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The National Rifle Association’s Lobbying Arm: The Behemoth On Capitol Hill May Finally Meet Its Match
In the wake of the devastating shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, the tragedy sparked a fervent national movement: just over a month later, over 200,000 people attended the March for our Lives protest in DC, with thousands of others participating in over 800 satellite protests around the world. Protesters came equipped with powerful messages on elaborate posters, such as “Arms are for hugging” and “The scariest thing in school should be my grades.” Scattered amongst the calls for the principles of peace and safety, however, were also posters with more accusatory, antagonistic messages, such as “Stop taking NRA money!” and “If I die in a school shooting, drop my body at the NRA.” This vilification of the NRA has become commonplace in the gun control movement. A lobbying and grassroots behemoth, the NRA is known for championing gun rights and for its deep pocketbook that is so instrumental in electing members of Congress and presidential candidates, as well as in influencing their decisions once they take office. What exactly is this organization, and how did it become so influential in politics?
Founded in 1871, the National Rifle Association was established by two former Union officers who wanted to educate citizens on marksmanship after seeing poor shooting abilities among Civil War recruits. Primarily engaged in informing citizens on safe and effective use of guns for the first half of the 20th century, it developed into a robust political and financial organization in the 1970s due to a variety of factors. For one, in 1971, agents of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms killed an NRA member who had several illegal weapons in his possession, which infuriated much of the NRA membership and administration, causing a rift in the traditional structure. Another important development was the shift of Southern rural conservatives from the Democratic Party. As this segment of the population’s political and ideological leanings were in the midst of dealignment, the NRA appealed to the cohort to fuse Second Amendment rights with conservative principles and with Republican ideals of liberty, right to privacy, and freedom from regulation. They appealed to make gun rights an essential ideology of the new conservative coalition before the conservative agenda was settled. Further, through the NRA’s incentive of grassroots mobilization, many previously disillusioned voters felt like active members in democratic processes again. The third and perhaps most disruptive change to the organization in the 1970s was the addition of the group’s first lobbying organ, the Institute for Legislative Action, in 1975. Harlton Carter, as the leader, envisioned that the NRA’s lobbying arm would be “so strong and so dedicated that no politician in America, mindful of his political career, would want to challenge our legitimate goals.” Under his leadership and beyond, the norm became opposition to all forms of gun control and aggressive lobbying for gun owners’ rights in Congress and state legislatures.
The organization today boasts nearly 5 million members, who enjoy member benefits ranging from a wine club to sporting events and life insurance, a 501 (c)(3) tax-exempt status, widely circulated magazines, and a lobbying arm to promote its interests. The NRA has had an instrumental impact on the election of Congressional and presidential candidates and on the passage of gun control legislation - or rather, the lack thereof. In the 2016 election, Trump received $969,138 from gun rights interest groups, and Ted Cruz received $518,272. Additionally, the NRA has given about $23 million to candidates, parties, and outside spending groups since 1989. Meanwhile, gun control interests have given only $4.3 million since 1989. In 2017 alone, the NRA by itself spent $5.1 million in lobbying, while all other gun control groups gave only $1.9 million. The lobbying and campaign financing efforts of the NRA has undoubtedly had an effect on national gun control legislation. For one, the last national gun control legislation, an assault weapons ban, was passed in 1994 and expired in 2004. Further, nearly all of the 46 senators who voted against the 2013 Manchin-Toomey Bill, which would have required background checks in all commercial gun sales, had received sizable campaign contributions from the NRA.
The Parkland shooting marked the 30th mass shooting in the first 45 days of 2018. This alarming rate needs to be curbed, and the most effective means is through the passage of preventative gun control reform in Congress. Many NRA members would support comprehensive gun control reform, and by no means do NRA members think that one’s liberty to possess a firearm outweighs the right of children to feel safe in schools. That being said, it is important to separate the NRA members from the NRA lobbying organ on Capitol Hill. NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action is adroit at getting candidates to office and gun rights legislation to a vote, and measures such as the NRA’s candidate report cards are effective at getting their members to the polls. In order for gun control groups to match the prowess of the NRA, they need to encourage grassroots mobilization while incentivizing with a powerful lobbying machine of their own. Gun control interests such as Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and his Independence USA PAC are increasingly providing campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. Further, the March for our Lives movement has quickly catalyzed the development of a national community in support of gun control with slogans like “We call BS!” as their rallying cry. The NRA’s lobbying arm has championed the gun rights movement, and as the national gun control movement continues to take wind, it appears that gun control interests will adopt the policy of fighting fire with fire. Capitol Hill will increasingly become a battleground where both interests must duel for control.
News & Analysis, Culture, All, Politics, USLilly Chadwick April 9, 2018 NRA, national rifle association, lobbyist, lobbying, rifle lobby, gun lobby, NRA lobby, government, policy, capitol hill, shooting, shootings, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, tragedy, national movement, march for our lives, call to action, peace, safety, gun, guns, organization, members, money, parkland shooting, liberty, second ammendment
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Journal of Nematology
Vol. 21, No. 4S (October 1989) /
Long-Term Effect of Crop Rotation on Soybean in a Field Infested with Meloidogyne arenaria and Heterodera glycines
D. B. Weaver
R. Rodriguez-Kabana
E. L. Carden
Previous cropping sequence (corn-soybean vs. soybean-soybean) and aldicarb effects on soybean yield and nematode numbers at harvest for soybean cultivars with various combinations of nematode resistance were determined in 1988 in a sandy loam soil infested with Meloidogyne arenaria race 2 and Heterodera glycines races 3 and 4 at Elberta, Alabama. Yield and nematode numbers differed among cultivars with 'Leflore' having the highest yield. Aldicarb treatment resulted in increased soybean yield but did not affect nematode numbers. Previous cropping sequence did not affect soybean yield or numbers of H. glycines, but soybean following corn-soybean had higher numbers of M. arenaria than soybean following soybean-soybean. The only significant statistical interaction was aldicarb x cultivar for numbers of H. glycines. Key words: aldicarb, crop rotation, Glycine max, Heterodera glycines, host-plant resistance, Meloidogyne arenaria, root-knot nematode, soybean, soybean cyst nematode.
Vol. 21, No. 4S (October 1989)
All material published by the Society of Nematologists (SON), except for papers prepared by United States and Canadian government employees, is copyrighted and protected under the U.S. copyright law. Under the Copyright Act of 1976, the term of copyright for materials registered by an organization is 75 years from the date first published. Before publishing any manuscript, SON requires that authors transfer full and complete ownership of any copyright to SON by signing a JON Page Charge/Copyright Form (.pdf). SON then registers the copyright. Subsequent use of published materials requires written permission from the SON and may be obtained by contacting the current Editor-in-Chief and state where and how the material will be used.
The author warrants that the article is an original work not published elsewhere in whole or in part, except in abstract form, and that the author has full power to make this grant. If portions of the article have been published previously, then the author warrants that permission has been obtained from the copyright holder and the author will submit a copy of the permission release with this copyright transfer form.
SON shall claim no proprietary right other than copyright. Authors and coauthors retain the right to revise, adapt, modify, or otherwise use all or part of the article in future works of the author(s), such as press releases, lectures, and reviews, provided that all such use is for the personal noncommercial benefit of the author(s). All patent rights are retained by the author(s).
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Letter: U.S. Senate plans to fast track bad health care bill
Originally Published: July 2, 2017 5:56 a.m.
By a roll call vote on May 4, 2017, 217 United States Representatives, including Trent Franks (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Martha McSally (R-AZ) and David Schweikert (R-AZ), voted to take health care away from 23 million people.
It was called the American Health Care Act.
I call it the roll of shame.
Now, a small group of Senators are writing in secret. They plan to fast track a bill that will be about the same as the House bill. They expect a Congressional Budget Office score by June 26. Then they hope to pass it by June 30, before people realize how bad it is.
It will not be a health care bill. It will be a tax cut for billionaires.
Contact Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) at 202-224-4521, www.flake.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact-jeff and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at 202-224-2235, www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact-form.
What Senator wants to add their name to the roll of shame? Vote cruel, irresponsible politicians out of office.
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McSally, Sinema face each other in Arizona Senate debate
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Home / Matt Carle
Matt Carle
Position: Defense
Full Name: Matthew Carle
Birthdate: September 25, 1984
Hometown: Anchorage, Alaska
Matthew Carle was born on September 25, 1984 in Anchorage, Alaska and is a retired National Hockey League defenseman. Matt was drafted in the second round, 47th overall, by the San Jose Sharks in 2003. Matt played for the Sharks until 2008 when he was traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning before being traded again three months later to the Philadelphia Flyers where he enjoyed four successful seasons, reaching the Stanley Cup Final in the 2009-10 season. Matt would return to Tampa Bay, signing as a free agent after the 2011-12 season and again reaching the Stanley Cup Final in the 2014-15 season. After twelve successful National Hockey League seasons playing for four different teams, Matt announced his retirement from professional hockey in November 2016.
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Montana Lines up to See President Trump at Missoula Rally
Ardent fans of President Donald Trump came to Missoula on Thursday to get in line for a chance at getting into the Minuteman Aviation hangar to see the chief executive up close and personal, some arriving as early as 3:00 a.m.
One woman from Oregon who identified herself as Brice was the first in line, but was not allowed entrance until the parking area opened early Thursday morning, but she was raring to go.
“I’ve never been to a Trump rally, but I’ve seen every single one of them on the RSB Network, and I wanted to be right up front to see my President and support him. I love him. I think he was anointed by God, and I think if it wasn’t for the father putting him here, we’d be in a lot of trouble right now.”
Brice said she believes that President Trump is a man of faith who has been placed in the Presidency for a specific purpose.
“I believe he’s a man of faith,” she said. “I’m in my 60’s and I believe he says the things that us patriots and people who grew up like I did, and he says the things that we are thinking, like that God and country mean something, and that you have to work hard to get what you want. Right now, we’re in the ‘good versus evil’. These Democrats, with abortion and open borders and socialism doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked anywhere ever.”
Another visitor, Mike Cuffey from Eureka is a Republican running for office in Senate District One in Lincoln County.
“There’s tremendous excitement for Donald Trump in Lincoln County,” said Cuffey. “We like the injection of enthusiasm that he’s brought into the business world, as well as the improved economic climate. I personally am a good friend of Ryan Zinke, I love what he’s doing with the Department of the Interior.”
Cuffey then made a plea to all Montana voters.
“I’m running for Senate District One, but that’s really the least important vote on the ballot,” he said. “I want to see Greg Gianforte reelected, I want to see my old friend Matt Rosendale replacing Jon Tester, but big time, I want to vote ‘no’ on I-186 and I-18. Let the legislature do the work. We’ll take a look at those bills and see if they are the best bills that they can be.”
The parking lot is over 30 acres in size and it was rapidly filling up with those wanting a glimpse of the President.
There are electronic signs in the area guiding visitors to the parking area, and shuttle buses will start running to and from the venue at 2:00 p.m.
Filed Under: Missoula Airport
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Lakers hosting three foreign exchange students
Lakers hosting three foreign exchange…
Pictured above are Maria (left) and Danii (right) with their host mom, Stephanie Segroves, who is a teacher at Lakers. Pictured below the article is Angel, who is staying with the Michael and Mary Tait family near Elkton.
This year, Laker High School is hosting three foreign exchange students through the International Student Exchange (ISE). Two are living with the Segroves family, right next door to the secondary school, and one is staying with the Tait family near Elkton.
Nguyen Vii Dan Tuong, also known as Danii, 17, is from Vietnam. She decided to become a foreign exchange student so she could learn more about the education, people and daily life in the U.S. She also wanted to improve her English.
Danii is enjoying the Laker life.
“I really like the teachers here. They are patient and friendly and they explain things well,” she said.
She is a member of the Laker Dance Team and is having a lot of fun, she said.
At her school in Vietnam, there are no teams or clubs. She also is not able to choose which classes she takes. The school day is from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Her schedule is different each day, she said.
While here in Michigan, Danii would like to travel around the state. She’d also like to try a new sport – ice skating.
Maria Eduorda Costa Oliveira, 16, is from Brazil. She decided to become a foreign exchange student because she likes to enjoy new experiences and she wanted to improve her English. She wants to see how people live in the U.S. and she would like to try some new foods.
In Brazil, Maria plays soccer and basketball, and would like to get involved in those teams at Lakers. She also is interested in getting involved in the Rotary Interact Club at Laker High School.
At her school in Brazil, Maria’s school day is from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Students stay in the same classroom all day, and the teachers rotate.
Maria is happy to be at Laker High School.
“The teachers here are really nice,” she said.
Yi-Chen Chen, also known as Angel, 16, is from Taiwan. She decided to become a foreign exchange student because her friend participated in the program and she really enjoyed it.
“I thought it would be really cool. It’s something new to try,” Angel said.
Angel is living on the Tait farm, and this is the first time Angel has ever been on a farm.
“It’s very quiet,” she said.
In Taiwan, her school day is from 7:40 a.m. to 5 p.m. She said she’s allowed to choose some of her classes.
“We’re in school from September through February, and we have a break in March,” she said. “Our summer break is in July and August.”
She said at her school, the students do all of the cleaning. They get it done during breaks throughout the school day.
Angel is happy she doesn’t have to do any school cleaning while a student at Lakers. She’s enjoying many aspects of Laker High, including her Spanish class with Mrs. Stephanie Segroves.
“I like the lunches here,” she added. “It’s also cool to have lockers and to change classrooms each hour.”
At her school in Taiwan, the students stay in the same classroom and the teachers rotate.
Angel plays the saxophone and the piano and she likes to paint. At Lakers, she’s involved in the FFA. She plans to play on the tennis team in the spring.
While in the U.S., Angel hopes to visit New York.
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The Top 10 for the Class of 2019
Laker Archery teams shine at national competition
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'We are who we want to be'
With the Luxembourg nation branding project fully underway, a panel discussion on Thursday evening showed that while the project is a chance for the country to define its own image, many questions remain yet to be answered.
(CS) With the Luxembourg nation branding project fully underway, a panel discussion on Thursday evening showed that while the project is a chance for the country to define its own image, many questions remain yet to be answered.
Hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in Luxembourg, the nation branding event saw Tom Theves of the Economy Ministry give an update on the process so far, which has involved a survey, workshops and an online forum open to everyone to help define the values that Luxembourg wants to portray.
First results are expected to be presented over the coming weeks, from where more precise messages will be developed to help communicate Luxembourg's brand abroad.
The importance of the nation branding campaign was highlighted by KPMG Managing Partner Georges Bock, who said that it could help make Luxembourg a key player in the FinTech sector by attracting new business in this emerging field. Luxinnovation's Frédéric Becker also pointed out Luxembourg's potential to attract innovation start-ups and the need to put the Grand Duchy on the map.
Builder of bridges
But what image of Luxembourg should the country put forward? One path explored, Theves explained, sees Luxembourg as a bridge, connecting people and cultures, but also as a builder of bridges, for example in the EU. Luxembourg is a reliable and trustworthy partner, he said, as well as being multicultural and multilingual.
It was the latter arguments that were pointed out in particular by Paul Schonenberg, who spoke on behalf of the “Conseil national pour étrangers”. However, Schonenberg also said Luxembourg's society resembles that of the Harry Potter books, where Muggles and Wizards live side by side but separate – similar to Luxembourg locals and the international community, who are not fully integrated with each other, despite the country's tolerant and accepting attitude.
The plurality of messages also became obvious in a video, in which AMCHAM members were asked what they associate with Luxembourg. The answers included anything from languages, its small size, the financial centre, taxes, community, quality of life and security to beautiful landscapes and its location at the heart of Europe.
The ideas they wanted put out there? That Luxembourg is a good place to do business with good networking opportunities, with a business-friendly tax environment, that it is innovative and dynamic, as well as welcoming.
However, members of the audience said that many more elements had to be brought into play, such as including the country's younger people, its higher education offer, as well as non-skilled labourers who – quite literally – helped build the country.
Branding is essential
Ultimately, it does not matter which path Luxembourg decides to take, argued Troy Bankhead of KNEIP, as long as the message is authentic and consistent. “We are who went want to be,” he said. But how do we get there and how do we make Luxembourg's brand messages heard over the stereotypes and negative headlines already existing, guests asked.
Luxembourg needs to be honest, Bankhead said, explaining that there should not be a gap between the message and reality. Most of all, however, the campaign needs to speak to people's emotions. With a long career in marketing, Bankhead explained that brands can break through barriers of culture, language or economy by giving meaning. “We want to be understood,” he said. “We are emotional beings.”
Going on to outline a number of successful brand campaigns, including Nike, Coke and Apple, Bankhead argued that Luxembourg cannot not brand itself. “Branding is happening around you,” he argued, saying that the Grand Duchy had the chance to define its own messages and carry them forward.
“Branding is going to be essential,” he said, “to touch the people we want to attract.”
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Learn More About Immigration Law in Pinckneyville, Illinois
Homeimmigration lawillinoispinckneyville
Immigration Law Lawyers In Pinckneyville Illinois
What is immigration law?
