music and releasing their first album (Hambone) as a trio, they were joined by Tom Andersen on the upright bass and Adams Collins on the five-string banjo. The road-tested chops Andersen and Collins brought to the table helped to cultivate the mature, well-rounded sound needed to accommodate their sophomore release “All Day Long.”
An Arkansauce show is riddled with improvisational guitar, banjo, and mandolin leads, paired with powerful harmonies and heart-felt songwriting, all held together by deep foot-stompin’ bass grooves. There’s an undeniably intimate connection between the band and their fans that’s contagious and leaves everyone in front of, and on the stage wanting more. Arkansauce holds their head high, as they look forward to enjoying everything life and music has in store for them and their fans.
http://www.arkansaucemusic.com/music/
← 7/16/2017 Colony Funk !
June 6/23 & 6/25 2017 Jeremy Steding & The Rebellion!! Sunday 6/25 @ 3 PM!! →
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Video now available of the Art & Politics roundtable discussion “Who Owns the City? Real Estate v. Art, Architecture and the People”
Posted by Jeff Edwards on Dec 12, 2020 in Activism, Art & Politica Lecture Series, Art & Politics Lecture Series, Film and Video, General VCS Info, Lectures and Panel Discussions | No Comments
A video is now available of last December’s Art & Politics Lecture Series roundtable discussion “Who Owns the City? Real Estate v. Art, Architecture and the People” fearuring writer Sam Stein, architect Georg Windeck, and artist, activist, and VCS feculty member Shellyne Rodriguez. You can watch it below or at this link.
I’ve included a description of the talk just below the video.
WHO OWNS THE CITY?
REAL ESTATE -VS-
ART, ARCHITECTURE &
Sam Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, joins SVA faculty member and activist Shellyne Rodriguez and architect Georg Windeck for a roundtable on power, property, gentrification, art, architecture, and fighting back.
Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer.
Art in NYC is right in the middle of these changes. Architects are pushed aside by developers, as standardized buildings whose destiny is to sit empty crowd the skyline; artists in a desperate search for the cheap rents that once made bohemia possible become the front-runners of gentrification; designers and planners are kept far away from urgent questions about habitability and climate change and are employed to make a profit for the few. This all while it seems barely possible to afford one’s rent and there are an estimated 69,000 homeless people in the city, as winter sets in.
Why is New York full of empty towers? Who has the power to shape the city? How does power in the urban space affect what gets made—and even imagined—by artists and architects today? Does bohemia stand a chance? What kind of organizing and political action is underway to change the situation?
Sam Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, joins SVA faculty member, activist Shellyne Rodriguez and architect Georg Windeck for this roundtable on power, property, gentrification, art, architecture, and fighting back.
Samuel Stein studies geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His writing on planning politics has been published by Jacobin, The Journal of Urban Affairs, Metropolitics, and many other magazines and journals.
Shellyne Rodriguez is a visual artist who works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against subjugation. Shellyne graduated with a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies From the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from CUNY Hunter College. She has had her work and projects exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum, New Museum and her work has recently been commissioned by the city of New York for a permanent public sculpture, which will serve as a monument to the people of the Bronx. Shellyne teaches at SVA and is also a community organizer and an active member of radical grassroots collective Take Back the Bronx.
Georg Windeck received his Diplom-Ingenieur in Architecture with distinction at the Technische Universitaet Berlin. He also studied sculpture at the Hochschule der Kuenste in Berlin. His training included a wide range of architectural work in several professional offices. His research focuses on new literary and imaginative approaches to architecture.Georg Windeck’s work has recently been shown in the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, and in the Center for Architecture in New York. His writing has been published in newspapers and magazines such as Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Deutsche Bauzeitung. He has won awards for competition entries for the reconstruction of the Bauakademie in Berlin, for the Nam June Paik Museum in Korea and for the Tadeusz Kantor Museum in Poland.
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news homepage | full list of labels | about the news blog
wild happenings in singapore | our wild places | make a difference! | wildsingapore homepage | email ria
Best of our wild blogs: 12 Apr 13
Should we care about Pulau Ubin? Seeking views and comments
from Lazy Lizard's Tales
Free guided tours of Sentosa's natural shore at Tanjung Rimau
from wild shores of singapore
Dr Francis Seow discusses his love for stick insects in Berita Minggu from Raffles Museum News
Job: Manager at National Biodiversity Centre, NParks
from The Biodiversity crew @ NUS
Bachelor of Business / Environmental Science – GIS Sessional Lecturers / Tutors [Jobs] from Green Business Times
LOHAS Asia and Green Drinks event: Singapore Skincare Discussion from Green Drinks Singapore
Fighting deforestation—and corruption—in Indonesia
from Mongabay.com news
posted by Ria Tan at 4/12/2013 09:49:00 AM
labels best-of-wild-blogs, singapore
Letter informs Ubin residents of possible resettlement
Poon Chian Hui Straits Times 12 Apr 13;
SOME residents on Pulau Ubin appear to be facing resettlement to make way for a possible adventure park.
They have been sent a letter telling them that their homes are slated for "clearance".
The Housing Board document said officers will visit their premises to conduct a "census survey" and determine their "eligibility of resettlement benefits". It also suggested the houses will be making way for an adventure park on the 1,020 ha boomerang-shaped island, which is home to some of Singapore's last kampungs.
No details were provided but the last time a project like this was mentioned was in 1993. Back then, it was reported that the Government would acquire 254 ha of the private land on Pulau Ubin within the following year, partly to create an adventure park.
Today, about 100 villagers live on the island. They are mainly older folk, some of whom depend on farming and fishing for a living. Others run small businesses, such as bicycle rental shops, to serve the 300,000 visitors who come every year.
The HDB said in the letter that the Singapore Land Authority had sought its assistance to clear the houses. It asked residents to prepare several documents, such as birth certificates, property tax bills or proofs of ownership of their houses.
These should be presented to officers who will visit their premises to conduct the census survey.
Responding to queries, the relevant agencies said they would provide more details at a later date. But affected residents said the exercise started a few months ago.
It is not yet known how many people are affected. HDB's Land Clearance Section officers are also involved in the survey. This department is the principal agency involved in clearing squatters from state land on behalf of the Government and other statutory boards, for public development.
Long-time Ubin resident Chai Tien Soong, 67, said officers came to inspect his house about two months ago and he showed them documents proving that he owns the place.
The driver, who has lived in Pulau Ubin since he was 17, was given approval to continue living in his current premises. But he said people from about five Malay kampungs have been asked to move out, or pay rent. It is understood they were offered compensation.
Speaking in Mandarin, Mr Chai said: "Everyone is having a headache over this now."
Dismay at Pulau Ubin houses possibly being cleared for development
Eugene Neubronner Today Online 12 Apr 13;
[Comment: shortly after this article came online, the link no longer takes us to the article.]
SINGAPORE - Residents and visitors on Pulau Ubin have reacted with dismay about the possibility of the squatter houses being cleared by the authorities.
It is understood about 10 houses are affected, all along a small stretch of road near Murai Hut on the island.
A letter, dated March 12, has been put up at the door of these houses. It said the Singapore Land Authority had "sought HDB Land Clearance Section’s assistance” to clear the squatter houses. It added that officers would visit the premises to conduct a census survey “for the purpose of determining (the owner’s) eligibility for resettlement benefits”. It’s header suggested that the homes would make way for an adventure park.
A resident, Miss Amidah Awang, who is in her 50s, said she was born on the island and had lived there all of her life. "It's cool, quiet, what food we need we can get from the forest or from fishing... I don't really want to move (to the mainland)."
She added: "If they really ask us to leave, we'll have to go to my sister’s house in Singapore.”
One of the houses affected is being used by cookerymagic.com to conduct Malay cooking classes on weekends there.
Senior Art Director Brice Li, 44, who was visiting the island with some friends from the United States, said he visits the island regularly.
He said that it would “very sad” for the houses to make way. Nevertheless, the silver lining was that wildlife had flourished now that there are fewer people living on the island, he said.
Eviction of residents at Kampung Melayu, Pulau Ubin: What's happening? from The Lazy Lizard's Tales blog: a compilation of conversation and information shared on social media about this issue.
More about Pulau Ubin on wildsingapore: how to get there and what to see and do.
labels pulau-ubin, shores, singapore, urban-development
Sentosa au naturel
The island is more than glitzy resorts and sandy beaches, with lots of flora and fauna on offer
Sarah Roxanne Sim Straits Times 12 Apr 13;
Think of Sentosa, and glitzy resorts and tourist spots come to mind. Yet, scattered among the fancy hotels and crowded theme parks are the island's hidden secrets - endangered trees, cheeky critters and beautiful plants.
In January this year, the Sentosa Development Corporation - known as Sentosa Leisure Group with its subsidiaries - was named a finalist in the Tourism For Tomorrow Awards, a worldwide travel industry accolade for sustainable tourism efforts.
The corporation, tasked with developing Sentosa as an attraction since 1972, was up for the Destination Stewardship Award, a category open to any country, region, state or town that protects its natural and cultural heritage while promoting itself as a vacation spot. This year's award eventually went to the Peaks of the Balkans committee, responsible for creating a 192km hiking trail across the mountains of Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania.
While Sentosa's charms are more modest, compared to the formerly war-torn region's transformative tourism feat, it is the result of decades-long planning which fiercely guards its green areas, despite the temptations of lucrative over-building.
The 10-year Sentosa Green Plan was launched in late-2009 to help ensure that at least 60 per cent of the 500ha island is made up of flora, fauna and open space. Currently, that figure stands at 58 per cent, estimates the Sentosa Leisure Group's environmental sustainability manager Lieow Shao Wei.
Ms Lieow says: "In Singapore, we may not have pristine lakes or big mountains like The Rockies in Canada. When most people think of Sentosa, they think of going to the beach or going to the attractions. Very few people think of exploring nature here.
"That is how we approach sustainability in terms of nature. It may not be a main draw yet, but it is something that goes hand-in-hand with the rest of the activities on the island."
Despite major developments and high visitorship on the island over the years (19 million visitors in 2011), deliberate steps have been taken to preserve the island's rich heritage and island charm. The island's ecological efforts are reflected in its meticulous land planning and usage as well as island operations.
Developers on the island are given strict guidelines by Sentosa Development Corporation. Luxury resort Capella Singapore, which opened in 2009, was made to build around five heritage trees on its compound. And Resorts World Sentosa moved more than 200 trees at its site and replanted them in other parts of the island, in order to conserve the wildlife and minimise the environmental impact of constructing the integrated resort.
As a result, pockets of Singapore's natural heritage have been preserved, dotting the island formerly known as Pulau Blakang Mati. The isle is home to 30 heritage trees. Four of these - namely, an Angsana, a Common Pulai tree, an Indian Pulai, and an cempedak tree - are the largest of their kind in Singapore. The island also harbours numerous species of wildlife, such as the Oriental Magpie-Robin and the Oriental Pied Hornbill, which are listed in the Singapore Red Data Book compilation of threatened wildlife here.
Nature Society Singapore's president, Dr Shawn Lum, sees the corporation as having a long-term plan for its green areas - one that balances "expansion of facilities and attractions" with careful management of "its green inheritance".
"Sentosa is home to very diverse and beautiful natural habitats, such as rocky shores and several distinct kinds of forests," adds Dr Lum.
Bearing this observation out, some visitors say they are drawn to Sentosa as much for its lush greenery and myriad animals and insects, as they are to its man-made entertainment.
On a Tuesday afternoon, Indonesian tourist Anita Ng was reading up on the wildlife in Sentosa at the Sentosa Nature Discovery, a small hub for nature lovers and rookies alike to learn more about the wildlife found on the island.
Ms Ng, 35, a housewife on her maiden trip to Sentosa, says that the wildlife is an "added bonus" to the activities on the island. She adds: "I was surprised by how green it is here. The balance of nature and fun activities is what makes Sentosa interesting and special."
Hit the eco trails
Straits Times 12 Apr 13;
TANJONG RIMAU
Where: A five-minute walk from Shangri-La's Rasa Sentosa Resort. The coast, which is the last remaining natural coastline on Sentosa, is behind the hotel.
What: Wildlife enthusiasts can glimpse monitor lizards and kingfishers and anemones such as the sea mat zoanthid at Tanjong Rimau, a relatively unspoilt shore.
Expect to see a 7ha forest, filled with trees such as the podocarpus polystachyus, commonly known as the sea teak, perched atop a cliff that Nature Society Singapore experts estimate has been holding up since the pre-Jurassic era.
If you are lucky, and have eagle eyes, you may even spy a macaque strolling by, or a sea cockroach darting across the sand.
Info: Call Sentosa on 6736-8672 or e-mail nature@sentosa.com.sg to schedule a free guided tour. As the area's colourful rocks are slippery, the occasional high tides can pose a danger to the uninitiated. Visitors should join the Sentosa team's guided tour instead of going unaccompanied.
JUNGLE NATURE TRAIL
Where: Starts from the tram roundabout near Rasa Sentosa Resort and the Flying Trapeze at Siloso Beach, and ends near the Resorts World Sentosa development.
What: This relatively short nature trail, which takes about 15 minutes to complete, offers a taste of the six main trails on the island such as the two segments that make up the 620m-long Imbiah Loop.
Just five minutes away from Tanjong Rimau, it offers a leisurely stroll surrounded by greenery. Squirrels and geckos can be spotted amid unique trees, such as dragon blood trees which produce red sap, thorny Nibong palm trees, and the Litsea Elliptica, commonly known as Medang trees.
Mr Daniel Seah, 58, an arborist with Sentosa Leisure Group, says visitors are often surprised to find out that Litsea Elliptica is often used in traditional medicine to treat fevers, headaches and stomach ulcers.
You can rent a hybrid bicycle for $15 an hour from the Segway Hub at Beach Station, and explore the island in an eco-friendly way.
Info: Take the Sentosa Express monorail service to Beach Station. Hop on the Siloso Beach Tram from Beach Station and get off at stop 4A near Rasa Sentosa Resort. The first train leaves Sentosa Station at VivoCity at 7am, and the last train leaves Beach Station at midnight. The Beach Tram service runs from 9am to 10.30pm from Sundays to Fridays, and from 9am to midnight on Saturdays.
SENTOSA NATURE DISCOVERY TRAIL
Where: Imbiah Lookout, near the Merlion
What: Visitors who want to be nature detectives can head to this attraction.
Converted in 2009 from a defunct monorail station, this hub for nature lovers has walls of information on the island's wildlife - from animals to insects and plants.
Visitors can also take a stroll down the 200m-long boardwalk, which is built out of recycled timber over the old monorail tracks.
Tembusu trees flank the boardwalk, and along the way, visitors can spot everything from colourful cotton stainer bugs to Oriental Magpie-Robins, which are an endangered species of birds listed in the Singapore Red Data Book of threatened wildlife here.
The boardwalk ends near a nature trail at the top of the Imbiah rainforest, one of two green lungs on the island.
Designated by Sentosa Development Corporation as nature zones, these large areas - with Mount Imbiah spanning 15ha and Mount Serapong spanning 25ha - must remain undeveloped.
History buffs can take a stroll to the top and explore colonial-era military forts and bunkers there.
Info: Take the Sentosa Express to Imbiah Station. Take the escalator at the Merlion Plaza up to Imbiah Lookout.
More about Sentosa's natural shores on wildsingapore and wild shores of singapore
labels marine, shores, singapore, southern-islands
Lower dues and other perks to make Singapore port more attractive
Jermyn Chow Straits Times 12 Apr 13;
REDUCED fees and other incentives aimed at boosting port competitiveness and making better use of anchorage space were announced last night.
The key change, which starts in July, will see port dues lowered for up to 83 per cent of the container ships that pull in here.
A 20 per cent concession on port dues, which is due to expire at the end of June next year, will also be made permanent.
The moves unveiled by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) will mean shippers which dock in Singapore can expect to save about $22 million a year.
The revised dues are likely to benefit ships that can turn around fast. Long-staying vessels - up to 7 per cent of those calling here - may have to pay higher fees.
Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew, who announced the changes, said they are aimed at ensuring that Singapore's port becomes more attractive in terms of financing and costs.
Mr Lui told the annual Singapore International Maritime Awards - part of the Singapore Maritime Week - last night: "I know in difficult times and challenging times that you all face in the maritime sector, this is something that we in Singapore and the MPA can help you along."
He also announced more incentives and discounts for ships to become more ecologically sustainable. These discounts fall under a $100 million Maritime Singapore Green Initiative launched in 2011.
Rebates for ships that burn cleaner fuels at Singapore's port will go up from 15 per cent to 25 per cent.
Another incentive will mean Singapore-flagged ships that adopt designs that reduce fuel consumption and sulphur oxide emissions will pay only one-quarter of their initial registration fees. Previously, these fees were halved.
Local maritime companies that develop and adopt green technologies that can achieve more than 10 per cent reduction in emission levels can also get more funds.
The moves to boost the maritime sector follow initiatives announced by Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam on Tuesday to raise the beleaguered industry's productivity.
Although shippers are grappling with tight margins due to high fuel and manpower costs, container volumes are expected to grow in Asia.
The maritime sector accounts for about 7 per cent of Singapore's gross domestic product.
Team bags $1.2m prize with radical design
A TEAM of engineering researchers and a crane manufacturer have won a US$1 million (S$1.24 million) prize for its radical design for a double-storey container port terminal with driverless trucks.
The team, comprising the National University of Singapore (NUS), Shanghai Maritime University and Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company, beat six other finalists to win the first Next Generation Container Port Challenge last night.
The competition, launched last year by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, is aimed at unearthing the ideal port design - a design that could well materialise when Singapore develops the new Tuas Port.
Dubbed Singa (Sustainable Integrated Next Generation Advanced) port, the idea was to save space and use less manpower, said one team member, NUS Associate Professor Lee Loo Hay.
Few, if any, ports in the world have multi-storey or double-storey port terminals.
labels marine, shores, singapore, transport
Malaysia: Secret Population of Orangutans Found in Sarawak
LiveScience.com Yahoo News 11 Apr 13;
A population of 200 of the world's rarest orangutans was found tucked away in the forests of the island of Borneo, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
All subspecies of Bornean orangutans are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But scientists estimate just 3,000 to 4,500 individuals are left in the subspecies known as Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus, making them the most severely threatened.
Two-thousand of those live in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Batang Ai National Park and Lanjak-Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary, researchers say. The previously unknown population was found by conservationists near the Batang park, in an area covering about 54 square miles (140 square kilometers).
Local communities apparently had been aware of the apes, but no major research projects had been undertaken in the area until February, when conservations with WCS and other groups surveyed the region. They found a total of 995 orangutan nests, including fresh nests that indicated the rare population was recently using the area.
Previously, researchers studying fresh nests left by wild orangutans in Indonesia found they are incredibly complex, made in the crooks of large branches. The orangutans bend and interweave living branches about an inch (3 centimeters) wide to form the nest.
"They are just bent. They can actually stay living and later on you can go back to them and see they are like an archeological artifact of all these strangely bent items," said Roland Ennos of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, when the study was published last year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "It's very similar to weaving a basket, they have to break the branches, weave them together and form a nice, strong, rigid structure."
The Sarawak state government is now mulling new protections (including new national parks) for the area where the hidden orangutans were documented.
labels forests, global, primates
Malaysia: Treasuring A National Treasure-The Great Hornbill
Wan Shahara Ahmad Ghazali Bernama 12 Apr 13;
KUALA LUMPUR, April 12 (Bernama) -- On a trip to Langkawi, nature lovers would be able to enjoy a 360-degree view of the Langkawi group of islands from two mountain peaks, namely Gunung Mat Cincang, which is accessible via a cable car, and Gunung Raya, where one can drive up to.
And if one is lucky, one might get a glimpse of the priceless national treasure - the Great Hornbill - the world's largest hornbill that resides in these mountainous regions.
Most visitors usually miss the sight of the bird, although the hornbill with the scientific name of Buceros bicornis is a large bird that measures 1.5 metres when it spreads its wings.
The weight of the bird can reach up to four kilogrammes, which probably also explains why the bird does not fly as freely as other birds and is usually seen hopping on to the highest branch of a tree before taking flight in a ski-like fashion as it spreads its wings in the air.
The size of the Great Hornbill, also known as Enggang Papan locally, is another factor why there needs to be preservation of its natural nesting place -- usually trees with huge diameters, which themselves are in danger of being sacrificed as timber for trade.
HUGE TREES - THE HORNBILL'S NATURAL HOME
The endangered Great Hornbill builds its nest within the natural cavities of trees that are large enough to house both mother and baby hornbills for a period of three months.
Within the tree hole, the mother-to-be will stay cocooned, with the opening of the crevice almost completely sealed by a mix of bird droppings, mud and saliva, leaving only a small hole where the partner bird is able to pass on food to the nesting mother.
Major food for the bird includes wild fruits, which are also an important source of water for the body, while the birds' usual diet consists of small animals, birds and insects.
Within the tree cavity, the mother hornbill prepares a nest using some of her own features and will go on to hatch her eggs, while her partner flies out to bring food for all three.
This also means that should the tree, in which the mother and her baby are nesting, be cut down, both the mother and baby hornbills will die trapped and hungry, while the partner will also suffer, as hornbills are known to be monogamous or partners for life.
THE CRY OF A HORNBILL
In fact, a bird watcher and member of the Malaysian Nature Society (MNS), Langkawi branch, Irshad Mobarak, tells a tragic story involving a hornbill.
He said he had once witnessed a hornbill wailing loud and long upon seeing the felling of a tree and the destruction of the nest in the tree that had housed its partner and baby.
It was even more painful to see the hornbill regularly returning for several years to the place where the tree had once stood.
"Unfortunately, in Langkawi, the hornbill does not only face the threat of losing its habitat due to illegal logging activities, clearing of hills or indiscriminate development, but it is also hunted and killed illegally by irresponsible people just to cater to the demands of foreign tourists seeking aphrodisiac food," Irshad lamented.
Meanwhile, should one want to watch the sheer magnificence of the Great Hornbill, taking up a spot in Gunung Raya, just after the fajar prayers or before the twilight hour, would be the best bet to personally witness the great birds flying.
One could also witness the birds flying across from one forest area to another in Pantai Kok, Langkawi, late in the evenings and before the sun sets.
A RICH BIODIVERSITY
Currently, world records show that there are only 55 hornbill species existing, including 31 species in Asia and the rest in Africa.
Only 12 of these species are found in South East Asia, but an interesting fact is that Malaysia is the sanctuary for 10 of these species -- a rich heritage indeed.
Even more interesting is that all these species of hornbills can be found in the Belum-Temenggor Forest Complex (BTFC) in Perak, which encompasses the Royal Belum State Park and the Temenggor forest reserves.
Bird watchers have the opportunity to see all the 10 species, including the Plain-pouched Hornbill, which is already classified as vulnerable to extinction by the Merah International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). These birds are presently found only at the BTFC.
The irony is that Malaysia did not even know that it was home to the Plain-pouched Hornbill, till researchers from MNS identified them and confirmed their identity in 1998 as the 10th specimen of the Hornbills found in the country.
A MAGICAL FINDING
During a recent visit to the forest, a conservation officer at MNS, specifically for the hornbill conservation project, Ravinder Kaur, explained that prior to the finding, the 10th specimen was said to be seen only in Myanmar and Thailand, with a population of about 1,000. The figure has come down though since, she said.
"When MNS made the efforts to organise the second Belum-Temenggor scientific expedition in 1998, they made a discovery that went beyond their expectations, which was the group of Plain-pouched Hornbills," she said, further explaining that the physical features of the bird were also similar to that of the Wreathed Hornbill.
In 2008, history was also created, with the recording of an impressive number of 3,000 Plain-pouched Hornbills at one count.
The number had astounded the researchers as scientists had estimated that only a total of 10,000 adults of the hornbill species could have existed worldwide at that time.
This finding also further underlined the importance of the forest complex, which comprises 266,170 hectares that should be a priority area and accorded due protection, especially the Temenggor forests that were yet to be fully protected.
There is no denying that many would want the Belum-Temenggor forest complex, which has been acknowledged as an Important Birds Area (IBA) in the world, to be given continued protection so that it would remain a tourist attraction and also a centre for bird watchers to gather every year, while generating small time businesses for the local people.
ORIENTAL PIED HORNBILL
Meanwhile, in Sabak Bernam, the villagers of Kampung Parit 13 Sungai Panjang, have established their own way of helping to conserve the Oriental Pied Hornbill, with the help of Universiti Putra Malaysia's Department of Biology Science.
These species of hornbill, the smallest among the hornbills found in the country, have adapted to living in village environments and indeed, are often the focus of tourism activities in these villages. They also contribute to raising awareness towards their conservation.
Initially, the loss of habitat had forced the birds to live within the ecosystem of humans living in the same areas. This distressed the people, who had to put up with disturbances to their crops, but eventually, they ended up adapting and accommodating each other.
Curiously, the birds have also adopted the earthen pots, made by villagers, as their nesting ground for laying eggs and protection during the breeding season.
Once the female hornbill enters the pot to prepare for hatching eggs, its partner will seal up most part of the pot's opening with clay, leaving only a little space for the passing on of food.
However, although the hornbills seem to have adjusted to the environment of human beings, a nesting mother hornbill will not accept any food from humans and will only accept food from its partner.
The remaining of the hornbills found in Malaysia are the Enggang Bulu (White Crowned Hornbill), Enggang Kawan/Buluh (Bushy Crested Hornbill), Enggang Berkedut (Wrinkled Hornbill), Burung Kekek/Burung Gatal Birah (Malayan Black Hornbill), Enggang Badak (Rhinoceros Hornbill), and Burung Tebang Mentua (Helmeted Hornbill).
labels birds, global
Malaysia: Marauding elephant caught
News Straits Times 12 Apr 13;
BALING: More than 100 villagers in Kampung Rambong Padang near here are relieved after state Wildlife and National Parks Department (Perhilitan) managed to capture a male elephant which had been destroying their crops for the past four months.
Acting on complaints from the villagers, a team from the department together with Rela volunteers captured the pachyderm while it was roaming alone in a bush about 300m from the village at 11.30am on Wednesday.
Kedah Perhilitan director Razidan Md Yasin believed that the elephant came to the bush scavenging for food when it was captured.
"The elephant is from the Ulu Muda forest reserve which is about 10km away from the village.
"We believe there are another two elephants on the loose based on footprints found in the area.
"We will continue to monitor the area to prevent elephants from harassing the villagers."
Razidan also said the captured elephant would be relocated to another area this Saturday.
A 53-year-old villager said he felt relieved that one of the elephants roaming the area had been captured.
Alias Md Daud learned that some of his friends were suffering losses after their orchards were destroyed by the elephants.
labels elephants, forests, global
Indonesia: Giant leopard shark washed up on Dulupi beach
Antara 11 Apr 13;
Gorontalo (ANTARA News) - A giant leopard shark was found stranded on Dulupi beach at Bajo hamlet in Boalemo district, Gorontalo, on Wednesday, according to Deo Datus Kaban, a local resident.
Kaban said here on Thursday that the shark, about 8 meters long and more than 100 kilograms, was found alive by local fishermen on Wednesday night.
"The shark was first discovered by local fishermen on Wednesday at around 21 pm on the beach, and now the local people are trying to trying to drag to the shore," he said.
Fishermen had trouble pulling in the stranded shark to the shore after it was washed out from a high tide, and stranded on the shore during low tide.
Safety nets are installed in the attempted to pull the fish safely and alive, since the fishermen believe if the fish is a sign carrier blessing.
This shark is now become a local resident`s spectacle Deo said.
According to Deo the local residents are still waiting for government`s instruction whether to release the shark, because it is still alive.
"Residents hope the fish will be released back, if it`s getting better," said Deo. (*)
labels global, marine, sharks-fins
Indonesia to maintain deforestation moratorium
Indonesia 11 Apr 13;
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Indonesian Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan has reiterated the country`s commitment to continuing the implementation of moratorium of new licenses logging concessions for primary forests and peat lands.
Minister Hasan expressed the commitment when speaking in the tenth United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) held in Istanbul, Turkey, April 8-9, 2013, the forestry ministry said in a statement here on Thursday.
During the 2009-2013 period, Indonesia has managed to reach averaged economic growth rate at 6.3 percent annually, despite the implementation of the moratorium.
Indonesia has also managed to cut the deforestation rate from the average of 3.5 million hectares during the 1999-2002 period to 450 ha during 2010-2011, through various forestry policies such as the movement of One Billion Indonesian Trees for the World.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed the Presidential Instruction No. 10/2011 on Moratorium on New Logging Concessions for Primary Forests and Peat lands in May 2011.
On the sidelines of the UNFF, the Indonesian ministry held meetings among others with the US deputy secretary of state to discuss the bilateral cooperation between Indonesia and the US.
Minister Hasan also met WRI Director Nigel Sizer on April 9, 2013 during the launch of Global Forest Watch.
The UNFF meeting was officially opened by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and participated in by 250 ministers from 197 nations.
In October 2000, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), in its Resolution 2000/35 established the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF), a subsidiary body with the main objective to promote "the management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests and to strengthen long-term political commitment to this end" based on the Rio Declaration, the Forest Principles, Chapter 11 of Agenda 21 and the outcome of the IPF/IFF Processes and other key milestones of international forest policy.
(Tx.F001)
Editor: Priyambodo RH
labels carbon-trading, forests, global
The tricky task of protecting plants in a globalized age
FAO 12 Apr 13;
12 April 2013, Rome - Odds are, today you ate something that came from another hemisphere. A mind-boggling $1.7 billion worth of agricultural products are traded internationally each year, with food items accounting for 82 percent of the total.
And where fruit or plants can travel, so too can less-savory characters. Fruit fly eggs hidden in the skins of oranges go unseen. Beetles burrow into wooden shipping pallets and escape detection. Fungal spores worm their way between the seams of metal shipping containers and so travel radically farther than the wind might ever blow them.
If they are not dealt with when they arrive at their destination, the consequences can be dire: every year global crop yields are reduced by somewhere between 20 and 40 percent due to plant pests and diseases, according to the FAO-based Secretariat of the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC). Precise data are not available, but a significant number of these plant pests were introduced via international trade.
It's not just food production that is at risk. Forests across the globe — relied on by 1.6 billion people in some way for their livelihoods — have been hard hit as well.
In addition to the more notorious "usual suspects" — Mediterranean fruit flies, wheat rust, African Army worms — a veritable panoply of culprits are damaging crops and undermining farmers' livelihoods around the globe: Eggplant Borers, Cassava Bacterial blight, Potato Cyst Nematodes, the European Grapevine Moth, and giant, rice-eating snails of the Pomacea genus. The list is both long and colorful.
Beyond the immediate impacts they have on crop yields and food security, there are other consequences.
Dealing with pest introductions and outbreaks costs governments, farmers and consumers billions of dollars every year. Once pest species are established their eradication is often impossible, and controlling them takes up a significant percentage of the cost of producing food.
Which is why the IPPC was created.
Standards a key tool
With the volume of trade in agricultural products picking up steam, in 1952 the international community came together to establish a mechanism through which countries could work together to prevent plant pests and diseases from spreading via agricultural commerce.
The IPPC serves as a network for information sharing between countries on pest occurrences, active control measures, phytosanitary regulations and best-practices — supporting their efforts to protect plant resources and trade safely. Other IPPC core activities include implementation of standards through capacity development and trade dispute settlement.
The main IPPC activity is the formulation of science-based, internationally-agreed standards which detail how plants and plant products should be handled during trade, known as International Standards for Phytosanitary Measures, or ISPMs.
Fifty ISPMs have been developed so far, covering issues ranging from how plant products or wooden packing materials should be treated prior to export, to recommended procedures and methodologies used by agricultural inspectors, to procedures for conducting risk analysis and required formats for phytosanitary certificates. Another 90 topics are under consideration.
"We now live in a globalized and incredibly interconnected world, full of opportunities for plant pests and diseases to spread from country to country. Reducing risks and preventing or minimizing that spread is far more cost-effective than trying to eradicate or manage an outbreak after-the-fact," says Craig Fedchock, IPPC Secretariat Coordinator.
"Doing so, we protect farmers from the economic devastation of pest and disease outbreaks, shield industries and consumers from the costs of control and eradication, and prevent the loss of biodiversity — as well as help maintain viable, well-functioning ecosystems," Fedchock adds.
Updates for two standards - Sea containers under the spotlight
This week the IPPC's governing body, the Committee on Phytosanitary Measures (CPM), approved two revised ISPMS during its annual meeting (8-11 April 2013).
The first was an update to existing ISPM 11: Pest risk analysis for quarantine pests including analysis of environmental risks and living modified organisms which adds detailed guidance on how authorities should undertake risk analysis for determining if a imported plant might be a pest to cultivated or wild plants, whether they should be regulated, and how to identify phytosanitary measures that reduce the risk to an acceptable level.
Additionally, ISPM 15: Regulation of wood package material in international trade, was revised to provide more specific guidance on approved treatments of wood packaging material.
The CPM also agreed to continue moving ahead on a new ISPM aimed at reducing the transmission of plant pests and diseases via sea containers. (Shipping containers account for around 90 percent of all of the goods transported into the world, with about 5 million in transit by sea at any given moment.)
CPM members also discussed options for improving monitoring and pest controls for international shipments of grain.
labels exotics, food, global
Report: Global warming didn't cause big US drought
Seth Borenstein Associated Press Yahoo News 12 Apr 13;
WASHINGTON (AP) — Last year's huge drought was a freak of nature that wasn't caused by man-made global warming, a new federal science study finds.
Scientists say the lack of moisture usually pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico was the main reason for the drought in the nation's midsection.
Thursday's report by dozens of scientists from five different federal agencies looked into why forecasters didn't see the drought coming. The researchers concluded that it was so unusual and unpredictable that it couldn't have been forecast.
"This is one of those events that comes along once every couple hundreds of years," said lead author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Climate change was not a significant part, if any, of the event."
Researchers focused on six states — Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa — but the drought spread much farther and eventually included nearly two-thirds of the Lower 48 states. For the six states, the drought was the worst four-month period for lack of rainfall since records started being kept in 1895, Hoerling said.
He said the jet stream that draws moisture north from the Gulf was stuck unusually north in Canada.
Other scientists have linked recent changes in the jet stream to shrinking Arctic sea ice, but Hoerling and study co-author Richard Seager of Columbia University said those global warming connections are not valid.
Hoerling used computer simulations to see if he could replicate the drought using man-made global warming conditions. He couldn't. So that means it was a random event, he said.
Using similar methods, Hoerling has been able to attribute increasing droughts in the Mediterranean Sea region to climate change and found that greenhouse gases could be linked to a small portion of the 2011 Texas heat wave.
Another scientist though, blasted the report.
Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded university-run research center, said the report didn't take into account the lack of snowfall in the Rockies the previous winter and how that affected overall moisture in the air. Nor did the study look at the how global warming exacerbated the high pressure system that kept the jet stream north and the rainfall away, he said.
"This was natural variability exacerbated by global warming," Trenberth said in an email. "That is true of all such events from the Russian heat wave of 2010, to the drought and heat waves in Australia."
Hoerling noted that in the past 20 years, the world is seeing more La Ninas, the occasional cooling of the central Pacific Ocean that is the flip side of El Nino. Hoerling said that factor, not part of global warming but part of a natural cycle, increases the chances of such droughts.
Some regions should see more droughts as the world warms because of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, he said. But the six state area isn't expected to get an increase of droughts from global warming — unlike parts of the Southwest — Hoerling said.
Drought report: http://drought.gov/drought/content/drought-task-force-report-page
labels extreme-nature, global
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Letter informs Ubin residents of possible resettle...
Lower dues and other perks to make Singapore port ...
Malaysia: Secret Population of Orangutans Found in...
Malaysia: Treasuring A National Treasure-The Great...
Indonesia: Giant leopard shark washed up on Dulupi...
The tricky task of protecting plants in a globaliz...
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Resources / Behind the Marketing
Behind the Marketing: James Kotecki, VP of Marketing at Infinia ML
With our #BehindTheMarketing series we ask marketers to share their stories. In this episode, James Kotecki, Director of Marketing at Infinia ML, explains how you can be great at marketing without knowing everything.
Lauren Locke-Paddon
James has been a marketing leader at several startups, an award-winning political video blogger, podcast host, and entrepreneur. Throughout his career he has interviewed dozens of visionary leaders including from Mastercard, Spotify, Salesforce, Facebook, Delta Airlines, General Motors on camera and off with his own podcast, Kotecki on Tech, and in his work for clients.
What was the biggest a-ha moment of your marketing career?
The biggest ah-ha moment of my marketing career came when I realized that
"I don't have to know everything."
I can actually just interview people who know things and turn that into great content. Those conversations turn into great ideas. So a large chunk of my business, my marketing expertise, and career, have been built around not knowing all these great insights about technology or the businesses that I'm marketing on behalf of, but in my ability to ask questions of people who do actually know those things.
“Something that is said in the voice of the customer, literally the voice of the customer, is far more powerful than something that I, as a marketer, can say.”
Powerful content and really powerful insights are probably living in the heads of my colleagues, at work right now, and it's my job to use my expertise to draw that out of that. It's not my job to kind of create that out of nothing. So I think once I realized that all the great content, all the great ideas, and all the stuff that marketing is pumping out could come from interviews and conversations, that was really a game changer for me. It allowed me to focus on what I'm good at: asking questions and then allowing other people to do what they're good at, which is sharing their insights and expertise. Now, I once heard Terry Gross interviewed, the host of NPR's Fresh Air, (the interview show) and she said that actually, she had some kind of similar revelation when hosting a radio show. In her early days of doing she realized 'Oh, I can I can actually just do interviews on the air - full time.'
When did taking a risk in your career pay off?
I was working in marketing at a tech company called Automated Insights, and it was going fine. But I just had this entrepreneurial itch to go and start my own thing. So I left. I took a risk, and I started my own company, a solo marketing business. I figured out eventually I was going to focus on customer storytelling, and testimonial creation on behalf of tech clients. I didn't realize that exact focus at first. I had inklings of it, but I was scattered in a number of different directions. It took me maybe 12, 18 months to actually figure out exactly how to focus the business precisely and what exactly I was selling.
At the end of that time, the person who had been the CEO of the company that I had left, had had gone to do something else and was now coming in to be the CEO of a new company called Infinia ML. He asked me to join that company as its director of marketing, and I did.
That the risk paid off because in that 12,18,24 month span, of doing my own business, I had really been able to level up my own marketing abilities, my own confidence, leadership and managerial abilities, to the point where I was able to come in at a much higher level for this new company and be a better contributor.
What advice do you have for marketers trying to take their career to the next level?
Okay, so somebody comes to me and says, “Hey, I'm a marketer and I want to take my career to the next level. What do I do?” I would first turn the question around and ask, 'What do you mean by next level? Is it just going from, a manager title to a director title? Isn't that kind of linear promotion?'
That's just one definition of what next-level could be. It could be doing something, deepening your expertise within the title that you have now. And the fact that you don't get a promotion and therefore increased managerial responsibilities is what actually allows you to deepen your expertise because you have fewer managerial responsibilities and you can actually go deeper. That's just an example.
Another example would be you could go and start your own thing. That's what I did. That's how I took my career to the next level. But I'm not saying anyone necessarily has to do that. I'm just suggesting that before you think about how to advance and climb the ladder of life, just think about whether the next rung is really in a straight linear fashion.
"Because the ladder of life doesn't look like any kind of ladder that you buy in a hardware store - the rungs are flung all over God's creation."
Your resolve as a marketer to figure out what the next step should actually mean for you at this time. Not what other people would define it as, not what might impress people at your family reunion, but what the next level should actually mean for you right now. I would spend a lot more time thinking about that question that I would even necessarily thinking about. 'Okay, how do I get there?'
Tell us about the impact of a successful campaign that your team recently executed.
I'm going to give you a very simple and in some ways for a marketer, very beautiful example of this. We’re a company of machine learning experts, data scientists, engineers. We have a set of tools and machine learning that we can kind of direct at any number of industries and executives. And so one marketing challenge for us has simply been to figure out okay, what's the best fit with our message in the market and what specific segments of the market are we trying to go after?
So we've recently begun to narrow our focus strategically, and as part of that, we've been sending out email campaigns to people that we've never met before. Classic marketing cold email campaign. You get a bunch of emails to people that you have a pretty good sense will be interested in what you're offering.
So this was one of our first major kind of straight up cold email outreach campaigns, and there was a lot of uncertainty. I gotta tell you - on the biz dev and on the marketing side around how and if this would actually work. And so I'm happy to reveal that once we did this campaign, we started to get some feedback that it was working. We started to get some positive responses, and I felt like Doc Brown and back to the future, you know, like jumping up and down and saying 'It works! I invented something that works and really, it was a team effort, obviously, to put together these emails and narrow the focus and write the copy and get the list. And put together all of the machinery that allows email marketing to happen. I'm sure all the marketers listening to this know that whole process very well. But there's a simple joy and beauty of just connecting with an audience and knowing that, yes, I have put together a message that is compelling because we, as a company, can offer something that is actually gonna help somebody else. And ultimately, I think that's what we're all here to do.
What do you see as the role of video in marketing going forward?
I'm gonna give two answers to this question. One: think about any science fiction, movie or TV show. Are there more videos in the world of the future or fewer videos in the world of the future than the world that we live in right now?
"On average, I would say there are way more videos in the future that we collectively have imagined for ourselves."
So if you are wondering if video is the future, you can kind of look to our collective psyche on that as we reflect it back through our own storytelling.
And the second answer is personal, because I actually started a video blog on YouTube in 2007 talking about politics. In fact, I actually interviewed several presidential candidates at the time, in my college dorm room at Georgetown University. I was one of the first people kind of talking about how presidential candidates were using YouTube in their campaigns. So personally, I'm extremely biased. I love video. It is really at the heart of who I am. I absolutely do not think that every single marketing campaign or marketing initiative needs to have video attached to it. In fact, in the work that I'm currently doing at Infinia ML there's probably a little bit less just because we're trying to still figure out our marketing and our messaging to know exactly what kind of videos to make. So I don't want to say that it's right for everybody and every moment.
“Video brings us back to an earlier era of communication.”
If you think about the earliest forms of communication between human beings, it's a person standing in front of me making noises or making motions, and they're communicating something to me, right? And then, through things like pictures and writing and paintings and all those things as beautiful and as wonderful as all those are, those actually get away from that kind of very basic, very instinctive garbled communication in a 1 to 1 kind of way and video actually brings it right back to, 'There is a person standing in front of me, albeit on a screen who is making motions and saying things with their with their mouth, and those sounds were coming out, and I'm hearing that I'm being communicated with.
“Video is very, very personal.”
And hopefully the way that if you're watching this video, you feel like I'm personally connecting with you right now. So I don't think anything can really match or surpass that for video. Until they get to some kind of Holodeck, of course. And I certainly hope Vocal Video will work on that, but until then, video is where it's at - so keep making videos , videos are the best.
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30 Sep, 2020 Uncategorized
Dawn Raid, just like the Fuck… Vulture Funds, and now it is Alleged the Council, with the backing of FF, are going to Erect the Statue of Nelson’s Pillar back to its Rightful Standing on O’Connell Street. Nothing surprises me now in this Pathetic Country? Sources also inform us, Irish History will soon be gone in the National Schools, in case it Offends the West Culchie Brits of D4 and beyond?
Posted by Fred Bassett
Dawn demolition for historic home of 1916 leader O’Rahilly
Conor Feehan 6 hrs ago
The grandson of the 1916 leader known as The O’Rahilly has reacted with fury to the demolition of his former home in Ballsbridge yesterday morning.
The bulldozers moved in on the historic property at 40 Herbert Park before dawn, and within hours it was reduced to rubble to make way for a block of luxury apartments and a hotel development.
Dublin City councillors had recently voted to start the process of having the building included on its list of protected structures, but An Bord Pleanála (ABP) had already approved an application by the developer, Derryroe Ltd, to raze the building – in the face of opposition from heritage groups and some local residents, as well as descendants of The O’Rahilly.
Although the planning board had given the go-ahead for the demolition, Proinsias Ó Rathaille, the grandson of The O’Rahilly, said it is his view that a commencement order for the work, which in effect rubber-stamps the decision of ABP, had not yet been issued by Dublin City Council (DCC).
In response to a query by the Irish Independent, DCC said it was investigating the circumstances surrounding the demolition. “Once the city council has ascertained the facts, it will take any appropriate action,” a spokeswoman said.
The conservation section of the council wrote twice – the first letter was in April – to try and gain access to the property, so an inspector could decide if it was suitable to be added to the protected structures list. However, no access was granted.
The issue of the commencement order will form part of the council’s investigation.
Mr Ó Rathaille also said the claims that the house had no historic relevance were not true, and that all the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation had been at meetings in the house, and the address had been written on a letter by The O’Rahilly as he lay dying just off Moore Street, having been shot while leaving the GPO.
“That house should be a national monument. A process was under way to have it listed but An Bord Pleanála had its decision made before we could put it in place,” Mr Ó Rathaille said.
“They went in around 6am yesterday and knocked it. They did it at dawn, just like the leaders of the Rising were executed at dawn.”
He also said that a revolver belonging to Michael Collins was found hidden in the kitchen of the house during renovations in the 1970s, and that three Irish presidents – Eamon de Valera, Seán T Ó Ceallaigh, and Douglas Hyde – had also visited it.
“My heart sank when I saw the pictures of the house after it was knocked down,” he said.
Peter Dooley @PeterDooleyDUB · 2h I am disgusted that The O’Rahilly’s, one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, House in Ballsbridge was demolished this morning by a ruthless developer, my understanding is that there was a vote passed @DubCityCouncil to protect his house. This is a disgraceful attack on our history
Published by Fred Bassett
Political searcher of the truth; I also expose corruption and cronyism and also help whistleblowers. View all posts by Fred Bassett
This well planned Attack on Irish History could have being Stopped, but the Politicial Parties lacked the Will and the Moral Courage, seats will be lost over this? The people of Ringsend have long Memories?