Immigration law determines whether a person is an alien, the rights, duties, and obligations associated with being an alien in the United States, and how aliens gain residence or citizenship within the United States. It also provides the means by which certain aliens can become legally naturalized citizens with full rights of citizenship. Immigration law serves as a gatekeeper for the border of the nation, determining who may enter, how long they may stay, and when they must leave. Immigration lawyers represent persons seeking temporary and permanent residency (green cards) status in the U.S., those interested in obtaining U.S. citizenship through a process called naturalization, and clients facing deportation and removal. Immigration attorneys may also represent businesses seeking to secure temporary visa status for foreign employees.
Answers to immigration law issues in Illinois
What are the requirements for the H-1B visa for foreign nationals to be able to work in the United States?
The most commonly used non-immigrant visa by US employers, the H-1B classification applies to foreign nationals who...
How is it possible to apply for a greencard through family?
In general, a foreign national who wishes to immigrate to the United States through family relationship must have a...
What are the requirements for the B-1 or B-2 visitor's visas?
Foreign nationals desiring to enter the United States temporarily for the purpose of consulting with business...
What are the requirements for the L-1 intracompany transfer visa?
L-1 intracompany transfer visas are available to foreign nationals coming to work in the US for an employer that is...
What are the requirements for the E-1 or E-2 treaty trader and investor visas?
The E-1 or E-2 non-immigrant status is for a national of any of the countries with which the United States maintains...
What are the requirements for the R-1 religious worker visa?
The R-1 Religious Worker visa status is for foreign nationals who wish to be temporarily employed in the United...
What are the requirements for the O-1 individuals with extraordinary ability visa?
The O-1 nonimmigrant visa is available to those foreign nationals who posses extraordinary ability in science,...
What are the requirements for the TN or Treaty NAFTA professional employee visa?
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created special economic and trade relationships for the United...
What are the requirements to become a naturalized US citizen?
U.S. Citizenship is obtained either by birth or naturalization. A foreign national may become a U.S. citizen either...
What are the requirements for the EB-2 & EB-3 visas for individuals with extraordinary ability, advanced degrees and labor certifications?
Employment Second Preference (EB-2)
Professionals Holding Advanced Degrees, or Persons of...
Federal court opinions concerning immigration law in Illinois
186 US 33 Alphonse Emsheimer v. City of New Orleans
419 US 102 Blanchette v. Connecticut General Insurance Corporations
136 US 356 Nashua Corp v. Boston L R Corp
136 US 436 Kemmler
192 US 454 County of St Clair v. Interstate Sand Car Transfer Company
207 US 161 Hunter Jr v. City of Pittsburgh
207 US 205 Marcus Bitterman v. Louisville Nashville Railroad Company
325 US 450 Alabama State Federation of Labor Local v. McAdory
325 US 561 In Re Summers
370 US 530 Glidden Company v. Zdanok Lurk
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Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment
March 2002 , Volume 24, Issue 1, pp 55–65 | Cite as
Gender Bias in the Personality Disorders Criteria: An Investigation of Five Bias Indicators
Leslie C. Morey
Megan B. Warner
Christina D. Boggs
This study examined possible gender bias in personality disorder criteria by considering a number of potential empirical indicators of bias: prevalence differences in a nonclinical sample; the implications of gender differences as perceived by nonprofessionals; the internal consistency of criteria as a function of gender; and the gender-normativeness of criteria. One hundred one participants familiar with the DSM-IV completed questionnaires assessing the presence of each criterion, and the perceived implications of the criteria for men and women. Results showed that the global mean self-rating for the criteria did not differ as a function of gender although there were some differences for individual criteria. Criteria that were more prevalent in one gender appeared to be viewed as a greater problem for that gender. The criteria also appeared to be measuring abnormal rather than gender-normative behaviors. Twelve criteria demonstrated differential convergence with other indicators of disorder as a function of gender, with most converging better for men than for women.
personality disorder gender bias diagnosis DSM-IV
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© Plenum Publishing Corporation 2002
1.Department of PsychologyTexas A&M University
Morey, L.C., Warner, M.B. & Boggs, C.D. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment (2002) 24: 55. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014005308914
DOI https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014005308914
Publisher Name Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers
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Ari J. Silverman
Co-Founder and Partner
Prior to co-founding Lion Equity, Ari worked with Alpert Companies, which is a master planned developer involved in planning, entitling and developing communities in Colorado. Ari’s responsibilities at Alpert included all transaction, financial and operational matters.
Prior to joining Alpert, Ari was a Director of M&A at Platinum Equity, a global, multi-billion dollar private equity firm. Ari joined Platinum Equity in early 2002 and played key roles in several transactions, which included all aspects of the transaction process.
Prior to Platinum Equity, Ari worked with The Sturm Group. The Sturm Group, is a private investment group backed by Donald Sturm, which focused on investing in technology, telecommunications and Internet related ventures. Ari was actively involved in due diligence, strategic decisions, and financial matters.
Ari started his career at Chase Securities Inc. in their High Yield Corporate Finance group. At Chase, Ari participated in all aspects of high yield corporate debt, structured finance and marketing related activities.
Currently, Ari is a Board Member for IMEX Global Solutions and NewPoint Media Group. Ari received a BSM from the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University.
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Posted on March 23, 2017 March 23, 2017 by Live Music Daily
Chris Shiflett of Foo Fighters Talks New Solo Country Album West Coast Town, Working with Dave Cobb, His Podcast “Walking the Floor”
By Max Stewart
Chris Shiflett is a self-described “Honky tonk and roll guitarist”, with feet firmly placed in both the Rock and Country music worlds (one foot wearing Vans, and the other foot wearing an ass-kickin’ cowboy boot, obviously). Sure, he is probably most well known as lead guitarist of the world-conquering Rock titans Foo Fighters, but he also hosts a podcast called “Walking the Floor” in which he has interviewed legendary Country and Americana acts such as the late Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam, Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell, Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Brad Paisley, and even Mike Ness of Social Distortion. And on April 14th, Chris Shiflett will release his Dave Cobb-produced Alt-Country album, West Coast Town.
Shiflett is no stranger to stepping into the spotlight as frontman having been the Singer / Guitarist of Punk band side-project Jackson United from 2003 – 2008. But his knack for leading the Honky-Tonk swing became clear after the release of 2010’s Chris Shiflett & the Dead Peasants and 2013’s All Hat and No Cattle (a nod to the heyday of twang with a batch of Classic Country covers of Waylon Jennings, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, amongst others).
Shiflett indicates in our conversation that his latest release West Coast Town is his most proud effort in terms of songwriting to date, and if the two first singles are any indication – “Sticks and Stones” and “West Coast Town” – I think there is no question that he is right (“Throw your bottles, sticks and stones. You’ve made it clear where I can go”).
Shiflett’s U.S. tour to promote West Coast Town kicked off this week in Portland (3/21), with dates that include Nashville (4/9), Atlanta (4/10), New York (4/6), Bozeman, MT (3/27), and Ketchum, ID (3/28). The shows feature opener Brian Whelan, who actually co-wrote four songs from West Coast Town. Check out a full list of dates here:
I got to catch up with Shiflett before he hit the road, where we talked about his new record West Coast Town, how he got into Country music, why Johnny Cash and Muhammad Ali are actually similar, and the steep learning curve to overcome when writing a Country song. Shiflett is the most level-headed and down-to-earth musician you could imagine, especially given the fact that he is in one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
Keep the honky-tonk-n-rollin’ dream alive and be sure to pre-order the album and look out for it on April 14th!
MS: First off, I am a big fan of the ‘Walking the Floor’ podcast. It has really helped bring me into the Country music world “through the back door” since by definition I am a Rock N’ Roll fan who has in the past few years really gotten into Country thanks to musicians like Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson, and I think your breadth of interviews have really furthered my understanding and appreciation of the genre.
What was your first introduction to Country music having grown up around the Southern California Punk scene? And at what point did you realize you wanted to put a podcast together that focused primarily on Country and Americana interview subjects?
CS: Well, you know, it was really a slow progression for me. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when I got into Country. I think probably like a lot of people I knew the obvious stuff when I was younger. I remember getting a Johnny Cash Sun Records cassette when I was about 18, and that was probably the first Country record that I owned by myself. You know, I grew listening to Rock, Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Punk Rock, stuff like that. But there was something about those early Rockabilly recordings. Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and all that stuff. And Johnny Cash was obviously a part of that. And I have come to realize as I have gotten older and gotten to know music what an anomaly Johnny Cash truly was.
Even though he’s probably the most well known country music artist ever, he’s kind of like Muhammed Ali. When you watched Muhammad Ali, he was really fighting like nobody else he was like a freakish, heavyweight fighter. He had a style that nobody has ever really been able to recreate and nobody had done before. So yeah, I just kind of got into it over time, little by little.
Probably a big push in that direction was when I was in [punk band] No Use For A Name [from 1995 – 1999], the singer of that band Tony [Sly] was really into all the Alt-Country stuff that was going on like Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, Whiskeytown, Old 97s, all that stuff. And that was all bubbling up. And that got me more into that sound. And you know, I am a huge Rolling Stones fan. And a lot of those bands sound more like the Stones than they sound like Buck Owens or something, but they have all of that in there. So.. it was just one of those things, kind of little by little, over time I just got more and more into. And you know how that goes when you get into something, I don’t know if you’re like me I want to know everything about an artist when I get into them and I want to own all of their records and figure it all out. And that’s just kind of how I was… and then I started my podcast a few years ago (2013).
There was a point I was down in Austin one night, watching a friends band called Heybale that has a long time residency at the Continental Club on Sunday nights. And Heybale are a bunch of AMAZING players, they are just incredible musicians and they do all old Honky-Tonk covers. Just a whole set, hours of Honky-Tonk covers. And I remember sitting in the room thinking ‘I love this music so much, but I don’t know how to play it’ (laughs). When I tried to play it, it just didn’t sound right. And it hit me that I had to form a Country cover band and just kind of live in that music for a while.
So I did that for a little while, and I wound up making a record of Country and Honky-Tonk covers (2013’s All Hat and No Cattle). When that record was coming out, one of the guys at the label suggested I put out a podcast to try and help promote it, which I did. And I pretty quickly learned that I really enjoyed doing the interviews and talking to other musicians that I look up to and am a fan of. And nowadays I have been doing it for so long, you can’t always get the interview with Dwight Yoakam or whatever. So I wind up talking to a lot of musicians that I don’t really even know their music, but I get to know their music by doing the interview and by doing a little research and finding out what they’re all about. That’s been a real education, too.
I think that’s really cool you have talked to some musicians that have been slugging it on the road for years and are still trying to break through. And those type of interviews are just as interesting from my perspective as someone who has had major success such as Steve Earle.
Yeah, I am really fascinated by the experience of younger musicians trying to make it now. It is so different from when I was 20-something first making records and first going on tour. The whole business has changed, the world has changed. I am just fascinated by their stories.
As it relates to the new record, West Coast Town, I am really enjoying what I have heard so far. “Sticks and Stones” has a great feel to it, almost an Old 97s or early Wilco vibe. It’s got that distorted rockabilly snarl to it.
Oh cool, yeah. Hey man, I’ll take it! (laughs).
Were there any major music inspirations that contributed to your writing for this new album in particular? Or anyone you may have been listening to more of when you were writing?
Really, to me, it is a mix of a lot of different things. It is equal parts Stonesy-Rock N’ Roll, Bakersfield sound Honky-Tonk, and Punk Rock. I don’t know if there was any one person or another that I was listening to when I was writing. I mean there probably was but that was last year and I am senile and I don’t remember (laughs). Yeah, but, I wrote and wrote and wrote for about 3 months straight leading into making that record. I am the type of person that isn’t the most disciplined musician in the world. If I don’t have a deadline, I tend to not really finish stuff like I should. I had ideas that had been sitting around for a little while. But once I booked the time with Dave Cobb I was like, ‘Fuck, I gotta get my songs together.’ (laughs)
And sitting down and really hammering those ideas out just lead to more ideas and I just wrote and wrote and it was great. It was a really good feeling to go into a recording session with a surplus of songs and not be really stressed. And to kind of have too have too many words, we were cutting shit out, and leaving stuff on the editing floor. That was a nice feeling going into it.
Sturgill Simpson said that working with Dave Cobb (who has also produced Shooter Jennings, Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Jamey Johnson) is a remarkable experience and Cobb would oftentimes purposefully evoke emotions, maybe get him riled up so that he could capture a certain feeling on a take. What was your experience like working with Cobb as a producer and were there any major takeaways?
Well since I never worked with Dave before and I didn’t really know him before I made the record, I had only interviewed him the one time [on ‘Walking the Floor’], I didn’t really know what to expect. But I was really blown away by his process, it is just so great and so fun, but he keeps it moving the whole time. He makes it so you never feel like you’re never stressed or working too hard, but you’re still getting a ton of shit done. I mean we made the whole record over the course of 3 weeks. Recorded and mixed, in the can, and over.
I don’t remember or at least I don’t know if he was manipulating me emotionally.. (laughs)
He could have been doing it and you didn’t know it!
Right, if he was, I didn’t catch on. Well, there was a point, it was pretty funny, like a week and half into making the record. He was kind of trying to get me to do something, I don’t even remember what it was, and I was kind of pushing back on the idea a little bit. And I forget what he said, but he kind of gave me shit about it (laughs). And that was the first time we had broken through the polite veneer of ‘We don’t really know each other’ kind of thing. And I remember I just laughed and said, ‘Oh shit, the gloves just came off. We just got real, alright let’s do it.’ But you want that sort of thing [from a producer].
He wants to make a good product and push you to make your best record.
Yeah, it was really great. I had never worked with a real producer on my solo stuff, so to have somebody like Dave that can just take your songs to another place and another level and make them better. I just can’t overstate how big of an impact he had on this record, it was amazing.
It comes through in all the other records he’s produced, so I am really looking forward to hearing the full album.
In terms of songwriting, Country songs at their core are driven by lyrics and storytelling (see “West Coast Town”) as opposed to Rock songs where oftentimes the riff and melody carries the song, did you find the process for writing the songs for this album was maybe more difficult than for a traditional Rock record like maybe with your band Jackson United?
Absolutely, and I am really glad that you touched on that. That was the hardest thing for me to adjust to and it took me a long time, and it is maybe why it took me a few years between albums to write a new album of original material because I struggled for a couple of years wrapping my head around writing lyrics that really told stories instead of just poetic, mumbo-jumbo which is what I really had always done in the past. Words that sounded nice together and maybe on some level meant something, but when you read them it’s just kind of vague.
But that is the defining difference between Country music and Rock music, I believe, is lyrically. And especially, nowadays, stylistically they are not really that different you know? Country, Pop, Rock, it’s all pretty closely related. But it’s the lyrics. I would have ideas or a theme of something that I wanted to say in the song. But once I broke through that discomfort and started to write like that, the ideas just started coming.
That is absolutely the thing I am probably most proud of for this record, I feel it has the best lyrics that I have ever written. When you make a record, there is always elements of it that makes you cringe a little bit (laughs). I just don’t feel any of those moments on this record. Maybe other people will, but I don’t.
Well that’s great. That segues nicely into another difference in Rock and Country style, as it relates to guitar playing. Sometimes in Rock, guitarists have the ability to lean on the distorted sound as opposed to Country which is a much more twangy, cleaner tone and the guitar parts are often more precise and crisp.
I know you have been playing Country guitar for a while with the Dead Peasants, but is it difficult to adjust your headspace from Rock to Country guitar both in the studio and live?
Yeah, it is but I mean have kind of wrapped my head around the single coil, twangy, a lot less gain thing. I really love that sound.
It took me awhile to get comfortable playing with that tone. And the Honky-Tonk lead guitar moves around the chords a lot more than you would with Rock N’ Roll, and that can be difficult. When it comes to recording leads, I kind of work them out, you know? I really seldom just press record and wing it. I mean there is something to say about that too, for sure. But you know, in a 3 minute pop song, I tend to work the lead part out. I want it to be an important part of the song. I think of myself as lead guitar player first, it’s a love of mine.
And it’s something that (laughs) went out of vogue when I started playing in bands that you would have ever heard of. So for my new record, it was important for me to put together some leads that I would really feel good about.
Well since you did the lead guitar parts, did you happen to incorporate any of the old school Nashville session guys on West Coast Town while recording in Nashville?
Yeah! Well, I had mostly new school Nashville session guys. So I had Chris Powell on Drums, and Adam Gardner on Bass. Those are guys that Dave Cobb uses a lot. And Dave Cobb was on Acoustic Guitar and I was on Electric Guitar. And that’s how we tracked basic tracks, for everything. No click track, just live in the room, all four of us, boom. Then we brought in a Keyboardist Michael Webb. A Singer named Kristen Rogers did all the harmony vocals on it, which was great. And then we had the classic Honky-Tonk element of the album was that Robby Turner came in and did all of the Pedal Steel guitar for the album (who has played with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, John Prine, Paul Simon). That guy has really deep roots in the country world, and was just a joy to work with.
Wow. Any of those players going to be joining you on the road or what is the plan for the band on the tour?
Unfortunately, I can’t afford to take those motherfuckers on the road (laughs). They’re expensive and I’m not popular (laughs). And they all live in Nashville, anyway. But, I have got some friends of mine from out here in L.A. that are going to come out and do the shows with me. We are touring as a tight little four-piece: two guitars, bass, and drums. And, yeah man, leaving Sunday to start the tour. Fingers crossed!
Well it should be a lot of fun. What can fans expect from the new tour? I know the tour itself will be before the album is released on April 14th but will be promoting the new album heavily. Should fans expect any tunes from 2010’s Chris Shiflett & the Dead Peasants or 2013’s All Hat and No Cattle?
Well, we’ll see. I think I am going to be throwing together pretty much the whole new record, and then throwing in some cover tunes on top of that. That’s how we’re starting it, and we’ll see as things move along how they go. You know, Atlanta is the last show, so who knows what we’ll be doing by then! But yeah, gotta throw some covers in there so people know some of the tunes.
Looking forward to it, good luck!
Right on, man. Thanks for having me!
West Coast Town (To Be Released April 14th on SideOneDummy Records)
West Coast Town
Goodnight Little Rock
The Girl’s Already Gone
I’m Still Drunk
Tonight’s Not Over
Still Better Days
Chris Shiflett 2017 U.S. Tour
Mar 21: Hawthorne Lounge, Portland, OR
Mar 22: Sunset Tavern, Seattle, WA
Mar 24: The Big Dipper, Spokane, WA
Mar 26: Missoula Winery, Missoula, MT
Mar 27: The Eagles Ballroom, Bozeman, MT
Mar 28: Whiskey Jacques, Ketchum, ID
Mar 30: Pappy and Harriets Pioneertown Palace, Pioneertown, CA
Mar 31: Museum Club, Flagstaff, AZ
Apr 02: Resident, Los Angeles, CA
Apr 03: Casbah, San Diego, CA
Apr 06: Rockwood Music Hall, Stage New York, NY
Apr 09: The High Watt, Nashville, TN
Apr 10: Eddie’s Attic, Atlanta, GA
Apr 22: Fingerprint (Record Store Day), Long Beach, CA
May 27: BottleRock Festival, Napa, CA
Get tickets here: http://www.chrisshiflettmusic.com/shows/
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Liz Crocker
Kate Inglis
recommended books, travels
For a week last November, Iowa City held me in its thrall. I was there for a conference at the University of Iowa titled “The Examined Life”. I had wanted to go to this conference for years; finally both the timing seemed right and the conference planners accepted my proposal for a workshop called “Healing Words: Writing Your Way to Compassion and Health”. The conference turned out to be everything I hoped for… a coming together of people engaged with in both writing and health care, many of whom wanted to be better communicators with their patients, to tell their own stories and to heal from the burdens they carried.
In addition to the rich emotional and intellectual fuel of the conference, I also enjoyed several sessions which were part of the simultaneously scheduled Iowa City Book Festival. This annual festival is just one of the reasons Iowa City was named the third UNESCO City of Literature in November, 2008, following on the heels of Edinburgh, Scotland and Melbourne, Australia. Another reason for UNESCO’s choice was that, since 1936, Iowa City has been known as the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop which has produced many of America’s outstanding writers, including 17 winners of the Pulitzer Prize.
I attended an author reading was given by Jon Kerstetter, whose book, Crossings: A Doctor-Soldier Story, had recently been published. The book jacket says that Jon Kerstetter’s life “has been marked by a crossing from one world into another: from civilian to doctor to soldier; between healing and waging war; and between compassion and hatred of the enemy”. I had purchased the book earlier in the week thinking that this man’s story sounded incredible and I wanted to know more.
Jon Kerstetter grew up in poverty on the Oneida Reservation in Wisconsin but his curiosity and determination led him to become an emergency physician and then a soldier, serving in Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia and Iraq. The first half of the book is full of descriptions of bravery and adventure and adrenalin and accomplishments. But then Jon’s life took a surprising turn and he faced a new ‘crossing’—from healer to one who needed to be healed, from one who helped ease other’s burdens to one whose own burden seemed impossible to carry.
At the reading, I observed a tall man, standing, speaking clearly, engaging with his audience, recounting various chapters of his life… poverty to college education, First Nations reservation to army barracks, emergency rooms to helicopter evacuations. If you just walked into the room, knowing nothing of this man, you would never know that his just being able to stand there and speak belied the greatest challenge of his life.
When Jon returned from Iraq, he had a debilitating stroke. Everything changed—Jon went from a decorated doctor-soldier to having to learn how to do everything from scratch. The stroke left him with profound cognitive and physical disabilities, excruciating pain, all complicated by PTSD.
Jon finally had to admit that he could never be a doctor or a soldier again; he knew he had to make another “crossing”. One of his doctors helped Jon realize that his love of books was grounded in a thirst for knowledge. Building on this, the doctor suggested that Jon enroll in a writing MFA program. Jon had already experienced some ‘writing as therapy’ having done some therapeutic journaling and had felt its benefits.
However, his internal critics identified any number of reasons why he shouldn’t do this—he was too old (59); his reading level, post stroke, was only grade 5.3 level; he was still in rehab; he couldn’t “keep up a fast pace with a slow brain”. Fortunately his internal cheerleaders spoke up and reminded him that he had pushed against boundaries his whole life; that he had gained more, post stroke, than many had thought possible; and that it was worth at least applying… and he was accepted. He remarked “I didn’t learn quickly, but I did learn… Speed was not my forte; persistence was.”
Jon Kerstetter, just as he had imagined becoming a doctor when he was boy living on a reservation, now was imagining become a writer while living in a body and mind complicated by disability and trauma. He says, near the end of his book, that through writing “Details and emotions come to life; I see a page, and the page is me. That extra dimension helps me see that I am healing and not dying; it helps me understand how I am testing the edges of my recovery. And so, I sit and write.”
“Healing” has been a years-long process for Jon and is still ongoing. He says he still stumbles and forgets words. All the more amazing, then, that he chose to write this incredible book and could stand and tell us about it!
And so I end where I began—I attended a conference on “The Examined Life” in Iowa City and gave a workshop about “Healing Words” to health care providers who wanted to explore the potential of writing to tell their stories and to lighten their burdens. And then I witnessed a powerful example of what I had been teaching… Jon Kerstetter is lightening his burdens and healing himself through words. It was a remarkable privilege to hear him speak and then savour his writing.
Copyright ©2004-2017 Liz Crocker and associated publishers. All rights reserved. No unauthorized reuse.
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Military and Service
More Awesome Stuff
Madly Odd!
Watch A Day In The Life Of A Busy 83-Year-Old Cowgirl Who Says Horses Are Less Trouble Than Men
Riding High In The Saddle At 83
The November 26, 2017 episode of the Australian tv show BackRoads included a very special person. The show’s host, Heather Ewart, travels around remote locations in Australia, interviewing common people who have a very uncommon, inspirational stories to share.
This episode, the cameras went to Corryong, a small town in north-eastern Victoria. Corryong is situated in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains where the movie The Man from Snowy River was filmed. Here, eighty-three-year-old Joan Sinclair lives on an enormous cattle farm in the area and is an avid horse lover. She’s known as one of the most experienced horse and cattlewomen in the High Country.
She’s lived on the same property since she was only six weeks old. She’s spent her entire life out in the beautiful countryside of north-eastern Victoria. Joan has married twice, but unfortunately, she has outlived both of them.
Years in the saddle has made Joan more comfortable riding than walking. As a child, it was the only way to get anywhere. Riding a horse was the only way she was able to make it to school. Joan’s always had a special spot in her heart for horses, and they’re still her favorite thing in the world. She’d rather be riding than walking.
Her father ran the farm when she was a girl, and she would often sneak off and join him when he headed up in the bush with the cattle. She quickly grew to love going up there. She told the show’s host, “It’s a different world when you get up the bush.”
At her age, the cowgirl has decided not to look for her next husband. She’ll just stick with horses for company. “They’re a lot less trouble than men,” she jokingly says.
She may not think she’s anything special, but her friends and family definitely think she is. This spunky horsewoman is still riding horses and herding cattle after eighty years. If only we all can age so well.
83yo Joan Sinclair is still in the saddle
Meet Joan Sinclair. She is one of the best horse and cattlewomen in the High Country and at the age of 83, she is still at it. #BackRoads #Victoriaab.co/backroads
Posted by ABC Rural on Sunday, November 26, 2017
Joan doesn’t have a Facebook account so we told her about all your positive comments. She said, “It’s nice to have someone say something nice about you when you’re not dead.” What a firecracker!
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More about Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln - States Quotes
View all Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States. Welcome, or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown. We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State. To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation. This is what we have to do. How can we best do it?
I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.
The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated — quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.
If those democrats really think slavery wrong they will be much pleased when earnest men in the slave states take up a plan of gradual emancipation and go to work energetically and very kindly to get rid of the evil. Now let us test them. Frank Blair tried it; and he ran for Congress in '58, and got beaten. Did the democracy feel bad about it? I reckon not, I guess you all flung up your hats and shouted 'Hurrah for the Democracy!'
I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.
On the other hand, the free states carry on their government on the principle of the equality of men. We think slavery is morally wrong, and a direct violation of that principle. We all think it wrong. It is clearly proved, I think, by natural theology, apart from revelation. Every man, black, white or yellow, has a mouth to be fed and two hands with which to feed it, and that bread should be allowed to go to that mouth without controversy.
If the union of these States, and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of fifty-two yearsof age, but a great deal to the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States, and to their posterity in all coming time.
Received as I am by the members of a legislature the majority of whom do not agree with me in political sentiments, I trust that I may have their assistance in piloting the ship of state through this voyage, surrounded by perils as it is; for if it should suffer wreck now, there will be no pilot ever needed for another voyage.
On the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
I freely acknowledge myself the servant of the people, according to the bond of service - the United States Constitution; and that, as such, I am responsible to them.
I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this, and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them.
I repeat the question, 'Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State Government?'
I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is not the Constitution as I would like to have it, but as it is, that is to be defended. The Constitution will not be preserved & defended until it is enforced & obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced and defended, and let the grass grow where it may.
Lest there be some uneasiness in the minds of candid men as to what is to be the course of the Government toward the Southern States after the rebellion shall have been suppressed, the Executive deems it proper to say it will be his purpose then, as ever, to be guided by the Constitution and the laws, and that he probably will have no different understanding of the powers and duties of the Federal Government relatively to the rights of the States and the people under the Constitution than that expressed in the inaugural address.
That portion of the earth's surface which is owned and inhabited by the people of the United States is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more. Its vast extent and its variety of climate and productions are of advantage in this age for one people, whatever they might have been in former ages. Steam, telegraphs, and intelligence have brought these to be an advantageous combination for one united people.
While the opinion of the court, by Chief-Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case and the separate opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a Territorial legislature to exclude slavery from any United States Territory, they all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a State, or the people of a State, to exclude it.
I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights, that each community, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all the concerns within that State that interfere with the right of no other State, and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole.
Again: If one State may secede, so may another; and when all shall have seceded none is left to pay the debts. Is this quite just to creditors? Did we notify them of this sage view of ours when we borrowed their money? If we now recognize this doctrine by allowing the seceders to go in peace, it is difficult to see what we can do if others choose to go or to extort terms upon which they will promise to remain.
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation...
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
Have we no tendency to the latter condition?
Let any one who doubts, carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery so to speak — compounded of the Nebraska doctrine, and the Dred Scott decision.
Died: April 15, 1865 (aged 56)
More about Abraham Lincoln...
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Just some facts
Filed under: Life stories, Sport — Leave a comment
The internet can be an effective place to find love. According to a recent Pew Research study, about 37% of single people have used some form of internet dating site, and about 17% of online daters have found long-term love online. With well over a million paying members and 20,000 new members joining each day, Match.com is the leading online dating site. And, overall, online dating sites are expected to earn 1.9 billion in revenue this year alone.
When looking for love online, women seek men with high-paying jobs. In turn, men are more likely than women to reveal financial information about than women are.
However, the most common answer that you will hear if you ask women about what they want in a man; it would be either good looks or good sense of humor.
Grammar matters! Studies have shown that when it comes to online dating profiles and messages, grammar matters just as much as the content itself. Poor punctuation is a turn-off to both sexes.
In Qatar there are 307 men for every 100 women.
The Olympic Torch relay was started by the Germans for the 1936 Olympics, as part of their propaganda onslaught
200 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
London is the first city to host the Olympics three times – 1908, 1948 and 2012.
London 2012 Olympics will run for 17 days.
Over 11000 athletes are competing at London 2012
The Olympic motto is citius, altius, fortius – Latin for faster, higher, stronger.
The five interlocking rings represent the five continents.
Greece’s athletes enter the stadium first at the opening ceremony.
541 athletes are representing Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics.
Track and field athletics dominates with 2,242 athletes, but after that (and excluding team games), there’s swimming (948), then shooting with 391 and Judo with 390.
As recently as 1984, women were barred from running marathons, and in 1996, 26 countries had no female athletes in the Games.
First Olympics ever where every country will be represented by at least one female.
The United States has more female athletes competing than male athletes, with 269 women competing, and 261 men.
Middle Eastern countries Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Brunei are sending women for the very first time.
Female participation in sport is banned in Saudi Arabia. Their female representative was born, raised, and trains in the USA.
Some 44% of all athletes are women (highest numbers from the UK). In terms of percentage of the major teams are: Japan (53%), Russia (52%), the US (51%), the UK is further down the list with 48%, behind Ethiopia.
150 000 condoms have been provided to the athletes at London 2012. 130 000 were supplied at the last Olympics in Athens.
4 billion viewers worldwide are expected to watch the Olympics
For the first time ever, 3D Live television will be screened at the Olympics.
The world’s biggest McDonald’s with seating for 1500 was constructed for the Olympics.
1948 Olympics-Athletes had to bring their own food.
Baked Bean is cockney rhyming slang for the Queen.
The Cook Islands’ eight athletes represent a rate of 40 per 100,000 inhabitants – the highest rate in the world.
Though toilet paper is often thought of as a cornerstone of modern Western civilization, it was invented in China in the 6th century.
Toilet paper comes in two varieties: virgin, which is freshly made from chipped wood and non-virgin, which is recycled paper.
India’s population is set to grow by over 295 million, or 26% by 2025.
Italy has the highest rate of mobile phone subscribers in Europe.
In Japan nearly 30% of the population is aged 60 or over.
More than 30% of women and men in America are obese.
Tags: health, love, men, mobile, phones, sex, sport, television, women
« Buffalo Theory
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‘Deadpool’: From super villain to antihero
RYAN Reynolds plays the Marvel Comics hero.
By: Lester G. Babiera (Contributor) Philippine Daily Inquirer / 01:20 AM February 08, 2016
MARVEL character Deadpool first appeared in the 1990 comic book “New Mutant #8” as a super villain. Eventually, he was turned into an antihero in 1997 when he headlined his first self-titled comic book.
Deadpool—whose real name is Wade Wilson—is a military man turned assassin. Diagnosed with cancer, he is offered by the government to undergo an experiment that will cure his sickness. The operation likewise gives him superhuman healing powers.
And this year, the comic book character will grace the silver screen with “Deadpool.” The movie stars Ryan Reynolds.
Reynolds, a Marvel Comics fan and one of the producers of the film, said that he and the filmmakers wanted to stay true to the character of “Deadpool” as read in the books.
“We’re staying as true to the character as possible. We really ran with the idea of Deadpool being aware he’s a comic book antihero,” Reynolds said. “It gave us the freedom to tell this story in a totally unorthodox way. We occupy a space that no other comic book movie has—or can.”
Deadpool is deemed as an unconventional Marvel Comics character because of his weird humor and his ability to break the fourth wall.
The film narrates Deadpool’s transformation from an ordinary person to a supernatural being and his action-packed search for the man who nearly destroyed his life.
Deadpool was created by comic book writer Fabian Nicieza and artist Rob Liefeld. This Marvel anti-hero is unique in a way because he is a contrast to usual holier-that-thou comics characters.
Liefeld noted that the filmmakers managed to compile the most interesting and significant published stories of Deadpool.
“They mined all the good stuff in the comics from about a 10-year period and came up with a movie that sews it all together,” Liefeld said. “This will be the Deadpool that will become canon moving forward.”
He also said that the film “explodes with action.”
“Deadpool” is the debut film of Tim Miller and it is written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.
“Deadpool” opens this February 10 in cinemas (2D and IMAX screens) from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.
20th Century FoxantiheroDeadpoolMarvel Comicsmovie adaptationRyan Reynolds
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Sam McKinniss – Daisy Chain
Home Events Sam McKinniss – Daisy Chain
likeyou, January 7, 2018 February 19, 2018 , Exhibitions, 0
in Venice, CA / United States
07.01.2018 - 04.03.2018 00:00
Sam McKinniss: Beck, 2017, oil and acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12 inches, 41 x 31 cm
Team (bungalow) is pleased to announce a show of work by New York-based artist Sam McKinniss.
“I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.” (Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979)
McKinniss has made a grouping of nine new paintings to be exhibited together under the title “Daisy Chain”. The city of Los Angeles inspired the choice of subjects, although a narrative of innocence and its destruction is the real thread here. The paintings, all intimately scaled, depict movie stars, pop singers, animals, book illustrations, landscapes. These images stitch themselves together, revealing a national obsession with creating, then desecrating, icons of purity. Behind these beatific paintings – a fantasia of greeting card images – lurk cults, suicide, murder and drug addiction.
In selecting the images that make up this exhibition, McKinniss has touched upon popular and mass culture, middle and high-brow. In the degree to which a visitor recognizes one or more of these subjects, a shortcut is forged between the painter and his audience, a shortcut that bypasses irony, erases distance and eases the triggering of emotional effects.