As the Fallout from Golfgate slows down a little, this will suit FG and its Cronies. With Big Phil gone into Pasture and poor Dara losing both Titles, Minister and Deputy Dog Leader of Martins Clowns, the Woulfe is lying low. Judge the Verdict cannot be different for your goodself – You have to go, at least you keep the Wig as a Memento
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Run-ons & Comma Splices
The run-on sentence and comma splice are common punctuation errors that can create confusion in your writing.
Run-on sentence
A run-on sentence occurs when two or more complete sentences (independent clauses) are joined with no punctuation. Here's an example:
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages his art became more famous after his death in 1972.
Comma splice
A comma splice occurs when two or more complete sentences are joined only with a comma, which is not strong enough punctuation. This is an example of a comma splice:
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages, his art became more famous after his death in 1972.
Five Ways to Fix a Run-on or Comma Splice
Add a period and a capital letter
Add a period and a capital letter to separate the sentences.
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages. His art became more famous after his death in 1972.
Add a comma and a coordinating conjunction
Add a comma and a coordinating conjunction. Coordinating conjunctions are easy to remember as F.A.N.B.O.Y.S.—for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so.
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages, but his art became more famous after his death in 1972.
Add a semicolon
Add a semicolon if the sentences are closely related.
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages; his art became more famous after his death in 1972.
Add a “transitional word”
Add a semicolon and a conjunctive adverb—also known as a “transitional word”. When using a transitional word, the comma should be placed immediately after the transition.
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages; however, his art became more famous after his death in 1972.
Common Transitional Words:
Add a subordinating conjunction
Add a subordinating conjunction—also known as a “dependent word”—to the beginning or the middle of the sentence.
Even though Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist known for his shadow boxes and collages, his artwork became more famous after his death in 1972.
In the example above, the comma stays when the conjunction "even though" is added to the beginning of the sentence.
Joseph Cornell was an innovative American artist because he used objects and items most people would throw away in his work.
In this example, the comma is removed when the conjunction "because” is added to the middle of the sentence.
Common Subordinating Conjunctions:
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Review: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
March 3, 2015 March 5, 2016 / Simon McDonald
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is one of the finest high school romance novels I’ve had the pleasure of reading. It’s an honest, occasionally awkward, sometimes heart-wrenching, often hilarious, and completely captivating portrayal of the complicated lives of teenagers. That the relationship in question is of the same-sex variety underlines the irrelevance of sexual orientation. Becky Albertalli’s debut reminds us that love is true, and pure, and boundless, and that whether you’re gay, or straight, or undecided – however you choose to describe yourself – we all have, or will, struggle through an identity crisis at some point in our lives, as we seek to define ourselves. That’s what binds us together. That’s what unites us.
Ostensibly, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is about a gay teenager – Simon – who comes out to his parents, friends and classmates after his covert correspondence with a mysterious boy is discovered. Albertalli doesn’t take the obvious route, however, and make her story’s focus Simon’s outing. Of course, it’s a vital element, and it’s infuriating witnessing Simon forced to deal with this cruel exposure; but Simon is comfortable with his sexuality, despite uncertainly about how his friends and family will react. He’s not confused about with his sexual identity, but he’s concerned about what it means beyond himself; how the ripples of this revelation might affect, if at all, those he’s closest to. The more prominent issue on his mind is that of the mysterious ‘Blue’ – his secret anonymous admirer, the boy he’s been emailing on a daily basis for weeks, and who he’s developed quite the crush on.
Simon’s communiqué’s with ‘Blue’ – the banter, the innuendo, the awkwardness – reminded me of my initial contacts with high school crushes. Is the connection mutual? Does she feel the same way about me as I do her? Am I even sure what I’m feeling? I’m acutely aware I’m a teenager, that very special breed of human who is prone to abnormalities. When you’re in love with someone at that age – or perceived love, as is how it often turns out – they become your obsession; other relationships fall to the wayside as you put all your hopes and dreams into this one person. The beauty of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda is how Albertalli depicts the fallout of Simon’s blossoming relationship among his closest friends; in some instances it binds, in other cases it disrupts.
Simon is a wonderful protagonist. He’s equal parts cute, awkward and hilarious, as we all are in our own ways. But we never forget he’s a kid, and at that phase in his life where the brittle pieces that he’s comprised of are hardening; he’s gradually solidifying into the man he’ll turn out to be, and that process involves missteps and miscalculations. Albertalli’s account of these is so true to life, and so emotionally honest. It’s a hugely impressive feat, and such a delightful read.
Albertalli, Becky, Book Review
Becky Albertalli, YA, Young Adult
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One thought on “Review: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli”
Pingback: Review: The Upside Of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli – Simon McDonald
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Black Mecca
March 23, 2018 May 1, 2018 Allison Schuette
“That period of time—growing up in Gary, Indiana, I would not want to be anywhere else in the world.”
Editing by Welcome Project intern Brandi Casada.
Transcript for Black Mecca
1967 is when Mayor Hatcher won. And I was at Bailey then. That was an exciting time for me because on the weekends, we would go out and go door-to-door. There was a guy named Lou Drinkard, and Lou took the young people, and he would take us in his car over to Operation Push in Chicago, and he would take us going door-to-door for Mayor Hatcher, and I remember my little project that I thought of—there were these little Charms suckers—they’re about this round—and they had little stickers that said ‘Hatcher’ about that big, and I put them on there, and I’d pass them out on the bus, so, and I’d say, ‘Now go home and tell your parents they have to vote for Mayor Hatcher. But I was very excited about my dad and my mom worked very hard—especially my dad worked really hard—in the campaign. And that night was one that I’ll never forget. When he did win, and I remember my mom and I were at home trying to listen to the radio. My dad was down there and he came and got us. 21st and Broadway was closed off completely, and people were just there, just excited, and happy.
But I do remember on that bus that next morning everybody was excited. Even the people whose parents probably weren’t for the mayor—at this point, everybody was for Mayor Hatcher, ok? And we were all excited, and especially to being bussed to Glen Park and Bailey School because there was tension.
I think our energy, our positive and excited energy, was making them uncomfortable, and I don’t think they were—and they showed on their face that they weren’t happy about it. And to be honest, as I think about it now—and today, I would say this would be surprising to me that there weren’t some children whose parents had supported Mayor Hatcher. But then, we’re in Glen Park. And in Miller, there were a lot of whites who supported him and maybe not so much in Glen Park because I can’t remember like, someone coming and saying, ‘Oh, I’m really happy about this,’ or, you know, ‘I’m with you,’ or, ‘My parents voted for him.’ I don’t remember any of that. It was strictly on racial lines with us. But we were obviously very happy on that day when we got back to school.
You know, a lot of people talk a lot about Mayor Hatcher winning for mayor, and of course, that was spectacular, and he was the first elected of a major city, but before him was Mayor Katz, who was Jewish, and they were equally—people in this community were equally not happy about there being a Jewish mayor. So, there was a time, just a feeling going on during that time in ’66, ’67 before the mayor—when he won in ’67, but that whole timeframe right there was not—it was just a time of transition, but not everybody was happy about the transition.
That period of time—growing up in Gary, Indiana, I would not want to be anywhere else in the world. Because as a result of him becoming the mayor, it became like, literally, the black Mecca for this country. And everybody wanted to come to Gary, no matter who they were: if they were an entertainer of some sort, if they were involved in politics—you name it, they came. And so, I was able to, you know, be up and close with these people. I don’t think I would have that opportunity anywhere else.
I don’t care where I went—if I went somewhere, and they said, ‘Well, where are you from?’ and I said, ‘Gary,’ their eyes lit up, and they were like, ‘You’re from Gary? Do you know—of course—the Jackson Five? Do you know Richard Hatcher?’ And people were just excited. ‘Well, tell me about—you know, growing up in Gary. What was it like? Did you ever see the Jacksons? Was Mayor Hatcher—was he like this or that?’ And so, it was exciting.
This entry was posted in diversity, Flight Paths Project, geographical region, inclusion, politics, race, video and tagged diversity, Flight Paths Project, geographical region, inclusion, politics, race. Bookmark the permalink.
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Main » TV-series » How I Met Your Mother season 10 release date - 2017, to be announced
How I Met Your Mother season 10 release date - 2017, to be announced
Original name: How I Met Your Mother season 10
Director: Carter Bays, Craig Thomas
Cast: Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris
Genre: Sitcom
TV channel: CBS
Original release: September 19, 2005 – March 31, 2014
About TV show How I Met Your Mother season 10
Is How I Met Your Mother coming back? How I Met Your Mother season 10 release date - 2017, to be announced.
How I Met Your Mother Plot
Ted (Josh Radnor) finally managed: He found his dream woman, married her and got children with her. At the same time, it did not look as if Ted would ever be able to bring his private life to a happy ending 25 years ago. Just as the woman Chaot did it unexpectedly and what obstacles he had to take for it, he tells his children on the domestic sofa in "How I Met Your Mother". In his stories, his four friends are particularly important. There is Marshall (Jason Segel), who is engaged to the attractive nursery girl Lily (Alyson Hannigan), Womanizer Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), who is placed in the head Had to teach the untalented women's failure Ted his dating techniques and the good-looking Robin (Cobie Smulders), to whom Ted has an eye.
How I Met Your Mother season 10 release date
2017, to be announced
How I Met Your Mother (English for "How I Knew Your Mother", short: HIMYM) is an American sitcom produced for CBS. The nine seasons comprise 208 episodes, which were broadcast from 2005 to 2014.
TV show status
Example: 2019-12-03 - Official release/renewed date;
2019, to be announced - The date will be announced in 2019;
Completed - The season 9 is final;
Cancelled - The show has been canceled after season 9.
How I Met Your Mother season 10 release date on CBS
Subscribe to receive last news and updates status TV show How I Met Your Mother season 10. You will receive an automatic email when the show renewed or cancelled.
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Our Lady of Sorrows Cemetery
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St. Mary's Catholic Church in Lewistown
Where to find St. Mary's
Street parking is available on both sides of the street in front of the church, as well as, in the small parking lot in front of the rectory located immediately south of the church.
"Rev. Howard of Galesburg organized St. Mary's Parish, Lewistown, IL in 1864. A church building was begun at once and finished the following year. Immediately, Lewistown was made the out-mission of Canton. The pastor was the saintly, Father Ryan who had a large territory with many labors. Fr. O'Neil succeeded in 1870. He ministered to both Canton and Lewistown until 1877, when he retired. Father Lyons was assigned to assume his duties. St.Mary's was served by priests from Pekin and Peoria until 1880.
In 1880, Lewistown was given a resident priest, and Bushnell and Rushville parishes were added, while Canton's duties were assigned elsewhere. The next year, a new parsonage was erected with Father Galley being the priest in charge. He was followed by Fathers O'Callahan, O'Brien, Theibes, Jansen, Libert, Finn, Flynn, Madden, Fitzgerald, Blaske, Sheedy, Walters and Father O'Brien.
In 1900, the church was remodeled with new stained glass windows. Splendid altars were added. In 1920, the resident pastor was removed to Havana, with Lewistown and Manito as out-missions. The first couple married in the church was Mary Cook and Patrick Hinchey. JJ McNally was the first child baptized there. St. Mary's Church was one of the strong factors in the many temperance fights in the city. Father O'Neil, during 1864, organized a temperance league among his members, which resulted in much good for the town." This excerpt was taken from The Fulton Democrat 1922.
Predecessors to St. Mary's are: Fr. Thomas Howard 1897 - 1902; Fr. James McGreevey 1902 - 1910; Fr. Theodore Wolters 1911 - 1916; Fr. Thomas O'Brien 1917 - 1935; Fr. Patrick Martin O.S.B. - 6 mos. in 1935; Fr. Keith Roche 1935 - 1940. Fr. Roche also had charge of St. Patrick's in Havana with the out-mission in Manito, IL. Fr. John Crowley became pastor in 1940. From1943 - '46, was an Army chaplain at New Guinea.
In July 1943, Edward Blough succeeded Fr. Crowley. He served all 3 parishes.
On May 9, 1944, Fr. Blough, reported to the Army School of Chaplains at Ft Devens, MA and was awarded the commission of first Lieutenant. Nine of the eleven members of his immediate family were in the services.
During the war years, St. Mary's Altar & Rosary was an extremely active group. They met in homes provided socials, worked with the USO, coordinated potlucks, provided Mass studies, purchased and sewed linens, provided hospitality whenever it was needed, sold baked goods, created lace for the altar linens, sent clothing to the Koreans, sponsored dances, presented books to the public library, bought new furniture and music, helped with the Junior/Senior prom, held annual picnics at Dickson Mounds and cleaned and decorated the church for holiday functions. In 1943 the Altar & Rosary Society hosted Card and Bingo Party nights in the High School gym. Tickets were 35 cents for the ticket and included pie and coffee. It was a complete success. Prizes included war stamps, pies and cakes. In 1955, the Altar & Rosary Society of Lewistown, became affiliated with the National Council of Catholic Women.
In 1950, Havana was the home of three Nauvoo Benedictine Sisters. Sr. Mary Adele, Sr. Mary Kathleen and Sr. Mary Bernadette came to Havana to conduct a kindergarten and give religious instruction in all three parishes. These sisters also ministered to out-mission parishes, St. Mary's in Lewistown and Immaculate Conception in Manito.
Father James Griffin served Lewistown at St. Mary's from 1945 - 1960, until Fr. William Gray was sent. Fr. Gray was sent from St. Patrick's in Peoria and served from Feb - June 1960 where he continued to serve Havana and Manito.
In June 1960, Father Robert O'Connor was appointed from Canton to pastor St. Mary's and St. Michael's in St. David, IL. With this assignment, St. Mary's was given its first pastor in many years.
St. Mary’s Church, in Lewistown, Illinois, was an out mission of St. Patrick’s from 1920 - 1960.
Upcoming Events for St. Mary's
Friday, January 22, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Confession at St. Mary's in Lewistown
Friday, January 22, 12:00 PM
Eucharistic Adoration at St. Mary's in Lewistown
Saturday, January 23, 3:45 PM - 4:15 PM
Saturday Vigil Mass at St. Mary's in Lewistown
Parish Office & Mailing Address
(for All 3 Parishes)
545 S. Orange St., Havana, IL, 62644
St. Patrick's Sanctuary is open for prayer and reflection at these times as well.
Parish Email: office@3fortheTrinity.org
Physical Addresses of the 3 Parishes
St. Mary's in Lewistown
705 N. Broadway, Lewistown, IL 61542
St. Patrick's in Havana
501 S. Adams St., Manito, IL, 61546
© 2021 3ForTheTrinity Catholic Community. All rights reserved.
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Inner Aspect of the Social Question
[ Lecture: S-3672: 9th March, 1919 | Zurich | GA0193 | DavyC ]
[ Buy from: | SteinerBooks | RSPress | Powell's | Amazon ]
On-line since: 23rd December, 2006
THERE is truly great significance in how certain men feel impelled to-day to speak about the present situation of mankind — men who at least try, with the aid of their feelings and perceptions, to see into the heart of social affairs. In this connection I would like to read you a few sentences from the address which Kurt Eisner gave to a gathering of students in Basle, shortly before his death. Perhaps some of you already know these sentences, but they are extraordinarily important for anyone who wants to grasp the symptomatic meaning of certain things to-day.
“Do I not hear and see clearly” (he says, referring to his earlier remarks), “that in our life this very longing strives to find expression — and yet accompanying it is the conviction that our life, as we are compelled to lead it to-day, is plainly the invention of an evil spirit! Imagine a great thinker, knowing nothing of our time and living perhaps two thousand years ago, who might dream of how the world would look after two thousand years — not with the most exuberant imagination would he be able to conceive such a world as that in which we are condemned to live. In truth, existing conditions are the one great mirage in the world, while the substance of our desires and the longings of our spirit are the deepest and final truth — and everything outside them is horrible. We have simply interchanged dreaming and waking. Our task is to shake off this ancient illusion about the reality of our present social existence. One glance at the war: can you imagine a human reason which could devise anything like it? If this war was not what men call reality, then perhaps we were dreaming, and now have woken up.”
Just think of it — in his efforts to understand the present time, this man was driven to make use of the concept of a dream, and to ask himself the question: Is not the reality which surrounds us to-day much better called a bad dream, than true reality?
So we have the remarkable case — and consider how typical it is — of a thoroughly modern man, a man who has felt himself to be a herald of a new epoch, who regards outwardly perceptible reality as nothing else than maya — rather as Indian philosophy does — as in fact a dream; and this man feels impelled by the singular events of the present to raise the question (no matter in what sense but still to raise it) whether this reality is not indeed a dream!
Yes, the whole tenor of Eisner's speech shows that he was using more than a mere phrase when he said that this present reality could be naught else than something inflicted on mankind by an evil spirit.
Now let us recall some of the many things that have passed through our souls in the course of our anthroposophical endeavours, and above all the fact that in general we try not to look on outwardly perceptible reality as the whole of reality, and that over against the perceptible we set the super-sensible, which alone prevents the perceptible from ranking as the true, complete reality. This outlook, however, is no more than a tiny spark in the currents of contemporary thought, for these are widely permeated by materialistic ideas — and yet we see that such a man as Kurt Eisner, who is certainly untouched by this spark (at any rate in his physical life), finds himself driven by the facts of the present day to make this surprising comparison: he compares outward reality, at least in its current manifestation, to a dream! Faced with present-day reality, he is driven to a confession which he can express only by calling to witness the general truth of the unreality, the maya-character, of the reality that is outwardly perceived.
Let us now go rather more deeply into many of the things which our consideration of the social problem has brought before our souls in the last few weeks. Let us observe how the trend of events in the past century has more and more brought men to the point of denying the reality of the spiritual or super-sensible world, so that this denial is, one might say, established in the widest circles. Certainly, in some quarters — you may object — a great deal is said about the spiritual world; churches are still numerous, if not always full, and words which purport to tell of the spirit echo through them. Moreover — to-day and also yesterday evening — you can listen almost all the time to bells, which again should be an expression of something recognised in the world as spiritual life. But in this connection we experience something else, too. If to-day an attempt is made to hear what the Christ is saying for our present age, then it is precisely from the adherents of the old religious communities that the most vehement attacks come. Real spiritual life, one that relies not merely on faith or on an old tradition, but on the immediate spiritual findings of the present — that is something which very, very few people want to-day.
On the other hand, is it not as though modern humanity were being impelled — not perhaps by an evil world-spirit, but by a good world-spirit — to think again of the spiritual side of existence — as witness the fact that people are surrounded by a sense-perceptible reality of such a kind that a man of modern outlook has to say: It is like a dream... even a great thinker of two thousand years ago could not have conceived the shape which outer reality would wear to-day?
In any case, here is a modern man led by such a recognition to form conceptions which are not customary to-day. I know that the conceptions of reality, which to-day I have pointed to as important, are found rather difficult by many of our anthroposophical friends. But, my dear friends, you cannot cope with life to-day unless you have the will to take account of these difficult conceptions. How do people usually form their thoughts in a certain realm to-day? They hold a crystal in their hands: that is a real object. They take a rose, plucked from its stem, and in just the same way they say: that is a real object. They call them both real objects in the same sense.
Natural scientists, in their chancelleries of learning and in every laboratory and clinic, talk about reality in such a way as to grant it only to things which have the same kind of reality as the crystal and the plucked rose. But is there not an obvious and important difference in the fact that for long ages the crystal retains, quite of itself, its existing form? The rose, plucked from its stem, loses its form in a very much shorter time; it dies. It has not the same degree of reality as the crystal. And the rose-stem itself, if we tear it from the earth, has no longer the same degree of reality that it had while it was planted in the earth. This leads us to look at objects in a way quite different from the superficial observation of the present day. We may not speak of a rose or a rose-stem as real objects; in order to speak of reality in the fullest sense we must take the whole earth into account — and then speak of the rose-stem, and its roses, as a kind of hair sprouting out of this reality!
So you see — sense-perceptible reality includes objects which cease to be real, in the true sense of the word, if they are separated from their foundation. It is here, in this great illusion, that we have to search among the appearances of outer reality for what truly is reality. Mistakes of the kind I have mentioned are common in looking at nature to-day. But anyone who makes them, and has got used to them as the result of centuries of habit, will find it extraordinarily hard to think about social questions in a way that corresponds to reality. For this is the great difference between human life and nature: anything in nature which no longer has full reality, such as the plucked rose, is allowed to die. Now something can have an appearance of reality which is not reality: the appearance is a lie. And we can quite well incorporate as a reality in social life something which is in fact not a reality. Only then it need not immediately fade away; it will turn into a source of pain and torment for mankind. Indeed, nothing can bring forth healing for mankind which is not first experienced and thought out in terms of complete reality, and then planted in the social organism. It is not merely a sin against the social order, but a sin against the truth, if — for example — daily work proceeds on the assumption that human labour-power (I have often said this here) is a commodity. It can be made to seem so, indeed: but this seeming results in pain and suffering for human society, and sets the stage for convulsions and revolutions in economic life.
In short, what needs to become a familiar thought for people to-day is this: not everything which is revealed in the outer appearance of reality — revealed within certain limits — is bound to be a true reality; it may be a living lie. And this distinction between living truths and living lies is something which should be deeply engraved in human minds to-day. For the more people there are in whom it is deeply engraved, in so many more will the feeling awake: we must seek for those things which are not lies, but living truths ... and the sooner will the social organism be restored to health. What must be added to this?
Something further is necessary for discerning the true or merely apparent reality of an external object. Imagine a being who comes from a planet with a different organisation from ours, so that this being has never encountered the distinction between a rose, growing on its stem, and a crystal — he might well believe, if a crystal and a rose were placed before him, that their reality was of the same kind. And he would no doubt be surprised to find the rose soon withering, while the crystal remained unchanged. Here on earth we know where we are in face of the realities, because we have followed the course of things through long periods.
But it is not always possible to distinguish true reality in the way one can with the rose. In life we encounter objects which require us to create a foundation for our judgment if we are to lay hold of the true reality in them. What sort of foundation is this — with respect particularly to social life?
Now, in the two preceding lectures I spoke about this foundation; to-day I will add something more. You know from my writings the descriptions I have given of the spiritual world — the world which man lives through between death and rebirth. You are aware that in referring to this life in the super-sensible, spiritual world one must be clear as to the relationships which prevail between soul and soul. For there the human being is free from his body: he is not subject to the physical laws of the world we live through between birth and death. So one speaks of the force or forces which play from soul to soul. You can read in my Theosophy how one must speak in this connection of the forces of sympathy and antipathy, playing between soul and soul in the soul-world. In a quite inward way these forces play from soul to soul. Antipathy sets soul against soul; through sympathy, souls are made gentler towards each other. Harmonies and disharmonies arise from the inmost experiences of souls. And this inward experience by one soul of the inmost experience of another is what determines the true relationship of the super-sensible to the sense-perceptible world. It is only a reflection — a sort of lingering remnant — of this super-sensible experience, the experience which establishes a true connection with the sense-world, that can be experienced here in the physical world during life.
This reflection, however, must be seen in its true significance. We can ask: How, from a social point of view, is our life here between birth and death related to our super-sensible life? From here we are at once led — as we often have been in studying the necessary threefolding of the social organism — to the middle member, frequently described: in fact to the political State. People who in our epoch have reflected on the political State, have always been concerned to understand exactly what it is. Moreover, the various class-interests of modern times have led to everything being jumbled up together in the State, so that without further knowledge it is pretty well impossible to tell whether the State is a reality, or a living lie.
It is a far remove from the outlook of the German philosopher, Hegel, to the very different outlook which Fritz Mauthner, the author of a philosophical dictionary, has lately proclaimed. Hegel regards the State more or less as the realisation of God on earth. Fritz Mauthner says: the State is a necessary evil. He regards the State as an evil, but one men cannot do without — as something required by social life. So are the findings of two modern spirits radically opposed.
Owing to the fact that a great deal which was formerly instinctive is now rising into the light of consciousness, the most variously-minded people have tried to form conceptions of how the State should be constituted and what sort of entity it ought to be. And these conceptions have taken the most manifold forms. On the one hand we have the pious sheep who refuse to grasp what the State really is, but want to portray it in such a way that there is not much to say about it, but a great deal to bewail. And there are the others, who want to change the State radically, so that men may derive from the State itself a satisfying form of existence. Hence the question arises: How can we gain a perception of what the State really is?
If one observes impartially what can be woven between man and man within the context of the State, and compares it with what can be woven between soul and soul in the life after death (as I described it just now), then and only then can one gain a perception of the reality of the State — of its potential reality. For, just as every relationship which arises from the fundamental forces of sympathy and antipathy in the human soul after death lives in the inmost depths of the soul, so everything built between man and man through political State-life is a pure externality, based on law, on the wholly external ways in which men confront one another.
And if you follow this thought right through, you come to see that the State represents the exact opposite of super-sensible life. And it is the more complete in its own way, this State, the more fully it fills this opposite role: the less it claims to incorporate in its own structure anything that belongs to super-sensible life, the more it merely embodies purely external relationships between man and man — those wherein all men are equal in the sight of the law. More and more deeply is one penetrated by this truth: that the fulfilment of the State consists precisely in it’s seeking to comprise only what belongs to our life between birth and death, only what belongs to our most external relationships.
But then we must ask: If the State reflects super-sensible life only by standing for its opposite, how does the super-sensible find its way into all the rest of our sense-life? In the last lecture I spoke of this from another point of view. To-day I must add that the antipathies which unfold in the super-sensible world between death and birth leave certain remnants, and we bring these with us into physical existence. Working against them in physical life is everything which lives in so-called spiritual life, in spiritual culture. This is what draws men together in religious communities, and in other spiritual societies, so that they may create a counterpart of the antipathies which have lingered on from the life before birth.
All our spiritual culture should be justified on its own ground, for it reflects our pre-earthly life and in a certain sense equips mankind for life in the sense-world, and at the same time it should be a kind of remedy for the antipathies which remain over from the super-sensible world. That is why it is so dreadful when people bring about schisms in spiritual life, instead of working for unity — in spiritual life above all. The remaining antipathies are surging in the depths of the human soul and prevent the achievement of what should be the essential aim: true spiritual harmony, true spiritual collaboration. Just where this should prevail, we find sects springing up. These schisms and sectarianisms are in fact the reflections on earth of the antipathies which are bound up with the origins of all spiritual life, and for which spiritual life should really come to serve as a remedy.
We must recognise this spiritual life as something which has an inner connection with our life before birth — indeed, a certain kinship with it. We should therefore never try to organise spiritual-cultural life except as a free life, outside the realm of politics, which in this sense is not a reflection but a counter-image of super-sensible life. And we shall gain a conception of what is real in the State, and in spiritual-cultural life, only if we take super-sensible life into account, as well as the life of the senses. Both together make up true reality, while the life of senses alone is nothing more than a dream.
Economic life has a quite different character. In economic life the single man works for others. He works for others because he, just as much as the others, finds it to his advantage to do so. Economic life springs from needs, and consists in all kinds of work which go to satisfy the ordinary natural needs of human beings on the physical plane — including the finer but more instinctive needs of the soul. And within economic life there is an unconscious unfolding of something whose influence continues on the far side of death.
Men work for one another out of the egoistic needs of economic life, and from the depths of this work come the seeds of certain sympathies which are destined to flower in our souls during the life after death. And so, just as spiritual-cultural life is a kind of remedy for the remains of antipathies which we bring into earthly existence from the life before birth, so are the depths of economic life a seed-ground for sympathies which will develop after death.
Here is a further aspect of the way in which we learn from the super-sensible world to recognise the necessity of a threefold ordering of the social organism. Most certainly, no one can reach this point of view unless he strives to become familiar with the spiritual-scientific foundation of world-knowledge. But for anyone who does this it will become more and more obvious that a healthy social organism must be membered into these three realms, for the three realms are related in quite distinctive ways to the super-sensible world, which — as I have said — is the complement of the sense-world and together with it makes up true reality.
But now observe — in recent centuries no one has spoken any longer of these interconnections of outward physical existence, as it manifests in cultural life, political life, and economic life. People have gone on spinning out the old traditions, but with no understanding for them. They have lost the practice of taking a direct way, through an active soul-life, into the world of the spirit, in order there to seek for the light that is able to illuminate physical reality, so that this reality comes then to be rightly known for the first time. The leading circles of mankind have set the tone of this unspiritual life. And in this way a deep gulf has arisen between the social classes — a gulf which lies at the root of our life to-day and is not to be drowsily ignored.
Perhaps I may again recall how, before the time of July and August, 1914, drew on, people who belonged to the leading classes — the former leading classes — were accustomed to praise the stage which our civilisation, as they called it, had at last reached. They spoke of how thought could be carried like an arrow over great distances by the telegraph and telephone, and of the other fabulous achievements of modern technique which culture and civilisation had carried to such an advanced stage. But this culture, this civilisation, was already rushing towards the abyss, out of which have come the frightful catastrophes of to-day. Before July and August, 1914, the statesmen of Europe, especially those of Central Europe — this can be established from the documents — declared times without number: Under present conditions, peace in Europe is assured for a long time. That is literally what was said, by the statesmen of Central Europe especially, in their party speeches. I could show you speeches made as late as May, 1914, when it was said: Through our diplomacy, the relationships between countries have been brought to a point which permits us to believe in enduring peace. That, in May, 1914! But anyone who at that time saw through those relationships, had to speak in a different vein. In lectures I gave then in Vienna, [See: The Inner Nature of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth.] I repeated, before the war, what I have often said in the course of recent years: We are living in the midst of something which can be called only a cancerous social disease, a carcinoma of the social organism. This carcinoma, this ulcer, duly broke out, and became what people call the World War.
At that time, of course, the statement — we live in a carcinoma, a social ulcer — was for most people a mere way of talking, a phrase, for the World War was still in the future. People had no notion that they were dancing on a volcano! For many it is just the same to-day, if attention is now called to the other volcano — and it certainly is one — which lies in all that is now coming to expression out of the social question, as it has long been called. Because people are so fond of sleeping in face of reality, they fail to recognise in this reality the forces which alone turn it into true reality.
You see, that is why it is so hard to bring home to people to-day what is so necessary — to bring home the point of the threefold ordering of a healthy social organism, and the necessity of working towards this threefold ordering! What is it, then, that distinguishes this way of thinking, which comes to expression in the demand for a threefold social order, from other ways of thinking? You see, these other ways spring from trying to work out what would be the best social order for the world, and what must be done in order to reach it. Now observe how different is the way of thinking which is founded on a threefold ordering of the social organism! There is no question here of asking: What is the best way of arranging the social organism? We start from reality by asking: How must human beings themselves be interrelated, so that they will be free members of the social organism and be able to work together for what is right and just?
This way of thinking makes its appeal, not to theories or social dogmas, but to human beings. It says: Let people find themselves in the environment of a threefold social order, and they will themselves say how it should be organised. This way of thinking makes its appeal to actual human beings, not to abstract theories or social dogmas.
Anyone who lived entirely alone would never develop human speech — human speech arises only in a social community. In the same way, anyone who lives alone cannot arrive at a social way of thinking; he will have no social perceptions and no social instincts. Only in a rightly formed community is it possible to build up social life in face of the happenings of the present time.
But a great deal stands in contradiction to that. Because of the rise of materialism in recent centuries, men have moved away from the true reality. They have become estranged from it, and lonely in their inner lives. And most lonely of all are those who have been torn out of the context of their lives and are connected with nothing but the dreary machine — on the one hand, the factory; on the other, soulless capitalism. The human soul has indeed become a desert. But out of the desert there struggles up whatever can proceed from the single individual. And this consists of inner thoughts, inner visions of the super-sensible world, and also visions which throw light on external nature.
Now it is just when we are quite alone, when we are thrown back entirely on ourselves, that we are best disposed in soul for all the knowledge that can be gained by the single individual concerning his relationships with the worlds of nature and of spirit. In contradistinction to that, we have everything that should flow from social thinking. Only if we reflect on this can we form a right judgment of the momentous hour of history in which we are now living. It was necessary, once in the course of world evolution, that men should have this experience of loneliness, in order that out of their loneliness of soul they should develop a life of the spirit. And the loneliest of all were the great thinkers, who to all appearance lived in abstract heights, and sought from there the way to the super-sensible world.
But of course men must not seek only the way to the super-sensible world and to the world of nature; they must also find a way that unites their thinking with social life. Social life, however, cannot be developed in loneliness, but only through genuine living together with other men; and so the lonely individual who emerged in our modern epoch was not well fitted for social thinking. Just when he rightly wanted to make something worth while out of his inner life, the fruits of his inner life turned out to be anti-social, not social thinking at all! The present-day inclinations and cravings of mankind are the outcome of spiritual forces which are bound up with loneliness, and are given a false direction by the overwhelming influence of Ahrimanic materialism.
The importance of this fact comes out clearly if one asks about something which many people find terrible. Suppose one asks: What do you mean by “bolshevistic”? Most people will say: “Lenin, Trotsky.” Now, I can tell you of a Bolshevist who is no longer alive to-day, and he is none other than the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. You will have heard and learnt a great deal about Fichte's idealistic, spiritual way of thinking. But you will not know much about the sort of man Fichte was unless you are familiar with the outlook he expressed in his Geschlossenen Handelstaat (A Closed National Economy), which can be bought very cheaply in the Reclam Library. Read how Fichte conceives the social ordering of the masses of mankind, and compare it with the writings of Lenin and Trotsky — you will find a remarkable agreement. Then you will become critical of merely external representations and judgments, and you will be impelled to ask: What really lies at the bottom of all this? And if you try to enter into it more closely and to get clear about its foundations, you will come to the following.
Suppose you try to make out the particular spiritual orientation of the most radical men of the present day, and endeavour perhaps to penetrate into the souls of the Trotsky’s and Lenin’s, their ways of thinking and forms of thought, and then you ask: How are we to think of such men? And you get this answer: One can imagine them first in a different social setting, and then again in our own social order, in this social order of ours which has developed in the light — or, more truly, in the darkness, the gloom — of the materialism of recent centuries. Now consider, if Lenin and Trotsky had lived in a different social order — what might they have become, with their spiritual forces unfolding in a quite different way? Deep mystics! For in a religious atmosphere the content of such souls might have developed into the deepest mysticism. In the atmosphere of modern materialism it has become what you know it to be.
Take Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Geschlossenen Handelstaat: we have here the social ideal of a man who in truth sought most earnestly to tread the highest path of knowledge who put forth a way of thinking which was constantly inclined towards the super-sensible world. When he conceived the wish to work out for himself a social ideal also, this was indeed a pure impulse of the heart, the human heart. But the very thing which fits us to pursue inwardly the highest ideals of knowledge is a handicap if we want to apply it to social life; it unfits us for developing a social way of thinking. Along the spiritual path taken by Fichte, a man has to make his way alone. Social thinking has to be developed in the community of other human beings. And then the social thinker's task is above all to consider how the social order must be laid out if men are to work together rightly at the task of founding social life on the direct experience of social fellowship. Therefore I never say to people: this is how you should organise private property as a means of production, or public property as a means of production. I am bound to say, rather: Try to work towards a threefold ordering of the social organism; then the operations of capital will be regulated from the spiritual realm, and infused with human rights from the political realm. Then spiritual life and the life of rights will flow together with economic life in an orderly way. And then will come in that socialisation which, in accordance with certain concepts of justice, will see to it that whatever a man acquires, beyond his own needs as a consumer, shall continually pass over into the spiritual realm. It returns once more to the spiritual realm.
At the present time this arrangement applies only to spiritual property, where it shocks nobody. A man cannot preserve his spiritual property for his descendants for more than a certain period — thirty years after his death at most. Then it becomes public property. We have only to take this as a possible model for the return flow of everything that is produced by individual effort, and indeed of everything embraced by the capitalist system — a model for the leading back of all this into the social organism. The question then is simply — how is it all to be divided up? In such parts as will do justice to the immediate spiritual and individual abilities, and also the former individual abilities, of the human beings concerned: it will be a question for the spiritual realm. Men will arrange it like that, if they are rightly situated within the social order. That is what this way of thinking assumes.
In every century, I daresay, these things would be done differently; in such matters no arrangements are valid for all time. But our epoch is accustomed to judging everything from a materialistic standpoint, and so nothing is seen any longer in the right light. I have often pointed out how in modern times labour-power has become a commodity. Ordinary wage contracts are based on that; they derive from the assumption that labour-power is a commodity, and they are determined by the amount of labour which the workman renders to the employer. A healthy relationship will arise only under the following conditions: the contract must by no means be settled in terms of so much labour; the labour must be treated as a rights-question, to be fixed by the political State; and the contract must be based on a division of the goods produced between the manual workers and the spiritual workers. Such a contract can be based only on the goods produced, not on the relationship between workmen and employer. That is the only way to put the thing on a healthy footing.
People ask: whence come the social evils which are associated with capitalism? They say, these evils come from the capitalist economic system. But no evils can arise from an economic system: they arise first of all because we have no real labour laws to protect labour; and further because we fail to notice that the way in which the worker is denied his due share amounts to a living lie. But what does this denial depend on? Not on the organisation of economic life, but on the fact that the social order permits the individual capacities of the employer to be unjustly rewarded, at the worker's expense. The division of proceeds ought to be made in terms of goods, for these are the joint products of the spiritual and the manual workers. But if you use your individual capacities to take from someone something which ought not to be taken, what are you doing? You are cheating him, taking advantage of him! One need only look these circumstances straight in the face to realise that the trouble does not he in capitalism, but in the misuse of spiritual capacities.
There you have the connection with the spiritual world. First make the realm of society healthy, so that spiritual capacities are no longer enabled to take advantage of the workers: then you will bring health into the social organism as a whole. It all turns on perceiving everywhere what is right and just.
In order to perceive this, one needs a principle of justice. To-day we have reached a stage when principles of justice can be derived only from the spiritual world. And again and again it must be pointed out that nowadays it is not enough to keep on and on declaring: People must recover belief in the spirit. Oh, there are plenty of prophets ready to speak of the necessity of belief in the spirit! But it gets nowhere for people merely to say: “In order to bring healing into the unhealthy conditions of our time, men must turn from materialism to the spirit.” ... No, mere belief in the spirit brings no healing to-day! Any number of celebrated prophets may go round the country saying over and over again: “People must turn inwardly” ... or, “The Christ used to be the concern of a man's personal life only; now He must be brought into social life”... with such phrases absolutely nothing is accomplished! For what matters to-day is not merely to believe in the spirit, but to be so filled with the spirit that through us the spirit is carried directly into material existence. It is useless to-day to say. Believe in the spirit ... what is necessary is to speak of a spirit which is in truth able to master external reality, and can truly declare how the membering of the social organism is to be accomplished. For the cause of the unspiritual character of the present day is not that men do not believe in the spirit, but that they cannot reach such a relationship with the spirit as would enable the spirit to seize hold of matter in real life.
How many men there are to-day who think it extraordinarily fine to say: “Oh, there is nothing spiritual in mere material existence — one ought to withdraw from it: our duty is to turn away from material existence to the set-apart life of the spirit.” Here is material reality: you clip your coupons ... and then you sit down in the room reserved for meditation, and off you go to the spiritual world. Two beautifully distinct ways of living, kept gracefully apart! That leads nowhere to-day. What is wanted to-day is that the spirit should wax so strong in human souls that it does not merely find expression in talk about how men are to be blessed or redeemed, but penetrates right into what we have to do in material existence — so that we enable the spirit to flow into and penetrate external reality. To talk habitually about the spirit comes very easily to human beings. And in this connection many people slip into strange contradictions. The character in Anzengruber's play, who denies God, illustrates this; it is specially emphasised that he denies God by saying: “As truly as there is a God in heaven, so am I an atheist.” This type of self-contradicting person, even though it may not take so crass a form as in Anzengruber's play, is far from rare to-day. For it is very common to talk in this style: As truly as there is a God in heaven, so am I an atheist!
All this gives us further warning not to think merely of belief in the spirit, but to try above all to make such an encounter with the spirit that it gives us strength to see through the reality of the material, external world. Then indeed people will stop using the word spirit, spirit, spirit... in every sentence. Then a man will prove by the way he looks at things, that he is seeing them in the light of the spirit. This is what matters to-day: that people should see things in the light of the spirit, and not merely keep on talking about the spirit.
This is what needs to be grasped, so that anthroposophical spiritual science may not be constantly confused with all the talking about the spirit which is so popular nowadays. Again and again, when some Sunday afternoon preacher of the worldly sort has merely spoken in a better style than usual, one hears that someone has said: “He speaks quite in the spirit of Anthroposophy!” Usually, in such cases, he is doing the very opposite! This is the point that needs attention; this is what counts.
Whoever recognises this is not far from perceiving that such a well-intentioned remark — I might say, a remark spoken from a presentiment of tragic death — as the one I quoted from Kurt Eisner, is particularly valuable, because it strikes one like the confession of a man who might say: “To be honest, I don't believe seriously in the super-sensible — at least I have no wish to give it any active attention. Those who speak about the super-sensible have certainly always said: the reality we perceive here with our senses is only a half-reality; it is like a dream! But I am bound to scrutinise the form which this sense-perceptible reality has assumed in the social life of the present — and then it does look to me very like a dream! The effect is that one is forced to say: this reality is clearly the invention of some kind of evil spirit ...”
Certainly a noteworthy confession! But might it not be otherwise? This tragic, terrible guise in which present-day reality presents itself to humanity, could it not be the educative work of a good spirit, urging us to seek in what looks like an evil nightmare for the true reality, which is compounded of the sense-perceptible and the super-sensible? We must not take an exclusively pessimistic view of the present; we can also draw from it the strength to achieve a kind of vindication of contemporary existence.
Then we shall never again allow ourselves to stop at the sense-perceptible: we shall feel impelled to find the way out of it to the super-sensible. Anyone who refuses to seek for this way will indeed be unable to think far without saying: this reality is the invention of an evil spirit! But whoever develops the resolve to rise from this reality to a spiritual reality, will be able to speak also of education by a good spirit. And in spite of everything we see around us to-day, we should remain convinced that humanity will find a way out of the tragic destiny of the present. But, of course, we must attend to the clear injunction that bids us work together for social healing.
This I wished to add to what I have said recently.
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Islamist Offensive Falling Apart Near Jisr Al-Shughour
As the third week of the Jaysh Al-Fatah offensive sets to begin, the Islamist groups that form this militant coalition have begun to experience a string of defeats at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and National Defense Forces (NDF) in the southern part of the Jisr Al-Shughour District.
Perhaps, the most telling tale of this collapse in the Jaysh Al-Fatah offensive was the Syrian Armed Forces reversing much of the latter’s gains in the northern part of the Al-Ghaab Plains, where they were able to recapture the villages of Tal Wassit, Al-Misheek, Jubb Al-Hamra, and swaths of territory in Qastoun.
This failure to maintain control of their initial gains near Jisr Al-Shughour has left Jaysh Al-Fatah at the mercy of the Syrian Armed Forces powerful counter-assault at the northern part of the Al-Ghaab Plains in the Idlib Governorate.
On Saturday, things did not get any better for the Syrian Al-Qaeda group “Jabhat Al-Nusra” and their allies from Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham and Jaysh Al-Muhajireen, as the SAA’s 87th Brigade of the 11th Division encircled the strategic villages of Al-Sirmaniyah and Al-Ziyarah, where they later began a counter-offensive.
North of the Syrian Government controlled town of Ghaniyah, the 87th Brigade continued their counter-assault towards the village of Ishtabraq, killing 22 militants from Ajnad Al-Sham and Jund Al-Aqsa before they were able to advance their positions to the north.
East of Ariha, the militants from Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham attempted to advance at the Ma’ar Tab’i Hill; however, their attack was repelled and countered by the National Defense Forces (NDF), who later declared the hill under their full control after they captured Tal SyriaTel nearby.
ALSO READ Quds Force reveals meetings between Bashar Al-Assad and Qassem Soleimani
According to a military source, the Syrian Arab Army soldiers that are entrenched at the Jisr Al-Shughour National Hospital are in good health – the source followed-up by stating that the Al-Qaeda militants were unable to breach the building’s security apparatus on Saturday, despite fierce clashes at the southern perimeter.
Russian-made MiG-29 jets spotted near front-lines of Turkish-backed forces in Libya: video
BEIRUT, LEBANON (2:20 P.M.) - A number of Russian-made warplanes were recently spotted over the front-lines of a key Libyan...
Iran directs message of readiness to enemies with massive military exercise: video
BEIRUT, LEBANON (1:40 P.M.) - The Iranian Revolutionary Guards announced on Friday that it simultaneously tested a large number of...
Indian army chief sends stern warning to China in new message
BEIRUT, LEBANON (1:30 P.M.) - On Friday, the Indian army chief, General Manoj Naravane, warned against testing his country's patience,...
Azerbaijani President raises country’s flag over strategic city in Karabakh
BEIRUT, LEBANON (1:20 P.M.) - Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev arrived in the city of Shushi on Friday for the first...
Russian drones blow up oil tankers of Turkish-backed militants: video
BEIRUT, LEBANON (11:00 P.M.) - Earlier tonight, the Aleppo countryside witnessed a number of powerful explosions, following a drone attack...
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ACT Alliance
Australian Lutheran World Service is a member of ACT Alliance, and work through ACT Alliance in times of natural disasters that occur around the world.
About ACT Alliance:
It is a coalition of 140 churches and church-related organisations that work together in humanitarian assistance and development.
The alliance works in 130 countries and mobilises US$1.5 billion annually in its work for a just world.
The alliance has over 30,000 people working for it globally.
Members employ around 30,000 staff and volunteers working for it globally.
ACT Alliance was created on 1 January 2010 by bringing together the efforts, resources, people and organisations who have been working together since 1995 as ACT International and since 2003 as ACT Development.