McKinniss’s choices both limit his audience – “I don’t like Drew Barrymore.” “Who is A$AP Rocky?” – while privileging those who remain, validating the viewer’s own cultural knowledge and enveloping them in a memory of love – “That’s Whitney Houston when she sang the ‘Star Spangled Banner'”. “My God, JonBenet Ramsey was so beautiful.” In these instances of reflection, the artist is no longer master but fellow fan, allowing his audience to access a shared sense of transcendent joy or sorrowful loss; a moment of catharsis.
In the range of subject matters, one can find numerous clues to the “make-up” of McKinniss’s psyche and, therefore, his world-view. For example, the democratic and leveling nature of Tumblr mates easily with the artist’s fascination for middle-brow artworks hung in regional museums. McKinniss’s adoration of figures such as Winslow Homer, Fairfield Porter, Mary Cassatt and Maxfield Parrish is not reactionary but, rather, stems from his childhood visits to the New Britain Museum of American Art, located down the street from his home.
Although there is a tendency to link McKinniss to painters such as Elizabeth Peyton and Karen Kilimnik – largely due to the confinement of much of their output to smaller scales – it is more enlightening to pair McKinniss with other contemporaneous practices such as Luc Tuyman’s gray-scale, funereal politics, Pablo Bronstein’s architectural Capriccios or Jamian Juliano-Villani’s hyper-real painted patchworks. What McKinniss’ work shares with this latter group of artists is a relationship to fact.
Throughout McKinniss’s work, a hierarchy of knowledge is in play. This shows particularly in “Beck”, 2017. The painting is a portrait of the singer/songwriter/producer Beck Hansen. The source image, which many would simply assume to be a promotional photograph, is a video still created by the fine artist Jeremy Blake. Both Blake and Beck are identified with the Church of Scientology – seen variously as a religion and as a cult. The McKinniss painting references the suicide of Blake and, by extension, the tragic relationship of Blake and Theresa Duncan, both of whom died by their own hand, citing as the cause a vast conspiracy of persecution by a cabal of Scientologists.
The McKinniss painting functions as a double-portrait – of the present Hansen and the absent Blake; one portrait “painted” on top of the other. All of this knowledge is rewarded. However, the artwork also rewards a complete lack of extratextual information. The sensuous and accomplished manner in which the painting has been rendered, the lusciousness of the palette, the presence of abstraction, the immediacy of the scale, also function to deliver pleasure to a viewer and to represent McKinniss’s intelligence and skill.
McKinniss’s artworks foreground the notion of recollection in a hyper-mediated world. Although his subject selections usually reference the decades of his childhood (the 80s and 90s) and, therefore, the aesthetics dominant in that era, his more contemporary choices, like Lana Del Rey or an aged Joan Didion, are also inflected by that same pastness. Beauty and innocence, in the American vernacular, appear stuck in a post-Reagan-era loop. Nothing in McKinniss’ work stretches back to the Summer of Love, yet many of the works in “Daisy Chain” bear the stamp of flower power. However, that stamp does not bear the radicality of the late 60s, but rather its cultural deployment as a signifier divorced from historicity.
Gallery hours Wed-Sun noon – 6 pm
www.teamgal.com
team (bungalow)
306 Windward Avenue
90291 Venice, CA
Tags: Beck Hansen, Drew Barrymore, Elizabeth Peyton, Fairfield Porter, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Jeremy Blake, Joan Didion, JonBenet Ramsey, Karen Kilimnik, Lana Del Rey, Luc Tuyman, Mary Cassatt, Maxfield Parrish, New Britain Museum of American Art, Pablo Bronstein, Sam McKinniss, Team gallery, Theresa Duncan, Whitney Houston, Winslow Homer
Opening: Leigh Ruple - Lovers WayOpening: Sam McKinniss - Daisy Chain
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The Insider: Phillip Escott and the Cruel Ways of ‘Cruel Summer’
By Phillip Escott • 3 years ago
That was Craig Newman, my co-director, convincing me that if we were ever going to get serious about making a film, we might as well drop everything and make one. So we did. Craig and I had been dabbling with no-budget shorts for a couple of years and they had played at a few film festivals but outside of that did nothing for us really–mostly because they were garbage, but hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?
I had just begun my Master’s degree in Film, and I convinced myself that the money I would spend on my education was better spent investing in the film, which goes against the first rule of filmmaking for many: never use your own money. I had been working as a freelance camera operator, so I felt I was familiar enough with ‘set etiquette’ (set-iquette?) to get this project off the ground and get the film made. Again, a huge mistake on my part.
We wanted to explore the nature of casual violence and depict the horrifying reality of it in the unflinching style of the French extreme films that had captivated the two of us during the noughties–only with a fraction of the budget afforded to those films. This came about due to a news story I had read about a couple of young boys who had burned a homeless man alive after being ‘dared’ to by some older kids. Craig had been haunted by a news report, from years previous, about a group of kids who went camping and tortured a supposed friend for two days. Both are barbaric crimes that would be unfilmable, but it allowed us to ask the all important question: “how did that happen?”, and CRUEL SUMMER was born.
I had written the first draft in under two weeks under the title THE BOY IN THE TENT, which I dug. I thought it sounded unique and had a haunting ring to it. Craig didn’t, however, and he was ultimately right. But coming up with an alternative name was tricky. So we threw it on the backburner and went into production. That’s when shit got really real, really fast.
That’s when shit got really real, really fast.
Coming up with a shooting schedule is the easiest thing in the world when you’re an ignorant 29 year old wannabe filmmaker. In the real world, however, it’s what makes or breaks your movie–along with your cast and crew. We put our finger in the air and took a wild guess that ten days would be an ample amount of time to shoot a feature film in, because why not? We allotted another two days for rehearsals with the main four cast members, and this is where having a co-director was a real blessing.
Two days before principle photography and we had everything in place, or so we thought. We had our excellent cast, our amazing crew, our permits and, of course, our terribly thought-out schedule. All was good with the world, except for the fact we hadn’t secured our main location yet–which was the woodland. You know, the place where MOST of the film takes place! So, the independent filmmaker wears many hats, and myself and our First A.D/Gaffer/last-minute-location-scout, Ian Smyth, hightailed it around South Wales looking for an area we could use as the main location while Craig ran the cast through their lines, We thought that would help save time while onset. Low and behold, we were wrong about that too.
Ian and I finally found a location that was perfect for us. It was secluded and far away from the major road networks and main flight paths–which I figured would earn me brownie points with our sound recordist, Dai Rees. However, it was miles away from our production base, but the owners of the area were lovely and offered us the run of the land for an incredibly generous amount. It was a no-brainer, and we finally had our main location secured… the day before principle photography began.
Now, there’s something else you need to know about Wales: It has what you’d call ( if you want to be polite), a maritime climate. It basically rains all the fucking time, so it’s the perfect place to shoot externally… if you want your film to have a damp, SEVEN-esque, look; which was the polar opposite of what we wanted, unfortunately. I mean, who factors in stuff like ‘weather’ and ‘distance to travel’ into a film’s schedule anyway? Not us, that’s for sure.
A gorgeous August day in Wales.
We shot for ten days straight, and we lucked out on the first day. It was a gorgeous August Saturday, and most of the crew even got sunburnt. We shot in my home area of Ely, which gave the film the required gritty backdrop for our inner-city youths, and as per the expected standards of Ely, we were propositioned (twice) for the chance to buy drugs. This was all before lunch too, but that doesn’t phase the entrepreneurial dealers of Ely from trying to make their money.
By day five however, the unexpected heatwave that blessed us took a turn for the worse and the heavens opened up –royally. Of course it had to be the day we planned for our climactic chase scene. Five hours went by, and the rain didn’t let up. It soon became apparent that our ten day shoot was about to become a nine day shoot, and I was really regretting not buying some narcotics from those shifty blokes back in Ely. Luckily for us though, our director of photography, Lucas Tucknott, is not only a genius but an incredibly relaxing individual. When he sat us all down and told us it was all going to be okay, we believed him. Not because we wanted to, but because we needed to. After five straight days of working sixteen to seventeen hours, the cracks were starting to show.
After five straight days of working sixteen to seventeen hours, the cracks were starting to show.
As punishing as the shoot got (and it really was a grueling experience), our cast and crew dug deep and carried us through. A filmmaker can only be as good as their team, and I think the finished product proves just how true that is. CRUEL SUMMER has garnered some very favorable reviews and has even landed a spot in the prestigious genre festival, FrightFest. This is largely thanks to the people who stuck by us as the shit went down and helped to deliver a film that we are so proud of and are, frankly, still amazed that it’s in existence at all.
Wait it out.
So to wrap this up, I guess the money I would have spent on my Master’s degree may have prepared me better for the project, but truth be told, the crash course in filmmaking that came with CRUEL SUMMER extends much further than what the classroom could provide. The making of the film truly was the easiest part; no matter how painful and exhausting we found it to be at the time. In comparison to navigating through the world of post-production and modern day film distribution, it was a walk in the park. But that’s another story.
Oh, and as for the name change, we originally wanted to go with SUMMER SCARS; it was such an incredible title and perfectly embodied everything we wanted for our film. So imagine our disappointment when we learnt that there was already a feature film with this title… which is also about teenagers getting into trouble in the woods… and just so happened to be shot in Wales too! We eventually decided on CRUEL SUMMER as it conveys the beauty/horror conflict that’s a running theme throughout the film just as well as SUMMER SCARS would have–or so we like to think.
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The Live Stream is Now Mainstream
ModSquad January 19, 2017
If you read our 2017 Digital Predictions earlier this month, you know live video is expected to grow this year even more than it did in 2016. Brands, news organizations, and nonprofits of all sizes are using live video streaming to connect personally with audiences.
As tomorrow’s inauguration of the 45th President of the United States draws near, we’re hearing all over “the world is watching” — for those of us closely following digital trends, the question we’re asking is, how will people be watching? The answer, for many: via the live web or social media video stream.
People around the world are watching the biggest news stories and events via live video stream, in addition to, and quite possibly surpassing, the number of people tuning in via traditional TV news. We saw this trend away from television take root over the past couple years, with consumers turning to Snapchat to keep up with events like the Summer Olympics and MTV Video Music Awards. At the same time, we’ve seen the steady trend of consumers cutting the cable cord, and as a result, media publishers adapting to reach their web- and social-centric audiences. To do so, many are turning to live video across a variety of social media platforms.
2016 was a big year for live video. By now, everyone knows who Chewbacca Mom is (her video was, by far, the most watched Facebook Live video of 2016). But 2016’s live streaming highlights were about much more than that. During the summer’s European soccer finals, content delivery network Akamai reported a peak of 3.3 million concurrent streams, totalling a traffic rate of 7.3 terabits per second.
In June, Buzzfeed UK and Facebook Live presented four separate town hall-style debates around the EU referendum. Not only did thousands of reactions and comments stream in throughout these live streams, but they also garnered more views than the respective live TV debates combined. Similarly, throughout the year in the U.S., live video played a major role in the presidential election process. YouTube’s report of election night coverage indicated their news partners reached a peak of 1.7 million concurrent viewers, a total of 47 million live views, and 10 million total hours watched.
Live video streams make major news and events both more accessible and more engaging. On Twitter, alongside the platform’s featured live video is a live feed of tweets using a specific hashtag. On Facebook Live, viewers can use the platform’s Reactions to express how they feel in response to what is being said or shown in the video. There and on YouTube, viewers can also comment in real time, as well as respond to other viewers’ comments.
With our focus on moderation, digital engagement, and community building, ModSquad is of course keen to see how communities of all sorts take on the unique challenge live comment streams pose (and of course even more keen to work with brands who want our help managing and moderating such discussions).
Live video streaming is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. If you’re thinking about incorporating live social video into your community strategy, drop us a note. We’d love to help design a strategy for community engagement or help you keep discussions properly moderated.
This entry was posted in Digital Engagement. Bookmark the permalink.
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When Apple has a bad day, we all have a bad day
by Paul R. La Monica @lamonicabuzz March 29, 2018: 1:14 PM ET
Tech selloff drags down US stocks
Wall Street has a problem. When big tech stocks like Facebook, Amazon and Apple sneeze, the entire market catches a cold.
Five titans of tech -- Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOGL) owner Alphabet, Microsoft (MSFT) and Facebook (FB) -- made up nearly a quarter of the market value of the entire S&P 500 as of the end of February.
Facebook, Google and Amazon have fallen sharply because of the possibility of more government regulations on the tech sector. That's dragged down the whole market.
The S&P 500 has fallen 5% in the past two weeks and the Nasdaq has tumbled 6%. Even the Dow, which has Apple, Microsoft, IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO) and Intel (INTC) as members, is down more than 3%.
But the market rebounded Thursday, led by solid gains in Facebook, Google and Apple.
Should investors be worried that there's too much tech in the major indexes? Perhaps.
Concentration in one sector is fine when things are humming along nicely. Tech stocks surged last year and continued to do so at the start of 2018 thanks to strong earnings.
But now that tech is under pressure, there are some concerns that it could bring about another major market crash like 2000 -- the last time that the sector made up such a large percentage of the overall market.
Still, many analysts and investment strategists think the negative headlines about Facebook's data privacy issues and President Trump's tough talk regarding Amazon will soon fade and that investors will instead focus on upcoming earnings reports.
Related: Is the tech wreck over or just beginning?
Big Tech companies will report first quarter results in April and early May and the numbers are expected to be very good.
Wall Street is forecasting a more than 30% jump in earnings for Facebook from last year for example. Google's earnings are expected to rise more than 20%.
The market also has a way of adjusting so that different companies wind up taking the lead while others falter. To that end, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKB) has recently moved ahead of Facebook in market value, bumping Facebook to sixth place.
The rest of the top companies in the S&P 500 are a much more diverse group. JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Bank of America (BAC) round out the top ten. No tech to be found here.
And the Dow, which weights its components by price instead of market value, isn't particularly tech heavy either.
The top five Dow stocks are Boeing (BA), Goldman Sachs (GS), UnitedHealth (UNH), 3M (MMM) and Home Depot (HD). That should help insulate it from any future problems in the sector.
It's also worth noting that the top tech stocks don't make up nearly as big of a percentage of the global stock market as they have in the past, meaning that a tech slump shouldn't drag down markets in Europe or Asia either.
Roman Kouzmenko, executive director for MSCI Core Equity Research, wrote in a blog post Thursday that the five biggest techs accounted for just 8% of the MSCI World Index at the end of February.
That's actually the lowest concentration for the market's top five stocks in five decades. There was one point in the mid-1970s when just TWO stocks dominated the market.
"The combined weight of IBM and AT&T alone in 1976 was greater than the weight of all the top five stocks today," Kouzmenko wrote.
In other words, the might of 2018's top techs pales in comparison to Big Blue and Ma Bell in their heydays.
CNNMoney (New York) First published March 29, 2018: 11:33 AM ET
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Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools During Earthquakes in California & Elsewhere? NRC’s Devil May Care Attitude.
California earthquakes, Diablo Canyon, earthquake hazard, earthquake risk, earthquakes, High Level Nuclear Waste, NRC, nuclear power, nuclear risks, nuclear waste storage, seismic design, Seismic hazard, Seismic risk, Spent Fuel Pools, Tsunami Risk, US NRC
Diablo Canyon, California. The name says it all- Devil’s Canyon. Swimming Pools said to be Fresh Water Reservoirs
In the mainstream news on Monday was discussion of a secret document from last year, found online at the Friends of the Earth web site. As the US NRC is voting today on an Environmental Impact Statement, which excludes seismic considerations from 4 nuclear sites, 3 on the west coast, and with a major California earthquake on the weekend, it is timely:
“U.S. inspector wanted reactor shut on quake fears: report
Posted:Mon, 25 Aug 2014 23:31:14 GMT
(Reuters) – A federal nuclear inspector urged U.S. regulators to shut down a California nuclear power plant until tests showed its reactors could withstand shocks from nearby earthquake faults, according to the Associated Press and an environmental group” http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/environment/~3/09Genj0_LOg/story01.htm
“Diablo Canyon: Secret document details federal safety inspector’s alarm over plant’s vulnerability to earthquakes,” Posted Aug. 25, 2014 by Kate Colwell, Agency expert says reactors must be shut until proven safe” See more at: http://www.foe.org/news/news-releases/2014-07-diablo-canyon-secret-document-details-federal-safety-alarm
This is explains the document’s points in readable language: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/diablo-canyon-earthquake-risk.pdf
Missing seems to be discussion of the problem of the spent fuel rod pools and that seismic risk at 4 sites, including 3 western sites, was excluded from the NRC’s Generic Environmental Impact Statement which will be voted today: https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/us-nrc-kicking-the-radioactive-waste-can-down-the-road-for-140-years-in-the-short-term-option-for-high-level-nuclear-waste-spent-fuel-rods/ [Aug. 27 update: All that can be surmised is that they want to allow relicensing of these nuclear power plants and then have them retrofitted if there is a more serious earthquake hazard problem. Some non-nuclear construction retrofits were found to be lacking during the recent California earthquake, which was far from Diablo Canyon.]
Two interesting pages from the NRC Inspector’s report (Dr. Michael Peck) are posted below. One seems to indicate that safety issues of spent fuel pools were not considered-apparently not required to be considered by the NRC. In the document, we find other earthquake related considerations, but not the issue of the spent fuel pools, per se. [August 27th clarification-update: As of 2012, “the NRC is requiring all operating reactor licensees to perform an updated seismic hazard evaluation for each site, which will include an evaluation of spent fuel pool seismic risk (NRC 2012b). Should new information indicate spent fuel pool risk is significantly greater than previously considered, the NRC would take the appropriate regulation action to ensure protection to public health and safety“. (NRC, Aug. 2014, “GEIS Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel“, pp. F-10-F-11) On August 26th the NRC noted that: “The continued storage rule adopts the findings of the GEIS regarding the environmental impacts of storing spent fuel at any reactor site after the reactor’s licensed period of operations. As a result, those generic impacts do not need to be re-analyzed in the environmental reviews for individual licenses.” Do they or don’t they have to reanalyze? It sounds like they will re-license and then require retrofit if there is a problem.]
In fact, the inspector appears mostly concerned that the law be followed for he seems willing to allow exemption from the law. From “Differing Professional Opinion – Diablo Canyon Seismic Issues“, document by Dr. Michael Peck (made available by Friends of the Earth, at the link above): “Recommended Action: The NRC to initiate enforcement action to ensure PG&E complies with plant technical specification required actions to shutdown the Diablo Canyon reactors. The reactors should remain shut down pending demonstration that SSC safety functions can be meet at the higher seismic stress levels or until the NRC approves necessary dispensation and/or exemptions from the applicable regulatory and Operating License requirements.” (p. 3) (Emphasis our own) Wasn’t it abusive Vatican dispensations and indulgences for sins that caused the Reformation? Isn’t it time to either reform or get rid of the NRC?
Regarding the Spent Fuel Pools:
(structure, system, or component (SSC)
safe shutdown earthquake (SSE) design
double design earthquake (DDE)
He was apparently transferred for raising these concerns:
(Emphasis added on both pages. Original at FOE link).
The California Energy Commission made the following points about the Diablo Canyon Spent Fuel Pools (spent fuel pools are also a concern for closed reactors):
“The inventory of the Diablo Canyon spent fuel pools as of June 2013 was 2,112 spent nuclear fuel assemblies, including 1,060 assemblies from Unit 1 and 1,052 assemblies from Unit 2.298 PG&E’s 2011 IEPR response indicated that the spent fuel pool inventory was 2,164 assemblies and that the ISFSI contained 16 storage casks, each containing 32 spent fuel assemblies. In 2012, PG&E loaded an additional 7 casks, bringing the number of storage casks to 23. PG&E planned to load an additional 6 casks during the summer of 2013.
Although PG&E has made progress in moving used fuel assemblies from wet to dry storage, the density in the spent fuel pools is still roughly four times the design capacity of the original spent fuel racks. Furthermore, if relicensed,299 PG&E intends to store the spent fuel generated during the 20-year relicensing period in the spent fuel pools at close to the existing density.
In July 2010, the NRC issued requests for additional information for PG&E structures aging management programs reviewed during the aging management program audit. Request for additional information B2.1.32-4 requested further information in response to reports from Diablo Canyon personnel that the spent fuel pool has had a persistent minor leak for many years. It was unclear to staff if leakage of the borated water has degraded either the concrete or embedded steel reinforcement that is inaccessible for inspection. PG&E’s response indicated that the Unit 2 spent fuel pool has had persistent minor leakage varying from 50 to 975 milliliters (ml) per week, with a typical range of 300 to 500 ml per week, and that the evaluations to date have not been able to identify conclusively the root cause of the leakage. The path of the leakage is through the liner to the spent fuel pool leak chase monitoring location. Structures that could be potentially affected by the presence of the borated water are the spent fuel pool concrete and structural steel. PG&E concluded that, based on evaluation of industry experience on spent fuel pool leakage, the amount of leakage being experienced was acceptable as there is a negligible adverse effect on the concrete and reinforcing steel. However, the extent of damage to the Unit 2 spent fuel pool concrete and embedded steel reinforcement remains unknown in inaccessible areas. PG&E’s current and planned wet storage practices at Diablo Canyon comply with NRC license requirements, the safety of which is supported by a July 2013 consequence study conducted by the NRC. The study sought to examine if faster removal of older, colder spent reactor fuel from pools to dry cask storage significantly reduces risks to public health and safety. This study compared potential accident consequences from a pool nearly filled with spent fuel and a pool in which fuel that had cooled sufficiently had been removed. The regulatory analysis for the NRC study indicates that expediting movement of spent fuel from the pool does not provide a substantial safety enhancement for the reference plant.
However, the NRC study does not appear to be supported by National Academy of Sciences conclusions from the report Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage: Public Report (2006) that dry cask storage offers several advantages over pool storage. Dry cask storage is a passive system that relies on natural air circulation for cooling, rather than requiring water to be continually pumped into cooling pools to replace water lost to evaporation caused by the hot spent fuel. Also, dry cask storage divides the inventory of spent fuel among a large number of discrete, robust containers, rather than concentrating it in a relatively small number of pools. The National Academy of Sciences report also concluded that while successful attacks on spent fuel pools are difficult, they are a possibility and could lead to the release of large amounts of radioactive material.” See pp. 203-205 “California Energy Commission. 2013. 2013 Integrated Energy Policy Report“. Publication Number: CEC-100-2013-001-CMF http://www.energy.ca.gov/2013publications/CEC-100-2013-001/CEC-100-2013-001-CMF.pdf
MUCH OF NORTH AMERICA IS DOWNWIND FROM CALIFORNIA. Of course, we know from Chernobyl and Fukushima that the entire world is downwind. WAKE UP CALL!
August 27, 2014 postscript:
The NRC document, “Generic Environmental Impact Statement for Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel, August 2014, Waste Confidence Directorate Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, D.C.” is available online. We recommend that you download your own copy to arrive at your own conclusions. It is 1,310 pages long. If nothing else it is an example of the adage that too many cooks spoil the soup as there were 40 individuals who participated in writing it. We have not read it in its entirety, but rather skimmed through many times and searched for key words. (We have recently read through a similarly idiotic, long-winded, GEIS for ISL uranium mining by the NRC). Beware that it seems misleading, deceptive and contradictory. For instance they define “short-term” storage as 60 years. For nuclear it is very short-term but when most people see “short-term” they are not thinking 60 years, but in days or months. The 40 individuals who wrote it should be fired, but are probably kept on because of their apparent doublespeak incompetence. One good worker could have written a coherent document in a short time.
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Request For Answers on Trump Judge Nominee Talley’s Conflicts of Interest – Wife Serves In White House; He Loves Ghosts; Hates the Environment and Endangered Species
abortion rights, African Americans, Ann Donaldson, Chief of Staff for White House Counsel, conflicts of interest, Deputy Assistant to Trump, Don McGahn, endangered species, Enforcement Acts, environment, EPA, ghost hunters, Ghosts, KKK, Miranda Rights, Mueller, Nathan Bedford Forrest, obstruction of justice, paranormal, Right to an attorney, Russia, Talley, Trump, Trump investigation, U.S. Grant, US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama
Trump trying to set up judges to protect himself?
Brett Joseph Talley was nominated by Trump to become judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Middle_District_of_Alabama
Talley’s wife “Ann Donaldson, serves as Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff for the White House Counsel, Don McGahn… Ms. Donaldson has emerged in recent weeks as a witness in the special counsel’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice” (See letter below).
Talley is interested in ghosts and other paranormal things, while hating the environment – against EPA and endangered species, according to the info he did turn in. At least he’s got consistency. Everything’s going to be dead once Trump’s through with it.
While not the topic of the letter, which is found further below, notice that Talley has one work on Lovecraft and two on “forbidden knowledge”. These seem to be a common theme: “Forbidden, dark, esoterically veiled knowledge is a central theme in many of Lovecraft’s works“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft Perhaps this is a glimpse into the inner psychological machinations of the Trump admin. Who knew that Alabama was so weird?
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Talley%20SJQ.pdf
“Feinstein Requests Answers on Talley Conflicts, Online Commentary Nov 17 2017
Washington—In light of Brett Talley’s failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest and online political commentary, Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today requested that Talley answer additional questions.
Feinstein wrote, “Earlier this week, after the Committee discharged your nomination, the press reported several items about your background that had not been previously disclosed to the Committee – either in your Senate Questionnaire or at your hearing. Specifically, it was reported that you may have additional conflicts of interest based on your wife’s current role at the White House and that you appear to have authored inflammatory online commentary on important issues that was previously undisclosed to the Committee. Based on these reports, we are asking you provide additional information to the Committee.”
Full text of the letter follows:
Brett J. Talley
Office of Legal Policy
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Dear Mr. Talley:
Earlier this week, after the Committee discharged your nomination, the press reported several items about your background that had not been previously disclosed to the Committee – either in your Senate Questionnaire or at your hearing. Specifically, it was reported that you may have additional conflicts of interest based on your wife’s current role at the White House and that you appear to have authored inflammatory online commentary on important issues that was previously undisclosed to the Committee. Based on these reports, we are asking you provide additional information to the Committee.
As you know, Question 24 on the Senate Judiciary Questionnaire asks judicial nominees to identify family members who present potential conflicts of interest. This is because occasions can arise where nominees will need to recuse themselves from cases in which a family member is involved. On Monday, the New York Times reported that your wife, Ann Donaldson, serves as Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff for the White House Counsel, Don McGahn. The article states that “Ms. Donaldson has emerged in recent weeks as a witness in the special counsel’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice” (attached). This fact was not disclosed in your questionnaire submitted to the Committee.
Federal district courts around the country, such as the one you are nominated to, are hearing cases involving President Trump’s executive actions. For example, federal district courts in Hawaii, Maryland, and several others, heard cases challenging President Trump’s travel ban. Please answer the following questions:
1. Do you believe your wife’s role as an attorney in the White House does not present a potential conflict of interest, if you are confirmed?
2. What issues has your wife worked on in the White House Counsel’s Office?
3. Is the reporting accurate that your wife has been interviewed by Special Counsel Mueller? If so, do you commit to recusing yourself from any case arising from Mr. Mueller’s investigation?
4. Do you commit to recusing from any case involving President Trump’s actions or executive authority for the duration that your wife serves in the White House Counsel’s Office?
Additionally, this week, BuzzFeed News reported there were more online political comments written by you under a pseudonym, “BamainBoston”, on a University of Alabama sports fan website called TideFans.com. Subsequently, Slate.com published articles discussing other online comments you wrote under the same pseudonym (attached). These posts had not been provided to the Committee prior to your hearing. Please answer the following questions:
1. BuzzFeed News reported that after the Sandy Hook Elementary tragedy when a gunman took the lives of 20 children, you wrote, “My solution would be to stop being a nation of pansies and man up. . . . Everyone should know that part of their social responsibility is to learn how to use a firearm effectively and carry one with them at all times.”
a. Did you author this post?
b. Why was this not provided to the Committee as part of your questionnaire?
c. What did you mean by the phrase “man up”?
d. Do you still believe that it is everyone’s “social responsibility” to carry a firearm with them “at all times”?
2. Slate.com reported that you wrote a comment (also under the “BamainBoston” pseudonym) regarding Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate Army general during the Civil War and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The post stated that “It was only after the perceived depredations of the Union army during reconstruction that Forrest joined (it is highly unlikely that he founded or acted as Grand Wizard) the first KKK, which was entirely different from the KKK of the early 19th Century.”
c. What led you to defend Nathan Bedford Forrest and his membership in the KKK?
d. Please explain your understanding of the views that the “first KKK” held regarding African Americans, and how these views were “entirely different from the KKK of the early 19th Century.”
e. Please explain whether your online comment accounted for enactment of the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 passed by the United States Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.
f. Please detail what sources of information you relied upon to inform your views.
3. Slate.com also reported that you wrote a comment (under the “BamainBoston” pseudonym) regarding Roe v. Wade and Miranda v. Arizona, describing them as “indefensible.” The post stated that while you considered “very few” U.S. Supreme Court decisions to be “indefensible when it comes to an interpretation of the Constitution,” you believed that “Roe v. Wade and Miranda are probably the worst offenders,” and further stated, “but that court is long gone, thank God.”
c. Do you stand by your comment that Roe and Miranda are “indefensible”?
d. Do you commit to recusing in any case involving women’s right to access abortion or a criminal suspect’s right to be informed of her rights to remain silent and be provided an attorney?
4. Have you posted online about any other legal, political, or social issues on any other website, blog, or social media platform that was not provided to the Committee? If yes, please provide copies of each post.
5. What other names or pseudonyms, if any, have you used to post comments online about any legal, political, or social issue?
6. BuzzFeed also suggests that two posts written under the pseudonym “BamainBoston” in 2012 were edited on June 28, 2017—the same day that, according to your Questionnaire, you met with Senators Shelby and Strange about a potential district court nomination.
a. Did you edit those posts on June 28? If so, what edits did you make and why?
b. Once you decided to seek a judicial nomination or became aware that you were under consideration for a federal judgeship, have you taken any steps to delete, edit, or restrict access to any statements previously available on the Internet or otherwise available to the public? If so, please provide the Committee with your original comments and indicate what edits were made.
7. As the Deputy Assistant Attorney General responsible for judicial nominations in the Office of Legal Policy, you have been responsible for advising President Trump’s judicial nominees on what information they must disclose to the Committee. During the last Administration, for example, Stephen Bough, a nominee to the Western District of Missouri, disclosed not only his own blog posts but also his commentary on other authors’ blog posts and on other websites, because Question 12a asks nominees to disclose material they have authored, including “material published only on the Internet.” (Stephen Bough Senate Judiciary Questionnaire, pg. 10).
a. What have you told other judicial nominees in terms of what online commentary they need to disclose to the Committee?
b. Specifically, have you advised other nominees not to disclose online posts or comments they have authored regarding legal, political, or social issues? If so, please disclose the names of the nominees you have so advised.
The Senate must consider carefully each nominee’s record and reflect on whether they are able to be fair, independent, and impartial. Information about your potential conflicts of interest and your public political commentary are critical to that inquiry. Please respond to these questions as soon as possible. We believe the Senate should not move forward on your confirmation until this information has been provided and Senators have an opportunity to evaluate and review it.”
https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?id=5BBF3A16-49AF-4AA7-8F95-2C7FEC50F74C
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The Lesser Known Story of India’s Role in Ethiopian Land Deals
Africa, Anuak, corrupt elites, corruption, deforestation, East Africa, Ethiopia, food, foreign investment, Gambela National Park, Horn of Africa, India, India overpopulation, land grabs, Nuer, overpopulation, peasants, property, refugees, Saudi Arabia, scramble for agricultural land, shortage agricultural land, world food
From “The Conversation“:
India has become the biggest land investor in Ethiopia. There are concerns at the behaviour of Indian firms in the Gambela ecological hotspot.
By Mohammad Amir Anwar, University of Johannesburg
The global food price crises between 2008 and 2009 led countries that bore the brunt of the catastrophe to look elsewhere for agricultural land to mitigate the effects.
In 2008 prices of some foods, including wheat, soared by 130% in a single year and the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index shot up 40%.
The result was a frenzied scramble that saw countries acquire an estimated 40 million hectares of land in foreign countries, most of it in Africa.
A great deal of attention has been paid to the role of the US, the largest investor in land in the world, China and Middle Eastern countries. Much less attention has been given to the role of India. A global land monitoring initiative, Land Matrix, ranks India as one of the top 10 investors in land abroad. It is the biggest investor in land in Ethiopia, with Indian companies accounting for almost 70% the land acquired by foreigners after 2008.
Indian land deals in Ethiopia are the result of the strong convergence in the two countries’ domestic political-economic policies. Both advocate the privatisation of public assets and increasing reliance on free trade and open markets.
India’s investment in land has been driven by the need to obviate the effects of spiralling food prices by outsourcing food supply. Ethiopia’s decisions are driven by its development policy based on commercialisation of agriculture and reliance on foreign investments.
Rough estimates suggest Indian firms have acquired roughly 600 000 hectares of land in Ethiopia. This is more than ten times the size of land acquired by firms in India under the country’s special economic zones policy. India is followed closely by Saudi Arabian firms, with 500 000 hectares of land, in Ethiopia.
What drives Indian firms to Ethiopia
India’s ability to feed its 1.22 billion people is under increasing strain. This is due to a rapidly growing population, low agricultural productivity, reductions in farm sizes, declining water tables, increasing control of the seed sector by multi-nationals and a gradual withdrawal since the 1990s of the farm support system.
India introduced special economic zones in 2005 hoping it would lead to agricultural development through the consolidation of land holdings. The intention was that this would lead to industrialisation.
But the policy exposed the oldest contradiction of capitalism – primitive accumulation which includes privatisation of land, the forced expulsion of peasant populations and the conversion of common, collective and state property rights to exclusive property rights.
Widespread resistance movements began in many states, stalling some of the biggest zones, most notably in Nandigram. The protests led to the fall of the Left Front state government of West Bengal in 2011 after 34 years in power.
To meet consumption needs the Indian government started encouraging firms to seek land abroad for growing crops. This was driven by two factors: it was struggling to make more land available for investors and the spike in global food price crisis in 2008.