The alliance is supported by an international Secretariat of 18 staff based in Geneva, Switzerland
ACT Alliance works towards a world community where all God’s creation lives with dignity, justice, peace and full respect for human rights and the environment.
Members of the alliance work together for positive and sustainable change in the lives of people affected by poverty and injustice through coordinated and effective humanitarian, development and advocacy work. We work with and for people of all faiths and none.
International networks and standards
ACT Alliance is a member of the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA), the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (SCHR) and the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP).
ACT Alliance is a signatory to the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief and is committed to the Sphere Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response and the Global Humanitarian Platform’s Principles of Partnership.
Members and official observers of ACT alliance are:
related to the World Council of Churches and The Lutheran World Federation
work in the area of humanitarian assistance and/or development as their primary mandate (for church-related organisations)
committed to high-quality work
approved by the ACT Alliance Governing Board
What does ACT alliance do?
Members of ACT Alliance work together for positive and sustainable change in the lives of impoverished, marginalised and vulnerable women, men, girls and boys through coordinated and effective humanitarian, development and advocacy work.
ACT Alliance supports communities to find sustainable ways to:
overcome poverty
adapt to changes in their environment and reduce the risk of future disasters
cope with and be better prepared for emergencies
recover from major setbacks due to conflicts or war, and
influence their governments and other decision-makers to fulfill their duties in protect basic rights.
They work with and for people of all faiths and none. ACT Alliance gives priority to the poorest and most vulnerable people in areas of the world with the greatest need for external assistance, and work to enable and strengthen existing capacity and resources, putting communities at the centre.
ACT Alliance work to uphold ethical and professional standards of transparency and accountability to the communities we serve, to those whose resources we are asked to be stewards of, and to each other. In all of this, they are committed as an alliance to learning, coordinating and collaborating with each other and others to increase the difference people make.
Read more about ACT Alliance here
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Home Opener Oct. 1st at 7p.m.
AMARILLO, TX – It’s nearly time…
After months of planning, the 2011-2012 Amarillo Bulls home opener is set for this Saturday at 7 pm at the Budweiser Bull Pen in the Amarillo Civic Center. It’s going to be a big night with plenty of activities, including a terrific game between the Amarillo Bulls and the New Mexico Mustangs.
The night is sponsored by McDonald’s and there will be tailgate party starting at 5:45 pm with free barbecue, refreshments and a live music from Smooth Condition. Fans are encouraged to bring a new toy in support of the Ronald McDonald House.
Prior to face-off there will be an Amarillo hockey history making moment as two banners will be raised.
When the puck drops, it’s the Bulls first game on home ice in the regular season as they face the Mustangs. The two teams played some exciting games last season, and this one promises to be the same. The Bulls were dominant on home ice last season, posting 18 victories during the regular season and another three in the playoffs.
Tickets are available from the Bulls office located at 301 Polk Street, Suite 101, in the Amarillo Building, Civic Center Box Office as well as all Panhandle Ticket Outlets, including United Supermarkets. Fans can also charge tickets online at www.amarillobulls.com. For further information on group tickets, or to purchase Full, or Half Season Tickets, as well as Seven-Game Flex Packs, please call the Bulls office at 806-242-1122.
Season Ticket Party
Bulls Blast New Mexico 7-2
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History of the Adequan® Select World
The AQHA Select World Championship Show got its start in 2003.
AQHA first offered Select classes in 1997. Six years later, the first AQHA Select World Championship Show was held in 2003 at the Tri-State Fairgrounds in Amarillo. The event is the world’s largest, single-breed world championship horse show open exclusively to amateur exhibitors age 50 and over.
Adequan® (polysulfated glycosaminoglycan) came on board in 2010 as the title sponsor of the Adequan® Select World Championship Show.
In 2012, AQHA began recognizing the top three 70-&-over exhibitors in each event with AQHA Super-Select awards. Two years later, AQHA presented the first Gene Graves Super-Select Special Recognition Award. This award is presented at the end of the show to the team of a Super-Select exhibitor and his/her horse that has garnered the most points in multiple events. This award was named in 2013 after AQHA Past President Gene Graves (2012-13), who died June 14, 2013. Gene and his wife, Barbara, attended the Select World since its inception in 2003. Gene was also the driving force behind the Super-Select awards.
In 2019, the Adequan® Select World moved to the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth, Texas. There it will stay until at least 2021, when the location contract is open for bid again.
However, the 2020 Adequan® Select World – originally slated for August 31 - September 6 in Fort Worth, Texas – was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Find all of The American Quarter Horse Journal's video interviews, photos and results from the Adequan® Select World.
View results from AQHA world championship shows and Level 1 championships.
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Interview of Rashda Rana by LexisNexis “Is there a Gender Gap in Arbitration?”
Arbitration analysis: Rashda Rana SC, barrister at 39 Essex Street Chambers and president of Arbitral Women, the international network of Women in Dispute Resolution, looks at the issue of the gender gap in arbitration.
IS THERE A GENDER GAP FOR WOMEN IN ARBITRATION?
Yes, certainly there is and it is unjustifiable. The high demand for arbitration services has driven many governments to cultivate a pro-arbitration environment through new arbitration legislation and other mechanisms, and has led to the proliferation of international arbitral centres throughout the world. Likewise, many global law firms have also responded to this increased demand by aggressively entering new markets and deploying significant resources to those emerging regions. The expansion of international arbitration into new regions as well as steady growth in more established markets has not, however, been reflected in the greater participation of more women. Women are not getting the same opportunities as men, regardless of background.
Statistics published by arbitral institutions indicate quite strongly that, more generally, there is a severe imbalance in the vast number of appointments whether by the parties or by the institution concerned — for instance, the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA) annual report for 2013 shows that in 2013, 9.8% of the 162 appointees selected by the LCIA and 6.9% of the 160 appointees selected by the parties were female. The LCIA is the only institution which actively pushes for the appointment of female chairs of tribunals. The appointment of European and American arbitrators usually account for a large chunk of the pie, within that the thinnest, barely visible slivers represent female arbitrators. Further analysis of the numbers indicates that things are not really improving.
There are many studies which indicate there is a huge gender gap — for instance, the Institute for Continuing Legal Education in California has carried out studies which show that 85% of the women lawyers surveyed perceived a subtle, but pervasive, gender bias within the legal profession. Almost two-thirds agreed women lawyers are not accepted as equals by their male peers (see also ‘Implicit Gender Bias in the Legal Profession: An Empirical Study’ by Justin D Levinson & Danielle Young, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy Volume 18:1 2010). Despite the fact that approximately 60% of all law graduates are women, this figure steadily decreases over time and rank, such that, by the time we get to the managing partner level, only 4% are women.
WHAT CAUSES OR PERPETUATES THIS GAP AND HOW DOES IT MANIFEST?
To some extent the problem lies in deep-rooted cultural perceptions and misperceptions. In every field unconscious bias is evident and perpetuated. Many studies (for example ‘Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favour male students’ — Moss-Racusina, PNAS, 2012) show categorically that unconsciously, we tend to like people who look like us, think like us and come from backgrounds similar to ours. This means that white men choose white men for board rooms, as counsel, as arbitrators, as judges. The bias clearly is not always unconscious — sometimes it is deliberate negative bias.
In the same report by the Institute for Continuing Legal Education, the findings were that 76% of those surveyed reported feelings of negative bias were from opposing counsel, 64% from clients, 48% from superiors, and 43% from peers. It is interesting to note that most feelings of negative bias were from opposing counsel, and the least was from peers. While 65% did not make any career changes due to these perceptions of negative bias, it is statistically significant that 35% did, and that 37% made no career changes because they believed it would not be any better elsewhere.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION TO ADDRESS THE GAP?
Affirmative action has and can effect change. It has been pioneered in many different sectors:
the political arena for numbers of MPs in any one party
in the commercial arena, with demands on boards of organisations to have a certain percentage of female directors
in model briefing policies for female counsel to be briefed on cases
in the judiciary for numbers of female judges
For instance, women now account for 20.7% of board members in FTSE 100 companies.
In Australia, the latest percentage of women on ASX 200 boards is 19.8%. In the US, the percentage of S&P 500 companies with at least one female director is just over 90%, yet 10% of these companies still do not have women directors and 28% have just one. The European Commission aims to attain a 40% ‘objective’ of women in non-executive board member positions in large publicly listed companies by 2020 (see further EU Directive on Women on Boards in 2012). Even that is not enough. There are ways of introducing affirmative action in law and in particular arbitration, but it has to be accepted and taken up by lawyers (young and old) advising their clients, the clients themselves and other counsel and arbitrators. A cultural shift is needed, not just time, to get there.
WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE FOR WOMEN ‘COMING THROUGH THE RANKS’ IN ARBITRATION TO HELP THEM SUCCEED?
Persevere. Surround yourself with supportive people: family, friends, colleagues, bosses, mentors. Find support for your ideas, yourself, your career path.
Men overestimate their abilities and capabilities which, in itself, leads to greater confidence, confidence building in others, promotion, pay rises and so on, with their prospects shooting upwards. Women, on the other hand, routinely underestimate themselves leading to a lack of confidence and consequently others doubting their ability, slower promotion, less pay and so on, with their prospects spiralling downwards.
Women need to reverse that trend by helping themselves and helping others. They should be assertive without being aggressive, promote their skills and expertise. They should remember they don’t need to mimic male behaviour, and, more importantly, they should be themselves.
Interviewed by Evelyn Reid
The views expressed by our Legal Analysis interviewees are not necessarily those of the proprietor
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2021 Sandwiching in History: Foster-Robinson House
Friday, March 5, 2021 to Friday, March 5, 2021
AHPP Facebook
2021 Sandwiching in History: Gibb-Altheimer House (Second Gibb House)
Friday, December 3, 2021 to Friday, December 3, 2021
9 July 2021 12:00
2021 Sandwiching in History: Green Book Sites, Hot Springs
Friday, July 9, 2021 to Friday, July 9, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Historic Argenta, North Little Rock
Friday, November 5, 2021 to Friday, November 5, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Historic Downtown Conway
Friday, May 7, 2021 to Friday, May 7, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Historic Downtown Searcy
Friday, September 3, 2021 to Friday, September 3, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Mount Holly Cemetery
Friday, October 1, 2021 to Friday, October 1, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Pinnacle Mountain State Park
Friday, April 2, 2021 to Friday, April 2, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Reed’s Bridge Battlefield Heritage Park
Friday, August 6, 2021 to Friday, August 6, 2021
2021 Sandwiching in History: Titan Ranch Silo, Vilonia
Friday, June 4, 2021 to Friday, June 4, 2021
5 February 2021 12:00
2021 Sandwiching in History: Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park
Friday, February 5, 2021 to Friday, February 5, 2021
7 April 2021 10
State Review Board: April
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 to Wednesday, April 7, 2021
Arkansas Heritage Headquarters 1100 North Street
4 August 2021 10
State Review Board: August
Wednesday, August 4, 2021 to Wednesday, August 4, 2021
1 December 2021 10
State Review Board: December
Wednesday, December 1, 2021 to Wednesday, December 1, 2021
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1889 Hanger House, Little Rock
Historic property owners can also benefit from federal tax deductions through donation of a conservation easement on their structure or site. An easement is a voluntary transfer of some of the rights inherent in property ownership, which allow donors to retain ownership and possession of a historic property while granting a government agency or qualified non-profit organization the authority to protect the historic, cultural, architectural, or archaeological characteristics of the property.
Easements must contain binding and enforceable covenants that run with the land and structure or property and obligate the owner to refrain from actions that are incompatible with the preservation of the property.
BROCHURE ON EASEMENT PROGRAM
Brochure on Easement Program (9824 KB)
How does an easement work?
Typically, the easement involves the surrender of some right that, as the owner, you would otherwise have, such as the right to modify the exterior or to use adjacent space in a way that might compromise the historic character and integrity of the site.
In granting an easement, you will still keep your essential interest in the property, except for the rights given away in the easement document. You can use your remaining interest as you see it. You may live in it, sell it, or give it away subject only to the terms of the easement. When you do sell it, the new property owners are advised to contact our office with their new property ownership information. This will also give them the opportunity to acquire a copy of the scanned easement, and to ask questions about their rights and responsibilities.
Sheeks House, Corning, Clay County
Since easements reflect the wishes of the grantor, the property will be protected regardless of who the future owners may be. Should the property be sold, the easement continues to bind the new owner, and the title passes with the assessment in force. Although easement agreements are final, the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program allows changes to the property, subject to approval if the easement is donated to the AHPP.
Easements clearly define the features to be protected - generally including adjacent open space - and prohibit incompatible uses, such as commercial development, subdivision, or other actions that are determined to be inappropriate.
Properties and their special characteristics worthy of protection are described in the deed of easement and documented with photographs. As a legal document, the easement is filed in the local land records along with all other legal documents relating to the property.
Why give an easement?
A preservation easement is given to protect and preserve the architectural, historic, or archaeological value of a landmark and its surroundings. It assures the grantor of the easement that the property will not be inappropriately altered or neglected following his or her tenure. It is the best way to protect your investment into rehabilitating a historic property.
Easements are an economical way for the state to ensure protection of its historic resources. Government agencies or conservation organizations normally cannot afford to purchase, maintain, secure, and supervise all the places worthy of preservation. With preservation easements, important sites can be maintained largely or totally without cost to the taxpayer. At the same time, the public benefits from their historic and educational value. As with the protection of endangered species, an important part of Arkansas's heritage is assured of survival.
How long does an easement last?
The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program accepts only those easements that are granted in perpetuity. Once a historic resource is protected by a preservation easement, its survival for future generations is guaranteed.
What conditions are included in the easement?
Mutual Aid Union Building, Rogers, Benton County
Each easement accepted by the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program is negotiated on an individual basis with the property owner.
The staff of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program will help identify and discuss with you the historic elements of your property, as well as your goals, plans, and needs. The terms of the easement are drafted to protect each of these elements as fully as possible.
In the case of a historic building or structure, the AHPP requires some control over the architectural elements of the exterior. The owner must obtain written approval from AHPP before beginning any alterations or additions. As stated above, the restrictions on the land may prohibit or limit subdivision and require that the landscape character of the property be maintained.
In the case of an archaeological site or battlefield, the easement normally stipulates that the owner notify AHPP before undertaking any new disturbance of the soil on the easement property. In this way, staff archaeologists from AHPP can assist in avoiding damage to the site. The easement also frequently requires the owner to take affirmative steps to ensure good farming practices and to protect the site from damage from vandalism and natural causes.
What are the advantages and benefits of donating an easement?
1928 Eureka Springs City Auditorium, Carroll County
Many donors enter such an agreement to ensure that their property will be permanently protected from willful destruction, demolition, dismantling, or other inappropriate treatment while at the same time realizing certain tax benefits that accompany such a donation.
Because an Arkansas preservation easement is perpetual, the donor and all future owners of the property are bound to adhere to its conditions. This can be a welcome guarantee for those who have invested considerable time, money, and love in a historic property. Donation of an easement can in some cases also provide the following tangible financial advantages:
The value of the easement, as determined by a qualified appraisal, can be claimed as a charitable donation deduction from taxable income.
By accepting an easement, the AHPP has made a commitment to the preservation of the property. The technical advice and assistance of the staff of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program will be made available to you. The staff can provide literature on preservation techniques, consultants, contractors, and other professionals experienced in working with historic buildings and can answer questions on an individual basis. The staff of the AHPP is obligated to inspect easement properties periodically. Such inspections provide good opportunities to provide technical advice to owners. Staff members are happy to meet with you on site to discuss your concerns and give advice on the most appropriate treatment for the property.
How do I donate a preservation easement?
1910 Elbert W. Holt House, Nashville, Howard County
Ca. 1900 Turner-BacK House, Little Rock, Pulaski County
When you are ready to discuss donating an easement, a staff member from the AHPP will make a site visit.
During this visit, the staff member will explain the program and review the standard restrictions. Then you and the staff member can begin to negotiate the terms of the easement and agree on the language of a draft. At an appropriate time, the staff member presents the matter to the AHPP, and the AHPP determines whether to accept the easement, if ultimately offered. The staff always recommends that donors consult their attorneys and have them review the easement document. Following an affirmative determination by the AHPP, the terms of the easement are put in final form. The property is documented photographically with the photographs becoming part of the legal record. Both the owner and the director of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program sign the easement deed. It is then recorded in the local court records, and the original document is returned to the AHPP for deposit in agency files.
(Note: Non-profit entities other than the AHPP are also able to accept preservation easement donations. For instance, the Eureka Springs Preservation Society has received easement donations in the past.)
What properties are eligible?
The White County Courthouse at Searcy
In order to be eligible for the tax deduction, the property must be listed in the National Register of Historic Places individually or as a contributing component of a National Register historic district. For more information, contact the AHPP.
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Police observed no threats from Andre Hill before shooting
Posted: Dec 29, 2020 / 10:55 AM CST / Updated: Dec 29, 2020 / 04:36 PM CST
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An officer on the scene of the fatal shooting of Andre Hill in Ohio’s capital city last week didn’t perceive any threats and didn’t see a gun, contrary to a mistaken claim by the fellow officer who killed Hill, according to records released Tuesday.
The records provide new details into the Dec. 22 shooting of 47-year-old Andre Hill, a Black man who was fatally shot by Officer Adam Coy, who is white, as Hill emerged from a garage holding a cellphone with his left hand and his right hand not visible.
The city fired Coy on Tuesday, accusing him of incompetence and “gross neglect of duty,” among other charges.
Columbus Officer Amy Detwiler said she saw a man — later identified as Hill — walk away from a car after arriving at the scene of the non-emergency call, according to a summary of her internal affairs interview released Tuesday. Coy had gotten there first. Detwiler didn’t see any interaction between Hill and Coy, but said Coy told her Hill had walked into a next-door garage.
After the officers crossed over to the garage they saw Hill, with Detwiler telling investigators “she felt Mr. Hill may need assistance to enter the residence,” according to her interview.
Coy asked Hill in a “normal tone of voice” to exit the garage and Hill complied but without responding, Detwiler said.
As Hill walked out, Detwiler “did not observe any threats from Mr. Hill,” nor did she see a gun, the internal affairs report said.
“Officer Detwiler stated Officer Coy observed a firearm and yelled, ‘There’s a gun in his other hand, there’s a gun in his other hand!’” the report said. “Officer Detwiler heard gunfire at this moment.”
No gun was found at the scene, police said.
Reports also indicate that Police Chief Thomas Quinlan felt something was off about the shooting as soon as he arrived, saw the officers and then saw the body cam video.
“I have responded to many officer-involved shooting scenes and spoken with many officers following these critical incidents,” Quinlan wrote in a Dec. 26 report. “There was something very distinct about the officers engagement following this critical incident that is difficult to describe for this letter.” He did not provide further details.
Coy’s handling of the shooting “is not a ‘rookie’ mistake as a result of negligence or inadvertence,” Quinlan said in his recommendation that the 17-year veteran be fired. Quinlan added that Coy’s actions were “reckless and deliberate.”
A review of Coy’s personnel file shows more than three dozen complaints have been filed against him since he joined the department in January 2002, mostly for rude or abusive language with a dozen for use of force. No details about the allegations are contained in the sparse summaries the city provided from the department’s internal affairs bureau. All but a few were marked “unfounded” or “not sustained.”
Quinlan noted that he had first raised concerns about Coy in 2008, when Quinlan was his patrol lieutenant.
“If sustained improvements are not fully realized a decision whether Officer Coy is salvageable must follow,” Quinlan said, quoting from a letter he wrote.
Coy was fired Mondayhours after a hearing was held to determine his employment.
“The actions of Adam Coy do not live up to the oath of a Columbus Police officer, or the standards we, and the community, demand of our officers,” according to a statement from Columbus Public Safety Director Ned Pettus Jr. “The shooting of Andre Hill is a tragedy for all who loved him in addition to the community and our Division of Police.”
Coy had the opportunity to participate in the hearing, Brian Steel, vice president of the police union, told reporters Monday. “He elected not to participate. I do not know why … I would have liked to have him here, but it’s his decision.”
Coy remains under criminal investigation for last week’s shooting.
Police bodycam footageshowed Hill emerging from a garage and holding up a cellphone in his left hand seconds before he was fatally shot by Coy. There is no audio because the officer hadn’t activated the body camera; an automatic “look back” feature captured the shooting without audio.
Hill lay on the garage floor for several minutes without any officer on the scene coming to his aid.
Detwiler, who joined the department in 2011, has received several commendations over the years for helping injured or stricken individuals. They include a 2018 case in which she and other officers drove a shooting victim to the hospital in a police cruiser after it became clear an ambulance would be delayed, according to a copy of her personnel file released Tuesday.
“Had they not taken this initiative, the victim most likely would have succumbed to her injuries,” the officers’ commendation said.
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Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring | Danger Room | Wired.com
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring (abcnews.go.com)
Report: Google, CIA Backing Web Startup (cbsnews.com)
Report: Google, CIA fund predictive analytics firm (news.cnet.com)
Bob Jacobson: Google and CIA Invest in a Minority Report-Like Technology That May Make Our World a Less Certain Place (huffingtonpost.com)
Labels: Central Intelligence Agency, Google, Google Earth, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Recorded Future, Searching, United States
Newt Gingrich has become, frankly, a hate-mongering bigot | Jay Bookman
Newt Gingrich went on Fox last night to peddle more of his hateful, vile garbage regarding the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque,” which is not at ground zero and is not a major mosque, but an Islamic community center.
“The idea of a 13-story building set up by a group many of whom, frankly, are very hostile to our civilization — and I’m talking now about the people who organized this, many of whom are apologists for sharia, which is a form of law that I think we cannot allow in this country, period,” Gingrich said.
Once again, my longstanding Gingrich Rule proves valid. Whenever the man utters the word “frankly,” what follows is almost always the opposite of frank speech. It is instead absolute baloney. In this case, he alleges that many of the people involved in the proposal to build the Islamic center “frankly, are very hostile to our civilization.”
That’s a serious charge, and neither Gingrich nor anyone else has provided any evidence whatsoever that it is true. With inflammatory remarks of this sort, Gingrich makes Joe McCarthy look measured and responsible.
Any grudging respect I once held for the man is now gone.
Newt Gingrich Is Super Serious About Running For President! [2012] (gawker.com)
Newt Gingrich (sort of) announces he's running in 2012 (dailykos.com)
Josh Horwitz: Passing the Sword (armwoodlaw.blogspot.com)
Dems to Newt: Get your mosque facts straight (timesunion.com)
Newt Gingrich 2012: How Close Is The Former House Speaker To Deciding Whether To Run? (huffingtonpost.com)
Posted by John H Armwood II at 6:35 AM
WikiLeaks Secret Records Dump Stays in Legal Clear: Ann Woolner - Bloomberg
With his prematurely white hair and his Australia-tinged English, 39-year-old Julian Assange has become the face and voice of what is surely the most massive leak of U.S. classified documents in history.
His online organization, WikiLeaks, devotes itself to government and corporate whistle-blowers and the documents they offer. It stands as a buffer between them and whomever had the secrets being bared, whether documents on Cayman Islands bank accounts, video showing Americans firing on civilians in Baghdad or Sarah Palin’s e-mail.
But none of that came close to this week’s disgorgement of classified military documents. WikiLeaks served as conduit for 92,000 pages of material from a military insider to the New York Times, the Guardian of London and der Spiegel magazine in Germany.
Those three published front page analyses and excerpts, which give on-the-ground accounts of the war in Afghanistan, its failings, its brutality and its corruption.
Assange acts as a document launderer of sorts, an intermediary between the gatherer of the documents, who faces prosecution, and news organizations, which don’t.
What about the man in the middle? His organization? Can they be prosecuted?
Better Safe
Assange has been staying out of the U.S., just in case. But it’s probably unnecessary. The First Amendment’s free-press protection shields those who merely publish classified documents that others take.
The need for that protection should be obvious.
“Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government,” the Supreme Court said in 1971 in the Pentagon Papers case.
Prosecutors charged the leaker, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, but had to drop the case because of government misconduct, like breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. And the New York Times was free to publish the 7,000-page internal history of the Vietnam War, revealing that president after president had lied about what the U.S. was doing in the region and the chances for success.
It helped turn the tide of public opinion.
The Obama administration has decried the possibility that the document dump could expose those cooperating with the U.S. to retaliation from the Taliban. WikiLeaks and the news organizations say they scrubbed the material to rid it of that risk.
No big lies have fallen out of the mega-load of field reports WikiLeaks made public this week, although it looks like two administrations have made the war sound more winnable than it probably is.
“This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war,” Assange told der Spiegel. It “will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence.”
As he makes clear, WikiLeaks is more an advocacy group than traditional news organization. Its chief aim is to make governments and corporations more transparent, and it is especially eager to unveil possible abuses of power.
But that doesn’t weaken its First Amendment protection.
“We are a publication,” Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman said in a telephone interview yesterday from Berlin. However different from a newspaper, “We are a publishing organization.”
U.S. Criminal Law
Unless the group or someone inside it solicited the documents or helped the insider obtain them, they probably have little to fear from U.S. criminal law.
Nor could WikiLeaks be forced to disclose its sources. The group located its headquarters in Sweden because it has one of the world’s strongest shield laws to protect confidential source-journalist relationships.
“We have been legally challenged in various countries,” Assange said in the interview with der Spiegel. “We have won every challenge.”
Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd., based in Basel, Switzerland, sued because WikiLeaks posted accountholder information from its Cayman outpost amid allegations of money laundering and tax evasion. The bank filed suit in San Francisco against California-based Dynadot, WikiLeaks’ domain registrar.
The bank won a short-lived court ruling that attempted to shut WikiLeaks, which had sent no lawyer to argue. Once it did, and once free-speech groups intervened to tell the judge the First Amendment forbids such an order, the judge dissolved his earlier decision and the bank abandoned the case.
WikiLeaks says it doesn’t dig for dirt or urge others to. “We do not solicit any information,” Schmitt says.
Don’t Ask
If they did, they could find themselves in a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act of 1917. That is the law that bans the release of confidential military and national security information. News organizations are exempt, but only if they don’t solicit.
Still, the organization may begin skating closer to the edge. It’s planning an educational effort for would-be leakers that will say “why leaking is a useful thing” and “how to do it properly,” Schmitt says.
And last year the group compiled a list of the “Most Wanted” documents, based on suggestions from people around the word.
Among the entries: the East German secret police file on Federal Chancellor Angela Dorothea Merkel and a list of all political prisoners in Egypt.
Suspected Source
For now, at least, Assange and WikiLeaks seem to be in the clear. Not so for the 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Private First Class Bradley Manning, suspected as a source.
Already in custody and blamed for an earlier submission to WikiLeaks, Manning is a “person of interest” in the recent disgorgement of secret Afghanistan reports, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
Assange, meanwhile, isn’t taking any chances. He recently canceled an appearance in Las Vegas and said at a news conference in London this week he had been told he would be arrested if he came to the U.S.
No doubt authorities would like to invite him in for a chat. But jail him? Not likely.
(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net
Columbia Journalism Review Publishes Fascinating WikiLeaks Leak Timeline (mediaite.com)
The Razor's Edge Between Nobility and Crime: Who Is Julian Assange? (bigthink.com)
WikiLeaks and The New York Times: Why Size Matters (dailyfinance.com)
The Pentagon's WikiLeaks Breakthrough (thedailybeast.com)
WikiLeaks' Afghan War Diary Tells Two Tales (pcworld.com)
WikiLeaks Secret Records Dump Stays in Legal Clear: Ann Woolner (businessweek.com)
Labels: Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, New York Times, Pentagon Papers, Sarah Palin, Vietnam War, War in Afghanistan (2001–present), Wikileaks
WikiLeaks and the Afghan War | STRATFOR
By George Friedman
On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan [2]. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.
The War in Afghanistan
Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior U.S. and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.
The WikiLeaks
At first glance, it is difficult to imagine a single database in which such a diverse range of
intelligence was stored, or the existence of a single individual cleared to see such diverse intelligence stored across multiple databases and able to collect, collate and transmit the intelligence without detection. Intriguingly, all of what has been released so far has been not-so-sensitive material rated secret or below. The Times reports that Gulʼs name appears all over the documents, yet very few documents have been released in the current batch, and it is very hard to imagine intelligence on Gul and his organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate [4], being classified as only secret. So, this was either low-grade material hyped by the media, or there is material reviewed by the selected newspapers but not yet made public. Still, what was released and what the Times discussed is consistent with what most thought was happening in Afghanistan.
The obvious comparison is to the Pentagon Papers, commissioned by the Defense Department to gather lessons from the Vietnam War and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg to the Times during the Nixon administration. Many people worked on the Pentagon Papers, each of whom was focused on part of it and few of whom would have had access to all of it.
Ellsberg did not give the Times the supporting documentation; he gave it the finished product. By contrast, in the WikiLeaks case, someone managed to access a lot of information that would seem to have been contained in many different places. If this was an unauthorized leak, then it had to have involved a massive failure in security. Certainly, the culprit should be known by now and his arrest should have been announced. And certainly, the gathering of such diverse material in one place accessible to one or even a few people who could move it without detection is odd.
Like the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks (as I will call them) elicited a great deal of feigned surprise, not real surprise. Apart from the charge that the Johnson administration contrived the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of what the Pentagon Papers contained was generally known. Most striking about the Pentagon Papers was not how much surprising material they contained, but how little. Certainly, they contradicted the official line on the war, but there were few, including supporters of the war, who were buying the official line anyway.
In the case of the WikiLeaks, what is revealed also is not far from what most people believed, although they provide enormous detail. Nor is it that far from what government and military officials are saying about the war. No one is saying the war is going well, though some say that given time it might go better.
The view of the Taliban as a capable fighting force is, of course, widespread. If they werenʼt a capable fighting force, then the United States would not be having so much trouble defeating them. The WikiLeaks seem to contain two strategically significant claims, however. The first is that the Taliban [5] are a more sophisticated fighting force than has been generally believed. An example is the claim that Taliban fighters have used man- portable air defense systems (MANPADS) against U.S. aircraft. This claim matters in a number of ways. First, it indicates that the Taliban are using technologies similar to those used against the Soviets. Second, it raises the question of where the Taliban are getting them — they certainly donʼt manufacture MANPADS themselves.
If they have obtained advanced technologies, this would have significance on the battlefield. For example, if reasonably modern MANPADS were to be deployed in numbers, the use of American airpower would either need to be further constrained or higher attrition rates accepted. Thus far, only first- and second-generation MANPADS without Infrared Counter-Countermeasures (which are more dangerous) appear to have
been encountered, and not with decisive or prohibitive effectiveness. But in any event, this doesnʼt change the fundamental character of the war.
Supply Lines and Sanctuaries
What it does raise is the question of supply lines and sanctuaries. The most important charge contained in the leaks is about Pakistan. The WikiLeaks contain documents that charge that the Pakistanis are providing both supplies and sanctuary to Taliban fighters while objecting to American forces entering Pakistan to clean out the sanctuaries and are unwilling or unable to carry out that operation by themselves (as they have continued to do in North Waziristan).
Just as important, the documents charge that the ISI has continued to maintain liaison and support for the Taliban in spite of claims by the Pakistani government that pro-Taliban officers had been cleaned out of the ISI years ago. The document charges that Gul, the director-general of the ISI from 1987 to 1989, still operates in Pakistan, informally serving the ISI and helping give the ISI plausible deniability.
Though startling, the charge that Islamabad is protecting and sustaining forces fighting and killing Americans is not a new one. When the United States halted operations in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviets in 1989, U.S. policy was to turn over operations in Afghanistan to Pakistan. U.S. strategy was to use Islamist militants to fight the Soviets [6] and to use Pakistani liaisons through the ISI to supply and coordinate with them. When the Soviets and Americans left Afghanistan, the ISI struggled to install a government composed of its allies until the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. The ISIʼs relationship with the Taliban — which in many ways are the heirs to the anti-Soviet mujahideen — is widely known. In my book, “Americaʼs Secret War,” I discussed both this issue and the role of Gul. These documents claim that this relationship remains intact. Apart from Pakistani denials, U.S. officials and military officers frequently made this charge off the record [7] , and on the record occasionally. The leaks on this score are interesting, but they will shock only those who didnʼt pay attention or who want to be shocked.
Letʼs step back and consider the conflict dispassionately. The United States forced the Taliban from power. It never defeated the Taliban nor did it make a serious effort to do so, as that would require massive resources the United States doesnʼt have. Afghanistan is a secondary issue for the United States, especially since al Qaeda has established bases in a number of other countries, particularly Pakistan, making the occupation of Afghanistan irrelevant to fighting al Qaeda.
For Pakistan, however, Afghanistan is an area of fundamental strategic interest. The regionʼs main ethnic group, the Pashtun, stretch across the Afghan-Pakistani border. Moreover, were a hostile force present in Afghanistan, as one was during the Soviet occupation, Pakistan would face threats in the west as well as the challenge posed by India in the east. For Pakistan, an Afghanistan under Pakistani influence or at least a benign Afghanistan is a matter of overriding strategic importance.
It is therefore irrational to expect the Pakistanis to halt collaboration with the force that they expect to be a major part of the government of Afghanistan when the United States leaves. The Pakistanis never expected the United States to maintain a presence in Afghanistan permanently. They understood that Afghanistan was a means toward an end, and not an end in itself. They understood this under George W. Bush. They understand it even more clearly under Barack Obama , who made withdrawal a policy goal
Given that they donʼt expect the Taliban to be defeated, and given that they are not interested in chaos in Afghanistan, it follows that they will maintain close relations with and support for the Taliban. Given that the United States is powerful and is Pakistanʼs only lever against India, the Pakistanis will not make this their public policy, however. The United States has thus created a situation in which the only rational policy for Pakistan is two-tiered, consisting of overt opposition to the Taliban and covert support for the Taliban.
This is duplicitous only if you close your eyes to the Pakistani reality, which the Americans never did. There was ample evidence, as the WikiLeaks show, of covert ISI ties to the Taliban. The Americans knew they couldnʼt break those ties. They settled for what support Pakistan could give them [12] while constantly pressing them harder and harder until genuine fears in Washington emerged that Pakistan could destabilize altogether. Since a stable Pakistan is more important to the United States than a victory in Afghanistan — which it wasnʼt going to get anyway — the United States released pressure and increased aid. If Pakistan collapsed, then India would be the sole regional power, not something the United States wants.
The WikiLeaks seem to show that like sausage-making, one should never look too closely at how wars are fought, particularly coalition warfare. Even the strongest alliances, such as that between the United States and the United Kingdom in World War II, are fraught with deceit and dissension. London was fighting to save its empire, an end Washington was hostile to; much intrigue ensued. The U.S.-Pakistani alliance is not nearly as trusting. The
United States is fighting to deny al Qaeda a base in Afghanistan while Pakistan is fighting to secure its western frontier and its internal stability. These are very different ends that have very different levels of urgency.
The WikiLeaks portray a war in which the United States has a vastly insufficient force on the ground that is fighting a capable and dedicated enemy who isnʼt going anywhere. The Taliban know that they win just by not being defeated, and they know that they wonʼt be defeated. The Americans are leaving, meaning the Taliban need only wait and prepare.
The Pakistanis also know that the Americans are leaving and that the Taliban or a coalition including the Taliban will be in charge of Afghanistan when the Americans leave. They will make certain that they maintain good relations with the Taliban. They will deny that they are doing this because they want no impediments to a good relationship with the United States before or after it leaves Afghanistan. They need a patron to secure their interests against India. Since the United States wants neither an India outside a balance of power nor China taking the role of Pakistanʼs patron, it follows that the risk the United States will bear grudges is small. And given that, the Pakistanis can live with Washington knowing that one Pakistani hand is helping the Americans while another helps the Taliban. Power, interest and reality define the relations between nations, and different factions inside nations frequently have different agendas and work against each other.
The WikiLeaks, from what we have seen so far, detail power, interest and reality as we have known it. They do not reveal a new reality. Much will be made about the shocking truth that has been shown, which, as mentioned above, shocks only those who wish to be shocked. The Afghan war is about an insufficient American and allied force fighting a capable enemy on its home ground and a Pakistan positioning itself for the inevitable outcome. The WikiLeaks contain all the details.
We are left with the mystery of who compiled all of these documents and who had access to them with enough time and facilities to transmit them to the outside world in a blatant and sustained breach of protocol. The image we have is of an unidentified individual or small group working to get a “shocking truth” out to the public, only the truth is not shocking — it is what was known all along in excruciating detail. Who would want to detail a truth that is already known, with access to all this documentation and the ability to transmit it unimpeded? Whoever it proves to have been has just made the most powerful case yet for withdrawal from Afghanistan sooner rather than later.
This is a superb analysis of the Wikileaks Afganistan War papers putting the information released into an easily understandable explanation of the context of the war and the interests of all parties involved. This article is must reading for anyone with even the most cursory interest in this war. Don't miss it. This is not a conservative or liberal piece. This is pure analysis. Conservative firebrand Bill O'Reilly has even posted this piece to his blog. This is the first time that I know I have agreed with O'Reilly. Something must be wrong here but I have not found out what's wrong yet. Please help me.
John H. Armwood
Military Disputes Its Own WikiLeaked Missile Report (wired.com)
Karzai denounces leaking of Afghan informant names (cnn.com)
Taliban Responds to WikiLeaks (michsineath.com)
You: Karzai calls WikiLeaks disclosures 'shocking' and dangerous to Afghan informants (washingtonpost.com)
Could the WikiLeaks docs help the US war effort in Afghanistan? (trueslant.com)
WikiLeaks Memos Say Ex-ISI Chief Plotted Karzai Assassination: Daily Outlook, Afghanistan (themoderatevoice.com)
Labels: Inter-Services Intelligence, New York Times, Pakistani government, United States, United States armed forces, Vietnam War, War in Afghanistan (2001–present), Wikileaks
News Analysis - Ruling Against Arizona a Warning for Other States - NYTimes.com
A federal judge in Arizona on Wednesday broadly vindicated the Obama administration’s high-stakes move to challenge that state’s tough immigration law and to assert the primary authority of the federal government over state lawmakers in immigration matters.
The ruling by Judge Susan R. Bolton, in a lawsuit against Arizona brought on July 6 by the Justice Department, blocked central provisions of the law from taking effect while she finishes hearing the case.
But in taking the forceful step of holding up a statute even before it was put into practice, Judge Bolton previewed her opinions on the case, indicating that the federal government was likely to win in the end on the main points.
The decision by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to throw the federal government’s weight against Arizona, on an issue that has aroused passions among state residents, has irritated many state governors, and nine states filed papers supporting Arizona in the court case.
But Judge Bolton found that the law was on the side of the Justice Department in its argument that many provisions of the Arizona statute would interfere with federal law and policy.
Gov. Jan Brewer said the state would appeal the decision.
Although Judge Bolton’s ruling is not final, it seems likely to halt, at least temporarily, an expanding movement by states to combat illegal immigration by making it a state crime to be an immigrant without legal documents and by imposing new requirements on state and local police officers to enforce immigration law.
“This is a warning to any other jurisdiction” considering a similar law, said Thomas A. Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund , which brought a separate suit against the law that is also before Judge Bolton.
The Arizona law stood out from hundreds of statutes adopted by states in recent years to discourage illegal immigrants. The statute makes it a state crime for immigrants to fail to carry documents proving their legal status, and it requires state police officers to determine the immigration status of anyone they detain for another reason, if there is a “reasonable suspicion” the person is an illegal immigrant.
The mere fact of being present without legal immigration status is a civil violation under federal law, but not a crime.
Arizona’s lawyers contended that the statute was written to complement federal laws. Judge Bolton rejected that argument, finding that four of its major provisions interfered or directly conflicted with federal laws.
The Arizona police, she wrote, would have to question every person they detained about immigration status, generating a flood of requests to the federal immigration authorities for confirmations. The number of requests “is likely to impermissibly burden federal resources and redirect federal agencies away from priorities they have established,” she wrote.
While opponents of the Arizona law had said it would lead to racial profiling, the Justice Department did not dwell on those issues in its court filings. But Judge Bolton brought them forward, finding significant risks for legal immigrants and perhaps American citizens. There is a “substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens,” she wrote, warning that foreign tourists could also be wrongly detained.
The law, she found, would increase “the intrusion of police presence into the lives of legally present aliens (and even United States citizens), who will necessarily be swept up” by it. Judge Bolton was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 2000.
Hannah August, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said, “While we understand the frustration of Arizonans with the broken immigration system, a patchwork of state and local policies would seriously disrupt federal immigration enforcement.”
Some critics said Judge Bolton had decided too quickly. Peter Schuck, a professor of immigration law at Yale, said Judge Bolton should have allowed the law to go into effect, which it was scheduled to do on Thursday, before issuing an order that curbed the power of a state legislature.
“She rushed to judgment in a way I can only assume reflects a lot of pressure from the federal government to get this case resolved quickly,” he said.
Now Judge Bolton’s ruling has shifted the political pressure back onto President Obama to show that he can effectively enforce the border, and to move forward with an overhaul of the immigration laws, so that states will not seek to step in as Arizona did.
The federal government has already regulated in the area of immigration law triggering the U.S. Constitutions preemption provisions. which prohibits state regulation in an area of law where the federal government both has the power to regulate and has chosen to regulate. Secondly the Arizona statute raises serious 14 Amendment due process issues because it creates a subclass of people who may be targeted by this law. The inherent racial profiling built into the enforcement features of this statute are counter to the very purpose of the 14 Amendment which was put in place during Reconstruction in an attempt to end the denial of equal civil rights and disparate treatment of African Americans based upon their race.
This ruling was a victory for the United States Constitution and a defeat for demagoguery. We do have a border security problem but ill conceived and racially discriminatory statutes like the one adopted in Arizona are not the answer to this problem nor are they the American way. We do not have to sacrifice our values and moral principles to secure our borders. Thank goodness this federal court agreed.
NALEO Applauds Arizona Ruling (eon.businesswire.com)
Eduardo Barraza: Arizona Judge Weakens SB 1070 (huffingtonpost.com)
Latino Policy Coalition Statement on Today's Ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton on Arizona's SB 1070 Law (prnewswire.com)
Judge Blocks Key Parts of Immigration Law in Arizona - NYTimes.com
PHOENIX — A federal judge, ruling on a clash between the federal government and a state over immigration policy, has blocked the most controversial parts of Arizona’s immigration enforcement law from going into effect.
In a ruling on a law that has rocked politics coast to coast and thrown a spotlight on the border state’s fierce debate over immigration, United States District Court Judge Susan Bolton in Phoenix said some aspects of the law can go into effect as scheduled on Thursday.
The parts of the law that the judge blocked included the sections that called for officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws and that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times. Judge Bolton put those sections on hold until the issues are resolved by the courts.
The judge’s decision, which came as demonstrators opposed and supporting the law gathered here and after three hearings in the past two weeks in which she peppered lawyers on both sides with skeptical questions, seemed unlikely to quell the debate.
The ruling came four days before 1,200 National Guard troops are to report to the Southwest border to assist federal and local law enforcement agencies there, part of the Obama administration’s response to growing anxiety over the border and immigration that has fed support for the law.
Lawyers for Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican who signed the law and is campaigning on it for election, were expected to appeal, and legal experts predict the case is bound for the United States Supreme Court.
Arizona immigration law spurs police, protesters (cbc.ca)
Arizona cops, activists ready for chaotic day (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Long fight ahead over Arizona law (cnn.com)
Immigration activists head to AZ to protest (abclocal.go.com)
Judge Stops Arizona From Enforcing Most Controversial Part Of Immigration Law (mediaite.com)
The korean Herald - Palin shows limits of female intuition
Women just feel it. They sense trouble and will instinctually right it. They’re like mama grizzly bears, “who kind of just know when something’s wrong” and when to raise a paw to stop it. So women should get to govern now. Or else.
That’s the message of Sarah Palin’s latest video, “Mama Grizzlies.” She isn’t the only woman who is finding feminine judgment to be a selling point.
Unlike Palin, Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren doesn’t choose to play up her gender. But it is clear that one reason she was able to push the Consumer Finance Protection Agency into being is that she presents herself as a refreshing picture of maternal common sense.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair likewise doesn’t play the mama card. But she has won approval of what might be called the nanny solution to the too-big-to-fail challenge posed by the largest banks.
Rather than let them fail like big boys and girls, Bair’s solution, and our new law, monitors banks so that they never get close to collapsing. Like a terrified mom with a 180-pound 17-year-old to discipline, Bair seems to think upping the punishments and scaring her charges will give her continued control. She recently warned banks that if they misbehaved they would face federal retribution equivalent to “the nuclear bomb that you hope you never have to use.”
Shirley Sherrod, another name in the news, fits in here, too. The Agriculture Department official came into the news because a right-wing blogger posted selected excerpts of an acceptable speech she gave to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, making it seem unacceptably racist.
But the flap over race obscured another feature of Sherrod’s speech: a Palin-esque emphasis on personal discretion. A farmer, she said, had “come to me for help.” But “what he didn’t realize what I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.” Somehow, this line drew laughs of support from Sherrod’s audience, in part, one senses, because Sherrod is a woman.
The womanly wisdom theme also came up last year in the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It emerged that Sotomayor had mentioned that one of her qualifications was that of a “wise Latina” who might make better legal decisions than a white man.
Whence the premium on female wisdom? The first source is obvious. Women, especially Alaskan women, Latina women and black women, count as diverse. And geographic, racial and gender diversity are believed to be a requirement of American politics. That “Mama Grizzly” advertisement comes straight out of ancient playbooks of some masculine people, like Karl Rove and Dick Morris.
But the second reason for the popularity of feminine instinct is newer. Masculine discretion has failed the country so monumentally recently, whether in economics or politics. It was men at the Treasury or Federal Reserve who scanned the charts and opted to tell us that housing prices could only go up. Men headed -- and still run -- the investment banks, and men placed bets on toxic derivatives and credit default swaps.