The lure of Ethiopia
The Ethiopian agricultural sector lies at the heart of the government’s development strategy. It has set out to attract more foreign investment in large-scale commercial agriculture as outlined in its 1993 policy which was later reformulated in 2005.
The policy marked a move towards a more trade-orientated approach, and a desire to attract foreign investors. Over 3.5 million hectares of land has been earmarked for investment by foreign firms.
Need for caution
Foreign investors need to tread carefully when acquiring land in Africa. This is best illustrated in the Gambela region of Ethiopia which I visited earlier this year. The area has been the centre of large-scale land acquisitions by Indian as well as other foreign investors.
According to the Ethiopian constitution, land is administered by the regional government. However, the federal government’s move to govern land investments through a centralised agency called the Agricultural Investment Land Administration Agency has led to discontent among Gambela regional government officials.
The concern is that the behaviour of foreign companies is not being managed adequately. There is a strong sense that land deals in Ethiopia have benefited both the foreign investors and domestic private capitalists with close ties to the ruling party.
A recent study found that foreign investors are farming less than 8% of the land they have acquired. During my visit I learnt that Karuturi Global Ltd, an Indian firm which has 100 000 hectares of land in Gambela, had only 1 000 hectares under production.
A lack of consultation with people living in the area is also a problem. Gambela is an ecological hotspot with Gambela National Park at its centre. It is home to Nuer and Anuak people whose livelihoods are threatened by investors illegally clearing trees in the park. These clearances happen mostly without consultation. This has led to conflict in the region.
Given the political nature of international land deals and the role states play in shaping policy and practice, there must be scrutiny on the role governments play in such deals because of their close alliance with private capital.
This is especially so for India. It can ill-afford to be tainted by accusations of complicity in land deals that disadvantage the people of Africa given the role it sees for itself in promoting co-operation among countries in the south to mitigate the effects of skewed power relations with the north.
Mohammad Amir Anwar, Post-doctoral fellow, University of Johannesburg
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
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The Nationals are under .500 for the first time since 2011
By Matthew PouliotApr 24, 2013, 6:03 PM EDT
The Cardinals completed a three-game sweep in D.C. by winning 4-2 on Wednesday, dropping the Nationals to 10-11 on the young season.
It’s the first time the popular NL pennant pick has been below .500 since finishing the 2011 season with an 80-81 record. Last year, the Nats were over .500 after every game but one (they started the season 2-2).
Minus Ryan Zimmerman, the Nationals scored just four runs in the three games against the Cardinals. One of those runs was scored by Stephen Strasburg today after his sixth-inning single, but that was the only run the Nationals amassed while he was in the contest. Strasburg dropped to 1-4 due to the lack of help.
It was the 10th time in their 21 games that the Nationals have scored two runs or fewer. Only the Marlins, with 13, have more such games. The Mariners, Padres and Phillies also have 10 apiece.
In comparison, the Yankees and Mets have just three such games.
Especially since the pitching staff is still healthy, it’s far too early for Nationals fans to panic. Strasburg and Gio Gonzalez haven’t been as dominant as hoped, but there aren’t any big warning signs there and both Jordan Zimmermann and Ross Detwiler have looked very good. Even if Dan Haren proves to be a lost cause, that’s something they can overcome once the offense gets going. And the offense is too good not to get going before much longer.
Tags: Dan Haren, Gio Gonzalez, Jordan Zimmermann, Ross Detwiler, Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasburg, Washington Nationals
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Researchers highlight new direction for drug discovery
In a discovery that rebuffs conventional scientific thinking, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) have discovered a novel way to block the activity of the fusion protein responsible for Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer found in children and young adults.
In the paper published online July 5 in Nature Medicine, they report discovering and successfully testing a small molecule that keeps the fusion protein from sticking to another protein that is critical for tumor formation. The researchers say this interaction is unique - and is especially surprising since the Ewing's sarcoma fusion protein is extremely flexible, which allows it to change shape constantly.
"Most targeted small molecule cancer drugs inhibit the intrinsic activity of a single protein, but our agent stops two proteins from interacting. This has never been shown before with a cancer-causing fusion protein and represents a potentially novel medical therapy in the future," says the study's lead investigator, Jeffrey Toretsky, MD, a pediatric oncology physician and researcher at GUMC's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The study could provide a model upon which to design treatment for other disorders caused by the interaction between two proteins, and may be especially useful in cancers caused by translocations of genes, such as sarcomas and leukemias, the researchers say. Agents in use now that work against fusion proteins inhibit a single protein to stop intrinsic enzymatic activity; one example is Gleevec, used for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). The Ewing's sarcoma fusion protein, known as EWS-FLI1, lacks enzymatic activity, "and this difference is why our work is significant," Toretsky says.
In the United States, about 500 patients annually are diagnosed with the cancer, and they are treated with a combination of five different chemotherapy drugs. Between 60-70 percent of patients survive over time, but with side effects from the treatment. Few additional treatment options are available for patients whose cancer progresses, Toretsky says.
Ewing's sarcoma is caused by the exchange of DNA between two chromosomes, a process known as a translocation. The new EWS-FLI1 gene is created when the EWS gene on chromosome 22 fuses to the FLI1 gene on chromosome 11, and its product is the fusion protein responsible for cancer formation. It is a so-called disordered protein, which means it does not have a rigid structure. A number of cancer-causing proteins are disordered.
In their 15-year search for a new treatment for Ewing's sarcoma, Toretsky and his colleagues were the first to make a recombinant EWS-FLI1 fusion protein. They used it to discover that the fusion protein stuck to another protein, RNA helicase A (RHA), a molecule that forms protein complexes in order to control gene transcription. "We believe that when RHA binds to EWS-FLI1, the combination becomes more powerful at turning genes on and off," says the study's first author, Hayriye Verda Erkizan, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Toretsky's lab.
Then, from a library of 3,000 small molecules loaned to Georgetown from the National Cancer Institute, the researchers searched for a small molecule that would bind on to EWS-FLI1. They found one, and further discovered the same molecule, NSC635437, could stop EWS-FLI1's fusion protein from sticking to RHA.
This was a wonderful discovery, Erkizan says, because the notion long accepted among scientists is that it is not possible to block protein-protein interactions given that the surface of many of these proteins are slippery - much too flexible for a drug to bind to.
They tested the agent in laboratory cell culture, and with the help of GUMC's Drug Discovery Program, the researchers designed a stronger derivative compound they called YK-4-279. In this study, they tested YK-4-279 in two different animal models of Ewing's sarcoma and found that the agent significantly inhibited the growth of tumors. There was an 80% reduction in the growth of treated tumors compared to untreated tumors.
Toretsky says that while the agent needs to be "optimized," these results serve as a proof of principle that inhibiting protein-protein interaction can work as a novel therapeutic that will target only cancer cells.
"We may be able to use this strategy to attack proteins we thought to be impervious to manipulation," he says.
Source: Georgetown University Medical Center (news : web)
Citation: Researchers highlight new direction for drug discovery (2009, July 5) retrieved 16 July 2019 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2009-07-highlight-drug-discovery.html
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Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute
The Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, previously Burnham Institute for Medical Research, is a non-profit medical research institute with locations in La Jolla, California, Orlando, Florida, and Santa Barbara, California. The more than 850 scientists at Sanford-Burnham are focused on revealing the fundamental molecular causes of various diseases, with research including topics such as cancer, neuroscience, stem cell research, diabetes and obesity. Research at Sanford-Burnham is supported by funding from National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, and Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation among others, and partnerships with pharmaceutical companies such as Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development. In 2008, Sanford-Burnham was awarded a $97.9 million grant by NIH to establish a high-throughput screening screening center. William H. Fishman, M.D., Ph.D., and his wife Lillian Fishman founded the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation in 1976 after retiring from Tufts University School of Medicine. The Foundation focused on oncodevelopment, the study of developmental biology in conjunction with oncology as a means to better understand cancer.
http://www.sanfordburnham.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford-Burnham_Medical_Research_Institute
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Infobox military person image param needs updating, Articles to be merged from January 2013, All articles to be merged,
American aviators
Aviators from Virginia
American Episcopalians
American people of English descent
Burials at Arlington National Cemetery
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Explorers of Antarctica
United States and the Antarctic
Byrd family of Virginia
United States Navy World War II admirals
United States Naval Aviators
Recipients of the Navy Cross (United States)
United States Navy Medal of Honor recipients
Tiffany Cross Medal of Honor recipients
Recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (United States)
Recipients of the Legion of Merit
United States Naval Academy alumni
United States Navy admirals
National Aviation Hall of Fame inductees
University of Virginia people
Virginia Military Institute alumni
People from Winchester, Virginia
Discovery and invention controversies
American polar explorers
20th-century explorers
Recipients of the Navy Distinguished Service Medal
American Polar Society honorary members
Recipients of the Gold Lifesaving Medal
Recipients of the Langley Medal
Non-combat recipients of the Medal of Honor
Richard E. Byrd
Byrd in 1928
Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
11 March 1957(1957-03-11) (aged 68)
Service/branch
Battles/wars
Navy Cross
Navy Distinguished Service Medal
Distinguished Flying Cross
Legion of Merit
Congressional Gold Medal
Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr., USN (25 October 1888 – 11 March 1957) was an American naval officer who specialized in feats of exploration. He was a pioneering American aviator, polar explorer, and organizer of polar logistics. Aircraft flights, in which he served as a navigator and expedition leader, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a segment of the Arctic Ocean, and a segment of the Antarctic Plateau. Byrd claimed that his expeditions had been the first to reach the North Pole and the South Pole by air. That Roald Amundsen has the first verifiable claim to each pole is now the majority opinion among polar experts.[1][2] Byrd was a recipient of the Medal of Honor, the highest honor for heroism given by the United States.
Ancestry Edit
He was the son of Esther Bolling (Flood) and Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr. He was a descendant of one of the First Families of Virginia. His ancestors include planter John Rolfe and his wife Pocahontas, William Byrd II of Westover Plantation, who established Richmond, and Robert "King" Carter, a colonial governor. He was the brother of Virginia Governor and U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, a dominant figure in Virginia Democratic Party between the 1920s and 1960s; their father served as Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates for a time.
Family Edit
Admiral Byrd was married (20 January 1915) to the former Marie Donaldson Ames (he named a region of Antarctic land he discovered "Marie Byrd Land") and had four children:
Richard Evelyn III, (grandchildren Richard Byrd, Leverett S. Byrd, Ames Byrd, and Harry Flood Byrd II)
Evelyn Bolling Byrd Clarke (grandchildren Evelyn Byrd Clarke, Marie Ames Clarke, Eleanor Clarke, and Richard Byrd Clarke)
Catherine Agnes Byrd Breyer (grandchildren Robert Byrd Breyer and Katherine Ames Breyer)
Helen Byrd Stabler (grandchildren David Stabler and Ann Blanchard Stabler)
He also had 3 great grandchildren by Richard Byrd Clarke
Samuel Ames Clarke
Anna Marie Clarke
Richard Byrd Clarke Jr
Education and U.S. Navy Edit
Byrd attended the Virginia Military Institute for two years and spent one year at the University of Virginia before financial circumstances inspired his transfer to the United States Naval Academy, where he was appointed Midshipman on May 28, 1908.[3]
On June 8, 1912 he graduated from Academy and was commissioned an ensign in the United States Navy. On July 14, 1912 he was assigned to the battleship USS Missouri and later assigned to the gunboat USS Dolphin.[4] On March 15, 1916 he was medically retired, promoted to the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) and assigned as the Inspector and Instructor for the Rhode Island Naval Militia in Providence, Rhode Island.[5]
Although technically retired, Byrd was able to serve as a retired officer on active duty during the First World War. He took flying lessons and earned his pilot wings. He developed a passion for flight, and pioneered many techniques for navigating airplanes over the open ocean including drift indicators and bubble sextants. Byrd was assigned to the Office of Naval Operations and was promoted to lieutenant on September 2, 1918 and to temporary lieutenant commander on September 21, 1918.
After the war, Byrd's expertise in aerial navigation resulted in his appointment to plan the flight path for the U.S. Navy's 1919 transatlantic crossing. Of the three flying boats that attempted it, only Albert Read's NC-4 aircraft completed the trip, becoming the first ever transatlantic flight.[6]
1926 North Pole flight, and controversy Edit
On 9 May 1926, Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett attempted a flight over the North Pole in a Fokker F-VII Tri-motor called the Josephine Ford. This flight went from Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and back to its take-off airfield. Byrd claimed to have reached the Pole. This trip earned Byrd widespread acclaim, including being awarded the Medal of Honor and enabled him to secure funding for subsequent attempts to fly over the South Pole.
From 1926 until 1996, there were doubts, defenses, and heated controversy about whether or not Byrd actually reached the North Pole. In 1958 Norwegian-American aviator and explorer Bernt Balchen cast doubt on Byrd's claim on the basis of his extensive personal knowledge of the airplane's speed. In 1971 Balchen speculated that Byrd had simply circled aimlessly while out of sight of land.[7] However, Floyd Bennett, the pilot on the trip never contested that they didn't reach the pole while he was still alive(Bennett would pass away in 1928). Simply put, the barren vicinity that the Josephine Ford reached was considered at the time, the geographical North Pole, rather than the pinpoint North Pole.
The 1996 release of Byrd's diary of the 9 May 1926 flight revealed erased (but still legible) sextant sights that sharply differ with Byrd's later 22 June typewritten official report to the National Geographic Society. Byrd took a sextant reading of the Sun at 7:07:10 GCT. His erased diary record shows the apparent (observed) solar altitude to have been 19°25'30", while his later official typescript reports the same 7:07:10 apparent solar altitude to have been 18°18'18".[8] On the basis of this and other data in the diary, Dennis Rawlins concluded that Byrd steered accurately, and flew about 80% of the distance to the Pole before turning back because of an engine oil leak, but later falsified his official report to support his claim of reaching the pole.[9] Others disagree with Rawlins. In 1998, Colonel William Molett, an experienced navigator published "Due north?". Molett maintained that Rawlins had put too much significance in erased navigational calculations which can be explained by any number of other reasons, including favorable windspeeds as well as simple human error due to lack of sleep and stress.[10]
The Fokker FVIIa/3M – "Josephine Ford", on display at The Henry Ford Museum
Accepting that the conflicting data in the typed report's flight times indeed require both northward and southward groundspeeds greater than the flight's 85 mph airspeed, a remaining Byrd defender posits a westerly-moving anti-cyclone that tailwind-boosted Byrd's groundspeed on both outward and inward legs, allowing the distance claimed to be covered in the time claimed. (The theory is based on rejecting handwritten sextant data in favor of typewritten alleged dead-reckoning data.)[11] This suggestion has been refuted by Dennis Rawlins[12] who adds[13] that the sextant data in the long unavailable original official typewritten report are all expressed to 1", a precision not possible on Navy sextants of 1926 and not the precision of the sextant data in Byrd's diary for 1925 or the 1926 flight, which was normal (half or quarter of a minute of arc). Some sources claim that Floyd Bennett and Byrd later revealed, in private conversations, that they did not reach the pole. One source claims that Floyd Bennett later told a fellow pilot that they did not reach the pole.[14] It is also claimed that Byrd confessed his failure to reach the North Pole during a long walk with Dr. Isaiah Bowman in 1930.[15]
If Byrd and Bennett did not reach the North Pole, it is extremely likely that the first flight over the Pole occurred a few days later, on May 12, 1926 with the flight of the airship Norge and its crew of Roald Amundsen, Umberto Nobile, Oscar Wisting, and others. This flight went from Spitsbergen (Svalbard) to Alaska nonstop, so there is little doubt that they went over the North Pole. Amundsen and Wisting had both been members of the first expedition to the South Pole, December 1911. Later, the first human being to actually set foot on the North Pole ice was Joseph O. Fletcher, after he landed his aircraft and made a short excursion.
Trans-Atlantic flight, 1927 Edit
Lt. Com. Byrd and aircraft
In 1927 Byrd announced he had the backing of the 'American Trans-Oceanic Company, Inc.', which was established in 1914 by Rodman Wanamaker with the purpose of building the aircraft to complete the journey. Byrd was one of several aviators who attempted to win the Orteig Prize in 1927 for making the first nonstop flight between the United States and France. His flight was sponsored by department-store magnate Rodman Wanamaker, an early visionary of Trans-Atlantic commercial flight.
Once again Byrd named Floyd Bennett as his chief pilot, with support from Bernt Balchen, Bert Acosta, and George Noville. During a practice takeoff with Tony Fokker at the controls and Bennett in the co-pilots seat, the Fokker Trimotor airplane, America, crashed, severely injuring Bennett and slightly injuring Byrd. As the plane was being repaired, Charles Lindbergh won the prize. But Byrd continued with his quest, naming Balchen to replace Bennett as chief pilot. Byrd, Balchen, Acosta, and Noville flew from Roosevelt Field East Garden City, New York on 29 June 1927. Arriving over France, cloud cover prevented a landing in Paris; they returned to the coast of Normandy, crash-landing near the beach at Ver-sur-Mer without fatalities on 1 July 1927.[16]
After he returned to the US, Byrd wrote an article for the August 1927 edition of Popular Science Monthly in which he predicted that while specially modified aircraft with one to three crewmen would fly the Atlantic non-stop, it would be another 20 year before it would be realized on a commercial scale.[17]
First Antarctic expedition, 1928–1930 Edit
It has been suggested that Arthur Treadwell Walden be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since January 2013.
Byrd's expedition
In 1928, Byrd began his first expedition to the Antarctic involving two ships, and three airplanes: Byrd's Flagship was The City of New York (a Norwegian sealing ship previously named Samson that had come into fame as a ship in the vicinity of Titanic when the latter was sinking); a Ford Trimotor called the Floyd Bennett (named after the recently deceased pilot of Byrd's previous expeditions); a Fairchild FC-2W2, NX8006, built 1928, named "Stars And Stripes" (now displayed at the Virginia Aviation Museum, on loan from the National Air and Space Museum); and a Fokker Universal monoplane called the Virginia (Byrd's birth state). A base camp named "Little America" was constructed on the Ross Ice Shelf and scientific expeditions by snowshoe, dog-sled, snowmobile, and airplane began. Photographic expeditions and geological surveys were undertaken for the duration of that summer, and constant radio communications were maintained with the outside world. After their first winter, their expeditions were resumed, and on 28 November 1929, the famous flight to the South Pole and back was launched. Byrd, along with pilot Bernt Balchen, co-pilot/radioman Harold June, and photographer Ashley McKinley, flew the Ford Trimotor to the South Pole and back in 18 hours, 41 minutes. They had difficulty gaining enough altitude, and they had to dump empty gas tanks, as well as their emergency supplies, in order to achieve the altitude of the Polar Plateau. However, the flight was successful, and it entered Byrd into the history books.
As a result of his notoriety, Byrd was promoted to the rank of rear admiral by a special act of Congress on December 21, 1929. As he was only 41 years old at the time, this promotion made Byrd the youngest admiral in the history of the United States Navy.[18] (Note - Some sources claim that the distinction of being the youngest admiral in the history of the US Navy belongs to Elmo Zumwalt but Zumwalt was 44 years old at the time of his promotion to rear admiral.)
After a further summer of exploration, the expedition returned to North America on 18 June 1930. A 19 year-old American Boy Scout, Paul Allman Siple, was chosen to accompany the expedition. Unlike the 1926 flight, this expedition was honored with the gold medal of the American Geographical Society. This was also seen in the film With Byrd at the South Pole (1930) which covered his trip there.
Byrd, by then an internationally recognized, pioneering American polar explorer and aviator, served for a time as Honorary National President (1931–1935) of Pi Gamma Mu, the international honor society in the social sciences. In 1928, he carried the Society's flag during a historic expedition to the Antarctic to dramatize the spirit of adventure into the unknown, characterizing both the natural and social sciences.[19][20]
Byrd's later Antarctic expeditions Edit
Admiral Byrd (circa 1955)
Byrd undertook four more expeditions to Antarctica from 1933–35, 1939–40, 1946–47 and 1955–56.
On his second expedition, in 1934, Byrd spent five winter months alone operating a meteorological station, Advance Base, from which he narrowly escaped with his life after suffering carbon monoxide poisoning from a poorly ventilated stove. Unusual radio transmissions from Byrd finally began to alarm the men at the base camp, who then attempted to go to Advance Base. The first two trips were failures due to darkness, snow, and mechanical troubles. Finally, Thomas Poulter, E.J. Demas, and Amory Waite arrived at Advanced Base, where they found Byrd in poor physical health. The men remained at Advanced Base until 12 October when an airplane from the base camp picked up Dr. Poulter and Byrd. The rest of the men returned to base camp with the tractor. This expedition is described by Byrd in his autobiography Alone. It is also commemorated in a U.S. postage stamp issued at the time, and a considerable amount of mail using it was sent from Byrd's base at Little America, which was powered by a Jacobs Wind 2.5 kW. Later a souvenir sheet was also issued.[21]
Byrd Antarctic expedition Commemorative Issue of 1933
In late 1938, Byrd visited Hamburg and was invited to participate in the 1938/1939 German "Neuschwabenland" Antarctic Expedition, but declined.
Byrd's third expedition was his first one on which he had the official backing of the U.S. government. The project included extensive studies of geology, biology, meteorology and exploration. Within a few months, in March 1940, Byrd was recalled to active duty in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. The expedition continued in Antarctica without him. As a senior officer in the United States Navy, Byrd, performed national defense service during World War II (1941–45), mostly as a consultant to the senior Navy commanders. From 1942 to 1945 he headed important missions to the Pacific, including surveys of remote islands for airfields. On one assignment he visited the fighting front in Europe. He was repeatedly cited for meritorious service and was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
File:Alone (Richard Byrd autobiography - cover art).png
The fourth culminating expedition, Operation Highjump, is the largest Antarctic expedition to date. In 1946, US Navy Secretary James Forrestal assembled a huge amphibious naval force for an Antarctic Expedition expected to last six to eight months. Besides the flagship USS Mount Olympus and the aircraft carrier USS Philippine Sea, there were thirteen US Navy support ships, six helicopters, six flying boats, two seaplane tenders and fifteen other aircraft. The total number of personnel involved was over 4,000. The armada arrived in the Ross Sea on 31 December 1946, and made aerial explorations of an area half the size of the United States, recording ten new mountain ranges. The major area covered was the eastern coastline of Antarctica from 150 degrees east to the Greenwich meridian.
As part of the multinational collaboration for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–58, Byrd commanded the U.S. Navy Operation Deep Freeze I in 1955–56, which established permanent Antarctic bases at McMurdo Sound, the Bay of Whales, and the South Pole.
Death Edit
Byrd died in his sleep on 11 March 1957 of a heart ailment at his Brimmer Street home in Boston.[22][23] He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.[22]
Awards, decorations, honors Edit
Bust of Richard E. Byrd by Felix de Weldon at McMurdo Station.
By the time he died, he had amassed twenty-two citations and special commendations, nine of which were for bravery and two for extraordinary heroism in saving the lives of others. In addition, he received the Medal of Honor, the Silver Lifesaving Medal, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Navy Cross, and had three ticker-tape parades. He preferred to dwell on the substance of his global adventures, and the stories of those that had gone awry as lessons learned.
Byrd was one of only four Americans in history entitled to wear a medal with their own image on it. The others were Admiral George Dewey, General John J. Pershing and Admiral William T. Sampson. As Byrd's image is on both the 1st and 2nd Byrd Antarctic Expedition medals he was the only American entitled to wear two medals with his own image on them.
In 1927, the Boy Scouts of America made Byrd an Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was given to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". The other eighteen who were awarded this distinction were: Roy Chapman Andrews; Robert Bartlett; Frederick Russell Burnham; George Kruck Cherrie; James L. Clark; Merian C. Cooper; Lincoln Ellsworth; Louis Agassiz Fuertes; George Bird Grinnell; Charles A. Lindbergh; Donald Baxter MacMillan; Clifford H. Pope; George P. Putnam; Kermit Roosevelt; Carl Rungius; Stewart Edward White; Orville Wright.[24]
Byrd Memorial on Mount Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand
Also in 1927, the City of Richmond dedicated the Richard Evelyn Byrd Flying Field, now Richmond International Airport, in Henrico County, Virginia. Byrd's Fairchild FC-2W2, NX8006, "Stars And Stripes" is on display at the Virginia Aviation Museum located on the north side of the airport, on loan from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. He was a 1929 recipient of the Langley Gold Medal from the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1931 Byrd joined the Tennessee Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Lunar crater Byrd is named after him, as was the United States Navy dry cargo ship USNS Richard E. Byrd (T-AKE-4) and the now decommissioned Charles F. Adams-class guided missile destroyer USS Richard E. Byrd (DDG-23)
In Glen Rock, New Jersey Richard E. Byrd School was dedicated in 1931. . On March 31, 1934, during a regularly scheduled broadcast, Admiral Richard E. Byrd was awarded the CBS Medal for Distinguished Contribution to Radio. Byrd’s short wave relay broadcasts, from his second Antarctic expedition, established a new chapter of communication history. Byrd was the sixth individual to receive this award.[25] The Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio was named in honor of Admiral Byrd in 1984. In 1958 the Richard Byrd library, part of the Fairfax County Public Library system opened in Springfield, Virginia. Admiral Richard E. Byrd Middle School, located in Frederick County, Virginia, was opened in 2005, and is decorated with pictures and letters from Byrd's life and career.
Richard E. Byrd Elementary School, a Department of Defense School located in Negishi (Yokohama, Japan) opened on September 20, 1948. The name was changed to R.E. Byrd Elementary School on April 5, 1960.
Memorials to Byrd can be found in two cities in New Zealand (Wellington and Dunedin). Byrd used New Zealand as his departure point for several of his Antarctic flights.
The fiftieth anniversary of Byrd's first flight over the South Pole was commemorated in a set of two postage stamps by Australian Antarctic Territory in 1979.
The long-range shortwave voice transmissions from Byrd's Antarctic expedition in 1934 was named an IEEE Milestone in 2001.[26]
Medal of Honor citation Edit
Rank and organization: Commander, United States Navy. Born: 25 October 1888, Winchester, Va. Appointed from: Virginia. Other Navy awards: Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit with gold star, Distinguished Flying Cross.
For distinguishing himself conspicuously by courage and intrepidity at the risk of his life, in demonstrating that it is possible for aircraft to travel in continuous flight from a now inhabited portion of the earth over the North Pole and return.
Awards and decorations Edit
Naval Aviator Badge
1st Row
(1926, Tiffany Cross version) Navy Cross
2nd Row
with award star Legion of Merit
with award star Distinguished Flying Cross
Navy Commendation Medal
with two award stars
3rd Row
Silver Lifesaving Medal
(1914) World War I Victory Medal
with three battle clasps Byrd Antarctic Expedition Medal
issued in Gold (1928–1930)[27] Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition Medal
American Defense Service Medal
with service star (1940) American Campaign Medal
(1943) European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal
with service star Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal
with three service stars (1942)
World War II Victory Medal (1945) United States Antarctic Expedition Medal
issued in Gold (1939–1941)[28] Antarctica Service Medal
posthumously eligible (1960) Officer of the Legion of Honor
Dates of rank Edit
United States Naval Academy Midshipman - Class of 1912
List of Antarctic expeditions
List of Medal of Honor recipients
List of Notable Freemasons
Laurence McKinley Gould
Mount Iphigene
↑ Peter Matthiessen, End of the Earth, National Geographic Society, 2003, page 197
↑ Richard Sale and Madeleine Lewis, Explorers, Smithsonian, 2005, page 34
↑ VMI to UVA to USNA
↑ Navy Register, 1914. pg. 64.
↑ Navy Register, 1917. pg. 196.
↑ Century of Flight: The Atlantic Challenge
↑ Montague, Richard (1971). Oceans, Poles, and Airmen. Random House Publishing. pp. 48.
↑ Goerler, Raimund E. (1998). To the Pole: The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925–1927. Ohio State University Press. pp. 84–85, compare to p 154.
↑ New York Times,9 May 1996, page 1; Rawlins, Dennis (January 2000). "Byrd's Heroic North Pole Failure". pp. 25–50; see pages 33–34. Rawlins, Dennis (January 2000). "Byrd's Heroic 1926 Flight & Its Faked Last Leg" (PDF). pp. 2–106; see page 40. http://www.dioi.org/vols/wa0.pdf. Retrieved 13 July 2007.
↑ The North Pole Flight of Richard E. Byrd: An Overview of the Controversy, Ohio State University
↑ Portney, Joseph (2000). "The Polar Flap: Byrd's Flight Confirmed". Litton Systems, Inc.. http://www.navworld.com/navcerebrations/polar_flap.htm. See also Portney, Joseph (1973). "The Polar Flap: Byrd's Flight Confirmed". pp. 208–218. and Portney, Joseph (1992). "History of Aerial Polar Navigation". pp. 255–264.
↑ Rawlins, Dennis (January 2000). "Byrd's Heroic 1926 Flight & Its Faked Last Leg" (PDF). pp. 2–106; see pages 69–76; also pages 54, 84–88, 99, 105. http://www.dioi.org/vols/wa0.pdf. Retrieved 13 July 2007.
↑ Ibid pp.39–41
↑ Nash, Simon (2005). The Last Explorer. Hodder. pp. 149.
↑ Fairbanks (2002). Polar Extremism: the world of Lincoln Ellsworth. University of Alaska Press. Chapter 4.
↑ Check-Six.com – The Ditching of the "America"
↑ "Why We May Wait 20 Years for Ocean Airliners" Popular Science, August 1927, p. 9
↑ U.S. Navy Register, 1930.
↑ "Richard E. Byrd 1888–1957". South-Pole.com. http://www.south-pole.com/p0000107.htm. Retrieved 8 May 2011.
↑ "Byrd Antarctic Expedition III, 1939–41". South-Pole.com. http://www.south-pole.com/p0000109.htm. Retrieved 8 May 2011.
↑ Paul Skowron, "A Philatelic Introduction to B.A.E. II: The Stamps"
↑ 22.0 22.1 Admiral Richard E. Byrd-Arlington National Cemetery
↑ "Admiral Byrd Dies at 68. Made 5 Polar Expeditions. Admiral Flew Over Both Poles and Helped Establish Antarctic as a Continent". New York Times. 9 Oct 1988. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60B14FC3D5D167B93C0A81788D85F438585F9&scp=7&sq=Richard+Evelyn+Byrd&st=p. Retrieved 23 May 2008. "5 Arctic and Antarctic Trips Provided Groundwork for U.S. Defense Concepts Frigid Testing Ground First Trip in 1928–1929. Born in Virginia. Polar Flight Eclipsed Work Under Federal Auspices. Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, U.S.N., retired, the first man to fly over the North and South Poles, died in his sleep tonight at his Brimmer Street home. He was 68 years old. ..."
↑ "Around the World". 29 August 1927. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,723029,00.html. Retrieved 24 October 2007.
↑ Our Source: "Byrd Gets CBS Award." (1934, April 1). Broadcasting with Broadcast Advertising, p. 35.
↑ "Milestones:Long-Range Shortwave Voice Transmissions from Byrd's Antarctic Expedition, 1934". IEEE Global History Network. IEEE. http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestones:Long-Range_Shortwave_Voice_Transmissions_from_Byrd%27s_Antarctic_Expedition,_1934. Retrieved 3 August 2011.
↑ "Congressional Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medals awarded to the members of Rear Admiral Richard Byrd's first Antarctic expedition". artandhistory.house.gov. http://artandhistory.house.gov/highlights.aspx?action=view&intID=393. Retrieved 2012-09-11.
↑ Public Law 79-185, 59 Stat. 536
↑ Richard E. Byrd Valor Awards
↑ Byrd Service Record
Time magazine; Monday, 8 November 1926. Born. To Mrs. Marie Ames Byrd, of Winchester, Virginia, and Boston, a daughter. Mrs. Byrd is the wife of Lieut. Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, U.S.N., who flew to the North Pole and back from Spitzbergen last spring. Lieutenant Byrd's brother, Harry F. Byrd, is Governor of Virginia.
Rodgers, Eugene (March 1997). Beyond the Barrier: The Story of Byrd's First Expedition to Antarctica. United States Naval Institute. ISBN 978-1-55750-713-6.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Richard E. Byrd.
Wikiquote has media related to: Richard E. Byrd
"The North Pole Flight of Richard E. Byrd: An Overview of the Controversy". Polar Archival Program, Ohio State University. 2007. http://library.osu.edu/sites/archives/polar/flight/controversy.php. Retrieved 14 July 2007.
"70South – information on Richard E. Byrd". 25 October 2007. http://www.70south.com/resources/history/explorers/byrd.
"Richard E. Byrd's 1926 Flight Towards the North Pole" (PDF). 25 October 2007. http://www.dioi.org/vols/wa0.pdf.
"To the Pole: The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925–1927". 15 February 2008. http://www.ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?/books/book%20pages/goerler%20to.htm.
"The Flight of the 'America' – 1927". 25 October 2007. http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/America-NX206.htm.
"Richard E. Byrd 1888–1957". 25 October 2007. http://www.south-pole.com/p0000107.htm.
"Did Richard Byrd get to the North Pole in 1926?". 25 October 2007. http://home.acadia.net/userpages/kikut/BBMainText.htm.
"A navigation expert's look at how Byrd's claim is one possible interpretation of his diary.". 25 October 2007. http://www.navworld.com/navcerebrations/polar_flap.htm.
"The History Of The Sailing Vessel City of New York, Admiral Byrd's Exploration Ship, Skippered By Captain Charles J. McGuinness". Tim McGuinness, PhD. 25 October 2007. http://sailoroffortune.com/city_of_new_york.htm.
"The Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University". 25 October 2007. http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/.
"Richard E. Byrd". Claim to Fame: Medal of Honor recipients. Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/memorial/156. Retrieved 25 October 2007.
"At the bottom of the World", Popular Mechanics, August 1930, pp. 225–241
The short film Longines Chronoscope with Richard E. Byrd is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
Retrieved from "https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Byrd?oldid=4174302"
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SABC News Western Cape
A member of the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) in the City of Cape Town says the committ...
A member of the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) in the City of Cape Town says the committee's report which former Mayor Patricia de Lille claims vindicates her from allegations of corruption, has yet to be finalised. Councillor Kevin Southgate
says the report will be tabled in council tomorrow, whereafter they will have to take any further submissions into account. De Lille has claimed that the report found that she did not use City money for upgrades at her home, which the DA accused her of. Southgate says the report will most likely only be finalised early next year: "The report has not yet been served before council. It was on the agenda for the last council meeting, but
it was then referred back to MPAC for further information. It is therefore difficult at this stage to pronounce on this particular matter, until the report comes back to MPAC and MPAC has considered the new information that has become available."