Men, mostly, sold the subprime mortgages. Men chose a man, John McCain, who promptly led the Republican Party to a defeat mitigated only by his XX-chromosome running mate, Sarah Palin. Maternal instinct is supposed to be change we can believe in.
Palin Mama Grizzly Shows Limits of Woman Wisdom: Amity Shlaes (businessweek.com)
Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto: America's Evita? Sarah Palin (huffingtonpost.com)
Brenda Peterson: Palin's Progress (huffingtonpost.com)
NH GOP Senate front-runner hits a few bumps (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor - Dangerous Waters in Korea - NYTimes.com
By CHRISTINE AHN
For those who survived the Korean War, the sight of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington leading a fleet of U.S. and South Korean ships along the eastern coast of the Korean Peninsula on the 57th anniversary of the temporary armistice is alarming indeed. In a move intended to punish North Korea for its alleged sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, the United States and South Korea are flexing their military might by mobilizing American and South Korean ships, over 200 aircraft, including the F-22 Raptor fighters, and 8,000 troops.
If anything, the military provocation by all sides demonstrates the frailty of the Korean armistice agreement, which was signed by North Korea, China and the United States on July 27, 1953. It shows how much the absence of a peace treaty could trigger another war, not just between the two Koreas, but between the United States and China.
To be clear, contrary to the rhetoric of promises of engagement emanating from the White House, President Barack Obama is continuing his predecessor’s hard-line policies of sanctions and military posturing. These have been counterproductive and have done nothing to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation. Worse, they are actually increasing the chances of military conflict in northeast Asia.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced last week during a visit to the demilitarized zone that the United States plans to impose greater sanctions on North Korea. Although Secretary Clinton asserts that “[t]hese measures are not directed at the people of North Korea,” it is in fact the North Korean people who will suffer from U.S. sanctions.
The freezing of North Korean assets, in particular, restricts the country’s ability to purchase the materials it needs to meet the basic food, healthcare, sanitation and educational needs of its people. Moreover, sanctions have not succeeded in pressuring North Korea to disarm. To the contrary, North Korea considers economic sanctions to be an act of war, and has responded by accelerating its nuclear weapons program.
History has taught us that military posturing, such as the current military exercises, do not change North Korea’s policies. Instead, Pyongyang views the maneuvers as a test of its will, and has warned that it will counter them with “a physical response” of its own. Worse, Beijing now views the U.S.-South Korea military exercises as too close to its own shores and as a threat to China’s security and that of the region.
This op-ed reflects the most common South Korean view of American policy towards North Korea that I encountered during my more than two years living in that country. South Koreans seem to have an infinite capacity to forgive North Korean provocations and seem very protective of North Korea, as if that country is a wayward brother or sister. It is a position difficult for non Koreans to understand given the reality of the North Korean regime and its history of brutal internal repression and provocations towards the south but it is essential that American policy makers understand this viewpoint. The strong stance against North Korean taken by current South Korean conservative President Lee Myung-bak is not the majority view in the country. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discovered this fact during her early 2009 speech, at Seoul's Ewha Womans University, where her comments on North Korea were coldly received.
Joint South Korea-U.S. drills enter fourth day (cnn.com)
U.S. Shows Power to N. Korea with Carrier Drills (time.com)
U.S. shows its power to N. Korea with drills (msnbc.msn.com)
Labels: Barack Obama, George Washington, Korea, Korean Peninsula, Korean War, North Korea, South Korea, United States
Remembering the Forgotten War: U.S. presence draws mix of opinions - YNN, Your News Now
SOUTH KOREA -- In the Myeong Dong section of Seoul, there are so many protests the police just wait for the demonstrators, especially on a day when American military presence was front and center. Recent tensions between North Korea and South Korea are accentuating the issue. The deaths of two women killed by a U.S. military vehicle in 2002 also made things rough for a while.
"Those are short term backlashes. People get emotional when an incident occurs but for the most part we are very well-received here," said Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Buczkowski of the United States Army.
"Honestly I feel they understand there is a military presence here. There's a lot of actually Americans that are here teaching. Very small world. I bumped into a couple of Americans on the train. I was like 'Oh, hi. How are you,'" said U.S. Army Specialist Johnathon Elkaim.
More than two million people a day pass through Myeong Dong, one of the most expensive shopping districts in the whole world. But it's also a popular place for protests, which is why NY1 had no problem finding people with an opinion on whether U.S. troops should even be there.
"I think it is a very positive thing because stationary troops in South Korea bring peace to Asia," said one South Korean.
"Two Korean girls were killed by American soldiers and because of those events people really go against the U.S. troops in Korea. But personally I think they are needed in Korea," said another.
"I think it is necessary at this time. I don't necessarily agree with it but I think we have no other choice because our country is still divided," said a third.
Op-Ed Contributors: The Forgotten War, Remembered (nytimes.com)
GALLERY: Powell lauds 'forgotten victory' at Korea memorial dedication (gazetteonline.com)
The Battle for the Peninsula (online.wsj.com)
Korea, The Forgotten War We're Still Fighting 60 Years Later (rightpundits.com)
U.S., S. Korean troops drop anti-sub bombs in drills (ctv.ca)
Remembering the Korean War, 60 years ago (boston.com)
The Forgotten War, Remembered (nytimes.com)
Labels: Asia, Korean War, North Korea, Seoul, South Korea, United States, United States armed forces, United States Army
Jim Webb and the Myth of White Privilege?
By: Terence Samuel
Here is what I anticipate: Jim Webb, the senior senator from Virginia, will soon be both vilified and lionized in the ''media'' for attacking affirmative action as wrong-headed and divisive. And one result is that the intense conversation we've endured in recent days about race in the wake of the sacking of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod is now headed for overtime.
Another take in Jim Webb's Friday July 23, 2010 Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. Terence Samuel, the writer is more tolerant of Jim Webb than I am. Read this for a slightly different perspective. You may read my comments below a portion of Webb's original piece here.
Labels: Affirmative action, Government, Jim Webb, Legislative Branch, Senate, United States, Virginia, Wall Street Journal
Gibbs: WikiLeaks not comparable to 'Pentagon Papers' - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com
The White House is doing its best to quash the idea that WikiLeaks' Afghanistan logs are in any way comparable to the Pentagon Papers — even as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's claims they are "the nearest analogue" to the explosive Vietnam-era revelations.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs brushed aside the notion, telling reporters just now that the 1971 leak of the Pentagon's Vietnam strategy deliberations was "policy" as opposed to the 91,000-plus Afghanistan reports, which were "a series of one-off documents."
"I don't see they are in any way comparable," Gibbs told reporters at today's briefing.
Pentagon says WikiLeaks war logs don't harm national security (salon.com)
WH: Web site leaks reveal names, operations (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst who released the... (lka.tumblr.com)
Glenn Greenwald on WikiLeaks Whistleblower Kidnapped and Charged by U.S. Military (mp3) (littlealexinwonderland.wordpress.com)
Daniel Ellsberg, the former US military analyst who released the pentagon papers in 1971, appeared on MSNBC today with Dylan Ratigan. He said he fears for the safety of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who is reportedly on the verge of leaking secret State Department cables. The Daily Beast reports that Assange is currently being sought by the Pentagon, and Ellsberg advises him not to reveal his whereabouts. (via WikiLeaks)
Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web M...
Newt Gingrich has become, frankly, a hate-mongerin...
WikiLeaks Secret Records Dump Stays in Legal Clear...
News Analysis - Ruling Against Arizona a Warning f...
Judge Blocks Key Parts of Immigration Law in Arizo...
The korean Herald - Palin shows limits of female i...
I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor - Dangerous Waters in Kor...
Remembering the Forgotten War: U.S. presence draws...
Gibbs: WikiLeaks not comparable to 'Pentagon Paper...
Harvard Prof Takes Aim at the Tea Party - The Chro...
Howard Dean: No More Apologies -- It's Time to Sta...
The Secret Town Fed By The Underground Railroad : NPR
Op-Ed Columnist - You’ll Never Believe What This W...
James Webb: Diversity and the Myth of White Privil...
Court Under Roberts Is Most Conservative in Decade...
National Journal Magazine - The Gray And The Brown...
Journalism Legend Daniel Schorr Dies At 93 : NPR
NPR Media Player
Op-Ed Columnist - Shirley Sherrod, Thrown to the W...
Clarence B. Jones: Thank You Shirley Sherrod
Breitbart: 'I am public enemy No. 1…' - Kenneth P....
Rachel Maddow - Gays Civil Rights Denied In The U....
Hardball Discussion of Sherrod Case
Chris Olbermann - The witch hunt vs. Sherrod, and ...
Books of The Times - Bruce Cumings’s ‘Korean War,’...
White House issues public apology to ousted USDA s...
President Obama, White House react to 'cable chatt...
The Plum Line - Shirley Sherrod blasts Fox News as...
Jasiri X Responds to Critics of "What if the Tea P...
Tea-partiers’ racist brew leaves bad taste - The K...
Court’s Leniency Ruling Is Too Late for Deportees ...
BBC News - The battle for Nelson Mandela's legacy
The Rachel Maddow Show - 'Gaiety Ensues' -- DADT c...
What if the Tea Party was Black?
Editorial - The Google Algorithm - NYTimes.com
Philip Morris Said to Benefit from Child Labor - N...
Rachel Maddow In Afghanistan
[Editorial] Exit Of A General- From "The Korean He...
Haitian Orphans Have Little but One Another - NYTi...
The Meaning of the Fourth of July Now - From The Root
Oil Companies Reap Billions From Subsidies - NYTim...
Dems in a jam as economy slows - POLITICO.com Prin...
Op-Ed Columnist - Rise of the Religious Left - NYT...
Editorial - Google vs. China, the Sequel - NYTimes...
Trashing Thurgood Marshall
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ISU Army ROTC wins MacArthur Award
By Paul Ehrsam,paul.ehrsam@iowastatedaily.com
Iowa State’s ROTC Army division has won the prestigious MacArthur Award for the second year in a row, establishing itself as one of the top programs in the country.
According to the U.S. Army website, “The award is based on a combination of the school’s commissioning mission and its cadet’s performance and standing on the command’s National Order of Merit List and its cadet retention rate.”
On Feb. 21, the U.S. Army’s Cadet Command announced that the ISU Army ROTC was one of the eight schools among 273 ROTC programs nationwide to be awarded the MacArthur Award.
“We are now one of the top eight in the country, which makes 265 other schools want to be where we’re sitting at,” said Lt. Col. Richard Smith, professor of military science. “We’re up there with the big boys, and it’s that national-level recognition that means a lot to the program and the kids.”
Every year the U.S. Army Cadet Command and the Gen. Douglas MacArthur Foundation reward eight schools that best recognize the ideals of “duty, honor and country” as advocated by MacArthur.
“It proves to us, to school and the state what level we’re on,” said Adam Schilling, battalion commander and senior in industrial technology. “It means a lot to know that we won the MacArthur Award, because we train harder for it and it kind of sets us apart.”
Schilling believes that one reason ISU Army ROTC excels is because it strives not only to meet goals, but to exceed them.
“One thing that helps set us apart is we look to exceed the standard and we set that as our personal standard,” Schilling said. “For example, with the personal training tests, for us to pass you have to get a 180 out of 300, but we want to shoot for that 300. Even though you passed, it’s still not good enough for us; we want to train you to exceed the standard.”
Winning the MacArthur Award will hopefully spread the word to prospective students thinking about ROTC.
“When we have someone thinking about where they want to go to school, and know they want to do ROTC and want to be an officer they’re trying to figure out ‘Where do I want to go?'” Smith said. “You want to go to the best, and in the Midwest you want to come here.”
The principles cadets learn while working towards the MacArthur Award will stay with cadets long after they have left Iowa State.
“The effort, the motivation, the dedication they put in now will make them better officers later on, and will lead to great opportunities,” Smith said.
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Naftali Nir
Email: naftali@arnon.co.il
Yigal Arnon & Co. represented Azorim Group and Ofer Investments in a rental agreement with Noble Energy
Advs. Amalia Meshi, Naftali Nir, Michal Sagmon-Cohen and Lareine Khoury represented Azorim Group and Ofer Investments in a rental agreement, in which Noble Energy will rent office space from Azorim for a period of 10 years, which includes 9 floors of offices and 13,000 sq.m. in the Herzliya Hills Complex.
Yigal Arnon & Co. represents Azorim and the Gabbay Group in the purchase of 45 acres of land in Kfar Shalem
Advs. Amalia Meshi, Naftali Nir and Nir Rodnitzky represents Azorim Construction (1965) and the Gabbay Group in the purchase of 45 acres of land in Kfar Shalem area in Tel Aviv for the purpose of building approximately 1,300 - 1,500 housing units as well as commercial space. In exchange for the land, Azorim and the Gabbay Group will pay the owners of the land 30% of the proceeds from the sale of the apartments and 38% of the proceeds from the commercial areas in the project. The project will be one of the largest construction projects in Tel Aviv, with an estimated value of NIS 3 billion.
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Pace Gallery ‘Pondering’ Further Experimentation with Admission Prices to Experiential Art Shows
Architectural rendering of Pace’s future home in New York.
COURTESY BONETTI/KOZERSKI ARCHITECTURE
Although they sell their wares for often eye-popping prices, art galleries have become known for admission-free accessibility. Collectors may pay a premium to cart off a painting, but the general public can walk in and take a look without laying out a penny. But immersive digital art “experiences” have recently called that model into question, and Pace Gallery, which has ten locations in seven cities around the world, has recently experimented with charging admission for certain shows in Palo Alto, California, and Beijing. In a wide-ranging conversation with Artnet News editor Andrew Goldstein at the recent Frieze Los Angeles art fair—and now available online by way of Frieze—Pace CEO Marc Glimcher said the gallery was “pondering” further experimentation with charging admission to shows of “experiential” art.
Pace represents several artists and groups inclined toward immersive art, often involving the use of complex technology. Among them are Studio Swine, Studio Drift, teamLab, and Leo Villareal, who will present a light tunnel at the Armory Show next week. In 2016, Pace charged $20 per ticket for visitors to its exhibition of Tokyo-based collective teamLab at its Palo Alto gallery. That exhibition drew 200,000 visitors. According to reporting in the Financial Times in 2017, Pace received 80 percent of the revenue from ticket sales. “This is well ahead of the 50 percent generally made from selling works directly and seems a viable income stream,” Melanie Gerlis wrote in the FT. Pace also experimented with ticket charges at a TeamLab exhibition at its Beijing branch in 2017.
Asked by Goldstein whether Pace’s new 75,000-square-foot building on 25th Street, slated to open this fall, will have a ticket booth, Glimcher said it will not. But asked whether there might ultimately be some ticketing option, as the gallery tried in Beijing and Palo Alto, Glimcher replied, “We are pondering it. We are trying to come up with an idea. It isn’t necessarily this building. But . . . if we think about it . . .” He mentioned a need to listen to artists before suggesting that “the model is going to grow wings.”
TeamLab, which recently opened the world’s first museum dedicated to digital art under the name “the MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM: teamLab Borderless” in Tokyo, is currently building its own space in Brooklyn’s Industry City, with participation from Pace. The 55,000-square-foot space is set to open next August, just before Pace’s new home base. Calling teamLab’s Brooklyn space an “experience-atorium,” Goldstein asked whether “that is the kind of thing you are thinking about.” Glimcher said, “We are thinking about it. It’s important to think about those 799,000 people on your Instagram.”
Much of the conversation at Frieze explored the question of whether experiential art can serve a different sort of business model than is conventional in the commercial art world. Glimcher pointed out that “millions around the world buy tickets to see teamLab,” which now encompasses 600 people, and that such artists and groups are “not burdened by old-fashioned ideas about what artists do and don’t do.” Glimcher remarked that the gallery has almost 800,000 Instagram followers in contrast to some “1,000 clients” who class as collectors (a figure he characterized as “an exaggeration,” even).
Of the traditional art economy, Glimcher said, “We have a little problem in that we have an arbitrage-based art economy. It’s gotten to the point where we think the value of the artwork comes from the last auction sale, which is not where the value comes from. It may be evidence of the value that’s been assigned to it, but the value comes from some fundamental qualities of the art, and if you get too into your arbitrage-based system and lose sight of that, and create all your models around these rarefied events of very expensive art being sold at auction, or art fairs, or whatever, you are losing sight of the thing that is giving the art value. So if you are going to build a new kind of gallery, [or] any new kinds of systems in the art world, they have to be pegged to the thing that is the true value, which is what the artists create.”
teamlab
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Rembrandt’s Legendary ‘Night Watch’ Is Being Studied in Front of a Live Audience. What Will Scholars Discover?
By John Chiaverina
John Chiaverina
More Stories by John
Young Collectors League Guides New Buyers Through the Daunting World of Art
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October 9, 2019 11:34am
Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) being studied as part of “Operation Night Watch” at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
COURTESY RIJKSMUSEUM
I think too much exposure to contemporary art has damaged my brain. A recent event offered decisive proof. During a viewing of “Operation Nightwatch” at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam—a nine-month project dedicated to the study and restoration of Rembrandt’s monumental 1642 painting The Night Watch—I had the pleasure of watching as the work was slowly scanned by a large machine while suspended in a glass room. Looking at museum-goers view the partially obscured masterpiece, I couldn’t help but see the process as a kind of conceptual art, perhaps a piece by someone like Mark Leckey, in which art historical signifiers were brushing up against contemporary technology, all wrapped up in an ultra-clean cube.
But clearly that wasn’t the intention. In reality, “Operation Nightwatch” is an in-depth initiative dedicated to preserving and shedding new insight on Holland’s most famous painting.
“I mean, it’s a 350-year-old painting, so you really have to be conscious about its condition,” Pieter Roelofs, the head of paintings and sculpture the museum, told me that day, discussing the origins of the efforts. He was wearing a crisp blue suit. It was a rainy Monday. Roelofs said that the institution is constantly monitoring its collection, and when they noticed “something going on” with The Night Watch, they decided a full examination and conservation project was in order.
A detail of The Night Watch, zoomed in to 5340 dpi, resolution 4.75 micrometer.
With “such an important painting—I mean, it’s one of the top paintings in the world—we didn’t want to do this outside of the public eye,” he said, noting that, for the museum’s global audience, a chance to see the work is a major reason to visit the institution. “Just once in your lifetime you really need to have the opportunity to see the painting,” he continued, “and by doing this examination project we really believe that we are adding value to the venue and value to the experience itself as well.”
The process started in July, with the move of the painting into the glass chamber where it now resides. Currently, scanning is underway—the museum is using a technology called macro X-ray fluorescence scanning, an absurdly hi-def procedure that can map out the chemical elements embedded in the paint. In the process, it might even uncover new truths about the artist’s compositional methodology. The museum will then assess the current condition of the painting. After that, a conservation plan will be adopted and followed.
“By identifying the individual element, you’re able to identify the pigment as well, and that’s helping us to understand the buildup of the painting as well, and how Rembrandt altered himself and corrected himself,” Roelofs said, of the scanning process. “So, he kept working on this, almost struggling on his compositions, and that’s interesting as well. I mean, we tend to present him as a kind of genius, but he was really hard-working.”
Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) in all its glory.
All of that said, Roelofs did offer to meet me halfway when I gave him my take on the contemporary art-like optics of the whole affair. “What we are doing is at the highest quality possible, and I think great art is always at the highest quality as well, so I do understand why you would think about that,” he said. I assumed the employees have not been thinking of themselves as performance artists. “They are not. No,” Roelofs responded. “I hope they’re not.”
The Night Watch, a groundbreaking group portrait of Dutch civic officers lauded both for its sprawling scale and virtuoso display of light and motion, means a lot to citizens of the Netherlands. It has been through a lot. In 1715, when the painting was moved from its original location at the Kloveniersdoelen (“musketeers’ shooting range”) in Amsterdam to City Hall, it was trimmed at the sides so it could fit through gateways. Flashing forward to 1911, an unemployed shoemaker punctured the work with a knife in protest of his joblessness. Then, in 1975, the piece was slashed by another knife-wielding man who told onlookers that he was doing it for the Lord. “It’s such an important painting that it attracts people from all—well, with all different ideas,” Roelofs said.
Different takes on the painting are crucial to the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra’s 2019 three-channel video installation Night Watching, which serves as a supplement to the main exhibition and is on view in the museum’s Gallery of Honour, on the same floor as the painting. Shot over six evenings, it shows 14 groups of people looking at The Night Watch and giving their own take on what they think the work means in the context of both history and their own personal experience. The painting is always out of the frame. In the piece, a group of Japanese businessmen comment that in their home country, branding tie-ins would be more thoroughly exploited (“They would sell Night Watch cakes,” one says). An old women in pearls states that “these men are here to have fun,” referring to the active militia group. Another person thinks that Captain Banning Cocq, who commissioned the piece, “comes off as an arrogant prick.”
Behind glass, the work continues.
As for the audience in the building that day, the project-in-progress seemed to be a bit confusing to some. It wasn’t exactly like watching paint dry, but it was like watching paint get scanned. “I don’t know what’s going on,” I overheard one person say in an accent I couldn’t place. I talked to a metalhead in town with his sister from the East Coast of the United States. He was wearing a shirt by the American metal band Exmortus—who, curiously enough, mostly write songs about battle and war—and was in Amsterdam to catch a rare show by a Dutch progressive rock band. “It’s kind of disappointing that we can’t see [the painting],” his sister said. (The scanner was blocking uninterrupted views.) I heard another American, this one with grey hair, inquire to a guard about the process. She was told that there were many months left to go before the work would be completed. “Well, I’ll have to come back,” she said.
The Night Watch
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Prior 2006
Ok Computer: Mobility, Software and the Laptop Musician
Nick Prior,
"I became obsessed with my laptop and my laptop speakers: I was trying to make a bubble you could exist in, a paradise" (Björk) [1]
In this paper I’d like to address some images, categories and open-ended notions of the laptop in music production. I am interested in the relationship between music and mobile computerized space, in the way the laptop intervenes in the sites of music - in its environments and (un)foldings. Implicit in the paper is the claim that, despite its increasing importance in various spaces of music, from cyberspace to live venues, as well as in mobile infrastructures generally, the laptop is a neglected device. This neglect, I will argue, is primarily down to a status ambiguity – the origins of which I’ll explain later. Yet we need to account for the laptop’s presence in urban networks and relationships, in everyday settings and virtual environments. Getting at some of the deeper issues revolving around the laptop’s ambiguous status in music is one way of examining the complex entanglements and layerings of mobile space. It will also hint at how practices of music production in its widest sense are changing, giving rise to a set of anxieties regarding what is being left behind.
Making and playing music with laptops is becoming a regular feature of music fields, both at their avant-garde and commercial poles. From the Kronos Quartet (who recently took to the stage with four laptops) to local rock guitarists using them as effects boxes, the laptop is moving inexorably into the spaces of music. In its most visible guise the laptop takes centre stage. Indeed, the glowing Apple logo has itself accrued enough symbolic value in experimental and electronic music to signify a challenging set of glitchy soundscapes or bursts of white noise (or indeed to signify educational capital at academic conferences). In high-profile mainstream rock concerts, it is often a cluster of laptop computers that co-ordinate the lights, video footage and pre-recorded audio sequences (von Seggern, 2005). In less visible form, the laptop is the unsung mediator at the side of the stage running the backing track or making a novelty appearance in one or two songs.
Even outside of live environments, musicians are now composing straight onto their laptops, moving beyond its utilization as a quick sketchpad for ideas. At once a means for recording audio, generating drum patterns, hosting software synthesizers and mixing down to a single file, the laptop encapsulates technological convergence. Indeed, with the right software it replaces the function of a host of hardware devices, including multi-track portastudios, hardware synthesizers, mixing desks, samplers, channel strips, compressors, guitar amplifiers, effects units and sound modules. Add to this the in-built digital connectivity of the laptop and the possibility of uploading songs to the Internet after production, and one has an all-in-one production unit that meshes composition with dissemination. If conventional production chains are, indeed, being bypassed by the digitalization of music, the laptop turns the agent of circumvention into a moving target.
I’m going to start by identifying two inter-related features of the laptop in music – its portability and its reliance on particular forms of software. Whilst these features feed into broader tendencies in late capitalist societies towards mobility and flexibility, in music they translate as discomfiture over the amount of musical agency given to the laptop and its ambiguous status as a multi-purpose machine beyond music making. Unpacking this claim will form the third part of the paper.
THE DIFFERENCE IS…MOBILITY
Very much a device that fits descriptions of contemporary society as “fluid”, “liquid” and “mobile”, the laptop is one of a number of nomadic machines of the digital age, from mp3 players to mobile phones, personal digital organizers to digital cameras (Bauman, 2000; Urry, 2003; Scheller and Urry, 2006). Allied with prospects of unfettered International travel and promulgations of a flexible capitalism zipping around the globe in networked circuits, the laptop is the image of the quick, mobile and efficient device. In a perspective of relationality, it is yet another node in a network of hubs, flows and networks, representing a new technological paradigm organized around powerful but flexible information technologies and information processing devices (Castells, 2000). From the perspective of spatiality, it is emblematic of socio-technical practices inherent in a new urban metabolism that drives mobile communications.
The laptop’s portability is, of course, its distinguishing feature. Designed to travel with the user, the laptop frees work from fixed working environments whilst inserting the user into mobile computer networks and dispersed spaces. [2] For musicians, the popularity and portability of the laptop opens up a series of possibilities for music that sends it beyond spatial anchorages such as the recording studio or domestic space. Gone are the days when bands (Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream come to mind) are forced into taking their whole studios with them on the road to recreate the sounds of their recorded work. Today, something similar can be packed into a small bag, carried to a venue and plugged into the PA without incurring the costs and glitches of labour-intensive equipment. Moreover, the untethering of music production from fixed locations has significant implications for both the everyday practices of musicians and the interrelationship between music and what the Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, calls the “space of flows” – that is, a spatial logic governed by the informational, global economy organized around a “fluid network of exchanges” (Castells, 2000: 429). [3]
Like the walkman and the mp3 player, the laptop raises a set of questions regarding the folding of spatialities as they intertwine with new cultural practices. For instance, consideration of the interface between space and the everyday routines of laptop users raises a number of issues about the personal uses of mobile devices. On the one hand, as Björk’s opening quote indicates, the laptop is insinuated into the mobile individualisation of technologically-rendered space. It becomes a “bubble” organised around a privatised desire for withdrawal - a kind of utopic hike into introspective technoculture. Here, the laptop becomes a dwelling, shelter or boundary. It separates the inside from the outside and functions as a nest through which creative output is hatched and nurtured, transposing the personal and affective relationship musicians have with music into an inner technological space rendered by Graphic User Interfaces, projects and folders. In many ways, this echoes the way the traditional recording studio seals itself from the outside world, both acoustically and creatively. As the French sociologist, Antoine Hennion argues, removed from the real world by sound proofing, the studio becomes an “idealized microcosm of creation” in which trial and error testing and sonic experimentation takes place (Hennion, 1989: 408).
On the other hand, the representation of the laptop as a detached and cocooned space smacks of caricature, for it fails to address the device as both porous and a generator of new forms of communicative sociality and spatiality. According to many musicians, open-ended collaboration is fundamental to the appeal of the laptop. Mirroring flexible work and leisure patterns in late-modern capitalist formations at large, the laptop supports planned and unplanned jams, spontaneous gatherings and modes of composition. The disposition, here, is towards short bursts of intense creativity rather than hard week-long slogs in the recording studio. For professional musicians on tour, mobile music making is an essential way to test out new ideas and collaborate with others, filling up commuter time with the production of music in “non-spaces” such as cafes, trains, buses, airports and cars. For amateur musicians, similarly, making music happens with others in the spatial and temporal interstices of life, on a little and often basis:
“I really enjoy packing up my little rig, going to someone’s house for a day and making new music” (SongCarver, musician, in Delaney, 2004: 5)
“It’s really nice to be able to set up two, maybe even three to a table, and all be working on tracks, and all be able to flip a laptop around, ask for each others’ opinions, and be able to mess with it or change it” (Printz Board, musician, in Delaney, 2004: 39)
Connecting movements of people with movements of music data supports a re-positioning of the laptop as a box of mobile delights that can be opened in a range of unexpected spaces, from warehouses and abandoned silos, to alleyways and (in one case according to the musician John von Seggern) the Mohave desert. In this respect, the laptop offers a number of unforeseen possibilities beyond the studio or the home, in principle linking musicians in the kinds of ephemeral encounters desired by 19th-century Parisian flâneurs – the urban idlers who drew on the sights of the urban spectacle their poetry. Like the flâneur, the laptop musician reacts to their environment by mining the crowds and ambiences for creative input. They are “travelling players”, passing semi-anonymously through rapidly accelerating cultural contexts in moments of mobile fantasy, catching things in flight:
“In theory, a quiet studio or room at home should be the ideal creative environment, but it doesn’t work out like that. Sitting at a table in a café – surrounded by people talking and moving around…can be more of an inspiration and less of a distraction than all those things to do around the house/studio” (Delaney, 2005: 126).
As a result, one ends up with a complex layering of spatial domains – both virtual and traditional, local and global, coded and material, individual and collective – all thickened by the intensification of computer clock speeds and an acceleration of cultural stimuli in everyday life. Here, a scrambling of energies, speeds, scales and proportions forces us to attend to the intersections between the physical mobilities of people and the way technologies invite forms of “virtual” mobilities of communication, especially with the advent of the Internet. The image of musicians composing MIDI code on superfast laptops whilst whizzing through train stations in Wi-Fi enabled train carriages captures something of the complexity here. [4] An interlacing of spaces takes place that updates the classic study by Schivelbusch (1979) on the significance of visual culture to the undertaking of train journeys in the 19th century. The 21st century folding of practice and rapid movement points up the need for a new cartography of music, essential to which is acknowledgement of the material context of spatiality and the interrelated locales in which the moments of production-text-consumption are made (Swiss, Sloop, and Herman, 1998). Such a re-mapping extends from globalised networks of commodities and dataspaces to the mundane micro movements of “musicking” bodies. After all, music and technology do not just act on the body, but are recruited into its daily rhythms, routines and affectations (DeNora, 2000).
So, just to sum up this section: despite being rooted in structures of global capital, commodification and productivity, the laptop remains a dynamic and emergent device open to inventions and rearticulations in moments of practice. Just as it drives the formation of new music, so it moves music production into myriad spaces and locales, reinforcing a suppleness in functionality and use. Indeed, we might even say that it is this mobility that leaves a trace in new genres such as “glitch” and the “microsound scene”, where the music often takes the form of chaotic, rapid, digital sounds redolent of the global metropolis. [5] In any case, though mobility looks, at first sight, to be a somewhat subtle additional quality to the desktop computer, its impact on creative practices is significant, both in terms of what it makes possible in music and how it transforms the scenes of contemporary urban landscapes.
THE DIFFERENCE IS…SOFTWARE
Yet, the laptop’s hardware capabilities are only enacted in music by the software used to make it. This is what separates the laptop in music from its function as a business machine, word processing device or means for sending email. It is the functionality and properties of music software and its use by musicians that transforms the laptop from a generic personal computer to mobile studio or live performance instrument. In fact, for some scholars, software is what “writes mobility” in that flows of objects (information, money, people, commodities) are mobilised by software-driven virtual environments and applications.
The use of software applications is particularly popular amongst laptop musicians, of course, not only because subcultures of collecting and swapping applications (legally and illegally) is central to laptop collaborations, but because software is already portable. Software, we might say, writes mobile music production. By focusing down on one of the most popular and renowned software applications for mobile and live performance, Ableton Live, I want to follow through the idea of software as a “technoscape” or techno-cultural script. The concept of the “technoscape” comes from the work of Arjun Appadurai (1996) whose definition points to its relation to technologies and spatial forms as both representations (as in landscapes) and material relations between physical objects and bodies. Using this concept, it becomes possible to scrutinize the kinds of spaces represented in the Graphic User Interface as well as the distinctive cultural practices they give rise to.
Ableton Live began life in 2001 as a performance tool designed by two German electronic musicians, Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles (a.k.a. Monolake), who were frustrated at the lack of software dedicated to live improvisation. It is therefore marketed as an application primarily designed for live performance and music on the move. Stylistically lo-fi, with retro fonts and crudely-rendered buttons and knobs, Live’s interface comprises semi-discrete sections dedicated to local functions, such as browsing files, selecting tools, navigating through clips, adding effects and routing signal paths. It is particularly suited for laptop use because it has the ability to conceal sections of the interface, thereby saving on screen space.
The operations available to Live’s users are a hybrid of conventional “cut and paste” tools, navigation commands and more local information behaviours particular to Live’s environment. Indeed, in conjunction with users’ own actions, Live takes on a plasticity and variability befitting its own origins in play. Along with the laptop, it has altered our idea of what music consists of, setting new standards for what can be achieved with a single piece of software in multiple environments. For instance, it foregrounds the function of “elastic audio” whereby audio, like MIDI data, is treated as flexible and mutable. In real-time live situations audio files can be non-destructively mutated and re-coded to change the placement of individual beats, correct pitch or stretch the length of particular phases. In itself this is a technique that has led to the stylistic “mashing” of genres. As one DJ explains:
“Everything fit[s] together; categories like Techno, Trance and House did not seem to matter anymore. Speed differences of 30bpm did not create audible problems – and pitching whole tracks over three semitones still sounded great. When I found out about the possibility of syncing a whole track by using Live’s Warp Markers, I immediately loaded about 150 songs onto my G4, warp-marked them and tried to find matching combinations”
(Mijk Van Dijk, DJ, in Delaney, 2004: 68-69)
Live hints at a new generation of software applications that are distinct from the studio emulation. Indeed, Live appears relatively indifferent to hardware precursors. For instance, there are few faders and knobs and the GUI is stylistically “flat” or “lo-fi”. Its technological form of life refers less to an original referent but to itself, to its own reality. This is particularly important as a new generation of musicians with little or no experience of the hardware studio is learning to make music in software environments, displacing the referent further from its image. [6]
Typical of the constraining and enabling features of technology at large, then, software both shapes the user’s modes of composition, but also enables a series of new practices central to the production of new forms and styles. Software is active and transformative, but only in relation to users’ manipulations. This balance of agency is something the makers of Live are themselves at pains to stress in the face of criticisms of the overly-automated nature of contemporary music. In some respects, however, they are fighting a losing battle: even amongst some musicians, the laptop and its applications are seen as suspicious imposters, whose automative capabilities render them out of place in music.
THE ANXIETY IS…CYBORG PERFORMERS AND “MATTER OUT OF PLACE”
The fact of automation unsettles a particularly powerful sense that performance is or should contain a signature of bodily dexterity. Hence, Roland Barthes’ distinction in the essay of 1970 “Musica Practica” is between a music one listens to, and a music one plays. Even before MIDI and computer automation, Barthes laments the fact that “playing has ceased to exist; musical activity is no longer manual, muscular, kneadingly physical, but merely liquid, effusive, ‘lubrificating’” (Barthes, 1970: 149-50). Laptop music intensifies and radicalises these anxieties, because the signs of bodily involvement are subtle and minimal. Typically, the laptopist will stand, sit or crouch behind the open lid of the laptop, scarcely displaying any overt connection between the production of sound and the movements of the body. [7] This all feeds the suspicion that, at best, the black or titanium box is doing most of the work, with the musician-technician having minimal input, at worst that they really are just pressing play and checking their emails. The ambivalence is evident in audience reactions to laptop sets, where there is often a radical uncertainty about dancing or clapping. So much more creative agency is being attributed to the machine than the musician that it becomes difficult to hold together the hegemonic idea of music as having a human author with an unambiguously positive relationship to the performance.
Indeed, the presence of automation and lack of physical index disturbs precisely because music is so heavily coded with ideas of unfettered human agency. A line is drawn between the domain of the human and its non-human context such that creativity is often seen as an exclusively human attribute, distinct from technology. For the sociologist Bruno Latour (1993), this purification ignores the fact that humans are always already mixed up with their technologies – from fabrics and spectacles, to buildings and jewellery - and that we actually never see a “pure human”. Even classical music, which is often considered an expression of “pure humanity” is saturated with human/non-human relations, from the musician’s own instruments, scores and notations, to microphones, mixing desks and acoustic treatments (Hennion, 1997). [8]
And yet the anxiety over performance persists, playing itself out not just in the reactions of audiences, publics and reviewers, but with laptopists themselves. Many are responding to the ambiguity by giving the audience a peek at their craft - projecting live relays of their desktops onto large screens or displaying the frequency bands of their music in real time. But they are battling against a potent mix of often contradictory attitudes swilling around the performance of laptop music sets: the computer is inanimate but is powerful enough to warrant critique, the musician becomes a technician but is still present as a figurehead, the audience laments the lack of gesture, but nevertheless is still interested in knowing what the laptopist is doing.
The laptop is what the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) calls “matter out of place” – an object with qualities that interact with certain expectations regarding its place in the world. [9] It doesn’t “belong” to the stage in the same way as other instruments because it retains a surplus of meaning as an amplifier of work. It is believed to perform a greater amount of work than the operator. Hence, in the majority of live performances it will be the only piece of visible kit not purpose built for music, there being no onboard sounds in the usual sense. This reinforces the suspicion that it is an impostor tainted by its proximity to business and, hence, more a management device than an instrument. At the very least, it’s position in music reveals a status ambivalence over its increasingly dominant place on stage and in music culture. This makes it a place-holder for conflicting meanings about what belongs in music: productivity and creation, reality and virtuality, play and work, the cybernetic and the organic.
Attitudes may change, of course, in that infiltration may shade into normalisation. After all, conventions of listening are not immutable and a century’s worth of recording and experimentation has already transformed our expectations of the way music is created, how it sounds and the spaces and formats through which we hear it (Thompson, 2004). Yet, these transformations are dependent on accumulative and subtle changes in values, including a gradual alignment between traditional norms and new practices (Pinch and Bjisterveld, 2003). For the time being, the laptop remains something of a liminal rogue, betwixt and between, the odd one out, the stranger. As such, there’s something to be said for using it as a powerful prism through which contemporary and traditional norms around music are revealed, unsettled and dismantled. When one adds the laptop’s links with questions around space and performance, its analysis attains a significance beyond music to illuminate current trajectories of late modern societies. There’s clearly much to be gained, then, from taking it seriously.
1 “Beat Manifestos”, Wired, 10.05, May 2002, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/manifestos.pr.html
2 This emphasis on the laptop’s mobility in music has the danger of cleaving it from historical antecedents, including early magnetic tape recorders, four track studios, early music computers and personal desktop computers (see Taylor, 2001; Théberge, 1997; Chadabe, 1997). Indeed, a full and adequate account of the laptop in contemporary music would need to trace its lineage back to the history of recording in experimental and military industrial contexts during what in technological terms was a long 20th century (Kittler, 1999). In recent history, it is also true to say that musicians have been using semi-portable hardware in the form of MIDI set-ups, sequencers, synthesizers and sound modules since the 1980s. The claim of the present paper, however, is that these devices were never really portable beyond their transportation by vans, buses and planes and that the total portability of the laptop underpins a subtle change with some less than subtle consequences.
3 Price is still an issue, it must be said. At around £1,000 for a mid-range unit we are still talking about an expensive piece of hardware beyond the means of most of the working population. Whilst a techno-romantic rhetoric claims the laptop to be the folk guitar of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the claim is too casual to hold water. This isn’t to say we can’t still scrutinize its increasing visibility in music fields, however. Nor can we ignore the fact that, like desktop computers, laptops once belonged to a business elite and were unaffordable to most musicians and amateurs. Today, this is no longer the case, with budget laptops already available for around £300 or so.
4 “There is nothing better as a performer than to be able to just jump on a train with your laptop and a few wires and just plug in to wherever you happen to be playing” (Ergo Phizmiz, musician, in Delaney, 2004: 59).
5 The problem with this exercise is that it too readily “reads off” the social context in the music, collapsing the filtering effects and agency of musicians themselves and returning to a crude base-superstructure model of music and society. A more convincing approach would be to put Bourdieu’s category of field to use in understanding the position taking of “glitch” musicians in the sub-field of cultural production. This is an approach I have taken elsewhere (Prior, 2006).
6 It is, of course, Jean Baudrillard who writes of the coming logic of simulation under conditions of postmodernity. Simulation, here, is a concept designed to capture the way images cease to correspond to a real referent: “The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational” (Baudrillard, 1988: 167).
7 If the musician died on stage, or fell asleep, there might be some disquiet among the audience, but as Toop notes, “the computer would simply keep on playing” (Toop, 2004: 224).
8 This is an argument that is associated with a perspective in Science and Technology Studies known as Actor Network Theory. ANT theorists extend the analysis of the “social” to non-human actors and refuse to construct hard and fast boundaries between matter and society. This is because humans always comport themselves to technology, so to separate creativity from technology fundamentally misunderstands the folding of the two. We can’t “opt out” of technology because, like the image of the Mobius strip, we are intertwined or folded into its locales, spaces and materials (see Latour, 1993).
9 In the case of hygiene, for instance, dirt is placed in a system of cultural understanding through which ideas of contamination, germs and illness are constructed. These ideas cement a wider cosmology around morality and moral purity based on certain categories and assumptions about the material world.
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barthes, R. (1970) “Musica Practica”, in Image, Music, Text, London: Fontana.
Baudrillard, (1988) “Simulacra and Simulations”, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by M. Poster, Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Z (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity.
Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.
Chadabe, J. (1997) Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music, Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.
Delaney, M. (2004), Laptop Music, Thetford: PC Publishing.
DeNora, T. (2000) Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Douglas, M. (1970) Purity and Danger, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hennion, A. (1989) “An Intermediary Between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music”, Science, Technology and Human Values, 14, 4: 400-424.
Hennion, A. (1997) “Baroque and Rock: Music, Mediators and Musical Taste”, Poetics, 24: 415: 435.
Kittler, F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Pinch, T. and Bijsterveld, K. (2003) “‘Should One Applaud?’ Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music”, Technology and Culture, 44,3: 536-559.
Prior, N. (2006) “Putting a Glitch in the Field: Music, Technology, Production”, unpublished conference paper, presented at Aesthetics and Society, University of Edinburgh, 2006.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. (2006) Mobile Technologies of The City, London: Routledge.
Schivelbusch, W. (1979) The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Blackwell.
Swiss, T., Sloop, J. and Herman, A. (1998) Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.
Taylor, T. (2001) Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture, London: Routledge.
Théberge, P. (1997) Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
Thompson, E. (2004) The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933, Boston: MIT Press.
Toop, D. (2004) Haunted Weather, London: Serpent’s Tail.
Urry, J. (2003) Global Complexity, Cambridge: Polity.
Von Seggern, J. (2005) Laptop Music Power! The Comprehensive Guide, Boston: Thomson.
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AskStudent
Christina December 5, 2007 General, Politics
Penn & Teller: Bullshit — Intelligent Design
Penn & Teller debunk Intelligent Design as a possible scientific theory, even while it is being added to science curricula across the U.S.
This program originally aired back in March of 2003, and Cobb County’s “intelligent design” policies were stricken down by a federal judge in Atlanta as unconstitutional in 2005.
But, scientifically speaking, creation is not a theory. It’s not even a hypothesis. It can’t be disproven. Hell, I’m not sure it can even be tested. Evolution was a hypothesis. Supporting evidence was gathered and it became a theory. For nearly 150 years it’s been tested and has not been disproven. Sure we’ve made adjustments and corrections, but the core concept remains.
Evolution will never advance beyond a theory in science, because it’s impossible to prove. That’s how the scientific process works. The more we fail to disprove a theory, the more likely its accuracy. People are free to believe in creation, but it can’t be a scientific theory because you can’t devise an experiment to disprove it. It cannot be tested. This makes it useless, whether true or false. Evolution theory can be used to make predictions and advances. So long as those predictions and advances hold up, the truth of the theory is actually fairly irrelevant, though it is obviously strengthened each time it is successfully used.
It’s always possible that something will come along and throw a wrench in our ideas on evolution and we’ll need to *ahem* evolve new ways of thinking.
What I don’t think ID/Creationism proponents ever really contemplate is this… Do you believe in survival of the fittest? Do you believe that an animal that is better suited to its life and environment will produce more successfully/frequently than one that is less well suited? To me, that’s just simple logic and observation. Of course it will. It’s no different than the best college basketball team making it through March madness and taking the NCAA championship. Yes, in any given season the best team might have a bad game at a bad time, but on average over the course of years, the best teams come out on top.
Now if you’ve accepted that, the logical next step is that those animals with advantages will pass those advantages on, and over time that can shift the attributes of the species.
We see evolution happen all the time, but opponents choose to ignore it. New strains of influenza pop up every year, for example.
Posted in General, Politics and tagged evolution, intelligent design. Bookmark the permalink.
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Rainah Berlowitz, Director of Operations of Education Through Music, Inc., has focused his professional and volunteering life on creating educational opportunity for at-risk youth and engaging young professionals in civic leadership. He currently serves as Director of Operations for Education Through Music, Inc. (ETM). Founded in 1991 and based in New York City, ETM helps schools and other organizations to provide and sustain high-quality, comprehensive and sequential music education for all children. He came to ETM in 1997 through Princeton AlumniCorps’ Project 55 Fellowship Program after receiving an A.B. in English from Princeton University. He remains involved with Princeton AlumniCorps, volunteering as a Project ’55 Fellowship Program mentor. Over his many years of service with ETM, he helped the organization grow through numerous milestones. Notably, in 2005, ETM was one of fourteen organizations nationwide to receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Education for evaluation, development and dissemination of its music education model. He also facilitated creation of ETM licensed affiliate organizations in Los Angeles in 2006 and San Francisco in 2008. While working for ETM, he began volunteering with Giving Opportunities To Others, Inc. (GOTO), a nonprofit founded in 2001 by one of his former Princeton AlumniCorps mentees. GOTO is managed by a community of young professionals who volunteer to enrich the lives of underprivileged middle school students by funding transformational summer camp experiences in the arts and acting as supportive role models. In 2005, after GOTO’s expansion to Boston, Rainah was appointed a member of the National Board of Directors and President of GOTO’s New York Executive Committee. In 2010, he was elected to serve as GOTO’s Board Chairman and Executive Director. In fall 2011, he was honored to be one of twenty emerging New York City arts and cultural leaders selected to participate in the Arts & Business Council of New York’s Arts Leadership Institute sponsored by American Express.
Kevin Bolduc, Vice President — Assessment Tools of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, leads the delivery of CEP’s performance assessment tools. He oversees both the design of new tools and the refinement of CEP’s suite of current assessment offerings. Kevin helped design CEP’s groundbreaking Grantee Perception Report and Donor Perception Report and has presented CEP’s data to boards, management and staff for dozens of funders. Kevin also advises CEP’s research process. He led phase one of CEP’s study of foundation strategy and co-authored the 2007 report, Beyond the Rhetoric: Foundation Strategy. He is also co-author of “Luck of the Draw,” an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review that explores how grantee experiences are affected by differences in the quality of program officers’ performance; CEP’s 2004 report, Listening to Grantees: What Nonprofits Value in Their Foundation Funders; and a case study on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s approach to performance assessment. Kevin frequently speaks about foundation performance assessment and strategy at national and regional conferences. Before joining CEP in September 2001, he was a consultant with The Parthenon Group, a Boston-based strategy consulting firm. He is past chair of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy’s Greater Boston Steering Committee, and was selected as a 2009 Independent Sector American Express NGen Fellow. Kevin graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Biology from Williams College.
Chloe Drew, Executive Director of the Council of Urban Professionals, administers a multi-million dollar portfolio of results-oriented initiatives that advance leadership development, diversity across the public, private and nonprofit sectors and access to capital and opportunity for the next generation of civic and business leaders. Chloe formerly served as Campaign Director for U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee in California’s 9th congressional district. She also co-founded and served as a founding board member of OaklandVOTE, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing voter participation in underserved communities. Before her work for the Lee campaign, Chloe taught social studies and math at the Colegio Americano de Quito in Ecuador, and was Deputy Finance Director of the Mark Udall for U.S. Congress campaign. Chloe earned a B.A. from Harvard University in History and Literature and currently serves on the boards of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and One Voice PAC. She is a former board member of the Wellesley Centers for Women and Emerge America.
Carrie L. Ellis, Director of Project Management at KaBOOM!, knows that broad, systemic change is possible when leaders focus on efficiency, strategy, and results. Since 2005, Carrie has led the Project Management team at KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit that creates playspaces through the participation and leadership of communities across North America. During this time, Carrie has managed her team in completing over 1,300 community-built playspace projects with nearly 200 funding partners and impacting over 3.5 million children. Previously, Carrie worked for several years in different capacities on the national staff of Teach For America, and she served as a Teach For America corps member teaching middle school in Los Angeles. Carrie is the Chair of the Board for Teaching for Change, a nonprofit that provides teachers and parents with the tools to transform schools into centers of justice where students learn to read, write and change the world. She is a graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, GA where she earned a B.A. in English, and she has a Master’s degree in Communication Management from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.
Carlos Lejnieks is President & CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Essex, Hudson & Union Counties (Newark, NJ) and Chairman of Big Brothers Big Sisters of NJ. Carlos took over an atrophied BBBS agency and, within three years, went from serving approximately 100 youth to serving well over 1,100. Prior to joining BBBS, Carlos was an administrator at North Star Academy, a nationally recognized public charter school in Newark encompassing four campuses ranging from elementary school through high school. At NSA, he led an international service trip to Ecuador with high school students. Prior to North Star, Carlos was held positions as Vice President of CN Communications International and Goldman Sachs. Lejnieks has served on President Barack Obama’s Regional Finance Committee, Governor Chris Christie’s Education Transition Team and Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s Transition Team. In 2009, Carlos was elected Chairman of the NJ Charter Schools Association and serves as a Trustee and Co-Founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools based in Harlem (NY). In 2010, Carlos was appointed to the National Advisory Board of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, replacing US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Carlos also serves on the Board of Regents for Saint Peter’s College and is a Trustee for Jersey City Medical Center Hospital. In 2011, Carlos was also a featured speaker at the Newark Peace Summit headlined by the Dalai Lama. A former collegiate varsity wrestler, Carlos has an M.Sc. degree from the London School of Economics and B.A. degree in International Relations and Commerce from Brown University. In 2011, he was given an Honorary Doctorate from Saint Peter’s College, where he delivered its commencement address.
Inmaculada Lopez de la Cova is the Head of Asia for British Red Cross (BRC) International Division in London. In that position, she leads the teams and partnerships agreements that BRC holds in Central, South, South East and East Asia as well as focusing on the development of the strategic direction of BRC for those Regions. In her continued engagement with the Red Cross Movement for more than 13 years, she has undertaken several responsibilities across various geographies. She started as a volunteer with the Spanish Red Cross supporting communities affected by the conflict in Guatemala in 1997, followed by supporting the coordination of the relief efforts after the Huricane Mitch destroyed Central America in 1998. This was followed by Inmaculada holding numerous overseas positions, Head of the Spanish Red Cross delegations in Palestine, India and Paraguay; Organizational Development delegate for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Iraq ; before joining British Red Cross as South Asia Desk Officer in October 2004 taking over the Tsunami operation for India, Maldives and Sri Lanka in January 2005. Since then, Inmaculada has been the focal point for British Red Cross for South Asia and the Middle East and she has lead the implementation of key projects across continents, enabled teams and individuals to perform to their potential and influence the way BRC shapes its partnership with key organizations across the world. Inmaculada has participated in several national and international trainings, workshops, conferences and seminars. She has expertise in Community Participation Methodologies and Management for Humanitarian Organizations and has a special interest in Community Lead Disaster Risk Reduction. Inmaculada has a Master’s degree in Journalism and a post-graduate degree in International Development. She lives in London with her husband and son.
Gonzalo L. Mercado, a native of Chile, serves as the Executive Director of El Centro del Inmigrante (The Immigrant Center). “El Centro” is a community based organization working to provide for the economic advancement and well being of immigrant workers through community organizing, education, advocacy, service provision and cultural activities as well as building bridges with receiving communities. Gonzalo has been actively involved in helping provide a voice and platform for immigrant workers and their families at both the local, state and national level. He has been involved in several campaigns, such as, the need for just and humane immigration reform as a moral and economic issue. He has worked as a liaison between various philanthropic organizations and local workers groups. He serves on the board of the New York Immigration Coalition, the North Star Fund and the Community Health Center of Richmond. He was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the NYC Commission on Day Laborers and the NY HIV Planning Council. He has experience organizing immigrants from all over the world through the Staten Island Immigrants Council where he has served as the coordinator since 2006.
Jane Mugo is Director of Internal Controls at Habitat for Humanity International, a Christian organization that builds simple, decent homes in partnership with people living in substandard conditions worldwide. She has global responsibility for organizational process reviews, implementation of best practices, and the development of policies to address identified risks and emerging issues. Jane is currently managing a hands-on initiative to streamline processes and implement controls resulting in more efficient and effective use of resources, capacity building and knowledge sharing across the organization. Prior to joining Habitat, she worked with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Kenya and the U.S, which has given her unique insight of both developed and emerging country issues. Jane is also actively involved in community and education initiatives. Previously, she consulted for school and nonprofit boards and served on the Board of Directors of Logos Christian School in Kenya. Currently, she is assisting two underserved schools and a church community in Kenya with setting up libraries using donated books. Jane serves on the Atlas Corps Fellows Selection Board and is a 2011 American Express NGEN fellow. Jane holds a J.D. from the University of Nairobi, an International MBA from Temple University and CPA certification in Kenya.
Keren Nazareth is the Executive Director of SAATH since April 2011. SAATH is a nonprofit in India that works with vulnerable households in urban and rural areas. She started out her work in SAATH in 2009, as the Coordinator for their Research and Documentation cell, then moved up as Co-Director. She holds a Masters in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her work includes programs related to livelihoods for youth, women, informal sector workers; extensive documentation work post-tsunami in four countries; setting up a rural artisans marketing initiative; and working with displaced urban communities. One of her passions is encouraging youth initiatives, and she helped set up and strengthen the youth volunteer and internship opportunities in Saath. She has facilitated over 200 interns and volunteers in her career so far. Her energy is currently focused on partnership building and fundraising for SAATH, developing an environmental initiative and setting up SAATH’s Urban Research Cell. She has co-authored a paper on Community Mobilization. She has previously worked with organisations such as Centre for Environment Education, Animal Help Foundation, and Thalassemia Jagruti Foundation. Additionally, her passion and love for animals has kept alive a spirit of rescuing and protecting both stray and endangered animals.
Mayur Patel joined Knight Foundation in 2009. As Vice President of Strategy and Assessment, he is responsible for aiding ongoing strategy development, strengthening research and knowledge management capabilities and assessing the impact and effectiveness of the foundation’s efforts. Mayur was previously a Project Associate with the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford, involved in research on international institutions and economic affairs, and a fellow with the World Trade Organization in Geneva. He has served as a consultant to Oxfam’s offices in Kenya and the UK, and as a trade and investment policy adviser to Realizing Rights, an NGO based in New York. He has previously worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Zimbabwe, his home country, on issues of civic engagement and parliamentary support. A Rhodes Scholar, Mayur has a Doctorate in international development from the University of Oxford, from which he also earned a Master’s degree. Prior to attending Oxford, he was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics (LSE). He is a Junior Fellow with the EVA Business and Policy Forum based in Helsinki and a recipient of a Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Award. Recently, Mayur was named a 2011 Independent Sector American Express NGEN Fellow and one of ’30 Under 30 Civic Leaders’ by Splashlife Magazine and the National Council on Citizenship.
Anders Pettersson is the Executive Officer to the Standing Group of UNICEF’s National Committees (NatComs). The NatComs represents the UN Children’s Fund in 36 of the more than 190 countries where the organization is working to improve the lives of women and children. The NatCom’s are UNICEF’s private sector arms for fundraising, communication, advocacy and corporate partnerships and they annually raise more than $1billion. Anders joined UNICEF in 2003 when he created and ran the organization’s global surge capacity program to support field offices in humanitarian crises. Before joining UNICEF, Anders worked for his government and developed and coordinated Sweden’s participation in civilian missions to support peace and security, democracy, human rights and rule of law in Central and Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Middle East. From the early to mid-90s, and prior to being a national and international civil servant, he did three tours as military peacekeeper with UNIFIL in Lebanon, UNPROFOR in Croatia and Bosnia and with NATO-IFOR in Bosnia. Anders did his undergraduate studies at University of Uppsala and Masters studies in Political Science and International Relations at Stockholm University, where he also participated in post-graduate research on the EU, commissioned by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He has also undertaken more recent studies at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix, AZ.
José Quiñonez is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and the University of California at Davis. A former legislative assistant for Congressman Ruben Hinojosa and nonprofit lobbyist in Washington, D.C., José is a passionate advocate for immigration, hunger and welfare reform. After working to improve predatory mortgage and payday lending practices at the Center for Responsible Lending, Jose organized a statewide coalition of asset builders for the Asset Policy Initiative in Sacramento. José became Mission Asset Fund’s (MAF) founding Executive Director in 2007. MAF is an award-winning nonprofit organization that integrates financially excluded low-income and immigrant communities into the financial mainstream by offering innovative and culturally relevant financial programs, products and services.
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Home / awards / movies / news / Oscars / The 2018 Best Animated Feature Oscar Nominations Are Here
The 2018 Best Animated Feature Oscar Nominations Are Here
Chris Perkins January 23, 2018 awards, movies, news, Oscars
It's that time again. The awards season seems to be getting more crowded and longer with every passing year, but The Oscars remain the highest profile out there. The Best Animated Feature category at the Academy Awards is, therefore, one of the most prestigious honours that any animated film can win.
This year saw a change to how the category was voted for, with the wider academy allowed to vote, rather than just the animation and shorts branch. The move was seen as an effort to combat a perceived bias towards smaller and international fare over the output of the major studios. But did it actually make a difference? It doesn't seem like it did.
Pixar's Coco, of course, got its anticipated nomination (and let's face it, will almost certainly win). But we're extremely relieved to say that two independent features also scored nominations- Nora Twomey's The Breadwinner (amazingly, Cartoon Saloon's third nomination) and Loving Vincent from Darota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman. Also nominated were The Boss Baby from DreamWorks Animation and Blue Sky's Ferdinand.
Coco also got a second nomination, in the Best Original Song category for Remember Me.
Beyond the features, animation is also recognised in the Best Animated Short Category. Here the nominees are Dear Basketball from the legendary Glen Keane and Kobe Bryant, Pixar's latest Lou, Garden Party from Victor Caire, Gabriel Grapperon and Revolting Rhymes, from UK studio Magic Light Pictures.
Congratulations to all the nominees! The 90th Academy Awards will take place on March 4, 2018. See all the nominees here.
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West 17th Street
Apartments near West 17th Street, Sioux Falls, SD
Phillips Apartments
910 S Phillips Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
647 S Main Ave
647 S Main Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
720 South Second Avenue
720 South Second Avenue, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
711 W 18th St, Sioux Falls, SD 57105
700 S Summit Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
615 S Prairie Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
609 S Spring Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
505 S Walts Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
641 S Dakota Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
527 S Euclid Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
1117 S Phillips Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57105
107 E 19th St, Sioux Falls, SD 57105
1400 S Main Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57105
720 S 2nd Ave, Sioux Falls, SD 57104
Want to live near West 17th Street? Let's start your apartment search now.
West 17th Street is a street located in central Sioux Falls, SD that runs through some of the following popular Sioux Falls neighborhoods: All Saints and Augustana. Also, West 17th Street spans across several zip codes including the following: 57105 and 57104.
During your search, you'll find that there are a lot of apartments available near West 17th Street. Prices for nearby apartments can be found as low as $805 and as high as $1,045.
Renters that live near West 17th Street find that there are several options for getting around town. It's a very walk-friendly area with easy access to shops, restaurants etc. There are some dedicated biking areas. You'll find there are some public transportation options in this area.
Is restaurant selection important to you? There is a fair selection of restaurants near West 17th Street including Taco John's, Giliberto's, Kingdom Boundaries Aftercare, Taco Bell and Subway. The following are some popular grocery stores in the area: Bariki International Market, East Dakotah Natural Foods and Sunshine Foods. If you're a coffee fan, you're in luck as there are several nearby options available including Josiah's Coffeehouse & Cafe and Starbucks.
Let's find your next place to call home. While hunting for apartments near West 17th Street - try using ApartmentGuide's filters to refine your search.
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People, Not Puzzles
Caley hates the puzzle piece autism logo. Me, I don't think I dislike the puzzle idea itself, but I do strongly dislike pretty much everything it's being used to connote. And it REALLY bothers me that, though many autistic people have reported that they find it hurtful, organizations continue to use it.
And it's not always an issue of using the logo without knowing how hurtful it is. A lot of autism organizations are aware of that people have reported it hurtful, and yet they still use that logo, and that bothers me most of all. Caley once went to a large autism organization seeking aid, only to find that their informational table was plastered with puzzle pieces. She said that as an Autistic person, she found the puzzle piece logo to be hurtful. She said, "I'm a person, not a puzzle." And they replied, "Oh, we know a lot of autistic people find it hurtful, but we have to use it."
Caley was SO upset to hear that this organization that purportedly stood for autistic people used a logo that they themselves KNEW many autistic people found hurtful that she had to walk away. That day, and to this day, she did not get the help that she needed from the organization, because they had hurt her.
Yes, I realize you can't change your logo just because one person doesn't like it, but this isn't one person, this is scores upon scores of people who actively find it hurtful. And yet, it's still used. And that fact? That fact really, REALLY upsets me.
So if you're trying to help autistic people, please, PLEASE use another symbol. The infinity spectrum is the commonly accepted alternative, if you're looking for one. But don't use, or if you can avoid it, even share anything with a puzzle piece. I can tell you Caley cringes every time she sees one, turning an attempt to help into something very hurtful, and you know what? She's not alone. So if you're looking to help autistic people, use a different symbol. And when an autistic person tells you something is hurtful, please, PLEASE listen.
Judy Endow's Post Goodnight Autism Puzzle Pieces
http://ollibean.com/2014/04/04/goodnight-autism-puzzle-pieces/
A beautiful picture of Autistic advocates protesting...well, a lot of things, but puzzle piece logos among them
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_VyorhzF_el4/S89bae-bUKI/AAAAAAAAAH4/Y2hzkNFMpj0/s1600/group1.jpg
I'm a Person, Not a Puzzle (shows the alternative the autistic community has offered to the puzzle piece, the infinity spectrum)
http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/32509.html
Also, those of you who also liked his page may note that this post heavily drew from a comment I left on Invisible Strings's post about his own feelings on the puzzle piece logo. Awesome page, if you haven't liked it yet, I highly recommend doing so!
"I, Too": My Autism Speaks Story
Almost everyone in the autism community has an Autism Speaks story. It may be positive ("I raise money for them!") or it may be negative ("Autism Speaks? You mean Autism $peaks."), but it is very rarely neutral. I’ve told snippets before, but here’s the entirety of mine.
When I was in high school, I was talking to a classmate about autism. I said my sister had it and was trying to cobble together an explanation of autism, even though I had little understanding of it. “We should do an autism fundraiser!” she said. I said, “Well, there’s an organization we could raise money for, Autism Speaks.” In a flurry of excitement, we ran all around the school that day, getting permission from administrators and teachers to host a Walk A Thon on our campus.
Though Caley was the inspiration for the fundraiser, I never asked her opinion about it, assuming she’d be all in favor of an organization devoted to helping her, nor did I involve her in it. Ultimately, between my fellow student and me (she got the project rolling and I took care of the day-of planning) we actually pulled off our plan, a minor miracle in of itself, and raised over $500 to donate to Autism Speaks, much to our mutual, extremely pleasant surprise.
Now, fast forward a year. I was hanging out on Facebook, like most college kids (and, these days, adults), do, chatting with a friend I hadn’t seen in years. In conversation, he mentioned to me that he was later diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. I, still proud of my past accomplishment, excitedly messaged him that I’d raised money for Autism Speaks. I don’t remember his exact response, but it was something along the lines of him saying, “I really wish you wouldn’t have.”
I don’t remember what that moment was like, but I’m sure it was one of shock. Why would an autistic person not want me to raise money for an organization devoted to helping them? I questioned him, trying to get to the bottom of this paradox. And he told me. He told me how Autism Speaks didn’t actually have any autistic people on its board, and how Autism Speaks didn’t speak for autistic people. Their agenda, in fact, was quite the opposite of that of most autistic people, he said.
I’m going to be honest. I didn’t believe him at first. So I did what anyone in my shoes would do – I turned to Google. And there waiting for me, where I had never thought to look because of COURSE an organization focused around autistic people would have the same goals as them, was article after article, post after post, of damning proof. You can do the same search yourself right now – in the years that have passed, more and more articles have joined the ones that convinced me.
And finally, I turned to the person whose opinion on the matter was the most important in the world to me. I turned to Caley. I asked, “Caley, what do you think about Autism Speaks?”
This video was her response. When you watch it, imagine her or the autistic person you know watching it. Imagine their perspective. Imagine how Caley felt when, as she told me she did, she Googled autism and divorce as a child after our parents divorced, looking for advice on how to help her cope with the divorce as an autistic person, and instead found this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mycxSJ3-_Q
She sobbed for hours, having been told that she was the source of all our parent’s woes – including the very divorce she’d been seeking help for.
This backlash against this video, blessedly, was huge, to the point that it inspired parodies by the autistic community (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU2paLv1MGE) and outrage from many allies. Ultimately, Autism Speaks withdrew the advertisement. They never, however, publicly apologized.
And it doesn’t end here. The list of the hurtful and harmful things Autism Speaks has done just goes on and on:
- They supported the Judge Rotenberg Center, a place where the electric shock “therapy” for its autistic students (read: torture) is so bad that the United Nations called for an investigation. http://www.autistichoya.com/2013/11/an-unholy-alliance-autism-speaks-and.html
- They have no autistic people on their board, and even when they had an autistic person briefly working alongside them, Autism Speaks leaders did not listen to his words, and as a result he resigned. How can they speak for autistic people when they don’t even listen to their voices?
http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2013/11/14/noted-cuts-ties-autism-speaks/18893/
- They only give 4% of their funds to services for autistic people, and a mere 1% of their money goes to research benefiting autistic adults. To give perspective, 5% of their funds go towards salaries and administrative costs. As a result, many autistic people refer to them as “Autism $peaks”. https://autisticadvocacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Autism_Speaks_Flyer.pdf
- They intimidated a 14 year old autistic girl who had dared to make a parody site about them (NTSpeak). http://autism.about.com/b/2008/01/22/when-is-a-humorous-site-not-so-funny-autism-speaks-has-its-say.htm
- A lot of their funding for research goes towards prenatal autism testing. This is research to take us down a road of eliminating autism, not even for those of you who are pro-cure, for the people who are here, but simply through abortion (as has already happened with Down’s syndrome). Autistic people see this as the road to eugenics, and I’d have to agree. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez936r2F35U
- They vilify and demonize autism and autistic people in their campaigns. The more recent instance of that was in the “Call to Action” that their leader, Suzanne Wright, put out, in which she compares autistic children to having been kidnapped, characterizes them basically as vegetables and their families as not living. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/aspergers-alive/201311/reporters-guide-the-autism-speaks-debacle
There’s more where that came from - enough to fill an entire website devoted to bringing to light these many wrongs (http://boycottautismspeaks.com/why-boycott-1.html).
As you can imagine, no, Caley does not support Autism Speaks.
If you’re reading this in shock, know that I had the same reaction when I first learned. It had been inconceivable to me that an organization’s goals could be so very opposite of those they claimed to represent. Once I realized the reality, however, I could no longer support them, and was horrified that I’d donated money to them in the first place.
And, that, is why I called this post “I, too.” Because I am not the only one who had this experience. We all have these stories, which start off with initial support (and even fundraising), followed by shock and disbelief, then a battle to square the organization you thought you knew and that which exists, and ultimately, a renouncement of the organization. And I know some of you reading are penning your stories at this very moment, having learned for the first time that Autism Speaks does not speak for autistic people. To those of you who fall into that category, I’m sorry. Yes, I wrote this to educate you, but particularly for those of you who, like me, were active fundraisers, to have heard that the very act that we intended to help the autistic people we care about actually, in fact, hurts them – well, it can be hard news to take.
The good news is, you’re not alone. Even the most respected voices in the autism community have been there, like John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye, and Jess at Diary of a Mom. The better news is, just because Autism Speaks is not a good organization to support, that doesn’t mean you can support autism organizations anymore. There are some wonderful pro-autistic people organizations out there, like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (http://autisticadvocacy.org/), the Golden Hat Foundation (http://www.goldenhatfoundation.org/), and many, many more.
I asked Caley what she’d want people reading this to do with this newfound knowledge of the harm Autism Speaks causes autistic people. She had this to say:
“It would be really appreciated if you helped spread the news, so less people had to go through supporting Autism Speaks and then later learning about what they do. And also, obviously, if you support them, PLEASE stop.”
Now you’ve heard her. You’ve heard the autistic community. And you’ve heard me, a person who was once sitting in the same position as many of you are now. Autism Speaks may not speak for autistic people, but autistic people are speaking for themselves loud and clear. Will you listen?
Image is of me, Creigh, at the high school fundraiser I hosted for Autism Speaks. I'm standing in front of the bleachers, sleeves rolled up and sunglasses on, looking proud of myself. I'm wearing a blue "Autism Awareness Day" t-shirt, with the Autism Speaks logo prominently emblazoned on it. If only I could go back in time and tell that me what I know now...
On Autism, Gut Problems, and the Gluten Free Diet
I almost didn't post this. The potential to offend people was too high, and I am most definitely not an authority on the subject. But I thought about it and came to the conclusion that I have a whole lot more background in research and statistics and science than many, by virtue of my psychology degree, and was in a position to help others understand where research as to the gluten free diet currently stands. This is not an exhaustive post, it's merely intended to serve as a caution to those familiar with the diet, but not the research and introductory information for those
If you're not aware, the gluten free diet is THE diet in the autism community. Those who believe in the diet believe in its benefits (claims can range anywhere from help with stomach problems, to a cure for autism) with an almost religious fervor. Given that fervor, talking about it is like talking about vaccines - it's a very dangerous thing for me to come out and discuss, because I will inevitably offend people. If you are one of those people, please know that is not my intention, nor is it a reflection of my respect for you or your decision. I write merely to spread information.
Discussing the gluten free diet is difficult for me, because I admit, I don't have a full understanding of all the literature. I have read quite a few studies (straight from the source, not merely blog articles that pick and choose and twist studies merely to support their points), mind you, but I am not an expert in the area. It is even more difficult for me to write here, because it's hard for me to address all the claims made about the gluten free diet, since they are so numerous. So instead, I'll break it down into the four most common claims, and then go into the reasoning/research behind the scenes.
1. Does a gluten free diet cure autism?
No. At this point in time there is no cure for autism.
2. Does gluten cause autism?
No. I'm sure I could go in depth and explain scientific reasons for why it doesn't, but we'll just stick with common sense here. Studies have found symptoms of autism in babies as far back as early infancy - at which point the baby isn't eating anything with gluten.
3. Does the gluten free diet significantly reduce any symptoms of autism?
Maybe, but it's unlikely. Studies disagree here, but the most trustworthy scientific take on this I've found - a Cochrane review - says there's "a lack of evidence to support the use of gluten and/or casein free diet as an effective intervention for persons with autism and also a lack of research on potential harms and disbenefits of such diets." Even without the review, though, between the biases involved and confounding variables, I'm extremely doubtful that there's any causal relationship.
4. Can the gluten free diet help some people with gastrointestinal problems?
Yes. I speak here as someone who is currently on a gluten free diet, as prescribed by my gastroenterologist for gut issues. I can personally attest to it, and there are loads of studies to back this up.
Confounding Variables
Okay, so I mentioned confounding variables in number three as a problem and I may have lost some of you. What is a confounding variable?* Well, in this case we're talking about the third variable problem, which is what happens when an outside variable makes it seem like there might be a causal relationship between two things, when there really isn't. For instance, using statistics, I could make it seem like ice cream causes people to drown. Because, and this is true, as ice cream consumption increases, so do drowning deaths. Does ice cream cause people to drown, though? No, of course not! There's another factor in there - heat. As it gets hotter, people seek relief by eating ice cream...and going swimming. Therefore, while it's true there's a relationship between the two, it isn't causal. There's a third variable, heat, which explains their correlation. This, by the way, is one of the reasons you should always be cautious when you read a headline that declares there's a correlation between ____ and autism, because for reasons such as the third variable problem, correlation does not prove causation.
What is a possible confounding variable in all this autism and gut problems research? Well, the biggest one, which was my automatic thought when I heard about this potential relationship, is anxiety. Anxiety is a highly comorbid problem for autistic people, which is to say that anxiety and autism are related. Anxiety and gut problems are also related. Therefore, you have a potential third variable. Anxiety could be causing these gut problems that we're seeing, as opposed to autism.
Another potential confounding variable is the food restrictions of people on the spectrum. Many are 'picky eaters' who have a very limited diet as a result. A diet inadequate in nutrition can, as Willingham points out, cause the very gut problems that the gluten free diet (for some) seeks to remedy. So, ironically, curtailing someone's diet by eliminating anything with gluten could also be causing harm. For this reason, I highly recommend utilizing a nutritionist if you choose to try the gluten free diet.
Yet another variable, which could help explain the occasional (still not as large as it has been painted) change in some symptoms in some autistic people, but not in all** that some (but again, not all) studies have found is gastrointestinal in nature. After all, if you're in pain and having gastro trouble, and then all of a sudden that pain/discomfort goes away, it's pretty common sense that your behavior is going to improve as well. Teasing out the difference between the two effects is something we have to be careful to do.
Why is it important whether or not gluten causes the dietary issues? Well, we could be focusing on this at the wrong angle. If, as I suspect, anxiety is the culprit, we could be focusing our attention on interventions to help combat it directly, while preserving dietary variety, which, as I said, is particularly important for picky eaters. Caley swears by anxiety medication for herself, but says we should be focusing even more on teaching people with anxiety techniques to help them cope...which we don't do. If battling anxiety were embraced with the same fervor as the gluten free diet has been, I feel quite certain that autistic people (and their guts) would be better off.
Now, I am not a scientist. I have pretty extensive training in statistics and a fair amount in research methods, which is why I feel more comfortable interpreting these studies than most, but I am definitely not a professional in the field. (Willingham, however, is.) I also have not done as much in-depth research into this issue as I would like and cannot say anything with certainty. The gluten free diet may well work to alleviate certain symptoms of autism, though again, given the weakness of the evidence at the moment, I am doubtful.*** I am fairly confident that it can help with gut problems that many autistic people have, but whether or not it helps on the net, when you factor in potential inadequate nutrition, or whether it helps more than targeting anxiety, I cannot say.
One thing, however, I am absolutely confident about. The gluten free diet is not the miracle 'cure' for autism or even for certain symptoms that it's been painted to be, and if I had an autistic child without obvious gastrointestinal issues, given current evidence, I would not be putting them on this diet.
*I'm simplifying my explanation to the extreme here, so those of you scientists/statisticians, go easy on me.
**Note how many qualifiers I included here. Occasional (as in, not all studies found these changes - I haven't examined the study construction in depth so I can't say if that might have something to do with the discrepancies), subset (as in, only a small sub group of people studied showed any such potential changes), and only some of the symptoms changed and not by huge amounts (as in, it's not a fix for those symptoms).
***I am speaking to the perspective of parents of autistic children who would put them on the GF diet, here. Myself and Caley don't see it as symptoms separate from the person, merely characteristics that autistic people often share, and we don't see them as the problem others do.
What We Hold Sacred
When I was younger, my father used to tell me, "Creigh, everyone has their own sacred cows." Being quite literal, I thought he was referring to actual cows for the longest time. Later I realized that he was referring to beliefs that people hold sacred and above reproach or question.* I hadn't even thought about that concept, much less the phrase, since then, until one day recently when I realized it perfectly describes discussions of autism.
I have been so careful in this website trying to avoid discussing topics of controversy, except in the most cautiously impartial sense representing both sides - and not indicating which I supported. This should not be seen as indicative of my own beliefs about autism. Actually, I have quite strong beliefs on the almost all the controversial subjects of the autism world, including treatments, cures, causes, and more. Why did I attempt to filter all but the least controversial of those beliefs out of the website? Out of fear.
My fear is that as soon as I say something in contradiction of a belief someone holds sacred (and you basically can't express an opinion either way on a subject without doing so) they'll write off the entire website. To use vaccines as an example, no matter if I came out as pro vaccine or as anti vaccine, there's a whole group of people that I would risk alienating. Because as soon as you disagree with someone on one of those 'sacred' subjects, it's almost like metaphorical walls go up in another person, and all your other words are tainted by that one disagreement.
That is the peak of foolishness. We can all learn from each other when it comes to autism. Even someone who believed exposure to rainbows caused autism (to use an example I'm sure will offend no one) might still have great insight into sensory issues, or a great idea for managing meltdowns or navigating the school system.
I guess what I'm saying is, we shouldn't write off someone's ideas just because they say something different from what we believe.** Who knows - they might have a point. Moreover, even if they were wrong about that one concept, it doesn't mean that they don't have other things of value to say.
So please, don't write off everything I say just because I have different beliefs from you (and I most likely do). As people who care about those with autism, whether we personally are autistic or love someone who is, we should stand together, not apart.
*And still later I realized that was probably not a terribly politically correct idiom.
**Although you should definitely check the evidence before believing them.
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Supports for people on the spectrum are also Supports for Caregivers
In typical me fashion, I was sitting up late last night thinking about autism, pondering over the supports we use for people on the spectrum - sticker charts, visual schedules, etc. And then it occurred to me. These are as much tools to train caregivers to interact and understand someone on the spectrum as they are tools for the intended person.
I thought about each support one by one, and here I'm going to take you through how they can actually help caregivers as much as caregivees...
1. Sticker charts
These have been much decried in recent years as tools for people on the spectrum, due to concerns about extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, among others. But one thing these do that we don't think about is they remind caregivers to look for positive things to reward.
Having that sticker chart is a reminder to look for the great things a child on the spectrum does, when the most salient things for caregivers of children (either on the spectrum or off) tend to be the bad. So I love the idea of using a sticker chart for the caregiver, to remind US to give praise throughout the day.
2. Visual schedules
Predictability is SO important for reducing anxiety in a person on the spectrum. And yet, our world doesn't tend to provide that. A visual schedule is a great way of not only giving a person on the spectrum a way to see what's happening next, but it's also a great way for us as caregivers to be held to that schedule.
When you don't have a schedule written down and given to the person on the spectrum, you are liable to deviate quite a bit without warning. If you have a visual schedule, it's a reminder that you need to change that schedule (and thereby give a warning to the person on the spectrum of the change) before you change your plans.
3. Timers
Similar to a visual schedule, a timer holds both the person on the spectrum AND the caregiver to a commitment in terms of the routine and transitions.
4. The 5-point scale
The five point scale is a way of communicating a state of emotional regulation. A 1, for instance, is fully regulated, whereas a 5 is extremely unregulated.
Right after I learned about this scale, Caley called me in the middle of a panic attack. Wanting to apply what I'd learned, I explained the five point scale and asked where she fell. She said she fell at a four, and defined a four as feeling "like I want to run in the closet and hide".
Yes, the scale was intended to support Caley, but it was a tool for me as her ally to remind me to ask her how she's feeling, and then better understand how that felt to her. I had no idea before that a "4" felt THAT bad to her. This tool, too, went two ways.
5. Functional behavior analysis
This is a tool held up as the foundation of changing a child's behavior. Essentially you figure out what happened first, what happened next, and what function that behavior served.
Yet, it can be used as an far better tool for ourselves. It's a constant reminder that behavior is communication. If a child screams and then the adult interacting with them goes away and they stop screaming, they might be saying "I'm overwhelmed." Biting might be a way of saying "pay attention to me". These analyses teach us to look for the underlying meaning in behaviors, rather than just brushing them off.
These are just some examples of the ways that these supports run both ways, but there are many more. What tools can you think of that run both ways?
The Kindle Fire as an AAC Communication Device
One of the things that I have always appreciated about the Kindle Fire (which I am not affiliated with, but do, in fact, own) is that it's a very low cost access point for a communication device. It's only $50.
Quick Talk AAC, Speech Assistant AAC, LetMeTalk, TalkinPictures, TalkTablet, Gabby Tabs - you may not have heard of them, but these are all communication apps available for Kindle devices, most of which are FREE.
That means that, for the low price of $50, you can try out several AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) apps for your child or yourself. What's more, there's now a way to unlock the Google Play store without rooting your Kindle, so that ANY AAC app available for Android will be able to work on your Kindle.
I don't know about you, but I think that's amazing. If you already have a communication device for your child, but want a more mobile one, or one you don't have to worry so much about breaking during high use situations (it's $50, so less stress), this is a GREAT addition.
What's more, devices can actually be really great for working on turn taking, visual schedules, and even spoken communication. I know when I nannied a child on the spectrum, one of the BEST communication activities I could do was watch Angry Birds videos with him on his iPad. I would ask him wh- questions about what was going on, he would also ask me questions about the characters, I would work with him on making inferences about what was going to happen next...the list goes on.
What matters is not so much the device itself, but what you do with it. And with a Kindle Fire you can do a LOT.
You can purchase one here:
http://www.amazon.com/…/B…/ref=s9_acsd_bw_dcd_odsbncat_c0_t…
And check out the AAC apps that come with the Kindle Fire store here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss…
And, if you'd prefer to use the AAC apps in the Google Play store (which are more varied than those in the Amazon store - top ones include Alexicom, Avaz, JABtalk, Sono Flex, Nova Chat, and more!), you can add the Google Play store to your device without rooting it by following the directions here:
http://www.geek.com/…/you-can-access-google-play-on-amazon…/
Have concerns about using a communication device with your child? Check out this article about them
http://www.speakforyourself.org/…/myth-augmentative-altern…/
On Toothbrushing, Sensory Sensitivities, and Pain
As those of you who are caregivers for those who have sensory sensitivities (as most anyone on the spectrum does) or who have these sensitivities yourself know, toothbrushing can be a sensory NIGHTMARE! I'll let Caley explain how it feels:
"PAIN!"
That's all she said when I asked her to describe it and I think that's plenty. And flossing, she says, is even worse!
When she was younger, our parents were in charge and made sure her oral hygiene was kept up by making her brush her teeth.
However, now that she's an adult who can make her own decisions, Caley has declared that the pain of toothbrushing is not worth the benefits (which should tell you just how painful it is) and that we should try to find something to do instead.
Here's everything we've tried so far, including what's worked and what hasn't, so that those of you with similar difficulties can learn from our experimentation.
Attempt #1: No Burn Mouthwash
Caley vetoed regular mouthwash right away, for sensory reasons, but agreed to try "no burn" mouthwash instead. Apparently that's false advertising on their part because she took one mouthful and immediately had to spit out and rinse.
As Caley says "It BURNED!!!!! It was lies!"
As that didn't work, we tried a mouthwash that didn't have any alcohol in it whatsoever: Biotene mouthwash. Caley approved of the lack of the burn, so this product gets the thumbs up from her!
That said, mouthwash alone is no substitute for an actual toothbrush. So we kept looking...
Attempt #2: Water pic
We thought this might be able to help with actual plaque removal, unlike the mouthwash. At the same time, unlike toothbrushing the water didn't have painful bristles, which was a point in its favor.
Unfortunately, despite looking like a good product for sensory avoiders this didn't work out. Not only was the water pressure not enough to really get rid of all the plaque, but the machine itself was LOUD, which set off sensory sensitivities in a different way!
Points for effort, but this one ended up being a waste of money for her needs.
Attempt #3: Stimudent
These are little wooden picks that you use to get plaque off your teeth. These, unfortunately, didn't work out either, also for sensory reasons, as well as practical reasons.
Sensory wise, they made Caley's gums bleed. The taste of blood really bothers her, so that was already enough to make her not want to use them. On top of that, it takes a forever, in Caley's words, to fully clean your teeth with these. Practically, therefore, these didn't pan out either.
Attempt #4: Trident gum
This one met with approval! Trident gum helps (slightly) to mechanically dislodge food in the mouth, and an ingredient in it, xylitol, helps make the mouth a less pleasant environment for harmful bacteria. That's actually the same ingredient as they use in baby toothpaste!
Again, like mouthwash, definitely not a replacement, but certainly helpful as part of a bigger oral hygiene plan.
Attempt #5: Oral swabs
These are basically little sponges attached to popsicle sticks. You can get them plain or, as we did, treated. Ours has dentrifice on it, which acts to scrub plaque away by abrasion, as toothpaste does.
They're easy to use, you just brush them around your mouth like a toothbrush. They're meant for people with disorders or health problems that make toothbrushing impossible - which certainly applied!
Caley tried them and deemed them a success! Not only did the sponge not cause pain, but it was also pretty much flavorless (despite saying they were mint flavored) - another point in favor for a sensory avoider!
We had a winner!
Now, am I saying these solutions are as good as flossing and brushing? No, not by any means. However, they mean Caley doesn't have to be in pain anymore, and using all three of them together (Biotene mouthwash, trident gum, and the oral swabs) makes a halfway decent oral care program.
It was definitely worth it to respect Caley's needs and find something new instead of trying to force her to do something that wasn't working for her. Caley and I are sharing this story to help those of you with similar needs find something that works for you, too!
Let us know in the comments about any other sensory friendly oral hygiene products you know of, or if you've run into similar toothbrushing issues yourself!
Idea for Head Banging
So a while back I was working with a child on the spectrum who liked to bang his head, which is pretty common. It's generally a sensory seeking behavior...but it's pretty bad for your head!
I happened to have one of these mesh back supports in my car and on an instinct attached it to the head of the chair the child was banging his head on. He LOVED it! He was able to still move his head back and forth and meet resistance when he went back, without actually banging his head on something.
Since it's mesh and elastic, the material gives quite a bit, which protected his head as he banged it and made sure he never actually made contact with the chair itself. The nice thing is, they're also super inexpensive - you can get them off of Amazon for less than $5.http://www.amazon.com/Fellowes-Office-Suites-S…/…/B000MUSOZ6 (I'm not affiliated, just providing a link.)
Let me know what you guys think! As always, I'm not a professional, just writing from personal experience - it went well for this boy and I thought I'd share the idea with the rest of you!
Communication Placemat
In my AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) class today my professor mentioned a great idea - communication placemats for meal time! She said she'd used one at a pre-school she'd been at before, where communication placemats were made. She said they distributed them to all the children, speaking and non-speaking alike, both for normalization and so the speaking children could model how to use them for the non-speaking children.
I made mine with a camp I helped out for elementary school students in mind - I put meal related things on top, social-related on the right, and adult related on the left. But this would be great to adapt to your own personal needs, too! You can use picture symbols instead of words for non-readers and use vocabulary more common at home. If I had to go back, I'd add in "like", "dislike", "I", and "want" that way you can prompt for sentence production (ie the child can point to "I want food").
Let me know what you would do to yours! You can buy them online but I literally drew this one in five minutes in class and all you'd need to do is laminate it.
A Story of Dysgraphia, Anxiety, and A Middle School Project
When we were in middle school, Caley and I were both required to draw maps. I mean, free hand draw a map of an entire continent, or a topographic map of Southeast Asia.
Caley and I got to talking about those maps this morning, and she revealed to me that at points she'd been thinking about breaking her arm so she wouldn't have to draw them. She was a MIDDLE SCHOOLER thinking about BREAKING HER OWN ARM.
And my family and I had no idea.
Sure, we knew that as someone with dysgraphia (common in people on the spectrum) writing hurt her - but we never realized it hurt her THAT much. And, yes, I personally knew how anxiety inducing those maps could be for those of a perfectionistic bend - I remember how painstakingly I drew the fjords of Norway and despaired over getting Crimea just right.
But I didn't know. I didn't realize just how bad it was for her.
I'll let Caley tell you the story in her own words:
"They were free hand-drawn maps. We'd do things like the 13 colonies, Europe and Australia. Europe was the worst. You had to draw the coastline and then map within five miles the different cities. And you had to color it in and make it pretty and it did matter how it looked. That's one of the few C's I got in middle school.
It hurt a lot because of my dysgraphia and then it extremely stressed me. I remember hurting myself throwing my pencil up in the air in frustration. The first map I didn't think of it. The second and third maps I definitely thought about breaking my own arm. Because it HURT to write that map. And it was SO stressful. I don't think my meds were really good back then so, along with going through puberty, everything just combined together.
I don't know how to describe it, it just hurts to write. I can do a little bit, but because of the way I have to bend my fingers so that I can have any kind of fine motor control over the pencil it becomes REALLY painful.
I don't think I ever told [other people] it hurt. Although it should have been fairly obvious by how I acted. I often shook my hand out, although that looked like stimming, and I hated writing. Typing was a lot better.
I think they did the maps to attract those into art into learning, but it kind of was punishing to everyone who didn't."
I don't know if there's one single lesson to this story.
Maybe how painful dysgraphia can be?
Or how bad anxiety can get?
The importance of teaching self-advocacy?
Or the way that these moments of anxiety can just go under the radar, because we don't realize JUST HOW BAD it is for the person?
The need for accommodations?
The way an assignment can be so frustrating that a child is thinking about hurting themselves to get out of it?
In the end, I think this story tells all of those and more.
-Creigh
“Her Autism Is Getting Worse”: Perceptions Can Be Misleading
Reading my previous post, I realized how easy it would be, were Caley less able to communicate what was going on and our family less familiar with autism, to get the idea that her autism was ‘getting worse’. Naturally, this phrase is problematic in of itself. Namely, autism is inseparable from Caley, just the same way that being female is, and she doesn’t view being autistic as a bad thing. As a result, the entire phrase just doesn’t work.
But in our hypothetical scenario, in which, say, a parent of a newly diagnosed non-speaking child was viewing these same changes, I realize that it’s easy to get the wrong impression and think someone can get ‘more’ and ‘less’ autistic. Today, I’m going to clear that up.
For some background for those unfamiliar with Caley’s situation, lately she has been having more autism-related difficulties. She has a stronger need than usual for predictability – she needs routines and plans to remain unchanged right now, and if they are changed it’s highly distressing for her. She has greater sensory needs than usual, as well. Recently, Caley began biting at her wrists, due to sensory needs, too, so we bought her some chewelry (in this case, a chewable bracelet) to help her address that urge without hurting herself.
Caley’s also more sensitive to sensory sensations than usual. As a result, all the usual restaurants that we used to eat at are out of the question – now we have to eat the table furthest away from any other patrons in a quiet Japanese sushi restaurant. And having earplugs on hand is a must. She has greater difficulty coping with shopping trips, and more trouble functioning in daily life, whether it’s preparing food for herself or getting to class. In short, her functioning level at the moment is significantly below where it usually is (although, of course, it fluctuates day to day and moment to moment).
With all this as background, it’s easy to see how someone less familiar with autism might mistake these changes as coming from her autism itself changing. The reality, however, is far different from that. Caley is just as autistic as she has always been. The difference, however, lies in her coping abilities. Ordinarily, Caley can blend pretty well with neurotypicals. But doing all the neurotypical-seeming things – dealing with changes in routine without showing the strain, coping with sensory input, etc – take energy. (See ‘the spoon metaphor’ for more on this.) And the instant that Caley gets sick, or is dealing with depression, etc, the energy she normally uses to help her deal with the neurotypical world is used instead for dealing with this new problem.
Here's Caley's explanation:
"Since I’m having to deal with other things, the energy I normally use to deal with things like making sure I seem neurotypical-ish and cope with sensory things is diverted. The supposed “bad things” about being autistic get emphasized more."
Without the energy to devote to blending, Caley’s autistic characteristics seem to strengthen. But, again, that’s not a change in her autistic-ness – it’s a change in the energy she can devote to blending in.
I hope this helps explain some of the fluctuations in ability levels you may see in people on the spectrum and the reason behind them. Let us know what you think!
Reader Q&A: It's okay to be sad sometimes
I had a reader email me yesterday and, with her permission, I'd like to share our exchange with you all, because I feel like this is a common feeling parents can run into - guilt about feeling different about your child's future.
So I was at the park with my son yesterday, and a young man and his little brother arrived. My son was playing with some "typical" kids, all was going pretty well. He was playing with the young man and the little brother also. The kids he was playing with left on their bike and scooter, and my son got very upset thinking they were leaving/cheating/trying to get away from him fast - he didn't "get" that they were going home, though once he calmed a bit, he understood and was ok.
A little while later, the young man came over to talk, and asked if my son was autistic. I said yes, mostly shows up socially.
I noticed I felt sad, though - and then I felt bad for feeling sad - like I was betraying my advocacy for feeing sad. A strange spiral of feelings. I think the sad comes from me wanting things to not be hard for him, and knowing that although he's just himself to me, that the stuff that I find charming and just "him" is stuff that might separate him and set him up for difficulty/bullying/whatever.
Sigh. Am I awful, does this make any sense? Do moms go through this, even activisty-moms?
MY REPLY:
It makes complete sense, you're not even the slightest bit awful, and all moms - and other caregivers, like me - go through that. I've had those same feelings. And you know what? That's okay. Accepting your child for who they are doesn't mean that you have to be cheerful about everything that comes along with that, especially when that something is bad. And knowing your child is going to have a tough time at some points? That's a tough thing to deal with. I've been there myself, when I was nannying, and I get it.
Your experience actually reminded me of one of mine. My post was about something different - it was about feeling gratitude, rather than sorrow - but there's a common theme. We both had this idea that accepting someone on the spectrum for who they are should mean that we feel the same emotions regarding them as for neurotypical children. But their reality is different, when you look at societal treatment, and it's okay to recognize that. Here's the post, let me know if you relate:http://www.autismspectrumexplained.com/…/on-society-gratitu…
Creigh
READER'S REPLY:
Thanks! That helps a lot.
It is kind of sucky to think that we end up cheering because "yay, somebody's not a complete jerk!" Woohoo. tongue emoticon
Totally relate - I don't even want to think about middle and high school. Hopefully he'll find his geek-crowd - having the other slightly-off-kilter people as my social group was a life-saver. If you can't fit in, at least not fitting in with others that don't fit works smile emoticon
Actually, when you embrace how you don't fit in and embrace yourself for who you are, your quirkiness can actually add to your popularity. I know a lot of spectrum-y people who are popular for that very reason.
This is where you can come in and help, by raising your son to love himself for who he is. And you're doing a great job of that. smile emoticon
I hope this exchange helped any of you who were having similar feelings. Feel free to comment with your thoughts and questions below!
Books about autism for kids...and a freebie for adults!
Okay, so after hours of searching online for good books about autism for kids, I have finally spent my Books A Million money! Since it took me so VERY long to find books that I felt comfortable with kids reading about autism. Why did it take so long? Because the books had to be:
-Accurate
-Promote or at least not deteriorate self esteem
-Apply to all autistic kids, either by acknowledging that everyone's different or by talking about very general characteristics
-Not scare kids. You'd think I wouldn't need this category, but I read a book for kids that tells them that POISON might cause their autism. Which is just ridiculous on so many levels.
After all that I came up with the following list. If you're looking for books to help you explain autism to your kids, I really recommend these!
1. Different Like Me: My Book of Autism Heroes
- It gives kids autistic role models to look up to. Enough said.
2. Ian's Walk
- Okay, so I mostly got this one because it came recommended by sources I trust. It's about a sibling's perspective of their autistic brother. I'll let you know more after I get it.
3. Autism Is...?
- A short, sweet picture book in which a grandma explains autism to her grandchild. Self esteem affirming, and basic enough that it applies to most kids. This is good for younger children. I've already given out one copy to a family, so I'm buying another for my lending library.
4. Can I Tell You About Autism?
- You know, out of all the books, this one did the best job I found of actually explaining how being autistic can affect kids in a kid-friendly way. It's a picture book, but more detailed and advanced than Autism Is...? and it's got a parent's section in the back, too. I wish it had more sections focusing on the strengths of autism (which is why I would couple it with Different Like Me if I was presenting it to kids), but overall it's a great book.
I'm going to add a fifth story to this list, one which I didn't buy because it's available for free on line. It's called "Movement." It might be good for older readers and adults, and it is one of the most powerful reads. I highly recommend, it's a great exercise in empathy.
http://www.nancyfulda.com/movement-a-short-story-about-auti…
Tell me what you think of the books!
On Books that Spread Fear
I am sitting here on the floor of Books A Million right now. I was fortunate enough to get a gift card this Christmas for them, and I've come here to spend it buying, you guessed it, books about autism. I was excited when I saw they had two whole shelves devoted to the subject. But I was horrified when I realized some of the books they contained.
You see, the treasures of books like Carley's Voice and The Way I See It, by Temple Grandin, are overwhelmed by a large quantity of very untrue and harmful books. "The Myth of Autism" one reads, proclaiming in large letters on its cover to tell readers "how a misunderstood epidemic is destroying our children". Another, seemingly innocuously titled book "The Autism Book" claims to tell parents about treatment, recovery, and intervention. Inside it endorses chelation and tells parents (in the same sentence as it says there is no scientific evidence backing this) not to vaccinate their children. Those are only two examples, but there are many, many more sitting on these shelves (did I mention Jenny McCarthy's book is here, too?).
And I can't help thinking to myself, some parent, likely scared after diagnosis, is going to come in here looking for answers. And this is what they're going to find. And I'm helpless to stop it.
If you know a parent of a newly diagnosed child, please, please reach out to them. Loan them your own autism books, tell them about the autism Facebook pages you follow, the websites you know. If you're not sure where to refer them, send them to the Autism Spectrum Explained resources page, which has more resources than they could ever need. Because if we don't, this is what they and their child may well be met with. And that, to me, is horrifying. Too many families have gone through this already - if our efforts can help keep even one from this, it will be worth it.
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Being amongst the UK’s leading black female entrepreneurs
In light of the recent events, we at BEYOUROWN want to develop our involvement with the #Blacklivesmatter movement and collectively stand in solidarity to help protect others who fall victim to racial hatred. We have put together a project with some of the UK’s leading black female entrepreneurs from a selection of diverse industry fields, […]
In light of the recent events, we at BEYOUROWN want to develop our involvement with the #Blacklivesmatter movement and collectively stand in solidarity to help protect others who fall victim to racial hatred. We have put together a project with some of the UK’s leading black female entrepreneurs from a selection of diverse industry fields, these women have written a heartfelt letter, to shed a little more light on their own personal journey throughout career and business building.
Multi-dimensional, these women highlight many aspects of the racial discrimination experienced, whether it be the invisible limitations and challenges faced due to skin colour, or the micro-aggressions, racial inequality and disgusting abuse that occurs in and out of the workplace, much of which is typically down-played, humoured and is not a true depiction of what we often see in UK mainstream media.
At BEYOUROWN we stand in solidarity, love and humanity. Furthermore, we will maintain our commitment to working consciously as a community to address and improve the conditions regards to racial inequality. We will also stand behind and support those who push for justice and fairness. We must not stay silent, for silence will simply not dismantle this alone. We must educate ourselves and others. We absolutely must protect those who are prey to racial inequality, mistreatment, pain and suffering on a daily basis. We at BEYOUROWN will continue to acknowledge our position of privilege and will use it for the greater good. We aim to highlight and amplify the voices of our Black female entrepreneurs and will continue to do so.
Dr Ava Eagle Brown is a CEO, Founder, Multi-award-winning International Speaker, Author and Transformation mindset business coach, Dr Ava Eagle Brown is in a class by herself. Ava coaches, trains and speaks globally to help others shift their mindsets to change their lives and businesses ultimately affecting their bottom-line. She is the author of her memoir The Mango Girl which is soon to be a feature film as well as CEO & Founder of The Mango Girl CIC, a non for profit aimed at helping women live their best lives.
Her recent exploits include starting a hair and skin line called The Mango Girl named started after a nasty divorce and became her therapy, just simply making body butter. She made the non-negotiable decision to create a unique brand that combines the passions of ethnic hair, beauty, authenticity, personal empowerment, culture, and modern convenience – all with the added touch of everything being handmade. Ava has been featured in The Financial Times, BBC, LBC, Huffington Post, The Belfast Telegraph just to name a few. Her clients have included: Ulster Bank, Citi Bank, HSBC & London Borough of Merton.
Dr Ava Eagle Brown’s letter
I grew up, a girl in one of the most deprived areas in Jamaica. A place is so beautiful yet its memories so ugly. Always on a race for survival being chased by monsters of all kinds – incest, violence, sexual abuse, homelessness, and worse.
The community expected me to join the rooted recreational activities of sex, raising babies, and going to the farm. Deep down I believed there was light at the end of the tunnel. Just when I thought it could not get worse, I was raped in front of my 3- year old daughter, and a gun on my head. Enough was enough, I decided to flee to the UK.
I was broken, yes, but I could heal, and I was going to be stronger and better. What I was not prepared for, was how difficult it was, that I had to work three times as hard as my counterparts and still do!
I am now a mindset and resilience coach specialising in trauma and tough situations. I’m also an author to books such as The Mango girl and The Single Mother’s Diary (which is a documentary on Amazon prime video), multi-award winning motivational speaker having clients such as London Borough of Merton and sharing stages with the likes of Levi Roots. Nominated at this year’s The Tällberg/Eliasson Global Leadership Prize, received ‘We are The City Award 2017’ and also CEO of my skincare line – Mango Girl.
However, it’s not always stars and sunshine. Being a woman of colour in entrepreneurship is incredibly challenging, especially in Western countries. We are forced to deal with inequality, stereotype, and stigma that comes along with it.
Black women entrepreneurs face more barriers than their male counterparts, such as lack of mentors, discrimination, and, more importantly, inadequate capital, as highlighted by a new report from the National Women’s Business Council, prepared by Walker’s Legacy.
More and more black women are becoming entrepreneurs globally but investment in their businesses is not increasing in direct proportion to their activity.
Some of these problems can be solved by seeking traditional ways of getting funds, such as bank loans. We also need continued and increased support for community-based business resources such as Women’s Business Development Centres. Lastly, since investors tend to fund people who look like themselves, we need more angel investors who are also people of colour.
I hope that in the future, funds will be more accessible, and there would be more equal opportunities for African extraction women. I hope that we do not have to start most of our business from our bedrooms and kitchens; and that we are treated with the same respect as white women in our field. That more of us get to sit at the tables as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and that we are seen by our talents and not our colours.
Most importantly, I wish that we will keep on rising no matter what pushes us down.
With love and strength,
Dr Ava Eagle Brown
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Kibo Capital Partners announces $50m first close of The Kibo Fund II
Kibo Capital Partners today announced the first close of its second fund, The Kibo Fund II LLC (‘Kibo II’), totalling US$50 million. Kibo II targets growth capital investments in East Africa, Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean islands.
Investors include some of the leading development finance institutions, as well as 30% of the capital coming from pension funds, family offices and other institutional and commercial investors.
Commenting on the first close, Managing Partner Thierry Hugnin said: “We appreciate the continued support by our existing investors in Kibo’s first fund, and are excited to be partnering with several new top-tier institutions in Kibo II, as we continue to grow our investment activities"
The Fund is expecting to raise US$80 million in total commitments by final close. “We continue to believe that we can add value to SME and mid-market businesses in our target region, and are raising additional capital to pursue further opportunities”, said Partner Christoph Evard.
The Kibo Fund II LLC (www.kibo-capital.com) targets growth-oriented SME- and middle market companies seeking equity investments of US$4-8 million across a number of industries, including financial services, healthcare, education, other services and light manufacturing. Kibo II is managed by Kibo Capital Partners, a Mauritius- and Kenya-based fund management firm.
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Nick Stewart Created the Voice of Brer Bear
Imagine you’re an African American Actor, and you’ve been given the opportunity of a lifetime, a starring role in “Song of the South,” a film made by Walt Disney. Things didn’t go as planned. The movie was met with both praise and opposition. Both extremes in opinions continue to this day, and the movie is censored in the United States.
Jan. 16, 1947: Local 27 of the American Federation of Teachers, meeting in Washington, called the Disney feature film “Song of the South” “insidious and subtle propaganda against the Negro.”
Black L.A. 1947: Black, Jewish Protesters Picket Disney’s “Song of the South” at RKO Hillstreet Feb. 6, 1947: Protesters are picketing the RKO Hillstreet theater, where Disney’s “Song of the South” is playing. (The film was also picketed when it played in Washington, D.C.) The protesters at the downtown Los Angeles theater included members of the National Negro Congress, the American Youth for Democracy and the American Jewish Congress, according to Sentinel Theatrical Editor Wendell Green. Green also noted that The Sentinel and the Tribune staged a similar protest at Lowe’s State theater in 1942 over “Tales of Manhattan,” which featured Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters and Rochester. “Beale Street Mama,” playing at the Avadon theater, was withdrawn after protests, the Sentinel reported. The Los Angeles Times did not report on the protests.
Nick “Nicodemus” Stewart, … veteran vaudevillian, provided the … speech for the bulky …Brer Bear
Stewart grew up in Harlem and, for a time, the British West Indies. By the age of 14 he was dancing and performing standup comedy at “The Hoofers Club,” a legendary gathering spot for such dancing greats as Bill “Bojnagles” Robinson, the Step Brothers and Honi Coles. He went on to appear at the “Cotton Club,” with many of the popular acts of the day.
In 1936 while appearing at the Paramount Theatre in Los Angeles with Cab Calloway and his band, Stewart was spotted by Mae West and signed for a role in her film “Go West Young Man.” He went on to appear in numerous films starring opposite such stars as John Barrymore and Bing Crosby. His credits include “Stormy Weather,” “Cabin in the Sky,” and “Carmen Jones.” In the 60’s, Stewart appeared in the opening scene of “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and more recently had a featured role in “Silver Streak”.
Stewart was a popular radio guest performer throughout the 40s and when television bowed in the 50s, he appeared often. On the popular “Amos ‘N’ Andy” TV series, he had the recurring role of Lightnin’. On Broadway, Stewart appeared in Irving Berlin’s smash musical “Louisiana Purchase.”
In 1950, Stewart built the Ebony Showcase Theatre in Los Angeles in order to give black performers an opportunity to play the types of roles they were denied elsewhere. Today, this theatre is one of the oldest and finest … theatres in the country and its alumni supporters include John Amos, Isabel Sanford and Margaret Avery. His theatre’s long-running production of “Norman Is That You?” was adapted for the screen by MGM.
After 57 years in show business, Stewart today focuses on working with young people in the … community. Stressing “education through entertainment,” he encourages youths from the inner city not to join a gang but to join a theatre group.
For stressing positive humanitarian themes in his theatre productions and for culturally enriching his community, Stewart has been praised by the Mayor, the police commission, and written up in all the local newspapers. Earlier this year, he was named “Hometown Hero of the Month” by the CBS-TV affiliate in Los Angeles, which honored him with a month-long series of on-air profiles.
Stewart, his wife Edna and his daughter Valarie continue to operate the Ebony Showcase Theatre (a non-profit organization). The theatre offers acting lessons as well as classes on writing, directing and filmmaking.
The entire theater complex consisting of 8 apartments, an annex, a printshop, a thrift store, a restaurant, a house, was “green-tagged” (deemed safe to occupy) by both the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Los Angeles City Building Department, after the Northridge Earthquake. The complex was seized via a pre-judgment right to possession and demolished (building by building without a demolition permit starting in 1998) by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency under the guise that the buildings suffered extensive earthquake damage as well as damage by a tornado, that touched nothing else in the city, 3 years after the earthquake. Millions of dollars from the Commercial Industrial Earthquake Recovery Loan Program for loans to existing small businesses was diverted to the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA)for the taking of the Ebony Showcase complex via costly eminent domain court proceedings that included the Ebony Showcase Theatre and the Stewarts as defendents, and not disbursed to eligible small businesses. Is it because because only insiders were told about the availability of recovery loans? The Stewarts weren’t informed, they were targeted instead.
Click here to read a news article with a badly photoshopped photo of Nick Stewart, that appeaed in the Los Angeles Sentinel Newspaper. The article said that Nick Stewart couldn’t get assistance from the city because it would “be a gift of public funds. Yet the CRA built a new theater named after Nate Holden (the City Councilman who masterminded the take-over) that was built on the grounds of the demolished Ebony Showcase Theatre. At the same time that the article was written, Nate Holden’t friends and staff members sucessfully formed a non profit corporation called Ebony Showcase Cultural Center, before the Stewarts were evicted. They, not the Stewarts, were somehow eligible to apply for recovery loans although they had never occupied any buildings, nor had they done any business. Click here to read the articles of incorporation filed with the California Secretary of State by the clone attempt.
Nick passed away December 18, 2000, one week to the day after attending and protesting the groundbreaking of the Nate Holden Theater.
Here the caption that accompanies the above photo on gettyimages.com: “Tenth District Councilman Nate Holden and Mayor Richard Riordan raise their arms in a gesture of solidarity as they agree to begin building the new performing arts center that will be on the site of the former Ebony Showcase Theater. Nick Stewart, the original owner of the Ebony, left, in the wheelchair, with his son Christopher next to him, showed up uninvited and unannounced to show their disapproval of the project. They claim that the city tore down the original building unnecessarily and that the city illegally using the copyrighted name, Ebony Showcase Theater. (Photo by Annie Wells/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)”
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity. Contributions are tax deductible to the full extent of the law.
No contribution is too big or too small.
Original caption dated October 16, 1981, reads, “Nick and Edna Stewart have done a lot to change black stereotypes in theater with their plays since the days when Nick had an act as a comedian.” (1981, Paul Chinn/Herald Examiner Collection)
The Ebony Showcase building is among the Landmarks featured in the book, L.A. LANDMARKS LOST AND ALMOST LOST. The author, Cindy Olnick is Director of Communications for the Los Angeles Conservancy, the nation’s largest local historic preservation organization.
Roy E. Disney, vice chairman of The Walt Disney Company said, “Nick was a show business legend who made his mark in virtually every area of the entertainment spectrum from vaudeville and radio to motion pictures and television. As the voice of Brer Bear, he lent his vocal skills to creating one of Disney’s most memorable characters and a screen personality that was larger than life. In addition to his achievements as an actor and his important contribution here at Disney, Nick was a very passionate and caring individual who created a landmark Los Angeles theater and provided young people with a unique opportunity to participate in the theater and learn other related crafts.He will be greatly missed.”
YOUR SUPPORT WILL KEEP THE LEGACY OF NICK (BRER BEAR) STEWART ALIVE THROUGH PROVIDING POSITIVE ENTERTAINMENT, TRAINING, ACTIVITIES, AND BENEFITS TO OTHERS, IN HIS MEMORY, AT A NEW LOCATION. Help us convert a building in South Los Angeles to a community resource and performance center devoted to the arts, music, dance, positive expression and entertainment for all people, without regard to their age, income, or ethnicity.
HOW YOU CAN HELP: Volunteer to take up a collection or make a donation. Share the link to this website. Tell people about us. Call, text, or email if you want to volunteer or if you have ideas to share. Leave comments below about Nick and Edna Stewart and their Ebony Showcase Theatre.
Nick and Edna Stewart used money earned to help thousands of others through the Ebony Showcase Theatre and charity. Valarie Stewart, the daughter of Nick and Edna Stewart, needs your help to keep the legacy of her parents alive, by continuing to provide Education, Artistic and Cultural Enrichment through Entertainment to our community and to the world, through the Ebony Showcase Theatre and Cultural Arts Workshop, the charity that they founded in 1950.
Valarie Stewart (Daughter), Administrator and WebWeaver
Ebony Showcase Theatre and Cultural Workshop
P.O. Box 431375, Los Angeles, CA 90043
Click here for Nick Stewart’s obituary from Walt Disney Pictures
Click here for our Amos and Andy fundraiser.
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Gregg Popovich all for impeaching President Trump after Capitol attacks: 'It will bring people together'
As lawmakers in Washington work to respond to last week’s horrific attacks on the U.S. Capitol, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich made his position clear on Tuesday afternoon.
He wants to see President Donald Trump impeached for a second time — which he believes will actually help heal the country.
“The fact that there’s going to be an impeachment beginning tomorrow is the least that we can do,” he said, via Jeff McDonald of the San Antonio Express-News. “I don’t have a lot of faith that the 25th amendment is going to be invoked.
“This impeachment will say a lot. If anything, it will bring people together rather than be divisive. It will bring people together who may have thought a different way and realize what Trump can really do and what he really is. So I’m all for it. It’s a good move.”
Popovich: ‘What we all watched was horrific’
Five people were killed and dozens more were injured after pro-Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 while attempting to get lawmakers to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. One of those killed in the attacks, a Capitol police officer, was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
More than 70 people have been charged for their roles in the attacks as of Tuesday, according to The New York Times, and at least 170 cases have been opened. The House of Representatives have introduced an article of impeachment against Trump, and are expected to vote on impeaching him for a second time later this week.
Popovich, one of the most outspoken critics of Trump, went off on him immediately after the attacks last week. Popovich, along with slamming Trump, also took aim at Vice President Mike Pence and Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham for enabling the president.
“He’s incapable. He’s incompetent,” Popovich said last week. “He’s incapable of caring. And it’s sad because he’s a deranged, really flawed individual, but he’s also dangerous … I believe with all my heart that Trump enjoyed [the attacks].”
Several days removed from the attacks, Popovich was still stunned by what had occurred.
“As a citizen, what we all watched was horrific and we all saw the lack of concern and incompetence on the part of our president, which is really said,” he said Tuesday, via the San Antonio Express-News. “He is what he is, but what that does for our democracy and our country and our standing and our credibility, let alone the safety for all those people in the building, is just enough to fry your brain. It is something you can’t even conceive of.”
Popovich proud of Liz Cheney, Republicans standing up to Trump
Though he’s had harsh words for Republicans in the past, Popovich was thrilled to see Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) support the impeachment push on Tuesday.
Cheney, in a powerful statement, said that Trump “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”
“To see people like Liz Cheney come out today and said what she said really warms your heart,” Popovich said, via the San Antonio Express-News. “She’s a Republican. Trumpism is a cult. She’s a real Republican. I’m a Democrat. Her values are just as important as my values. That’s what you talk out. That’s what you compromise. Crazy nuts, wack jobs, conspiracy theorists have gotten us to this point.
“It would be laughable if it wasn’t dangerous and sickening, when [Kevin] McCarthy and [Mark] Meadows and Hawley and Cruz talk about we shouldn’t do any impeachment because that might be divisive. I mean, it’s hilarious the level of hypocrisy they would reach and the shame they would not feel.”
Gregg Popovich is all for impeaching President Donald Trump a second time. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
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Watch the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame 2020 Virtual Induction Celebration Now!
Please make a donation today.
Your donations make sure that we continue to honor these extraordinary Arizona women.
Use the button below
HONORING ARIZONA'S
Inducted Women
Shelly Cohn
Shelley Cohn's name is virtually synonymous with the arts in our State. During her years as Executive Director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts she brought energy, creativity and a vision that the arts should be seen as having a powerful impact both culturally and economically upon their communities. Shelley has been a tireless advocate for artists and arts organizations throughout this State and many others.
So influential has she been that she even has an award named after her! The Shelley is presented annually at the Governor’s Arts Awards banquet “to an individual who has advanced Arizona’s arts and culture sector through strategic and innovative work to create or support public policy beneficial to the arts in Arizona.”
One of her most lasting contributions while leader of the arts agency was the creation of the Arts Trust fund. This fund was established as a partnership between business leaders, local arts leaders and elected officials. Derived from the Corporation Commission filing fees, the Arts Trust Fund still serves as the chief funding source for the Arts Commission--30 years after its creation. It is little wonder many of Shelley’s innovations in the arts and public policy have served as models and implemented nationally.
Shelley Cohn’s leadership and administrative prowess can be seen in her service as Chair for many boards of directors, including the Arizona Community Foundation, the Desert Botanical Garden and Childsplay; she serves as Chair of Hillel at ASU’s Life & Legacy giving program.
Shelley Cohn was raised in New Mexico and Texas, but has called Arizona home for more than 40 years. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA from ASU. She completed the prestigious Program for Senior Executives in State & Local Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She has taught classes at ASU in arts entrepreneurship and arts and public policy.
An entrepreneur herself, Shelley consults throughout the country on the arts and culture programs, including the Flinn Foundation, Washington State Arts Council, the Minnesota Arts Board and the South Carolina Arts Council.
A colleague of hers summed up Shelly in 3 words: extraordinary, indefatigable, peerless!
Copyright © 2019 by the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.
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Holding the Line Rick Shelley
As members of the Alliance of Light, humans have committed to the battle against the Ilion Federation, and they’re doing their part. But the Alliance’s army is fragmented, and to unify their forces, the army’s leaders must do the unthinkable: they form the First Combined Regiment, made up of soldiers from every alien race in the Alliance.
The Spec Ops Squad is supposed to be the best of the best, an elite group within the First Combined Regiment to take care of the dirtiest jobs. Sergeant Bart “Dragon” Drak isn’t too surprised to learn that these warriors don’t have a whole lot in common, and it’s obvious that it will take a lot of work to turn a bunch of commandos into a team. He didn’t sign up for this, but he’s got to see it through.
In the midst of training, the Spec Ops Squad is called off to planet Dintsen to fight off an invasion from the Ilion Federation. With such an elite fighting force, beating them back should be a piece of cake... except Ilion’s got the same kind of team on their side, and theirs are better trained. Drak will have to face down tremendous odds and new challenges to bring his team home.
Rick Shelley
Holding the Line Rick Shelley
Customer Ratings for Holding the Line
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Wood pallet manufacturer opens warehouse in Baltimore with aim of creating up to 50 jobs
Mural project aims to transform buildings, perception of East Baltimore
By Brittany Britto
Yvonne Hardiy-Phillips explains the concept of her public art project and thesis "You Are Here." (Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun video)
East Baltimore's Oliver and Johnston Square neighborhoods have suffered high levels of violence, blight and drug trafficking.
But they're also home to historic landmarks such as the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum and Green Mount Cemetery, resilient communities and efforts to redevelop.
Yvonne Hardy-Phillips — whose family has invested in East Baltimore since the early 1970s — is intent on telling the neighborhood's story, fostering pride and making sure that area is recognized as a vital part of Baltimore. The Maryland Institute College of Art graduate student, 64, has commissioned eight artists to reimagine the outside of two vacant buildings she owns at Harford Avenue and Biddle Streets as a tribute to the community and its history.
Yvonne Hardy-Phillips has transformed the exterior of 1137 Harford Avenue, at the corner of Biddle Street, with a public art project called "You Are Here." The project, which includes work by six artists, is also her 2017 MFA thesis project at MICA. (Amy Davis / Baltimore Sun)
The project "designates that particular property and our neighborhood as a destination. It connects to the idea of mapping your community, which then invites others into the space," Hardy-Phillips said. A map with a red star near the location's storefront is just another way "to say that we've been here, we are here, and we're going to be here."
Her effort is titled "You Are Here."
Bold works adorn the two buildings, and a nearby fence is lined with colorful crocheted medallions by artist Deb Jansen. There are an abstract mosaic of wood, glass, clay and metal by MacArthur Fellow Joyce J. Scott; black-and-white wheatpaste portraits of members of the community by photographer Chris Metzger, and world-renowned Baltimore-based street artist Gaia's mural of Henrietta Lacks and Johns Hopkins.
"It's a beacon in a neighborhood that has become a passageway, a throughway, a route," artist Scott said of the buildings. Now, she added, it's a reason to bask in the beauty of the community.
Hardy-Phillips, a curator for more than 30 years in the Baltimore area, decided on the project for the thesis of her master's in curatorial practice. Instead of a standard gallery or museum space, Hardy-Phillips chose the two buildings on Harford Avenue.
New mural lifts a community's spirits – and increases awareness of Harris Creek watershed
The large-scale mural at S. Collington Ave. and McElderry St. is the first of five planned by the Waterfront Partnership's Healthy Harbor Initiative
Both lie outside the state-designated boundary of the Baltimore National Heritage Area, which promotes tourism and offers grants to nonprofits within the boundaries. Hardy-Phillips and community members have been petitioning for years to have East Baltimore included in the state-designated boundaries.
"She's been very supportive and excited for a boundary extension, so we've been working with her on extending the boundary, hopefully in the near future," said Jeff Buchheit, executive director of the heritage area organization. But Hardy-Phillips, who now lives in Mount Vernon, hopes to aid the process by showing the appeal of East Baltimore.
Her parents, Doris E. and Ernest W. Hardy, bought the 1137 and 1139 Harford Avenue buildings in the early 1970s. Her mother used the storefront at 1139 to open an ice cream parlor and sandwich shop.
"It was a big deal," said Hardy-Phillips, adding that Mayor William Donald Schaefer paid her mother a visit.
Hardy-Phillips inherited the buildings, making them her home while attending Towson University starting in 1976, renting them out to families and opening up a deli before she finally closed them around 2007. But with the exterior, she sought to make a statement.
Once home to German and Irish immigrants, East Baltimore "was still a very nice neighborhood during the late '50s, '60s, '70s when it turned into an African-American neighborhood," said Hardy-Phillips, who is African-American. Now, she said, the story is often focused on the drug epidemic, unemployment, the 1968 riots and the ones that followed Freddie Gray's death.
Yvonne Hardy-Phillips, left, with helper Raymond David Smith, refastens the sign explaining the public art at 1137 Harford Ave., at the corner of Biddle Street. (Amy Davis / Baltimore Sun)
"I think there's a negative narrative that tries to put Baltimore in a trick bag of before and after the '68 riots as if we have no other history, and now, we got the before and after of the 2015 riots as if there's no way to talk about ... history or what might have led to this," Hardy-Phillips said. "I think it's a real incomplete picture and I think art can paint a more vibrant, complete and truthful picture of what was, what is and what could be."
In 2011, Hardy-Phillips recruited Baltimore-based artist-duo Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn to paint the south wall with bold colors, green foliage and large brown hands holding cityscapes, a way to portray urban living and draw people into the area, said Hardy-Phillips.
She enlisted photographer and Stevenson University senior lecturer Metzger, 36, who created the two-story wheatpaste "I Am That I Am" mural on the buildings' south wall, an homage to the iconic "I Am a Man" photo taken by photojournalist Ernest Withers during the 1968 Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers' strike. The mural features portraits of more than a dozen notable men and women in the community, including Jenné Afiya Matthews, founder of the all-women of color arts collective Balti Gurls; Lt. Col. Melvin Russell, who leads the Baltimore Police Department's community outreach; and Mark Collins, assistant principal of Dr. Bernard Harris Sr. Elementary School.
This photo and wheat paste installation titled "I Am That I Am," by Chris Metzger, appears on the south wall of 1137 Harford Avenue, at the corner of Biddle Street. It's part of a public art project called "You Are Here." (Amy Davis / Baltimore Sun)
Each posed and finished the phrase "I am"; their words — "a leader," "alive," "historian," "love," "committed" — later dispersed throughout the mural. The project caused a buzz within the community, according to Regina Hammond, president of neighborhood association Re-build Johnston Square.
"I know when the project was completed, everybody was running to see it. That corner has been empty for a few years. To see some interest in that area, it was exciting," said Hammond, a 30-plus-year resident of Johnston Square.
On the north wall, Gaia's vibrant depiction of Hopkins, who posthumously founded the hospital in East Baltimore and the university that bear his name, is painted next to former Hopkins patient Lacks, whose cancer cells — also depicted — have led to breakthroughs in medical research. It's a conversation across space and time, Hardy-Phillips said.
Members of Lacks' family — grandchildren, great-grandchildren and her sister-in-law — visited while Gaia was painting.
"It brought a tear to my eye," Hardy-Phillips said. "We took a lot of pictures."
Also on the north wall, Megan Lewis' mural "I Am Your Sister, Not Your Competition" depicts three black women of different hues with flowing hair that all but defies gravity — a dialogue about support and love among women of color — and the mosaic by Scott.
Thesouth wall of 1137 Harford Ave. includes a mural by Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn. (Amy Davis / Baltimore Sun)
"They are much more about velocity and rhythm and about tone, and there's also something about humans there, too," said Scott of the mosaic panels, created with the help of students in a workshop held at her Station North studio. "I hope there's something [people] are bemused by, that they want to come and take a look to figure out the story that they want to add to it."
"It is also important that African-American neighborhoods that are that close to Station North have the ability to shine as well and to show that all of these neighborhoods have artwork and something wonderful in them. [Hardy-Phillips'] gone the extra mile to not only create a mural, but to create this ... wonderful piece of sculpture that you can see from helicopters," Scott said.
On a recent Wednesday, handyman Raymond David Smith, 53, was fixing the "You Are Here" poster near the storefront of the building. Big red letters spell out "MICA EDU" near the roof (a nod to the school that supported Hardy-Phillips through the process), and a 3D heart sculpture by artist Nicole Fall is suspended in the air between two windows — a symbol of the coming resuscitation of both the building and East Baltimore, Hardy-Phillips said.
[Most read] Ravens have No. 27 overall pick in 2021 NFL draft. Here’s a look at where they could go in first round. »
Smith said the project has been "good for the neighborhood." He's seen people stop to ogle the murals — a stark change from the buildings years ago when they were unpainted and sometimes vandalized.
"The murals made a big difference. ... I'm proud."
But Hardy-Phillips, who graduates this spring, said they aren't finished yet.
Scott will produce more mosaics, and Hardy-Phillips has been brainstorming the possibilities, like a cultural center in the nearby empty lot, a coffee shop in the storefront — something Hardy-Phillips says the neighborhoods lack — and a way for neighbors to express their visions and ideas for the space.
"I'm sort of following a family tradition of trying to do monumental projects that uplift the community right on that same corner," said Hardy-Phillips, but she doesn't want to forget the origins of the building.
"The artwork was assembled and applied to the architecture built by the immigrants, so there's a historical connection for me. I don't want that to be lost," she said.
"It's important to have a true, complete and deep history so that everyone cares about East Baltimore, not just African-Americans."
bbritto@baltsun.com
twitter.com/brittanybritto
Baltimore Police Department
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Action/Adventure, The Criterion Collection
Zoltan Korda
John Clements, Ralph Richardson, C. Aubrey Smith, June Duprez
In 1898, a British officer (Clements) decides to resign his commission just as his regiment is summoned to the Battle of Khartoum in the Sudan. Quickly regretting his decision after he's branded a coward, he places himself at the center of the action as a heavily disguised spy, aiding his comrades and redeeming his honor.
A pounding adventure shot in saturated Technicolor and superbly directed by Zoltan Korda (brother of Alexander, the film's producer), "Feathers" is top-notch entertainment based on A.E.W. Mason's classic novel. Clements is solid in the lead, but top acting laurels go to Ralph Richardson in a rare screen turn as Clements' friend and romantic rival, along with the incomparable C. Aubrey Smith as a crusty war horse. The scenes where Smith recounts his past glories in battle are peerless.
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Sports News archive
Horse Racing news archive
Today’s Tips
Blog » Sports News archive » Super Bowl XLIX
Super Bowl XLIX
The Seattle Seahawks will defend their Super Bowl title on Sunday against the New England Patriots, who are aiming for their fourth Super Bowl victory. The game will see one of the league’s best offenses, directed by quarterback Tom Brady, against a brilliant Seattle defence. In the regular season, the Patriots were 11th in yards per game with 1,073, while the Seahawks led the NFL in total defence, allowing only 267.1 yards per game. If New England wins, Brady would tie Hall of Famers Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw for the most Super Bowl rings with four apiece, cementing his status as one of the best ever to play the position.
The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots have been on a collision course over the last three months. The teams are a combined 16-3 since the start of November and have looked like the two best teams in the league over that time.
The Seahawks’passing game was exposed by the Packers in the NFC title game, and the Patriots have the personnel to replicate Green Bay’s game plan, so once again, Seattle’s fortunes will fall on the legs of Marshawn Lynch and Russell Wilson. The Seahawks defence has dominated everything put in its path, but in Rob Gronkowski, Seattle’s defence gets a new challenge. The Patriots run game will present its own challenges, but not one the Seahawks aren’t familiar with.
As of late Thursday odds have the New England Patriots as one-point favourites over the Seattle Seahawks. There’s been significant movement since the line was first released after the conference championship games: Seattle had opened as a three-point favourite at some shops, but as money poured in on the Patriots, the number moved the other way and has held there for some time. There are indications though, that the line could swing back again, making this game the first pick-’em in Super Bowl history.
Games like this, with two evenly matched teams, usually come down to situational football; specifically, which team performs better in the red zone. The Patriots always land near the top of the league in red zone efficiency and did so again in 2014, scoring a touchdown on 62.3 percent of their red zone drives, fifth best in the league. Seattle, on the other-hand, finished 20th in red zone efficiency. Meanwhile Packers Quarter-back, Tom Brady reiterated that even if he continued to sniffle his way through his Super Bowl media engagements on Thursday, confirming that he was still battling the cold that he caught from his wife and children, he did not expect it to affect his performance during Sunday’s game against Seattle.
The World’s Best Tipster would indicate the Seahawks settling for field goals too often and New England trying to cash in on its opportunities, giving Bill Belichick his fourth Super Bowl title, or not?
New England Patriots win a thrilling Super Bowl XLIX
The Seahawks Win the NFC title and earn their place in Super Bowl XLIX.
Who Are The Super Bowl 51 Favorites?
Betadvisor
Betadvisor Copyright © 2021.
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| ERROR: type should be string, got "https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124702543552710177\nMiracle Gro for Green Shoots?\nRandall W. Forsyth\nJuly 8, 2009 12:01 am ET\nNOT ALWAYS DO THE FUNDAMENTALS and technicals line up quite so conveniently.\nAmid growing evidence that the so-called green shoots of growth spotted in the spring are quickly withering in the summer heat, calls are being heard for a second round of fiscal stimulus.\nAt the same time, the stock market also looks as if it is wilting in the July sun. On the charts, the indices have reached some ominous price points and patterns.\nTaken separately, the fundamentals might be ambiguous. Things have stopped heading to hell in a hand basket, but they hardly are improving. And the stock market might be due for a correction after its 30% surge in the past few months, even if the economy were sitting on the launch pad.\nBut taken together, the fundamentals and technicals paint a consistent picture of growth falling short of the optimism embodied in the notion of green shoots.\nThe Standard & Poor's 500's decline of 2% Tuesday, or 17.69 points to 881.03, put the average right on its 200-day moving average, which is a widely watched measure of the market's medium-term trend. Recently, the S&P's 50-day moving average moved above the 200-day MA, a move called a \"golden cross\" by technicians. Translation: the short-term upward momentum had overcome the intermediate-term downward trend.\nBut, as Barrons.com's technical maven, Michael Kahn, detailed last week, this indicator is far from infallible (\"Will Stocks Turn to Gold,\" July 1) And, indeed, this time it appears to be a case of fool's gold.\nAnother widely watched technical formation also appears to be breaking down -- the dreaded head-and-shoulders. That describes a market that hits a peak (the left shoulder), pulls back but rallies to a higher peak (the head), falls back and then rises to a third peak (right shoulder) that is lower than the head. When the stock falls below the \"neckline\" formed by the lows on either side of the \"head,\" it's a negative signal.\nAccording to Bespoke Investment Group, the S&P broke below the neckline of a head-and-shoulders formation going back to April. Based on chartist lore, a head-and-shoulders formation should give way to a drop equal from the neckline equal to the distance from the head to the neckline. That would point to a drop to about 828 on the S&P 500, or 6%, according to B.I.G.\nI'm agnostic about precise predictions from the charts, but the moving averages and the head-and-shoulders pattern both portray stock prices that are no longer rising.\nThis impression that things aren't getting better was underscored by the June employment data reported last Thursday, which broke the trend of \"less-bad\" job losses. But the 467,000 decline in payrolls understates the state of the labor market.\nAccording to the TrimTabs' Weekly Macro Analysis based on tax revenues, \"declines in wages and salaries are accelerating.\" Wages were down 5.8% in June from a year earlier, a worsening from the 4.8% year-on-year drop in May, after adjusting for the \"Making Work Pay\" tax credit.\nGiven these doleful trends, calls are beginning to be heard for a second round of fiscal stimulus to follow the $787 billion package that the Obama Administration got through Congress in short order in February. White House Economic Adviser Laura Tyson said that mightn't be enough given that economy was worse than the Obama team realized when it took office, echoing a statement made earlier by Vice President Joe Biden.\nIt's astounding that anyone, let alone a trained economist, would expect that a fiscal stimulus package passed just before spring training would turn around the economy by the mid-point of the baseball season. Remember \"long and variable lags\" that accompany government policies' impacts? And much of the Obama plan doesn't take effect until 2010.\nWhat's being called for is the equivalent of Miracle Gro for the green shoots of economic growth. For those unfamiliar with the stuff, it's like steroids for plants. If only it were as simple to pour Miracle Gro on the economy.\nRichard Russell, writing in his Dow Theory Letters, contends that \"the great primary trend of the stock market continues to be bearish.\" That suggests the lows have not been seen.\n\"I don't think most analysts understand the amazing power and tenacity of the great primary trend of the market,\" he continues. \"Most people believe that if the government or the Fed does this or that, the bear market can be halted or reversed. Nothing could be further from the truth.\"\nWhich means that March's lows are likely to be broken, followed by \"a much lower bear market,\" Russell says. To which he adds, apologetically: \"Sorry, those are my deepest and most truthful thoughts.\"\nThat contrasts with the green-shoots crowd, the most vociferous of the bunch get on television and crow the recession is over. Meanwhile, jobs and incomes continue to decline. The bear market won't be over until these loudmouths also are unemployed.\nComments: randall.forsyth@barrons.com"
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Rangers sign Kris Benson
Kris Benson didn't arrive in camp Saturday just to try and revive his baseball career. The right-hander is trying to win a spot in the starting rotation.
Benson, 34, signed a minor league contract with the Rangers that has a May 5 opt-out clause. Benson, who hasn't pitched in the majors since 2006, doesn't sound like a man planning to use it.
"I feel like I'm 24 again," said Benson, who threw batting practice Saturday. "It's been so long since my shoulder's been feeling this good. I put in a lot of hard work the past couple of years just to get back to this point."
Benson, hampered in recent years by rotator cuff problems, is 68-73 in his big league career.
Manager Ron Washington liked what he saw of Benson on Saturday.
"He had a good fastball, good placement with it, nice changeup down in the zone and a tight breaking ball," Washington said. "He didn't break a sweat."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...n.38c7a14.html
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Boat Race 2013: Organisers to introduce new safety measures
Last updated on 14 February 201314 February 2013 .From the section Rowing
The blades of the Oxford team's oars narrowly missed the swimmer's head
Additional safety measures will be introduced before the 2013 Oxford v Cambridge University Boat Race to avoid a repeat of last year's disruption.
In April, protester Trenton Oldfield swam into the path of the crews causing the race to be halted, before Cambridge won it after it had been restarted.
Oldfield was jailed for six months for causing a public nuisance.
Race director David Searle has appealed for no repeats in this year's event on 31 March, saying: "Please don't do it."
Boat Race factfile
The Oxford v Cambridge University Boat Race was first held in 1829 and has been held annually since 1856, apart from during World War I and World War II.
Oxford have won 76 of the 158 races, Cambridge have won 81 times, while the 1877 race was classed as a dead heat.
He added: "We've got eight-and-a-half miles of riverbank where somebody could go in so it is very, very difficult to stop someone if they want to do it."
Oldfield, who was released from prison in December, told BBC Radio 5 live he did not regret the incident.
Without specifying what action was being taken, Searle insisted security would be increased for this year's race. "We are taking additional measures this year and we have looked at all of our actions last year," he said.
"We've reviewed them and thought about how we would react slightly differently, not much differently, if it happened this year. We had practised emergency stops and it worked. We got the race restarted eventually and it finished.
"What I would say to anybody thinking of doing that, is that it's unbelievably dangerous.
"You risk getting killed, which would be tragic for them and for the people involved. Nobody wants that to happen. This is just a sporting event."
The BBC will have live coverage of the 159th Oxford v Cambridge University Boat Race on 31 March on television, radio and online.
England seal seven-wicket win over Sri Lanka - radio & text
And also emojis 😂" }}]},rulesPageUrl:t,forumId:"dummy",i
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Paul McCartney live at Rio Tinto Stadium, Salt Lake City
Tuesday 13 July 2010 Live 5 Comments
Sir Paul McCartney performed before a sell-out crowd of 24,000 at the Rio Tinto Stadium in Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of his Up And Coming Tour.
The weather was warmer than McCartney’s chilly concert in San Francisco three days previously. McCartney took off his collarless black jacket after the first few songs to reveal a pink shirt and braces. “Usually I keep my jacket on a little longer,” he told the crowd, “But now it’s coming off. And that’s all that’s coming off.”
The setlist had some changes from his recent shows. Compared to San Francisco, McCartney performed ‘Drive My Car’ instead of ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ instead of ‘I’m Looking Through You’, and ‘And I Love Her’ in place of ‘Two Of Us’. He also brought Ram On back into the set, having played the song at his recent Cardiff and London shows, and reintroduced the Wings song Letting Go.
During the concert McCartney read out an audience-member’s sign which evidently amused him. It read: “Paul, you’re in Utah, marry us”.
The Salt Lake City show was also the 200th that he has played with his current band. McCartney has been performing with Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens (music director/keyboards), Rusty Anderson (guitar), Brian Ray (bass) and Abe Laboriel Jr (drums) for eight years.
Paul McCartney, Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens (keyboards), Brian Ray (guitar/bass guitar), Rusty Anderson (guitar) and Abe Laboriel Jr. (drums) have been touring together since 2002s Back In The World Tour. Over the last 8 years the band have travelled the world and played some groundbreaking and headline-making shows together. Stand out moments have included 2003’s performance to over 500,000 people outside the Coliseum in Rome and Paul’s first show in Red Square, Moscow. In 2004 the band gave the Glastonbury Festival its most legendary moment to date. 2005 saw Paul and the band making history again as he performed live to the International Space Station to wake-up NASA astronauts. 2008 saw a series of special one off concerts, headlining the Liverpool Sound concert at Anfield, the largest ever outdoor music event in Kiev, Ukraine, with over 500,000 people lining the streets to watch the show. A show in Quebec city’s national park, The Plains Of Abraham, to 300,000 people to celebrate Quebec’s 400th anniversary and September took them to Tel Aviv for Paul’s first ever concert in Israel. The Beatles were banned from performing there at the height of Beatlemania in the 60s. In 2009 Paul and the band toured US throughout the summer and Europe in the winter. The tour commenced with the inaugural run of shows at New York’s Citi Field Stadium, which was the site of the former Shea Stadium where The Beatles made history in 1965 when they played a concert that set the precedent for the modern day stadium rock show. Critics hailed the Citi Field performances (seen by over 100,000 people) as the concert experience of a lifetime. 2009 ended with a sell-out show at London’s O2 Arena, Paul’s first ever concert at the legendary venue.
Speaking about the band Paul said: ‘The great thing is that we have grown into a band. It’s funny because I always felt we were a bunch of guys playing together and were very lucky because we made a good noise that we found ourselves excited to be in the middle of. Last year I just suddenly said to myself, “Wait a minute, you have been playing with these guys for, like, nine years now.” Whether you like it or not that makes you a band and that is the great thing. That is what happened to us, we have become a band almost without noticing.’
paulmccartney.com
Here’s a brief clip of Jet from the show.
The setlist:
‘Venus And Mars’/‘Rock Show’
‘Jet’
‘All My Loving’
‘Letting Go’
‘Drive My Car’
‘Highway’
‘Let Me Roll It’
‘The Long And Winding Road’
‘Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five’
‘Let ’Em In’
‘My Love’
‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’
‘And I Love Her’
‘Blackbird’
‘Here Today’
‘Dance Tonight’
‘Mrs Vandebilt’
‘Eleanor Rigby’
‘Ram On’
‘Something’
”Sing The Changes”
‘Band On The Run’
‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’
‘Back In The USSR’
‘I’ve Got A Feeling’
‘Paperback Writer’
‘A Day In The Life’/‘Give Peace A Chance’
‘Let It Be’
‘Live And Let Die’
‘Hey Jude’
‘Day Tripper’
‘Lady Madonna’
‘Get Back’
‘Yesterday’
‘Helter Skelter’
‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’/‘The End’
Paul McCartney live at AT&T Park, San Francisco
Paul McCartney live at Pepsi Center, Denver
1964: US single release: A Hard Day’s Night
MeanMrs.Mustard Wednesday 14 July 2010
I loved it. My vocal cords, arms and legs? Not so much.
The set list was right down to a T.
When he played “Ram On,” (I was surprised, I don’t think that was set) I leaned over and shouted to my brother (yeah, you can’t whisper) “Do you think if we brought a sign that said, ‘Play “‘I’m Down,'” Paul,’ he would play it?
When he saw the “You’re in Utah” sign, he read it aloud, and I think he said, “All of you? Well, I AM in Utah…” That’s what I could make out, anyway.
Yeah, when he came out at 8:12, my brother and I stood on the chairs. But when he got to the “Rock Show” part of the “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” medley, somebody behind us informed us that we were not short enough to stand on the chairs. Yeah, we’re short, but not short enough.
Between “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Blackbird,” tall people in front of us sat down, so I was able to see half-an-inch-tall Paul AND the Jumbotrons. I sometimes picked up my brother by the waist so he could see, too. (I’m not taller than he is, he’s shorter than I am.) But then everybody stood up for “Something” and didn’t sit down. But when I stood on tiptoe, I could see mini-Paul.
Oh, yeah. I need to make something clear. During “Hey Jude” and “A Day in the Life/Give Peace a Chance” I kicked Polythene Dan’s (not his real name) BEHIND. He’ll tell you otherwise, of course. But that’s not true.
Also, during the “The End” solos, they showed the intro to Rock Band on the video screens behind Paul and his band.
AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME! (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
A Fiendish Thingy Wednesday 14 July 2010
Did *you* bring a sign? 🙂
“All of them?? Well, I AM in Utah.” Oh goodness, the joys of Macca. 😀
Okay, on to the rambling. I’m typing with one hand, so forgive me if the following has errors. (You’ll find out why later on.)
So. When I got to the concert, my dad was being super annoying. He was complaining about the heat, and the sun, and how Paul hadn’t come out yet. The people sitting around us were such BORES, they were horrible. This put me in a small funk.
Then, Paul came on. I started weeping like a fangirl. People stared, but i didn’t care. It was really incredible how great I felt when Paul came on. The cheering, the fog; everything was perfect at that very moment, and I was really, genuinely happy. I just thought to myself, “Wow. That’s Paul effin’ McCartney.”
Guess that’s the Beatles for you. 😉
The concert was great, I stood up the whole time and danced to every song. I was the only person singing along to the “Fireman” songs, where I was/.
It’s really sad how some people just go to concerts just TO go to concerts, you know? A concert is a wonderful, rare and precious thing to a lot of people. It just bugs me how a large percentge of the people who attend concerts aren’t even having a good time, when others who adore the music aren’t able to go.
Aanyhow, at the end of the concert, before the first of the encoresd, People started to leave, so my dad and I moved up a couple of rows. The people sitting *there* were horribly bland, as well.
Right before Paul played “Lady Madonna”, I yelled, “I LOVE YOU PAULIE!” from my seat, and he made a funny face. It was so groovy, I couldn’t believe it.
I heard “Get Back” for the first time ever at the concert; I’ve been restraining from hearing it all my life, for childish reasons 😛 , but I couldn’t escape from it this time. I think it was a good first listen, though. I learned the chorus pretty fast. 🙂
When he started to play the Sgt. Pepper reprise, I’d gotten tired of being the only one standing, swaying, and shaking it, so I told the people behind me to “stand up, guys! How can you not dance to this?” They probably felt weird that a teenager was telling them what to do, but they eventually stood up, and we rocked out.
Last night, my wrist was hurting, but I ignored it, since I thought it was just because I was tired. This morning, after I slept for about three hours 😛 , I went to tennis, and I was picking up my racket when I felt agonizing pain in my wrist. I went to the hospital, and found that I had torn a tendon at the concert. I have no idea how it happened. It’s mild, but I still thought that was reeally cool. It may seem weird, but I think that’s an awesome way to remember things; injuries. And surgeries because of those injuries. And what’s better than tearing a tendon at a Paul McCartney concert?
The entire concert just seemed so surreal, and I’m really glad I was able to go. (Wish me luck at surgery!)
PS- This is an article I found online.
https://www.cityweekly.net/BuzzBlog/archives/2010/07/14/review-paul-mccartney-at-rio-tinto-stadium
MeanMrs.Mustard Thursday 15 July 2010
Ha, I think I might have heard you. 😉
I was the one who always yelled, “You’re welcome, Paul!” whenever he said, “Thank you.”
People LEAVING a PAUL CONCERT? That’s unspeakable!
By Expert Textpert, 2 hours ago
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Deborah Kade
Christmas Eve in Interlaken, Switzerland
We spent the morning visiting with Frau Rose Meier whom turned 99 at the beginning of the month. We finally met Gabby and her sister's daughter from Zürich. Frau Meier is one amazing woman!!! She has a few aches and pains but she is still able to bend over and touch her toes. She even showed us some flexibly exercises she does.
We shared some Christmas schnapps which she says is great for the liver. Michael and I hilariously laughed as we got drunk at ten in the morning.
Frau Meier is disappointed we don't have time to come over in the next few days for tea and dessert but she said she will look forward to us coming back in September and visiting her. She is very special to us.
The rain finally stopped by 3:00 PM. Snow levels have dropped. Can see the fresh snow popping out from behind the fog and clouds. Once the rain stopped, the Springlike temperatures dropped, too.
Michael and I had our dinner here at the Beau Rivage. They were serving a special Christmas Eve four course meal. We started with champagne. We also had a bottle of Spiezer from the Spiezer Winery in Spiez. Try saying that three times! I think I may have room in my luggage to take a bottle home with us, too.
Greens with fresh Canadian salmon. Fried sliced ginger as a garnish.
The soup:
Pureed chestnut with bread stick croutons. Quite unique and oh so tasty!
The main:
Potato gratin, beef tenderloin and mixed vegetables
The dessert:
Blood orange layered mousse and cake. Blood orange sorbet.
Tonight is the 200th anniversary of the song Silent Night.
1818 - 2018 "Silent Night! Holy Night!" had its world premiere on Christmas Eve in the St. Nicholas church of Oberndorf near Salzburg, Austria performed by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr.
"It was the 24th of December of the year 1818, when the then assistant priest Joseph Mohr at the newly established parish of St. Nicholas in Oberndorf handed over to the organist represented by Franz Gruber (who at the time was also school teacher in Arnsdorf) a poem, with the request to write a fitting melody for two solo voices together with choir and for accompaniment by guitar." These are the words of Franz Xaver Gruber which he wrote on December 30, 1854 in his "Authentic Account of the Origin of the Christmas Carol, 'Silent Night, Holy Night!'" Later the same day, on the 24th of December, Gruber came to the musically talented Mohr and handed over to him his composition. As Mohr liked what he saw, this song was included in the Christmas mass that evening. Mohr sang the tenor part and provided accompaniment with guitar, while Gruber sang bass. According to Gruber, the song was met with "general approval by all" in attendance (mostly shipping laborers, boat builders and their families). In Gruber's "Authentic Account," there is no mention of the specific inspiration for creating the song. One supposition is that the church organ was no longer working, so that Mohr and Gruber therefore created a song for accompaniment by guitar. Surrounding this premiere performance of "Silent Night!" many romantic stories and legends have been written adding their own anecdotal details to the known facts.
We now know that Mohr created the text to the song already in 1816 during the time he served as an assistant priest in Mariapfarr in Lungau. The score autographed by Mohr which was discovered in 1995 - the only extant one autographed by Mohr - attests to the date of creation for the text. In the lower left is written: "Text von Joseph Mohr mpia Coadjutor 1816" ("Text by Joseph Mohr - confirmed by my own signature - assistant priest 1816"). After careful study by historians, it is estimated that this autograph was written between 1820 and 1825, while the "1816" after Mohr's name is believed to refer to the year in which Mohr created the text. This autographed score also provides a key statement in the upper right: "Melodie von Fr. Xav. Gruber" ("Melody by Fr. Xav. Gruber") and therewith clarifies conclusively the question many have asked over the years as to which man actually composed the melody to the song.
Silent Night!" was created and first performed during very difficult times. The Napoleonic wars (1792-1815), which had caused great suffering, had come to an end. With the Congress of Vienna there were new borders and a new order set for Europe. In the course of these events, the ecclesiastical Principality of Salzburg lost its status as an independent country and was forced to secularize. In 1816, its lands were divided in two with part assigned to Bavaria and the larger portion relegated to Austria.
The site where "Silent Night!" was first performed - Oberndorf by Salzburg in Austria - had been a suburb and was now separated from its town center of Laufen located across the river (today part of Bavaria, Germany) when the Salzach River became the new border. For centuries transportation of salt along the river had provided the basis for the local economy. The salt trade declined during the Napoleonic wars, and then never fully recovered. This caused a depression in the local economy, with the transport companies, boat builders and laborers facing unemployment and an unsure future. It was during these troubled times that Mohr was in Oberndorf (1817-1819).
Mohr's previous place of service, Mariapfarr, had suffered greatly during the withdrawal of the Bavarian occupation troops in 1816 and 1817. Mohr was witness to these events and in 1816, he wrote the words to "Silent Night!" With this in mind, the creation of the 4th verse of "Silent Night!" takes on special meaning. Its text expresses a great longing for peace and comfort.
The song was almost lost forever after its first performance in a church in Oberndorf (near Salzburg) to Gruber’s guitar accompaniment.
The first known performance of “Stille Nacht” in the United States took place near New York City’s Trinity Church. In 1839, the Rainer family singers of Austria included the German version of “Stille Nacht” in their repertoire during an appearance at the Alexander Hamilton Monument near the church, some 24 years before an English version of the carol would be published.
Today’s most popular English version of “Silent Night” was translated by the Episcopal priest John Freeman Young, assigned at the time to the same Trinity Church associated with the 1839 performance of “Stille Nacht.” Reverend Young apparently enjoyed translating European hymns and carols into English, and it is his 1863 “Silent Night” text that is found today in most hymnals and Christmas carol collections published in the English-speaking world.
The original Franz Gruber melody has also been altered slightly, probably during the time when it was being performed in Austria and Bavaria during the 19th century.
A Christmas Carol Goes Around the World But the familiar melody we recognize today as “Silent Night” or “Stille Nacht” is not quite the same one that Franz Gruber composed, and although the song was not truly “lost” or “forgotten” — as legend would have it — the world-famous carol did take many years to become as well known and as ubiquitous as it is today. In the intervening years Joseph Mohr is known to have written a “Stille Nacht” arrangement around 1820, and new hand-written arrangements by Franz Gruber appeared before his death — one for a full orchestra in 1845, and another for organ in 1855. By 1900 “Stille Nacht” had made its way around the entire globe. But we should start at the beginning.
On a cold Christmas Eve in 1818 pastor Joseph Franz Mohr (1792-1848) walked the three kilometers from his home in the Austrian village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg to visit his friend Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863) in the neighboring town of Arnsdorf bei Laufen. Mohr brought with him a poem he had written some two years earlier. He desperately needed a carol for the Christmas Eve midnight mass that was only hours away. He hoped his friend, a school teacher who also served as the church’s choir master and organist, could set his poem to music. One of the many amazing things about this carol is that Franz Gruber composed the “Stille Nacht” melody for Mohr in just a few hours on that December 24, 1818.
Recent flooding of the nearby Salzach river had put the church organ out of commission, so Gruber composed the music for guitar accompaniment. A few hours after Gruber finished his composition, he and Mohr stood before the altar of the St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf to perform their own work. A local choir group backed them up as the sounds of the brand new carol broke the silence of that “Stille Nacht.”
Because flooding had damaged its foundation, the St. Nicholas Church was demolished in the early 1900s. The Salzach River (which also flows through nearby Salzburg), has a tendency to flood. For this reason, the entire town of Oberndorf was relocated to a less flood-prone location some 800 meters upstream in the 1920s. Around the same time, a new parish church was constructed, and a small memorial chapel, the Stille-Nacht-Gedächtniskapelle, replaced the original Nicola-Kirche.
For many years in the latter half of the 19th century, when the carol was beginning to become more popular, people who knew anything about “Stille Nacht” assumed the melody must have been composed by a more famous composer, possibly Beethoven, Haydn, or even Mozart. Although Gruber had made a written claim as the composer prior to his death in 1863, doubts lingered on into the 20th century. The question was officially settled only several years ago when an arrangement of “Stille Nacht” in Joseph Mohr’s hand was authenticated. In the upper right-hand corner of the arrangement Mohr had written the words, “Melodie von Fr. Xav. Gruber.”
“Stille Nacht’” – The Song Around 1832, when Gruber’s melody was performed by folk singers from Austria’s Ziller Valley (Zillertal), several musical notes were altered, and the “Silent Night” melody became what we know today.
In Austria “Stille Nacht” is considered a national treasure. Traditionally the song may not be played publicly before Christmas Eve, and any commercial use of the carol is forbidden. Contrast that with the situation in most other countries, where you are likely to hear “Silent Night” playing in the local shopping mall or even as part of a radio or TV commercial.
Nevertheless, “Silent Night” enjoys a revered position among Christmas carols all over the world, no matter what it may be called or in which language it may be performed.
Franz Gruber was born on November 25, 1787 in the Austrian town of Hochburg. He became a teacher and later moved to Arnsdorf. The rooms where he lived and worked can still be seen on the second floor of the Arnsdorf schoolhouse. But Gruber obviously did not spend all his time composing music. He fathered a dozen children by three different wives. In 1839, the Gruber family left Arnsdorf for Hallein, just south of Salzburg. His grave now lies next to the family’s former home there and is adorned with a Christmas tree each December.
Joseph Franz Mohr was born an illegitimate child on December 11,1792 in Salzburg, Austria. He became a Catholic priest in August 1815 (only after receiving the special papal dispensation then required for illegitimate persons entering the priesthood). Mohr’s final resting place is in the tiny Alpine ski resort of Wagrain where he died penniless in 1848. He donated his modest earthly fortune for the education of the children in the community. Today the Joseph Mohr School stands as a fitting memorial—only yards away from the grave of the man who wrote the words heard round the world.
The first known performance of “Stille Nacht” in the United States took place near New York City’s Trinity Church. In 1839 the Rainer family singers of Austria included the German version of “Stille Nacht” in their repertoire during an appearance at the Alexander Hamilton Monument near the church, some 24 years before an English version of the carol would be published.
The “Silent Night” translation that we sing today in English first appeared in 1863—the year of Franz Gruber’s death, and some 45 years after the song’s initial performance in Austria. The English-language author was unknown until 1959, when it was determined to have been the Episcopal priest John Freeman Young, assigned at the time of his work to the same Trinity Church associated with the 1839 performance of “Stille Nacht.” Reverend Young apparently enjoyed translating European hymns and carols into English, and it is his 135-year-old “Silent Night” text that is found today in most hymnals and Christmas carol collections published in the English-speaking world.
Additional history and information
"The story of Silent Night begins in the beautiful city of Salzburg, Austria. In the splendor of that baroque city ruled by the Prince Archbishop, a simple weaver named Anna lived. Anna, alone in this world, was of very modest means with little hope of raising her lifestyle or even marrying. One day she fell in love with a soldier, stationed in Salzburg. In a fling, she and the soldier conceived a child, who was born on December 11, 1792. However, he took no responsibility for his child, and left Anna and the baby to fend for themselves. Nevertheless, Anna gave the soldier’s surname to her baby, whom she named Joseph Mohr. Being an unwed mother with a bastard child, Anna knew the scorn and rejection of society. She finally asked the city hangman to be the godparent to her baby Joseph.
Anna provided as best she could for Joseph and realized that a good education would give him the hope of a good future. The local parish priest recognized his brightness and his singing ability. He arranged for Joseph to attend the famous abbey school of Kremsmunster. There, young Joseph excelled in his studies. He later realized he had a vocation to the priesthood and entered the seminary at the age of 16. Finally, when he was ready for ordination at the age of 22, Joseph needed a special dispensation since he had no father.
Joseph Mohr was assigned as the assistant pastor at St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, about 10 miles northwest of Salzburg on the River Salzach. (The church of St. Nicholas was destroyed by flooding in 1899, but a memorial chapel stands there today.) The parish was of very modest means, and the pastor was strict and frugal to say the least.
Here Father Mohr became friends with Franz Gruber. Gruber was the son of a weaver, who had little appreciation for music. Franz was expected to follow in the trade of his father. Despite his father’s disapproval, Franz began playing the guitar and the organ. The parish priest allowed Franz even to practice in Church. His talents too were recognized, and he was sent to school for formal music training. He eventually settled in the town of Oberndorf, working as a music teacher and raising his family of 12 children. Mohr and Gruber shared their love of music, and both played the guitar.
On December 23, 1818, with Christmas fast approaching, Mohr went to visit a mother and her new born child. On the way back to the Rectory, he paused by the river and meditated on the first Christmas. He wrote a poem capturing the essence of that great faith event, and called it Silent Night, Holy Night. In his composition, he captured the ineffable mystery of the incarnation and birth of our Lord: The holy infant Jesus, who is Christ the Savior, Son of God, and Love’s pure light, was born of Mary and filled the world with the redeeming grace from Heaven.
Upon his return to the parish, he was confronted with the news that the organ was broken. Voracious mice had eaten through the bellows, disabling the wind system necessary for the pipes to produce music. Being so close to Christmas and without sufficient funds to consider repairing the organ, the people feared that Midnight Mass would be silent. Father Mohr rushed to the home of his friend, Franz Gruber, and shared his plight. He handed Gruber the poem, and asked him to write a melody for it to be played on the guitar. Franz Gruber completed the task in time. At Midnight Mass, 1818, the world heard for the first time the simple yet profound song we know as Silent Night.
The song was well received, and quickly spread throughout Austria, oftentimes being called simply A Tyrolean Carol. Frederick Wilhelm IV , King of Prussia, heard Silent Night at the Berlin Imperial Church and ordered it to be sung throughout the kingdom at Christmas pageants and services. Ironically, the music gained fame without any attribution to its composers. Some thought Michael Haydn, the brother of the famous composer Franz Joseph Haydn, wrote the piece. Frederick Wilhelm, thereby, ordered a search.
One day, the king’s agents arrived at St. Peter’s monastery in Salzburg, inquiring about the composers of Silent Night. Felix, the son of Franz Gruber, who was a student there, approached them and told them the story behind Silent Night and directed them to his father, who was now the choir master of another parish. From that time on, both Mohr and Gruber were credited with Silent Night.
Father Joseph Mohr died at the age of 56 of tuberculosis on December 4, 1848. Gruber died at the age of 76.
Our English translation is attributed to Jane Campbell in 1863, and was carried to America in 1871, appearing in Charles Hutchins Sunday School Hymnal."
Literal translation
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht! Silent night, holy night
Alles schläft, einsam wacht everyone sleeps; alone watches
Nur das traute heilige Paaronly the beloved, holy couple
Holder Knab im lockigen Haar, blessed boy in curly hair,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh! sleep in heavenly peace
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh! sleep in heavenly peace.
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Alles schläft; einsam wacht Nur das traute hochheilige Paar. Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar, Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh! Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh! Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Hirten erst kundgemacht Durch der Engel Halleluja, Tönt es laut von fern und nah: Christ, der Retter ist da! Christ, der Retter ist da! Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Gottes Sohn, o wie lacht Lieb' aus deinem göttlichen Mund, Da uns schlägt die rettende Stund'. Christ, in deiner Geburt! Christ, in deiner Geburt!
Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright Round yon virgin mother and child. Holy infant, so tender and mild, Sleep in heavenly peace, Sleep in heavenly peace. Silent night, holy night, Shepherds quake at the sight; Glories stream from heaven afar, Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia! Christ the Savior is born, Christ the Savior is born! Silent night, holy night, Son of God, love's pure light; Radiant beams from thy holy face With the dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth, Jesus, Lord, at thy birth.
Michael and I went to the church around the corner for the 11:00 PM Christmas Eve mass. I wish we had taken a phone to take pictures. The outside of the church is not modern looking but the inside is.
The wood ceiling is a 6 pointed vaulted star. Quite lovely! Gorgeous wood!! Flickering candles were everywhere. I would say there was a 30 foot Christmas tree off to one side by the altar. The only decorations on the tree were white candles; not bulbs. A man had to climb a ladder in order to light them with a long pole. So beautiful, though!
In front of the altar in a semicircle were wooden 5 pointed stars in varying sizes. I counted 16 placed at different levels but there may have been more I could not see from where I was sitting. In the middle, a manger was placed.
There were two floral displays of red roses and delicate white flowers that were not baby's breath but resembled it. One was placed on the side of the altar and one was in front of the lectern.
They had someone play the alpen horn. It was both beautiful but haunting. The sound echoed around the interior of the church like the church bells echo off the mountains when they are rung every evening at 8 PM.
Michael understood the whole mass as the speakers spoke high German and they talked slowly. He even sang some of the carols.
Michael was surprised they said Holy Ghost instead of Holy Spirit during the mass.
The priest mentioned this was the 200 year anniversary of Silent Night. He played the guitar just like that first time. The organ joined in the last verse. All the lights were turned off. We only had light from the flickering candles. Beautiful stillness and peace......
Teton Village, Wyoming to Provo, Utah
Today, I did get that photo of the moose!!!
Copyright © 2017. BeyondArizona. All Rights Reserved.
BeyondArizona is a registered trademark of Deborah Kade.
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Australia minister warns foreign journalists amid China spat
A Chinese journalist wipes his forehead while looking at his smartphone during a daily briefing by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Beijing, Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020. A Chinese-born Australian journalist for CGTN, the English-language channel of China Central Television, has been detained in China, Australia’s government said Monday. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
SYDNEY (AP) — A senior Australian government minister on Sunday warned foreign journalists working in the country they might come under the scrutiny of federal agencies if they provide a “slanted view” of Australian affairs.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton made the comments during a television interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp., referring to journalists reporting to “a particular community.”
While he didn’t mention China, Dutton’s comments come after the evacuation from China last week of Australian journalists Bill Birtles and Mike Smith, who sheltered in Australian diplomatic compounds after being questioned by police. Australian Cheng Lei, who works as a business anchor for CGTN, China’s English-language state broadcaster, earlier was taken into custody.
“If people are here as journalists and they’re reporting fairly on the news, then that’s fine,” Dutton told ABC TV’s Insiders program. He said reporters shouldn’t provide “a slanted view to a particular community.”
Dutton wouldn’t confirm reports four Chinese journalists were questioned by Australia’s national security agency ASIO in June, but said there had been “ASIO activity.”
“Where ASIO has sufficient grounds for the execution of a search warrant or for activities otherwise, then they’ll undertake that activity,” he said.
“If people are masquerading as journalists or business leaders or whoever they might be and there’s evidence that they are acting in a contrary nature to Australian law, then ASIO and the Australian Federal Police and other agencies will act.”
He said there is no evidence that action by Australian agencies had put Australian journalists in China at risk. Asked about Cheng Lei, he said “we want to work very closely with the Chinese in relation to that matter and we’ll continue to do that.”
Beijing accused Australia of an interference in China’s internal affairs and judicial sovereignty for providing diplomatic protection to Birtles, who reports for the ABC, and Smith, who works for the Australian Financial Review.
“Australia’s actions in organizing the two journos to hide in the embassy completely exceeds the scope of consular protection and in fact is interference in a Chinese legal case,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.
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YouTubers Document Illness As Dengue Fever Questions Persist
on Nov 1, 2015 at 11:08 am
HAWAII: A pair of prolific internet vloggers have documented their battle with an illness they believe was contracted on the Big Island during a recent visit, while the state of Hawaii investigates two confirmed cases of “locally-acquired” dengue fever on Hawaii Island.
HAWAII ISLAND – A pair of prolific internet vloggers have documented their battle with an illness they believe was contracted on the Big Island during a recent visit, while the state of Hawaii investigates two confirmed cases of “locally-acquired” dengue fever on the same island.
Charles Trippy and Allie Wesenberg star in the daily video blogs of the Internet Killed Television web series. The channel CTFxC on YouTube has over 1.5 million subscribers. The channel has been uploading videos every day for the past seven years, said to be a Guinness World Record. Highlights of their Hawaii trip began on October 13 and included footage of adventurous visits to Honaunau in South Kona, South Point, and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
But it wasn’t until after Wesenberg returned home that she fell ill and was hospitalized on October 22.
Trippy managed to avoid getting sick and Wesenberg is now out of the hospital. The couple says some of the other tourists they were with while on the Big Island – about 8 or 9, Trippy estimated in one video – also became ill.
“This thing Allie has – or we think she might have – is called dengue fever,” Trippy said in a video following Wesenberg’s discharge from the hospital. “We’ve been talking to the Hawaiian health department and they’re kind of like helping us right now.”
The dengue virus is spread through the bite of infected Aedes mosquitoes, according to the Hawaii Department of Health. Dengue is not spread directly from one person to another. The symptoms of dengue fever usually start 5 to 6 days after being bitten, and include sudden onset of fever, severe headaches, eye, joint, and muscle pain, and rash. Minor bleeding problems can also occur. The symptoms usually go away completely within 1 to 2 weeks.
On October 29, Hawaii health officials announced they are investigating two confirmed cases of “locally-acquired” dengue fever on Hawaii Island, as well as four more probable cases. Hawaii State Department of Health would not disclose any locations because of “concern for the privacy of the small number of individuals involved in the investigation.”
State officials have not drawn an official connection between the dengue fever investigation and the CTFxC videos.
On Friday, Big Island Video News specifically inquired about the CTFxC videos and any connection those videos may have to the state’s dengue fever investigation. Janice Okubo of the DOH Communications Office said the health department will review the videos before addressing the situation.
The public is advised to take precautions and conduct mosquito prevention throughout the state.
Filed Under: Breaking Tagged With: Allie Wesenberg, Charles Trippy, dengue fever
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Numbers 1 :: New King James Version (NKJV)
The First Census of Israel
(cf. 2 Sam. 24:1–9; 1 Chr. 21:1–6 )
Num 1:1
Num 1:1 - Now the LORD spoke to Moses in the Wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying:
Num 1:2 - “Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male individually,
Num 1:3 - “from twenty years old and above—all who are able to go to war in Israel. You and Aaron shall number them by their armies.
Num 1:4 - “And with you there shall be a man from every tribe, each one the head of his father’s house.
Num 1:5 - “These are the names of the men who shall stand with you: from Reuben, Elizur the son of Shedeur;
Num 1:6 - “from Simeon, Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai;
Num 1:7 - “from Judah, Nahshon the son of Amminadab;
Num 1:8 - “from Issachar, Nethanel the son of Zuar;
Num 1:9 - “from Zebulun, Eliab the son of Helon;
Num 1:10
Num 1:10 - “from the sons of Joseph: from Ephraim, Elishama the son of Ammihud; from Manasseh, Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur;
Num 1:11 - “from Benjamin, Abidan the son of Gideoni;
Num 1:12 - “from Dan, Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai;
Num 1:13 - “from Asher, Pagiel the son of Ocran;
Num 1:14 - “from Gad, Eliasaph the son of Deuel;[fn]
Num 1:15 - “from Naphtali, Ahira the son of Enan.”
Num 1:16 - These were chosen from the congregation, leaders of their fathers’ tribes, heads of the divisions in Israel.
Num 1:17 - Then Moses and Aaron took these men who had been mentioned by name,
Num 1:18 - and they assembled all the congregation together on the first day of the second month; and they recited their ancestry by families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, each one individually.
Num 1:19 - As the LORD commanded Moses, so he numbered them in the Wilderness of Sinai.
Num 1:20 - Now the children of Reuben, Israel’s oldest son, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, every male individually, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:21 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Reuben were forty-six thousand five hundred.
Num 1:22 - From the children of Simeon, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, of those who were numbered, according to the number of names, every male individually, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:23 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Simeon were fifty-nine thousand three hundred.
Num 1:24 - From the children of Gad, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:25 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Gad were forty-five thousand six hundred and fifty.
Num 1:26 - From the children of Judah, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:27 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Judah were seventy-four thousand six hundred.
Num 1:28 - From the children of Issachar, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:29 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Issachar were fifty-four thousand four hundred.
Num 1:30 - From the children of Zebulun, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:31 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Zebulun were fifty-seven thousand four hundred.
Num 1:32 - From the sons of Joseph, the children of Ephraim, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:33 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Ephraim were forty thousand five hundred.
Num 1:34 - From the children of Manasseh, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:35 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Manasseh were thirty-two thousand two hundred.
Num 1:36 - From the children of Benjamin, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:37 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Benjamin were thirty-five thousand four hundred.
Num 1:38 - From the children of Dan, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:39 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Dan were sixty-two thousand seven hundred.
Num 1:40 - From the children of Asher, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:41 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Asher were forty-one thousand five hundred.
Num 1:42 - From the children of Naphtali, their genealogies by their families, by their fathers’ house, according to the number of names, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war:
Num 1:43 - those who were numbered of the tribe of Naphtali were fifty-three thousand four hundred.
Num 1:44 - These are the ones who were numbered, whom Moses and Aaron numbered, with the leaders of Israel, twelve men, each one representing his father’s house.
Num 1:45 - So all who were numbered of the children of Israel, by their fathers’ houses, from twenty years old and above, all who were able to go to war in Israel—
Num 1:46 - all who were numbered were six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifty.
Num 1:47 - But the Levites were not numbered among them by their fathers’ tribe;
Num 1:48 - for the LORD had spoken to Moses, saying:
Num 1:49 - “Only the tribe of Levi you shall not number, nor take a census of them among the children of Israel;
Num 1:50 - “but you shall appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of the Testimony, over all its furnishings, and over all things that belong to it; they shall carry the tabernacle and all its furnishings; they shall attend to it and camp around the tabernacle.
Num 1:51 - “And when the tabernacle is to go forward, the Levites shall take it down; and when the tabernacle is to be set up, the Levites shall set it up. The outsider who comes near shall be put to death.
Num 1:52 - “The children of Israel shall pitch their tents, everyone by his own camp, everyone by his own standard, according to their armies;
Num 1:53 - “but the Levites shall camp around the tabernacle of the Testimony, that there may be no wrath on the congregation of the children of Israel; and the Levites shall keep charge of the tabernacle of the Testimony.”
Num 1:54 - Thus the children of Israel did; according to all that the LORD commanded Moses, so they did.
Spelled Reuel in 2:14
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10 Basic Responsibilities of Board Members
All organizations are unique in their own right. Even so, every board of directors has some of the same basic fundamental responsibilities. Organizations may operate for profit or charity. They may be membership-based or non-membership based. Organizations may be new or long-standing. They may have a strong financial base or they may be a struggling start-up. These are the types of characteristics that determine the manner in which the board fulfills its responsibilities. The board’s role also varies based on the organization’s purpose and vision. As organizations grow and evolve, and the world they operate in grows and changes, the board is responsible for reviewing the changes and making adjustments that are in the best interests of the organization.
Regardless of an organization’s health, type, or status, boards have the following 10 basic responsibilities:
Establish the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
The organization’s vision is the founding members’ view of what they want the organization to be and what purpose it serves. The board is also responsible for writing a mission statement, which is what the organization intends to do to fulfill the vision. The board should consider the vision while doing its strategic planning to ensure that their planning continually aligns with the vision. Everyone who is directly or indirectly connected with the organization should be aware of the vision and the board plays a large role in that.
Hire, monitor, and evaluate the chief executive.
Boards have the task of identifying, recruiting, and appointing the most qualified individual they can find to serve as the chief executive. In addition, the board writes the chief executive’s job description. Before conducting an executive search, the board needs to consider the organization’s needs, strengths, and weaknesses in considering the skills and abilities that a leader can bring to help the organization move forward. The new leader should be clear on what the board expects for his or her first year of service.
Provide proper financial oversight.
Board directors work together to establish a budget and ensure that there are proper internal controls in place for incoming and outgoing funds. Even small companies and startups should have an audit committee and do an internal audit every year.
Ensure the organization has adequate resources.
Every organization needs resources and it’s the board’s responsibility to ensure that every part of the organization has adequate resources for the organization to meet its obligations and fulfill its mission. Boards need to carefully consider the best way to allocate money and other resources for the benefit of the organization and its stakeholders. Nonprofit board directors should expect to make regular donations to the organization and use their personal and professional network to advance the mission of the organization.
Create a strategic plan and ensure that it’s followed.
Boards set goals and objectives according to a strategic plan so that they have a guide for how to meet the organization’s goals. A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is usually part of the strategic planning process. The strategic plan may be done every year or every few years. Strategic planning should account for short and long-term goals. Boards monitor progress on the goals based on reports received from management.
Ensure legal compliance and ethical integrity.
All organizations have to abide by rules and laws. Board directors have a fiduciary duty to ensure that their organization is in full compliance with its legal obligations. Board directors should behave in a truthful, ethical manner and thus, set an example for others. Legal compliance also entails setting up policies to establish acceptable behavior such as the Whistleblower policy, Code of Conduct, and Code of Ethics.
Manage resources responsibly.
Board directors are accountable to many individuals and groups. For this reason, boards need to ensure that they’re protecting the organization’s assets and managing them responsibly. Board directors have a legal duty to be transparent and accountable for their actions and inactions. Board directors are generally protected from liability for judgment errors as long as they act responsibly and in good faith and do proper due diligence when making decisions.
Recruit and orient new board members and assess board performance.
The board is responsible for recruiting, nominating and appointing new board directors that have the right mix of skills and abilities to help the organizations fulfill and advance its mission. Boards need to be as objective as they can be about their own performances. Most boards do a self-evaluation every year with the goal of identifying their weaknesses and forming a plan to improve the board’s performance.
Enhance the organization’s public standing.
Reputation is an important factor in an organization’s functioning. The board serves as a link between the company and its stakeholders. Every interaction with stakeholders presents opportunities to share the organization’s culture, mission, accomplishments, and goals. Stakeholders expect boards to be transparent and accountable. Organizations that operate openly and honestly enjoy the benefit of having a trusting relationship with their stakeholders. It’s important for boards to have a designated spokesperson who can effectively articulate the organization’s good work or answer to stakeholders in times of crisis.
Strengthen the organization’s programs and services.
Boards decide which programs most exemplify the organization’s mission. By factoring the organization’s resources and demands, boards can make decisions about whether their current and proposed programs and services align with the organization’s mission and purpose. When programs compete for funds and other support, boards have to make tough decisions about priorities.
Having a list of responsibilities is a great tool for boards to assess their own performances. A BoardEffect board management software program is another valuable tool for board directors. It streamlines the processes for creating meeting agendas and meeting minutes while cutting costs compared with compiling paper board books. The program also has a built-in survey tool so that boards can complete their annual board self-evaluations to monitor their progress year after year. These 10 basic board responsibilities will get boards off to a great start and they should consider them a starting point for developing their own, customized expectations for board directors.
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The Criminal Population in New England: Records, Convictions, and Barriers to Employment
By Robert Clifford and Riley Sullivan
The portion of the U.S. population with a criminal record has been receiving mounting attention in recent years. While there is a significant amount of data about the criminal population under supervision, there is very limited linked data identifying how most individuals move through the criminal justice system. By analyzing multiple national and state data sources, this report aims to identify the size of the New England population with a criminal record and to describe the broad demographic characteristics of this population.
The report illustrates that the size of the population in the region with a criminal record is significant: in 2014 there are 5.3 million individuals in criminal record databases in New England. Young men between 20 and 24 years of age account for a disproportionate number of arrests and convictions in New England, and most individuals with a criminal record committed a misdemeanor, not a felony. The report illustrates that the region's mid-sized cities often host a disproportionately larger share of ex-offenders. The report discusses the need for more complete and coordinated data systems that can accurately examine flows through the criminal justice system and the outcomes of all ex-offenders.
Monetary Policy & Economic Research ,
ex-offenders ,
criminal history ,
Massachusetts CORI Reform ,
New England ,
The Effect of Changing Employers' Access to Criminal Histories on Ex-Offenders' Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the 2010–2012 Massachusetts CORI Reform
Reintegrating the Ex-Offender Population in the U.S. Labor Market: Lessons from the CORI Reform in Massachusetts
Aging and Declining Populations in Northern New England: Is There a Role for Immigration?
The Fiscal Capacity of New England
Achieving Greater Fiscal Stability: Guidance for the New England States
New England Public Policy Center
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It takes guts, tenacity and vision to give life to a work of art that you intend to release into the world. That's what Teddy Wilson exudes these days; an attitude that screams, "Yes I can!".
We asked the full-time freelance make-up artist, and now budding content producer, just a few inquisitive questions about what inspired his latest project, "Not Tonight", directed by Dylan Thomas. The visual is a 90's romp guided by Lil' Kim's signature voice and paying homage to fem queer people of color.
Read Teddy's interview below!
What Inspired the project?
I was inspired by an article written for AfroPunk by Court Kim. She breaks down Lil’ Kim’s debut album HardCore and the impact Lil’ Kim had on black and pop culture, the fashion and music industries and just women in general. In the days of Nicki Minaj, I don’t hear people think or talk about Kim in the way that I do, so the articles excited me. Lil’ Kim was a millionaire at 17 years old. She came from Brooklyn in the 90s. She was a black female. According to the underlying story of white supremacy, she wasn’t supposed to do any of that. The odds were against her, but she turned herself into a cultural iconic by tapping into her sauce. That is her authentic power. People boycotted her all over the place, but she couldn’t be stopped. She gave us a language and a right to say things we thought about but wouldn’t dare say.
Immediately after reading that article I was hit with so much nostalgia and inspiration. From there I thought I was going to create a visual editorial and tell a story about personal power. I wanted to tell a story that speaks to queer people of color. Specifically, FEM Queer People of Color, because I think we’ve been shit on for years, killed & disaffirmed for too long. So, I decided to create the visual myself, showing just a small array of Fem Queer People of Color having fun and being their authentic selves. AKA, tapping into their power. That being said, I also wanted to celebrate Lil’ Kim and the Ghetto Fab era of the 90’s. This visual is a declaration of personal power and living in your truth. It’s an affirmation for FEM Queer People like myself, the cast and all of the other POWERFUL- ASS people who were on the set that helped bring this vision to life.
What does the project mean to you?
This project to me, means I can do whatever I want. As long as I stay committed, stay focus and believe. But it also has become a love letter to a younger me because of the healing and lessons I’ve received during the development and shooting process. I have been wanting to creative direct a visual for years, but I never had the money to do so. I felt so artistically stifled. I felt like a fraud. Like I would talk about this creative mind I have and what I want to do with it but I was never able to show it. This time I was able to and I’m so proud. I proved to myself that I’m capable of anything I want. Period. That’s what this project means to me.
What’s next for you?
What’s next…? I’m planning another project but I’m taking my time because I want to save a big chunk of change because my partner & I are moving in together this summer. I’m also planning to travel to Peru and Bali next year so that requires some coins. But I do want to release another visual in the new year. In the meantime, I’m seeking agency representation and work my way onto an agency assistance list. I am a full-time freelance makeup artist and currently work for a freelance beauty service, but I have my eye on bigger things. It's my time and I want to level up and call more of the shots in my career. So, anyone who sees or likes my work, call me! I’ll be waiting for you. I’m not above assisting. I like to be of service. I’ll be talking to you soon! xoxxo
WATCH IT HERE ON BMS
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We pride ourselves on running our business with honesty and integrity. We give back to the local community in which we operate by donating £25 from every invoice paid above a nominal threshold to a local charity of the client’s choice selected from our nominated charities below.
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Co-Housing Entices Families and Seniors
By Lisa Renner • Apr 22, 2014
Claire Miller playing the harp in her Wolf Creek Lodge cohousing home.
Greg Kelly was looking for an alternative to the isolation that can come with suburban living. He hated how in many suburban neighborhoods, people barely interact with their neighbors, spend most of their time in cars and struggle to keep their families going all on their own.
When the now 41-year-old married father of a 10-year-old girl heard about plans for Fair Oaks EcoHousing near Sacramento, he and his family quickly signed on board. The development, which is scheduled to open in summer 2016, is an environment-friendly cohousing project which combines energy-efficient private residences with shared facilities like a common house and a garden. Residents will eat meals together several times a week in the common house. The goal is to create the feel of a “small village where neighbors know and care about each other.”
As a licensed marriage and family therapist, Kelly recognizes the value of community. “When we don’t have healthy relationships and interactions with other human beings, we become more disconnected from each other, more isolated and that isolation can significantly contribute to mental health issues,” he said.
He and his wife were also attracted to the Fair Oaks because of the nearby friends it would give his daughter. “I drive her from play date to play date sometimes. That takes energy and gasoline. You don’t need to do that as much in a cohousing community because there are other kids to hang out with.”
The Fair Oaks project will join some 40 cohousing developments in California, most of them in the northern part of the state. Cohousing started in Denmark in 1972 by a group of families who wanted communal living while still retaining their private residences. The concept made its way to the United States 20 years later after husband-and-wife architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett published the book “Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves” following a Denmark tour and started developing and designing projects. The couple is working on the Fair Oaks project as well as several other projects around the country.
Cohousing is a growing trend with new developments popping up all the time despite drawbacks of monthly dues, required chores and the challenging process of coming to a group consensus. Cohousing differs from traditional condominiums because residents help design the development and manage it.
McCamant and Durrett live in Nevada City Cohousing, a 34-home development they designed in the wooded hills of California’s gold country, and raised their now grown daughter there. Homes are spaced close to each other and face a long pathway used by walkers and kids riding scooters and bicycles. The common house includes a music room, children’s play room, teen lounge, kitchen, dining and sitting areas. On one recent day, the common house hosted a group lesson for young Suzuki violin students.
Completed in 2006, the homes range from about $255,000 to $425,000 and range in size from 860- to 1,683-square feet with two to four bedrooms. Home owners pay monthly dues of $200-$500, which includes heat, hot water, high-speed Internet, building insurance, trash pick-up and sewer.
The community has about 90 residents, including about 35 kids. “They’re constantly building forts or making up games or playing baseball,” said McCamant. “They’re not watching TV, they do not use electronics.”
A few miles away in Grass Valley, McCamant and her husband recently completed Wolf Creek Lodge, a cohousing community designed for active seniors. The development opened in 2012 with 30 homes, all but three of which have sold. Costs run from $280,000- $495,000 for units that are 640-square-feet to 1,150-square feet. Monthly dues are $300-$400.
Magdalene Jaceckel, 91, who has lived in the development for over a year, said she benefitted from the community sensibility in cohousing when she recently had a heart attack. Her neighbors rallied around her with one going to the hospital with her and another calling her daughter. “What would I do if I lived by myself?” she said.
Claire Miller, a 67-year-old Wolf Creek resident, said living there forces her to be more social than she would be otherwise. She enjoys gardening with and cooking for the other residents. “Left to myself, I wouldn’t talk to anybody for days on end,” she said.
The biggest drawback to living in cohousing is giving up control on some decisions and putting in the time to do landscaping, cooking and attend meetings, said Bob Branstrom, a 63-year-old resident. “You’re committing to a community and that means work,” he said.
Don Knutson, who has lived in Southside Park Cohousing in Sacramento for 14 years, said he loves cohousing’s emphasis on egalitarianism and cooperative action for mutual benefit.
Actually putting together a cohousing community from scratch is extremely difficult. Marty Maskall, a leader behind Fair Oaks EcoHousing has been working on getting it going since 2005. The project had trouble getting land. One deal fell apart and investors lost a lot of money. Some original participants left. Maskall, 69, was thrilled when the project’s current 3.5-acre site came up for sale. It was land the group had tried to buy once before in 2005. “The universe handed it to me and said ‘do you want this?’ Maskall said.
She was motivated to keep pressing on because she believes cohousing is a healthy way to live. To her, the main benefits of cohousing are the convenience of a social life on site, the connection of having deep relationships with neighbors and the safety that comes with neighbors watching out for one another.
Roslyn Eliaser, another leader of Fair Oaks EcoHousing, said she was attracted to cohousing because it reminds her of the neighborhoods of her childhood when she was growing up in Sacramento. “We were in and out of everybody’s backyards all the time,” said the 61-year-old. “Everybody shared things and borrowed things and had keys to everyone’s houses.”
She said it’s nice to know that option is still available. “The co-housing thing is saying these are the people who want to live like this,” she said.
by Lisa Renner, California Health Report
<h1>Co-Housing Entices Families and Seniors</h1> <p class="byline">by Lisa Renner, California Health Report <br />April 22, 2014</p> <p>Greg Kelly was looking for an alternative to the isolation that can come with suburban living. He hated how in many suburban neighborhoods, people barely interact with their neighbors, spend most of their time in cars and struggle to keep their families going all on their own.</p> <p>When the now 41-year-old married father of a 10-year-old girl heard about plans for Fair Oaks EcoHousing near Sacramento, he and his family quickly signed on board. The development, which is scheduled to open in summer 2016, is an environment-friendly cohousing project which combines energy-efficient private residences with shared facilities like a common house and a garden. Residents will eat meals together several times a week in the common house. The goal is to create the feel of a “small village where neighbors know and care about each other.”</p> <p>As a licensed marriage and family therapist, Kelly recognizes the value of community. “When we don’t have healthy relationships and interactions with other human beings, we become more disconnected from each other, more isolated and that isolation can significantly contribute to mental health issues,” he said.</p> <p>He and his wife were also attracted to the Fair Oaks because of the nearby friends it would give his daughter. “I drive her from play date to play date sometimes. That takes energy and gasoline. You don’t need to do that as much in a cohousing community because there are other kids to hang out with.”</p> <p>The Fair Oaks project will join some 40 cohousing developments in California, most of them in the northern part of the state. Cohousing started in Denmark in 1972 by a group of families who wanted communal living while still retaining their private residences. The concept made its way to the United States 20 years later after husband-and-wife architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett published the book “Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves” following a Denmark tour and started developing and designing projects. The couple is working on the Fair Oaks project as well as several other projects around the country.</p> <p>Cohousing is a growing trend with new developments popping up all the time despite drawbacks of monthly dues, required chores and the challenging process of coming to a group consensus. Cohousing differs from traditional condominiums because residents help design the development and manage it.</p> <p>McCamant and Durrett live in Nevada City Cohousing, a 34-home development they designed in the wooded hills of California’s gold country, and raised their now grown daughter there. Homes are spaced close to each other and face a long pathway used by walkers and kids riding scooters and bicycles. The common house includes a music room, children’s play room, teen lounge, kitchen, dining and sitting areas. On one recent day, the common house hosted a group lesson for young Suzuki violin students.</p> <p>Completed in 2006, the homes range from about $255,000 to $425,000 and range in size from 860- to 1,683-square feet with two to four bedrooms. Home owners pay monthly dues of $200-$500, which includes heat, hot water, high-speed Internet, building insurance, trash pick-up and sewer.</p> <p>The community has about 90 residents, including about 35 kids. “They’re constantly building forts or making up games or playing baseball,” said McCamant. “They’re not watching TV, they do not use electronics.”</p> <p>A few miles away in Grass Valley, McCamant and her husband recently completed Wolf Creek Lodge, a cohousing community designed for active seniors. The development opened in 2012 with 30 homes, all but three of which have sold. Costs run from $280,000- $495,000 for units that are 640-square-feet to 1,150-square feet. Monthly dues are $300-$400.</p> <p>Magdalene Jaceckel, 91, who has lived in the development for over a year, said she benefitted from the community sensibility in cohousing when she recently had a heart attack. Her neighbors rallied around her with one going to the hospital with her and another calling her daughter. “What would I do if I lived by myself?” she said.</p> <p>Claire Miller, a 67-year-old Wolf Creek resident, said living there forces her to be more social than she would be otherwise. She enjoys gardening with and cooking for the other residents. “Left to myself, I wouldn’t talk to anybody for days on end,” she said.</p> <p>The biggest drawback to living in cohousing is giving up control on some decisions and putting in the time to do landscaping, cooking and attend meetings, said Bob Branstrom, a 63-year-old resident. “You’re committing to a community and that means work,” he said.</p> <p>Don Knutson, who has lived in Southside Park Cohousing in Sacramento for 14 years, said he loves cohousing’s emphasis on egalitarianism and cooperative action for mutual benefit.</p> <p>Actually putting together a cohousing community from scratch is extremely difficult. Marty Maskall, a leader behind Fair Oaks EcoHousing has been working on getting it going since 2005. The project had trouble getting land. One deal fell apart and investors lost a lot of money. Some original participants left. Maskall, 69, was thrilled when the project’s current 3.5-acre site came up for sale. It was land the group had tried to buy once before in 2005. “The universe handed it to me and said ‘do you want this?’ Maskall said.</p> <p>She was motivated to keep pressing on because she believes cohousing is a healthy way to live. To her, the main benefits of cohousing are the convenience of a social life on site, the connection of having deep relationships with neighbors and the safety that comes with neighbors watching out for one another.</p> <p>Roslyn Eliaser, another leader of Fair Oaks EcoHousing, said she was attracted to cohousing because it reminds her of the neighborhoods of her childhood when she was growing up in Sacramento. “We were in and out of everybody’s backyards all the time,” said the 61-year-old. “Everybody shared things and borrowed things and had keys to everyone’s houses.”</p> <p>She said it’s nice to know that option is still available. “The co-housing thing is saying these are the people who want to live like this,” she said.</p>
This <a target="_blank" href="https://www.calhealthreport.org/2014/04/22/co-housing-entices-families-and-seniors/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.calhealthreport.org">California Health Report</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Percentage of Newborns Breastfed in Hospital on the Rise
Activists, Refinery Neighbors Start to Monitor Air Quality
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Figurative paintings Watercolor Sans titre by Jan Min
- Medium : Watercolor
- Subject : Urban
- Mounting type : Artwork delivered with an open mat
Jan Min Netherlands (the)
Jan loved to draw and to paint when he was a child and has returned to his passion for the arts as soon as his career in the medical sector ended, at the beginning of the 2000s. He then began a five year training at the Gooise Academy of Laren where he got to try various techniques, both graphic and visual. Jan graduated in 2008 and began his career using oil paint, which he thoroughly enjoys, and then trading it for watercolour two years later. Indeed, after several workshops specialised in this technique, the Dutch artist literally fell in love with it and has enthusiastically made water colours for the past fifteen years.
Jan is driven by the pleasure he finds in recreating atmosphere and lights found in the landscapes around him. He enjoys representing urban settings and seascapes. Using different tones and shadings, the painter commits to capturing the beauty that inhabits the places he visits, giving them a sensitivity that is doubled with a latent poetry, which he strives to communicate with the viewer.
Since 2015 Jan has been a member of the Dutch branch of the International Watercolor Society - a non-profit organisation devoted to promoting water colour - and has participated in many collective events that enabled him to share his work all around the world. In addition, he teaches his passion and skills to many amateurs by offering classes and workshops. By devoting himself daily and consistently to the perfection and transmission of his technique, the artist earned the prestigious title of “Master” in the international organisation of Water colourists in April 2017.
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University switches insurance providers
By Deirdre Erin Murphy
After a year-long, student initiated search, the University will be offering the Chickering Group as the new student health insurance plan.
"There was a strong opinion that the University needed to issue a request for proposal to find out what other companies were offering," said Alison Montgomery, director of administration at the Student Health Center.
The new plan offers several new services for University students that the previous health insurance provider, Southern Health Insurance, Inc., was not able to provide.
One of the differences is that the new health plan eliminates the requirement of only one physician managing the care of the patient.
"We hoped to be able to offer 100 percent of any services ordered by student health physicians," Montgomery said.
The Chickering Group also offers no co-insurance or co-pay for services performed at the Student Health Center, travel assistance coverage and two levels of co-pay options for prescription drugs.
University students, especially graduate students who usually must purchase their own insurance coverage, will be able to enroll with the Chickering Group through Oct. 1.
All University students are required by the Board of Visitors to have a health insurance plan. As in previous years, the new plan includes single-coverage for Graduate teaching and research assistants.
The new plan will be effective Aug. 25.
The offered plan will cost $1,070 for a single-buyer annual premium.
"That's [the price] consistent with increases in the health insurance industry," Montgomery said.
The Chickering Group is partnered with Aetna, the largest health care provider in the United States.
"What makes the Chickering Group different and attractive is that it links itself with Aetna," Montgomery said. "It's a little more transportable."
The Chickering Group is able to offer services across the country because of its relationship with Aetna. The Group acts as a student liaison to Aetna by processing the claims and handling other administrative processes, Marketing Communications Manager Christine Murray said.
The Chickering Group, a student health care provider, serves approximately 90 schools.
"We insure over 200,000 students and their dependents," Murray said.
Universities such as New York University, Columbia University, University of Michigan and University of Chicago use the Chickering Group as their health care provider.
The University chose the Chickering Group through a long process that was finalized by a five person selection committee. The committee looked for a health insurance provider based on criteria that included their processing claims and marketing abilities, customer service availability, use of technology and the quality of the providers' proposals to the University, Montgomery said.
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Examining Ryan’s tuition promise
The plan covers approximately 12 percent of U.Va. undergraduates
The tuition promise was announced at Jim Ryan's inauguration in mid-October.
Photo by Andrew Walsh | The Cavalier Daily
By Sophia McCrimmon and Victoria Dancu
University President Jim Ryan’s promise to guarantee financial aid for low- and medium-income students may not be a major departure from current financial aid practices.
In mid-October, Ryan announced at his inauguration that students from Virginia families earning less than $80,000 per year with “typical assets” — average amounts of savings and investments — will be able to attend U.Va. tuition-free. Students from Virginia whose families earn less than $30,000 per year with typical assets will be eligible for free room and board on top of the free tuition.
Just under 12 percent of U.Va.’s approximately 16,000 undergraduate students will qualify for the newly-announced policy to allow low- and medium-income families from around Virginia to attend the University at reduced costs, according to data from Student Financial Services.
But in an interview with NBC29, Ryan said his proposal wasn’t a significant change in SFS’ practices.
“What I asked our team to do is to calculate the grants that we give the families earning under $30,000 and under $80,000,” Ryan told NBC29. “And when they did, that they realized that we were coming really close to paying for — through grants — tuition, room and board for families earning under $30,000 and paying tuition for families earning under $80,000.”
University Spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn said in an email to The Cavalier Daily that 600 currently-enrolled in-state students fall under the $30,000 annual income threshold, and 1,300 currently-enrolled in-state students fall within the $30,000 and $80,000 threshold.
De Bruyn said the University is committed to the plan — which codifies existing practices into policy — and hopes that the new financial aid system allows for more individuals to engage in beneficial opportunities.
“While current UVA financial aid essentially meets this commitment, we believe it’s important to make an explicit promise that this is what we are going to do going forward as part of UVA's commitment to Virginia's low- and middle-income families,” de Bruyn said. “Opening doors of opportunity is one of our highest callings as a public university.”
De Bruyn said that only grants — not loans, which must be paid back — will be given to students whose family incomes fall below $80,000 to cover tuition, and to students whose family incomes fall below $30,000 to cover tuition, room and board. Loans may be given to cover other unofficial costs of attendance, such as travel or books, de Bruyn added, and federal work-study programs may still be included in aid.
While some are hopeful that the financial aid plan will improve the accessibility of opportunity at U.Va., they have expressed skepticism about the specifics of the plan.
Francesca Callicotte, a fourth-year College student and president of United for Undergraduate Socioeconomic Diversity — or UFUSED — said she supports the policy but wants to see if it will make a difference.
“I think that with anything we’re promised at this University it’s always great to have some healthy dose of skepticism,” Callicotte said. “President Jim Ryan’s address was wonderful — I think that the initiative itself seems great.”
Assoc. Education Prof. Walter Heinecke also said he would like to see a more detailed elaboration on the proposal and its influence on admissions.
“I’d like to see how this policy might influence U.Va.’s admissions policy in terms of socioeconomic diversity as well as racial diversity,” Heinecke said. “So I think it’s an excellent aspiration and I totally praise President Ryan for his commitment to equity here, I’d just like to see how this works out in the details.”
As the University is one of the only public “need-blind” admissions institutions across the country, it does not consider financial status when making admissions decisions.
De Bruyn noted that the emphasis of the plan will begin with the incoming Class of 2023. However, the plan will also apply to current students.
“Current programs will stay in place,” de Bruyn said. “This promise will be focused on members of the Fall 2019 incoming class, but applies to all current undergraduate students as well. Current undergraduate students will apply for financial aid as normal and be evaluated for eligibility for this promise even if the student has not received financial aid in the past.”
Callicotte said she thinks that the new plan will bring a new focus to students throughout the socioeconomic spectrum.
She also said she hopes the new financial plan could create a more diverse student body in upcoming years, noting how the promise would potentially enable a wider variety of individuals to harness opportunities presented by higher education.
“I would want this initiative to bring in students who bring in valuable experience that isn't usually seen and or articulated at this University,” Callicotte said.
Joshua Farris, a fourth-year Curry student and co-director of Student Council’s inaugural U.Va. AL1GN Conference — a forum that will occur in March with the purpose of connecting first generation and low-income students — said he hopes decreased costs could help students feel more comfortable at the University. Farris emphasized the importance of retaining first-generation and low-income students and hopes that in this effort, the plan will expand to consider the costs of extracurricular activities as well.
“Addressing all these social and emotional needs — I think that increases [low income and first generation students’] sense of belonging as well as their social capital [which] might reduce attrition and increase the graduation rate,” Farris said.
Ellie Brasacchio, a third-year College student, chair of the Student Council Representative Body and co-director of the AL1GN Conference, said she sees the proposal as a continuation of a fundamental change she has observed at U.Va. — and could result in more low-income and first-generation student voices being heard at the University.”
“I've already been seeing a change within U.Va. … with [the proposal’s] emphasis on first generation and low income students,” Brasacchio said. “It's a fairly new thing — people are just now starting to talk about [accessibility for low-income and first generation students] and starting to get excited about it.”
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Thailand.gc.ca
Common menu bar
Canada - Thailand Relations
Fact Sheet: HTML Version | PDF Version * (151 KB)
Canada and Thailand have a dynamic and cooperative bilateral and multilateral relationship that is continuing to expand.
Canada’s first ambassador to Thailand was appointed in 1961 and the first resident ambassador established the Embassy of Canada to Thailand in Bangkok in 1967. Canada is represented in Thailand by a consulate headed by an honourary consul in the northern city of Chiang Mai.
In Canada, Thailand is represented by the Royal Thai Embassy in Ottawa, with a Consulate General in Vancouver, and honourary Consulates General in Edmonton, Toronto and Montréal.
Thailand is currently Canada’s second-largest overall trading partner in the ASEAN region. Bilateral merchandise trade between Canada and Thailand totalled $4.3 billion in 2018, up from $4 billion in 2017, with $780 million in exports to Thailand and $3.6 billion in imports from Thailand. Meanwhile, bilateral trade in services totalled $416 million in 2017. Of that, $158 million in services were exported from Canada to Thailand and $258 million in services were imported from Thailand to Canada. In addition, Canadian direct investment in Thailand totalled $110 million in 2018, while Thai direct investment in Canada reached $56 million, up from $53 million the previous year.
People-to-people ties
Canada and Thailand enjoy growing people-to-people ties. Thailand is a popular tourist destination for Canadians, with more than 250,000 visiting the country annually. It is estimated that more than 6,000 Canadians are living in Thailand and close to 20,000 Thai citizens visited Canada in 2018. Academic relations are an important part of the bilateral relationship, with many Canadian universities having long-standing cooperation agreements with Thai academic institutions.
Canada has been an active partner in fostering Thailand’s economic, social and democratic development. Since bilateral relations were established in 1961, Canada has contributed more than $450 million to Thailand through our bilateral assistance program. Although this program has since ended, Canada continues to promote the advancement of human rights and inclusive governance in the country, notably through the Canadian Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI). The Embassy of Canada to Thailand works closely with local civil society organizations, academic and diplomatic partners, and government agencies to promote:
freedom of expression and assembly;
the rule of law;
gender equality;
women’s rights;
the protection of human rights defenders;
the rights of LGBTI communities; and,
the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.
The Embassy is also working with other Canadian missions in the region, including our Mission to ASEAN, to advance Canada’s regional and global foreign policy priorities. We also work actively with Thailand through the United Nations on issues such as peacekeeping, women, peace and security, and regional security.
* If you require a plug-in or a third-party software to view this file, please visit the alternative formats section of our help page.
Discover Canada
Visas and Immigration – Bangkok
Studying in Canada
Doing Business with Canada
Canada - Cambodia Relations
Canada - Laos PDR Relations
Canada - ASEAN
For Canadians
Living/Travelling Abroad
Doing Business with Thailand
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Gary Brown: Father’s efforts to give me a nickname
Jan 13, 2013 at 12:01 AM Jan 13, 2013 at 1:19 PM
When I was a child, my old man tried to hang the nickname “Butch” on me, I guess intending to strengthen me by dooming me to years of tough guy playground fights and mistaken identity with a rather large assortment of other guys named “Butch” in my generation.
It never stuck. I still got my nose bent once by a bully, but I think he just called me “Four Eyes” when he punched me as I was taking off my glasses at a point I thought still was before the fight.
My older brother, Dad thought, was born to be called “Doc,” which was ironic since he was the one who actually helped cause many of the cuts and scrapes and bruises I got in my young life, by leading me astray in our play.
I don’t remember my younger brother and sister being called anything but shortened versions of their real names. I do remember calling my kid brother “Dufus” and “Huckleberry” from time to time, but I don’t think those, technically, are nicknames.
OUR FATHER’S FAULT
But “Butch” and “Doc” were the nicknames by which my father at first referred to me and my older brother. He was military. Everyone had nicknames in the Army, and if they didn’t get one during World War II, monikers were pinned on them after they were discharged and started working in the blue-collar world.
Dad was called “Jake.” Not by us, of course. I called my father “Jake” once. Only once. I don’t think I need to go into details. There was a glare involved. Some words of warning were issued. I don’t think I called him anything but “Dad,” “Pop” or the formal “Father” from that day on.
But everyone else who came to the door and wasn’t trying to sell him something seemed to call him “Jake.” I think he must have liked it because he devised nicknames for the my brother and I from the moment of our births.
I don’t know if Dad was trying to impress the doctor, and maybe dicker over a discount in my brother’s sticker price, but immediately Dave became “Doc.”
Well, not to Mom. Dave wasn’t “Doc” to our mother. Mom didn’t recognize nicknames, other than “Honey” or “Baby” or something else that would have caused us even more problems on the playground.
Until I grew out of that kind of name, I tried to keep Mom only on the outskirts of school, out of earshot of my peers.
But at home, nicknames caused no end to family discontent for a time.
My dad would call me Butch.
In the era when children served as remote controls for television sets, he would say, “Would you change the channel to 5 for me, Butch?”
It wasn’t really a question, but I think he was cutting me some slack as a pleasurable reward thing for not questioning whether it was my name.
Almost instantly, my mother negated any progress my father might have made from the positive reinforcement by saying, “And while you’re up, GARY, why don’t you get your father some more ice water.”
Then she smiled at Dad, as if it was all just for him. Even if he had a suspicion she was up to something, he couldn’t say anything because, after all, he was getting the fresh cold drink.
I wasted several years trying to figure out why Dad had tried to call me “Butch.” I could have asked him, I suppose, but what was the challenge in that?
I did get other nicknames handed to me, eventually. “Gar.” “GB.” Much to my chagrin, “Heebie Geebie.”
Many of my coaches, perhaps because never really knew the first names of players on my far end of the bench, referred to me as “Brownie.” And, likely because of the Peanuts comic strip, some people called me “Charlie.”
But nobody called me Butch.
For that matter, I was the only one who called my brother “Doc,” and that was just to see how irritated I could get him before he punched me in the arm.
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Edinburgh Castle with soldiers and canon
Hill, David Octavius, 1845, Salted paper print
Loophole in Edinburgh Castle with soldiers and canon
Two men who are soldiers stand in a loophole beside a cannon. A sergeant with a hat and a sash leans on the gun while a soldier with a bearskin hat, sporran and a rifle stands beside the weapon.
192. x 14.4 cm.
Salted paper print
Edinburgh Castle is perhaps the city's most famous landmark. It stands on top of the remaining core of an extinct volcano. Excavations suggest the site was inhabited by Bronze Age man as early as 900 BC, and was fortified by Iron Age man roughly 2000 years ago. The oldest part of the present day Castle is St Margaret's Chapel, built in the early 12th century. The Castle holds the Honours of Scotland and more recently has welcomed back the Stone of Scone otherwise known as the Stone of Destiny.
Edinburgh Castle is perhaps the city's most famous landmark. It stands on top of the remaining core of an extinct volcano. Excavations suggest the site was inhabited by Bronze Age man as early as 900 BC, and was fortified by Iron Age man roughly 2000 years ago. The oldest part of the present day Castle is St Margaret's Chapel, built in the early 12th century. The Castle holds the Honours of Scotland and more recently has welcomed back the Stone of Scone otherwise known as the Stone of Destiny.
Partnership of genius
Clothing and dress > Accessories > Hats
Clothing and dress > Accessories > Sporrans
Homes > Residential buildings > Castles and palaces
Military > Arms and armament > Cannons
People > Adults > Men
People > Military activities > Soldiers
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Subject matches "Commercial activities" or its children
Blackfriar's Wynd in Spring 1825
Skene, James, 1825, Watercolour
Item of 129
Skene, James
Blackfriar's Wynd, now Blackfriar's Street, runs from Edinburgh's Cowgate to the High Street, emerging approximately half way between the Tron Kirk and the Netherbow. The name "Blackfriars" is associated with a Dominican monastery which, in medieval times, was situated south of the Cowgate, near the top of what is now Infirmary Street (named after the former Royal Infirmary which later stood on the site of the Convent). The monastery was founded by Alexander II in 1230 (1). Dominican monks traditionally wore a black habit which gave rise to the name "Blackfriars". As James Skene notes in "Reekiana", the Blackfriars, unlike the Franciscans or "Greyfriars," were not confined to the walls of their monastery, but went out into the community to preach, hence their Latin description, "Pridicatores"(2). They were also medicants. They subsisted on alms and were not permitted to own personal possessions. The relative freedom of the Dominican order provoked the rivalry and even the animosity of other orders (e.g. the Franciscans), leading, according to Skene, to "abusive tales of their dissolute habits". He suggests that the jealousy led to "these absurd sculptured caricatures of Friars or Monks in obscene attitudes". In the watercolour, James Skene views Blackfriar's Wynd from the lower end of the close. The picture evokes a noisy and crowded street scene in a narrow Old Town wynd, far narrower than its 21st century counterpart. By 1825, when the watercolour was painted, fashionable society had long relocated to the New Town of Edinburgh, and the Old Town had become associated with poverty and squalor. The head of Blackfriar's Wynd had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1824, which had swept through the High Street and Parliament Square, a conflagration which "surpassed in fury and extent of destruction any of the many disasters of the kind to which the city has from time to time been exposed"(3) . In 1825, the original lower section of Blackfriar's Wynd was still intact. Skene was fascinated by the surviving 15th and 16th century houses which, he tells us, reminded him of a narrow street which he had discovered, during the course of his many travels, in the old city of Nantes in Brittany (4). (1) Maitland, William, History of Edinburgh, 1753, 181 (2) Skene, James, Reekiana, Edinburgh Central Library Archive, 1836, 129 (3) Skene, Reekiana, 92 (4) Skene, 128
Blackfriar's Wynd, now Blackfriar's Street, runs from Edinburgh's Cowgate to the High Street, emerging approximately half way between the Tron Kirk and the Netherbow. The name "Blackfriars" is associated with a Dominican monastery which, in medieval times, was situated south of the Cowgate, near the top of what is now Infirmary Street (named after the former Royal Infirmary which later stood on the site of the Convent). The monastery was founded by Alexander II in 1230 (1).
Dominican monks traditionally wore a black habit which gave rise to the name "Blackfriars". As James Skene notes in "Reekiana", the Blackfriars, unlike the Franciscans or "Greyfriars," were not confined to the walls of their monastery, but went out into the community to preach, hence their Latin description, "Pridicatores"(2). They were also medicants. They subsisted on alms and were not permitted to own personal possessions. The relative freedom of the Dominican order provoked the rivalry and even the animosity of other orders (e.g. the Franciscans), leading, according to Skene, to "abusive tales of their dissolute habits". He suggests that the jealousy led to "these absurd sculptured caricatures of Friars or Monks in obscene attitudes".
In the watercolour, James Skene views Blackfriar's Wynd from the lower end of the close. The picture evokes a noisy and crowded street scene in a narrow Old Town wynd, far narrower than its 21st century counterpart. By 1825, when the watercolour was painted, fashionable society had long relocated to the New Town of Edinburgh, and the Old Town had become associated with poverty and squalor. The head of Blackfriar's Wynd had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1824, which had swept through the High Street and Parliament Square, a conflagration which "surpassed in fury and extent of destruction any of the many disasters of the kind to which the city has from time to time been exposed"(3) . In 1825, the original lower section of Blackfriar's Wynd was still intact. Skene was fascinated by the surviving 15th and 16th century houses which, he tells us, reminded him of a narrow street which he had discovered, during the course of his many travels, in the old city of Nantes in Brittany (4).
(1) Maitland, William, History of Edinburgh, 1753, 181
(2) Skene, James, Reekiana, Edinburgh Central Library Archive, 1836, 129
(3) Skene, Reekiana, 92
(4) Skene, 128
Architecture > Architectural features > Windows
Homes > Residential buildings > Tenements
People > Commercial activities > Street traders
Places > Scotland > Edinburgh
Transport > Infrastructure > Streets
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Physiotherapy student named student rep of the year
Huge congratulations to third year physiotherapy student Rhys Hughes, who has been voted 2014 Student Representative of the year by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP).
The award, voted for by all UK members, was presented at the 2014 Annual Representative Conference (ARC) on Monday 3rd March, and is a great achievement considering there are over 30 physiotherapy programmes represented within the CSP.
Rhys, a regional co-ordinator for the south west and Wales, was praised for his approachability and for dealing with members' concerns on issues such as placement problems, grade disputes and managing dyslexia. He was also recognised for championing the use of digital technology and making the CSP more accessible to student members - boosting the following of the CSP student Twitter page, and creating the CSP student Facebook page.
Fittingly, this year's ARC conference took place in Cardiff, with members gathered at the Mercure Holland House Hotel. The awards were made by the CSP's chair of council Sue Rees, and Rhys received huge applause as he collected his Student Rep of the Year award on 'home turf'.
Rhys was also awarded the 2014 CSP Welsh Board Prize for dedication to the profession (voted for by CSP Welsh Board members).
Rhys says; "It was a true honour and completely unexpected, there are many physiotherapy students who do what I do on a daily basis, and the work that they do in promoting the profession, supporting their peers and the passion they have for physiotherapy is phenomenal. My thanks have got to go out to everyone who has supported me throughout my degree: physiotherapy students throughout the UK, my peers here at Cardiff University, members in Wales, all tutors at Cardiff University, my clinical supervisors, family, parents and friends, girlfriend and last but not least Jamie Carson (CSP Student Support Officer), without his continuing support half of what we do as students just couldn't happen."
Tony Everett, the School's Director of Undergraduate Studies for Allied Health Professions, elaborated; "With typical modesty Rhys has reluctantly accepted the praise, not only for his two recent honours but also for the consistent high quality input he gives as a student representative throughout the year. Rhys has played a major role in transforming the representation of the student body by his very professional Chairmanship of the Student/Staff Panels as the outward face and his tactful behind the scenes organisation and development. In a way Rhys is correct when he states that many students do what he does, which reflects the calibre of students within physiotherapy and healthcare in general – but Rhys does it that much better.
As staff we are proud of our student body – but some go that extra mile. Well done Rhys."
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Chinese Defense Lawyer Guo Guoting Arrives in Canada
Embattled Chinese defense lawyer Guo Guoting has arrived in Canada to participate in an international research conference, according to a Boxun report. Guo, recognized for his legal representation of activists, has defended journalists, Falun Gong practitioners, and other lawyers who have run afoul of Chinese authorities.
Embattled Chinese defense lawyer Guo Guoting has arrived in Canada to participate in an international research conference, according to a Boxun report. Guo, recognized for his legal representation of activists, has defended journalists, Falun Gong practitioners, and other lawyers who have run afoul of Chinese authorities. On March 4, the Shanghai Justice Bureau upheld an earlier decision to suspend Guo’s law license for one year after he was accused of "adopting positions and making statements contrary to the law and the Constitution" and "defiling and slandering" the Communist Party and government (see related story here). Shortly afterward, Shanghai police placed Guo under house arrest (see related story here). Boxun reports that Guo’s house arrest was lifted at the end of March, shortly after one of his clients, journalist Shi Tao, was convicted of disclosing state secrets and sentenced (see related story here).
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Cedars-Sinai Discoveries No Time for MS
discoveries magazine
No Time for MS
Aug 20, 2019 Amy Paturel
As soon as 39-year-old Amy Fire sits down to take a breath, her 2-year-old son, Phoenix, hops into her lap. “Mommy, I want a snack,” he announces. A minute later, her 6-year-old son, Fenris, strides into the room. “Mommy, can you read me a book?”
Photography by Ramin Rahimian
Like many parents, Fire is used to juggling a few dozen balls simultaneously. The mother of two is also a PhD-level scientist.
“I like to stay busy,” she says, citing the built-in cabinets she fabricated from scratch while she was seven months pregnant with Phoenix and completing her thesis. Her latest project: working alongside her husband, Kaolin, at Grabango, a company that’s developing a checkout system to allow people to walk into a store, grab the items they want, pay and leave—all without stopping at a cashier.
Amid this busyness, Fire is also navigating multiple sclerosis (MS), a degenerative disease that attacks the fatty myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells and allow them to communicate. With MS, the patient’s immune system damages the healthy nerves in the brain and spinal cord. Like a fraying electrical wire, nerve cells with damaged myelin can short-circuit, causing a constellation of troubling symptoms ranging from blurry vision to trouble with balance and speech.
In Fire’s case, MS means she can’t count on her legs to do what they should. When she walks, they often give out. And if her kids play too roughly with her, they might knock her down. She also suffers from periodic fatigue, numbness in her left hand and occasionally feeling off-balance.
To prevent the neurological disease from progressing, Fire gives herself injections and, when it’s time for her thrice-weekly shot, both boys run into the room to watch. “They think it’s the coolest thing,” she says.
This is the changing face of MS, a disease that once sentenced women and men to wheelchairs and robbed them of their livelihoods, their independence and their chance to have a family. Scientists still don’t understand what causes the disease or how to definitively stop it from progressing—and many people suffer for years undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. But with advancing technology, refined diagnostic criteria and more than a dozen treatment options, there is hope.
Diagnostic Odyssey
Kaolin and Amy Fire enjoy some relatively quiet time with sons Fenris and Phoenix.
Women are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with MS than men, primarily between the ages of 20 and 50. Some are preparing to start a family or career, while others are in full swing, managing busy work schedules and households.
“Women are more susceptible than men to autoimmune diseases like MS,” says Nancy Sicotte, MD, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Program and the Women’s Guild Distinguished Chair in Neurology. “There are a lot of theories as to why they are disproportionately affected—hormones may play a role—but the bottom line is, we just don’t know yet.”
Fire has the most common and unpredictable form of the disease, called relapsing-remitting MS, where symptoms shift, striking various areas of the body. They can also spontaneously disappear (remit) or recur (relapse). Left untreated, relapsing-remitting MS can develop into secondary progressive MS, in which patients experience worsening symptoms without periods of remission.
Like many MS patients, Fire suffered for years before doctors delivered a definitive diagnosis. Her symptoms began in 2000 when she was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. They were minor, almost unnoticeable without the benefit of hindsight. But, by 2011, when she and Kaolin frequently went on 6-mile walks, her legs would often just give out.
“It was like a bunch of wet clothes were on the ground and my legs were kind of stuck in them,” Fire says, “and when I rubbed my legs together, it felt like they were coated in oil.”
During one of their weekly walks, her husband said, “I hope it’s not MS,” recalling an acquaintance with MS whose legs didn’t function well.
When a doctor at UC Berkeley’s student health center referred her to a neurologist, Fire underwent her first MRI, but it was clear. “The doctor said to return if my symptoms didn’t resolve on their own, which they always did, but then they would come back,” Fire says.
We are not just trying to stall disease progression, we’re also trying to predict what their disease process will look like 10, 20, even 40 years down the line,” —Marwa Kaisey, MD
Those persistent and vague symptoms led to a frustrating series of misdiagnoses. One doctor said the numbness in her hand was carpal tunnel syndrome and told her to wear a brace. Another said she was suffering from neuropathy and repeatedly tested her for diabetes. None of them mentioned the possibility of MS.
“Unfortunately, no single test can diagnose MS,” Sicotte says. Instead, clinicians rely on a complex mix of clinical symptoms, imaging tests and spinal fluid analyses to make an educated and informed assessment about whether a patient has the condition.
Physicians get it wrong about 15-20% of the time.
That’s one reason Sicotte, chair of the Department of Neurology at Cedars-Sinai and founding director of the Neurology Residency Program, trains residents and practicing neurologists to review MRIs themselves rather than relying on radiologists who may not be well-versed in the signs of MS. She notes that improved diagnostic criteria do no good if physicians don’t know how to apply them.
Lesions to the central nervous system can occur up to 10 times more frequently than a new symptom. So, even if a patient doesn’t notice a new attack, she can accumulate nerve damage while waiting for answers. On an MRI, those lesions show up as bright white spots. “The image lights up like a Christmas tree,” Fire says.
The problem is, other conditions—such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke and even migraines—also produce ominously festive MRIs. Therefore, doctors like Sicotte look for bright spots of a specific size, shape and location.
“MS lesions have a distinctive oval shape, a bit like a football,” Sicotte says. Almost all MS lesions have a vein running through the middle because the immune system’s fighter T cells lock on to small vessels where the blood runs more slowly. From there, they can break through into the brain or spinal cord and cause an inflammatory attack on myelin that appears as the lesions visible on MRI scans.
Chasing Dreams
More than a decade after Fire’s first MRI, doctors referred her to a neurologist. “The neurologist reimaged my entire spine and said, ‘It’s textbook MS,’” Fire says. “After I was diagnosed, I went over the old UC Berkeley records again and I saw the doctor’s note. She suspected MS.”
Irritated with the misdiagnoses, Fire was also disappointed with herself. “If I had carried my records through, somebody would have picked up on it sooner,” she says. The same week she was diagnosed, her husband was laid off and, as Fire was driving around a curve in the middle of the desert, she hit a ditch and totaled her car. “It felt like a metaphor for my future,” she says. Her body, like her car, was beyond her control.
Even though the neurologist cautioned against reading about MS online, Fire saw stories about people diagnosed with an aggressive form of the disease who were in wheelchairs at age 29. Nearly every story linked MS with a poor quality of life and early death. “I wondered if having a family was in the cards for us,” she recalls.
Regrettably, when patients like Fire are first diagnosed with MS, they often see outdated information and think their future is being erased. “They have a real fear that the trajectory of their disease will lead them to a wheelchair,” says Marwa Kaisey, MD, a neurologist and MS specialist in the Department of Neurology at Cedars-Sinai, whose own mother was diagnosed with MS when Kaisey was a teenager. “A neurologic diagnosis is not something anyone expects to happen at that age, and MS is not curable.”
But it doesn’t have to derail patients’ lives. Instead, MS becomes something patients can manage, like diabetes. “Some patients diagnosed today can still have the career and family they planned,” Kaisey adds.
MS: A Bucket Diagnosis
With advanced imaging technology and revised diagnostic criteria to define MS more broadly, fewer patients are falling through the cracks. The problem is, more people are being misdiagnosed with MS.
In a study led by Cedars-Sinai neurologist Marwa Kaisey, MD, 1 out of every 5 or 6 patients who received a firm diagnosis of MS turned out to be suffering from something else. And up to 72% of them had been taking disease-modifying therapies they didn’t need, sometimes for decades.
These statistics reflect the challenge of correctly spotting MS. Symptoms like intermittent numbness, tingling and fatigue are common in conditions ranging from menopause to diabetes. To complicate matters, brain MRIs for disorders like migraines produce an image that’s eerily similar to a brain MRI of an MS patient.
In Kaisey’s study, migraine was the most common misdiagnosis among patients with MS—with good reason. Both conditions disproportionately affect young women and both present with similar symptoms, such as numbness and tingling. Other misdiagnoses include cerebral palsy, neuropathy and even anxiety.
“We have to find that sweet spot where we’re identifying people at the onset of disease, but we’re not misdiagnosing people,” says Nancy Sicotte, MD.
Scientists used to believe pregnancy made MS worse because many women experience a relapse during the postpartum period. But when examined over an entire year, relapse activity is about the same, whether patients become pregnant or not—and relapses tend to decrease during the third trimester. So, instead of telling women they can’t have children, doctors find that an MS diagnosis frequently precipitates family-planning discussions.
That was certainly the case for Fire, whose diagnosis nudged her and her husband to start the family they’d been avoiding talking about for more than a decade. “I was terrified of the medication and admitting my MS was real. Starting a family seemed like a way to put all of that on the back burner since none of the medications for MS are approved for use during pregnancy,” she says.
After Fenris was born, Fire continued working toward her degree. She was determined not to let MS get in the way of her dreams. And since she was nursing Fenris, she stayed off medication postpartum. Her life seemed to be on course. But eight months after Fenris was born, MS threw Fire off her axis again when she woke up with blurry vision.
She went to the optometrist who determined she was suffering from optic neuritis, a condition linked to MS in which damage to the myelin surrounding the optic nerve interferes with the transmission of visual information from eye to brain.
“By the time I left the optometrist’s office, I could see clearly only out of one eye. The other eye could only sense light,” Fire says. “It completely freaked me out.”
She received a standard treatment for patients suffering a relapse: high-dose steroid infusions for three days. “It knocked the relapse down quickly, returning my vision to normal within days, while waiting it out could have taken months,” she says.
Unfortunately, steroids also come with serious long-term drawbacks, putting patients at risk for cataracts and osteoporosis—while doing nothing to halt the progression of MS.
Plus, steroids can make life pretty miserable. “I remember not being able to sleep, and my husband remembers me being angry and stressed out,” Fire says.
Add it all together, and the experience nudged her toward another change: disease-modifying therapy.
The medical response to an MS diagnosis today is radically different from what physicians could offer a few decades ago.
“If a neurologist thought a patient had MS—a condition with no effective treatment—there wasn’t any urgency to make the diagnosis,” Sicotte says. “In particular, we didn’t want to tell somebody, ‘I think you have MS but I’m not sure,’ which would cause significant stress and might not be accurate.”
By the time Kaisey’s mom was diagnosed in the late 1990s, only three medications were available. Now there are more than 15, including therapeutics that could dramatically alter the course of the disease. All of this means that the way doctors care for people with MS has shifted significantly, and the development of disease-modifying therapies has been lightning fast. “There’s a lot of hope in what we do,” Kaisey says.
But deciding which therapy to pursue first can be a life-changing gamble. Until recently, doctors focused exclusively on treatments that target immune T cells, the “effecter” cells that infiltrate the brain and spinal cord and strip the nerves of myelin. Some of these therapies make T cells less inflammatory. Others block them from getting into the brain and spinal cord. The newest medicines in this class sequester T cells, locking them up inside the lymph nodes.
The rub: As these therapies become more adept at obliterating T cells, patients become more vulnerable to infection. “There’s an increased risk of unintended consequences, including a life-threatening brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML, which is caused by a virus that about half of us carry,” Sicotte says, noting that the virus is harmless in people with normal immune systems.
Recently, scientists uncovered another key player in the attack on patients’ immune systems: B cells. “We think what’s happening is that B cells are presenting bits and pieces of myelin to the T cells and saying, ‘Here, go find this and get rid of it; it’s a foreign invader,’” Sicotte says. The T cells go in search of myelin and, when they find it, they launch their attack.
Depressed with MS
A multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis can be depressing, and not just because of the psychological and emotional fallout of the diagnosis. Unlike other chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes or lupus, with MS, a biological basis explains why patients feel depressed.
“Depression is part of the disease process,” Nancy Sicotte, MD, explains. “Changes in the brain that are associated with MS disease activity impact structures in the brain that are important for mood.”
That assault on the brain means even optimistic patients can get hit with the sense that their world is falling apart and may not be worth patching back together. In fact, at least 50% of people with MS will experience depression at some point during the course of their disease.
But there is some good news: Preliminary research suggests those brain changes may be reversible with appropriate treatment.
“We usually recommend a combination of medication and therapy,” Cedars-Sinai neurologist Marwa Kaisey, MD, says. Cedars-Sinai is one of three sites in the United States recruiting patients to participate in a study testing whether online cognitive behavioral therapy can improve symptoms of depression among MS patients.
“An online platform is a nice idea because people with MS sometimes have mobility issues or they’re working, raising a family or just busy living life, and it’s hard for them to keep a weekly appointment,” Kaisey says.
The course has already been validated among people with depression who do not have MS.
Enter B-cell depleters. These drugs are not associated with PML because they don’t affect the number of T cells. Instead, they eliminate only the B cells that activate T cells to go after myelin.
In the past, doctors typically started patients on the safest, most time-tested treatments—the oldest T cell-targeting therapies—and, if those treatments didn’t control the disease, they would gradually work up to more effective but riskier options. The latter class of drugs interferes with the immune system’s standard operating procedure and can generate side effects like repeated infections, and kidney or heart problems.
“Despite the increased risk of side effects, we have seen a complete 180-degree shift where we sometimes start patients on the most effective treatments from the very beginning, including B-cell depleters,” Kaisey says.
Both Sicotte and Kaisey are part of a team of investigators exploring which form of therapy is best for newly diagnosed patients through a national, multicenter clinical trial called TREAT-MS. The goal of the trial: to determine whether patients would benefit more from early, aggressive therapy, or from ramping up from less intense medications to more aggressive ones if those initial drugs fail.
“We are not just trying to stall disease progression, we’re also trying to predict what their disease process will look like 10, 20, even 40 years down the line,” Kaisey says.
Historically, about half of relapsing-remitting MS patients would develop secondary progressive MS within 10 years. Emerging research suggests that disease-modifying treatments allay progression—and the effect seems to be even better with the newer generation of therapies.
I’m not sure having MS makes a difference in our daily existence. My life is pretty great and I’m grateful that modern medicine has come as far as it has with regard to this disease.” —Amy Fire
Homing in on a treatment strategy is as personal as it is complex. Physicians determine a patient’s risk profile and then examine lifestyle factors like travel habits and fear of needles, and medical issues like the presence of other chronic conditions.
Deciding between the options was easy for Fire. She has a low threshold for big risks and wanted to play it safe. She started with Copaxone but, when it turned out she was allergic to the drug, she and Sicotte selected a similar injectable, Rebif.
“The medication does nothing to minimize my symptoms,” Fire says. “I just want the peace of mind of knowing I’m doing everything possible to stall the progression of the disease.”
The Big Unknown
Despite her anxiety, Fire shows no signs of slowing down. She and her husband live in Berkeley with their two children. Every six months, she travels to Los Angeles to check in with Sicotte. “It’s like going to see an old friend,” Fire says. “I really feel like she cares about me and she cares about my kids.”
In addition to taking medication to keep the disease from progressing, Fire plans family menus around local, seasonal vegetables, tries to manage her stress levels by getting help at home and exercises regularly. “Exercise is a wonder drug for any neurological condition, not just MS,” Sicotte says. “You’re going to do better if you’re in good shape.”
But Fire can occasionally dwell in worry despite her treatment and healthy habits. Her relapse in 2014, after Fenris was born, scared her. “I had to face questions like ‘Am I going to be able to chase my kids around the playground? Or is that not for me with this disease?’”
Fire manages the impact of her condition day by day, often finding it tough to distinguish which symptoms are related to disease progression and which are just part of “midlife mommying.” “I sometimes feel especially tired at the end of a day. Is that because of MS or is it because many moms feel depleted when their kids are finally in bed?” Fire muses. “There’s no definitive answer.”
At the same time, she and her husband savor their work together, both in their careers and in raising their family. She even ran a 5K in 2017. “We sometimes struggle to get through the day, just like any other American couple trying to raise kids,” she says. “So I’m not sure having MS makes a difference in our daily existence. My life is pretty great and I’m grateful that modern medicine has come as far as it has with regard to this disease.”
Meanwhile, scientists keep knocking down preconceived notions about what it means to have MS. With the introduction of new and better therapies, MS has transformed from a diagnosis of despair into a manageable condition.
“Now when I diagnose someone, I’m able to say, ‘You likely will be able to live the life you planned. MS is going to be part of your life, but it’s not going to be your whole life,’” Kaisey says. “That’s a win!”
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