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'The situation is going to get worse': Liberals pushed to come up with answers on asylum issue
At Monday's emergency meeting of the House of Commons immigration committee, opposition members will try to put some political pressure on the government
Ontario MPP Lisa Macleod turns away after scrumming with reporters at the Ontario Legislature, in Toronto on Thursday, July 5, 2018.CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Janice Dickson
OTTAWA — With tensions over asylum seekers mounting between Ottawa and Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s new PC government, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel wants to give provincial immigration ministers another chance to air their grievances — and Lisa MacLeod says she’d happily do so.
As Ford’s community and social services minister, MacLeod is butting heads with the Liberal government over its handling of the asylum-seeker issue, and she was at it again Friday after the main federal, provincial and territorial players gathered for a meeting on the matter in Winnipeg.
She walked out of the meeting after a testy exchange with federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen, who later publicly accused Ontario of fear-mongering on asylum seekers. She called his comments “mean-spirited” and demanded an apology.
At Monday’s emergency meeting of the House of Commons immigration committee, opposition members will try to put some political pressure on the government by urging their Liberal counterparts to examine the problem, as well as the pressure it is putting on provinces.
Rempel will introduce a motion calling on the committee to “undertake a study to review the adequacy of the federal government’s response to the impact of increased asylum seekers crossing into Canada from the United States.”
She and NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan are calling on the committee to hold two more meetings this summer in hopes of learning more about what the government intends to do.
Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Ahmed Hussen stands during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, May 24, 2018. Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS
The motion calls on Hussen to testify, for the committee to meet at least twice more this summer and that the study be concluded before Aug. 3. Rempel also wants provincial ministers to either testify or provide written submissions to the committee.
MacLeod said she’d happily oblige.
Rempel called for Monday’s meeting after hearing Ontario and Quebec say they’ve run out of room for migrants. The Ontario government said it is facing a “looming crisis” next month if Ottawa doesn’t help find space for refugees and asylum seekers currently sheltered in college dorms.
Ford has demanded the federal government foot the entire bill for the province’s costs. The federal government has so far offered $11 million in help.
“If we’re going to be allocating all of these funds and they’re unbudgeted, then the government should be able to table some sort of plan, and I do feel it’s been very piecemeal and reactive,” said Rempel.
I don't think we can wait until the fall because I think the situation is going to get worse
“I don’t think we can wait until the fall because I think the situation is going to get worse.”
Canada’s Safe Third Country agreement with the U.S. stipulates that asylum seekers are required to make their claims in the first “safe” country where they arrive — meaning those who cross into Canada at an official land border crossing are sent back to make their claim in the U.S.
The agreement does not cover “irregular” or “illegal” asylum seekers — those entering Canada at unofficial points, most notably in Quebec.
The number of asylum seekers crossing between legal entry points has steadily decreased. According to new numbers released Friday, the RCMP intercepted 1,263 people at the border in June, which is down from 1,869 in May. In April, the RCMP intercepted 2,560 people at the border.
The end of Roxham Road near Perry Mills, New York, June 3, 2018. Thousands of asylum seekers have illegally crossed the border from New York into Quebec at this spot this year. Tyler Anderson/National Post
While committee chair Liberal MP Rob Oliphant won’t have a vote, he suggested he would be keen to hold additional meetings, if only to latch on to some facts to help to dispel any myths or “outrageous” claims that are circulating.
“That’s my duty,” Oliphant said. “I would say it’s best to get a hearing of the facts, get the evidence, find out what’s going on. That’s my personal opinion. Committee will make the decision. The more information the better and the sooner the better.”
Even so, the influx of asylum seekers crossing into Canada is an important issue, but not a crisis, Oliphant added.
As long as Trump is in office, the United States is not a safe country for asylum seekers
“I’m going to be pushing that we have the right meetings at the right time with the right people to get the right information.”
Oliphant said he hasn’t yet spoken with the Liberal members of the committee, but their contingent usually meets before committee to discuss what they’re thinking “in terms of a team.”
The members listen to the opposition’s arguments, he insisted, and will come up with a decision after that.
For her part, Kwan — like Rempel — also has a slew of questions for Hussen and his officials. But she also said the committee needs to find a strategy to deal with the U.S., where President Donald Trump’s hard line on immigration is being blamed for pushing people north.
“As long as Trump is in office, the United States is not a safe country for asylum seekers,” Kwan said.
Latest Politics
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Press Release — North Korea: HRF Celebrates Overdue South Korean Law Promoting Human Rights
NEW YORK — Today South Korea’s legislature passed the North Korean Human Rights Act.
The new law mandates the promotion of freedom in North Korea by funding North Korean defector and refugee organizations, creating a North Korean human rights foundation, and establishing an archive of human rights violations perpetrated against the North Korean people by the Kim regime. HRF established the Global Coalition for the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2015 to promote the passage of this law.
"This is an astonishing moment. The Republic of Korea has taken its head out of the sand and has finally confronted the cruelty and horror of the North Korean dictatorship. It is a victory for all who support human rights and human dignity,” said HRF chairman Garry Kasparov. “We in the Global Coalition are delighted that the South Korean government will—for the first time ever—finance the defector organizations that send films, e-books, radio broadcasts, and educational materials to the North Korean people."
The North Korean Human Rights Act also establishes a public campaign to raise awareness about North Korea’s human rights violations and takes steps to ensure that South Korean humanitarian aid is not misused by the Kim regime. The goal of establishing the human rights archive, inspired by the post-war German model, is to monitor and document the crimes of the North Korean dictatorship. It is vital to note that no such archive or record has ever existed in South Korea.
“Passing this monumentally-important law sends a categorical signal to Pyongyang that South Korea will no longer appease the crazy antics of the Kim regime. It will also send a needed message to the South Korean people that promoting human rights in North Korea is a legitimate and worthy cause,” said HRF president Thor Halvorssen.
The law’s passage comes at a time when the rest of the world unanimously agrees on the extent and gravity of the crimes of the North Korean dictatorship. Earlier today, the U.N. Security Council voted 15-0 to toughen sanctions on the regime. Two weeks ago, the U.S. government also passed new legislation that punishes the regime for human rights violations. This follows a U.N. General Assembly resolution that urged the U.N. Security Council to refer Kim Jong-un to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. In recent years, the American, Canadian, European, and Japanese governments had taken steps to promote human rights in North Korea, but until today the South Korean government had failed to act.
"People inside the North will know about the law's enactment and it will put considerable pressure on the political elite in Pyongyang," said South Korean politician Kim Moon-soo, who first drafted the law in 2005. North Korean defector organizations said the law would give “big momentum” to their efforts to get knowledge into their homeland, where access to foreign news is forbidden. “Ultimately, information and technology will play a key role in the liberation of North Korea,” said venture capitalist Alexander Lloyd, who co-founded HRF’s North Korea program. “It’s a great day for liberty,” he added.
HRF created the Global Coalition for the North Korean Human Rights Act in 2015 after a disheartening analysis of the apathy and blithe neglect shown by successive South Korean governments and legislatures with regard to the plight of North Korean refugees, the shortage of resources for North Korean defector NGOs, and the lack of education in South Korea about North Korea’s gulags and public executions. Last September, the Global Coalition visited Seoul to campaign for the Act and hosted a widely-publicized press conference that included Garry Kasparov, Serbian democracy advocate Srdja Popovic, North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho, and South Korean lawyer Kim Tae-hoon. Other members of the Global Coalition include Malaysia’s opposition leader Nurul Izzah Anwar, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond, North Korean defector Jung Gwang-il, Peru’s former president Alejandro Toledo, Romania’s former president Emil Constantinescu, and Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yushchenko.
Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. Its North Korea program has resulted in multiple threats of violence emanating from the North Korean government including threats of assassination, bodily harm, and missile attacks on HRF staff, members, and associates.
Contact: Noemi Gonzalo-Bilbao, (212) 246-8486, noemi@hrf.org.
Press Release – Malaysian Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim Released from Prison
Press Release — Vietnam Censors Havel Prize Laureate Mai Khoi
South Korea Silences North Korean Defectors to Appease Kim Jong-un
Maldives: Opposition Candidate Wins Election, Ending Yameen’s Authoritarian Rule
Press Release — HRF to King of Malaysia: Release Anwar Ibrahim
Helping North Koreans, One Flash Drive at a Time
HRF in the News — A Selection of Articles on Kanye West in Kazakhstan
HRFStaff
Liu Xia, Detained Widow of Nobel Peace Laureate, Leaves China
A heart-breaking testimony of torture in North Korea
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← Mysterious Nazca Lines reveal their secrets
Mysterious white light on Mars seen in NASA photo →
Ancient city gate from the time of King David discovered in Israel
By James Rogers | Fox News
Archaeologists in Israel’s Golan Heights have discovered an ancient city gate from the time of King David.
The find was made during an excavation at the ancient city of Bethsaida. “There are not too many monumental discoveries dating from the reign of King David,” Rami Arav, associate professor at the University of Nebraska and Bethsaida excavation director, told Fox News via email. “This is absolutely a significant contribution to biblical archaeology and biblical studies.”
Arav explained that Bethsaida was founded in the 11th century B.C. as a pre-planned city and the capital of the Biblical kingdom of Geshur. “The city included a place, granary, city walls, city gate, a high place in the city gate, and a cobblestones courtyard in front of the gate,” he said.
The city was destroyed in 920 B.C. “Since this is the period of time of King David and since the Bible narrates that King David married Maachah the daughter of Talmai the king of Geshur, it is reasonable that King David walked on these very cobblestones when he visited the city,” Arav added.
King David bearing the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem depicted in the early 16th century. From a private collection.(Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
An ancient stele, or monumental stone slab, was discovered adjacent to the gate’s tower. The stele depicts the Moon-god worshipped by the ancient Aramean people.
Arav explained that the discoveries were made during the 32nd season of excavations in the ancient city. The project was initially sponsored by Israel’s Haifa University, then by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. It is now sponsored by the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Post reports that a gate discovered at the site last year likely dates from the First Temple period when the city was known as Zer.
In a separate project, last year archaeologists in Israel uncovered an ancient site that may offer fresh insight into the biblical kingdom of David and Solomon. The kingdom is described in the Hebrew Bible but has long divided historians.
While some experts believe that it existed in the 10th century B.C., others have questioned its existence, citing a lack of evidence of royal construction at the center of the region where the kingdom is said to have existed.
However, part of the building at Tel ‘Eton in the Judean foothills has been dated to a period in history that coincided with the supposed joint kingdom, according to a study published in the journal Radiocarbon.
In another project, soldiers at a paratrooper base in Southern Israel recently uncovered a Biblical-era watchtower.
The watchtower, which dates back to the 8th century B.C., was revealed during recent excavations by Israel Defense Forces troops working under the direction of the Israel Antiquities Authority.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
Tagged as Ancient city gate from the time of King David discovered in Israel, archaeology, biblical sites, fox news, James Rogers, King David, stele
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621. Tony Martin: “The Bigger Your Heart Is (The Harder You’ll Fall)”
Posted by The Nixon Administration in Tony Martin, Writing credit: Ronald Miller
Motown M 1082 (A), August 1965
b/w The Two Of Us
(Written by Ronald Miller and William O’Malley)
Tamla Motown TMG 537 (A), October 1965
(Released in the UK under license through EMI / Tamla Motown)
Ageing crooner Tony Martin, signed to Motown the previous year after a long career in showbiz only to be effectively superseded by an even bigger signing in Billy Eckstine, was not destined to be a star of the Motown catalogue, but he was lucky enough to arrive at Hitsville just before the label went supernova. By a matter of weeks, Tony Martin made it in under the cut-off between “artists from the early days of Motown” and “artists Motown could afford to sign and jettison at will”, and so despite the overwhelming failure (on every level) of his début single Talkin’ To Your Picture, he was afforded the privilege of this belated follow-up. Lucky us.
There was absolutely nothing good about Talkin’ To Your Picture, a badly-sung, phoned-in rendition of a terrible song with genuinely creepy lyrics that appear to endorse stalking as a valid courtship technique, a record memorably christened by Motown Junkies regular Damecia as “The Sound of Boring Middle-Aged America”. So, the bar is set accordingly low for this one; unlike his début, here Martin is given the benefit of Motown’s own staff writers, in the form of their newly-designated MOR specialists Ron Miller and William O’Malley.
Their approach, reasonably enough, is to do what they were good at – pastiche. Handed the task of doing something with an audibly past-it former MOR idol, they set about pushing Martin down the same path already trodden by a great many other audibly past-it former MOR idols in the early Sixties, and attempt to turn him into Dean Martin. It doesn’t really work – the results are gloopy and irritating – but it’s quite a lot less awful than Talkin’ To Your Picture, and I’m grateful for small mercies at this point.
Most noticeably of all, while there are far, far too many things stacked on top of it, the tune that’s underpinning all of this is actually (whisper it) kind of catchy. The deep bass bom-bom-boms are engagingly silly, you can whistle the central melody, and Tony seems to be having enough fun with the shrill Hollywood female choir (who at one point briefly and bafflingly break into a full-on Busby Berkeley chorus line routine) that you can just – just! – make out enough personality under the pancake to begin to understand what Motown ever saw in him in the first place.
Hopefully that won’t be taken as any kind of a recommendation; this is still absolutely, pants-wettingly ridiculous in its overdone pomposity, with our Tony – if anything – somehow ending up even more of a parody of himself than we’ve previously heard, the slippery, none-more-stagey slickness of his voice making Bobby Breen sound like Johnny Rotten. You can practically smell the warpaint. And, once again, it’s stuffed full of would-be euphoric moments it hasn’t earned, key changes and angelic choirs and a half-hearted big finish (on a record only two and a half minutes long) that sounds as though everyone involved suddenly became self-aware and realised they were making muzak rather than a symphony.
But for all of that, I don’t absolutely hate it. It’s ridiculous, but there’s the tiniest kernel of understanding buried in here along with the finger-snapping tune; not enough for Tony to really embrace his inner ham in the style of Bobby Breen, and he’s not a good enough singer to tease out the dignity in schlock a la Billy Eckstine, but enough to make me steer away from giving it the lowest score possible.
(Or maybe you’re only interested in Tony Martin? Click for more.)
“Music Talk” Tony Martin
“The Two Of Us”
14 thoughts on “621. Tony Martin: “The Bigger Your Heart Is (The Harder You’ll Fall)””
Next please.
This may be one of those cases of “be careful what you wish for”…
Just looked ahead – oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!
Rob Green Nashville TN said:
You are right —- sounds like “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin.
A perfectly ridiculous song but unfortunately for me I played it and can’t get it out of my head…..
Indeed – it’s a Dino pastiche, but I’d have to grudgingly admit it’s a well-conceived one.
(In fact, Miller and O’Malley nail it so closely that I was absolutely convinced Tony was Italian-American like Dino, but instead it turns out on further investigation he was in fact Jewish and of Polish-German extraction, so I’ve amended the review accordingly.)
W.B. said:
Since you mentioned “Everybody Loves Somebody,” I’ve oft-wondered if the oft-covered Solomon Burke chestnut “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” was written as an answer / counterpoint / response to that other song.
But “the slippery, none-more-stagey slickness of his voice making Bobby Breen sound like Johnny Rotten” – priceless. Much like what I read in a book on worst rock ‘n’ roll records about Ernie Freeman’s arrangements on the 1968 ABC LP Joey Bishop Sings Country Western “[making] Billy Sherrill seem like Swamp Dogg.”
I haven’t heard this one, but since you mentioned Dean Martin… Not saying I am a huge fan of Dino’s but I feel like his mid-sixties hit singles were well made, pop recordings. I am assuming everyone knows this but “Everybody Loves Somebody” was recorded by Dinah Washington in the late 50s & her version is quite good. I actually like Dino’s version too. His producer, Jimmy Bowen, cleverly threw in those piano triplets in to give it a mild rock & roll/r&b feel & it DID get to #1 in the era of the Beatles/Motown. Apparently, someone in Dino’s camp heard the Dinah Washington version of “Everybody” & thought it would be a good song for Dino to cut. In fact, Dino recorded 2 versions of the song for 2 different albums. The 2nd version was the hit single recording. One more factoid & I promise I’ll shut up… Dino also did a version of “The Door Is Still Open to My Heart” (complete with triplets!) which was done in the 50s by doowop greats the 5 Keys. Okay I’m done (for now!)
In my intolerant youth I regarded ‘Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime’ as the most utterly detestable song, in any medium, of all time… Strangely, I love Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’ (another ‘everybody’ song) with parallel intensity – Bruce seems to have his finger on a genuine human universal, whereas Dino seemed to me to be uttering an intolerably inflated and mendacious platitude, to which the only appropriate answer could be some sort of Primal Scream – which, perhaps only the throat-shattering howls at the beginning of James Brown’s ‘Bring It Up’ would be adequate to exorcise…. And yet a third ‘everybody’ song – the lovely ‘Everybody needs love’ (Gladys, and also the Temptations) evoked soul-stirring gentle bliss. Hmmm.. I like W.B.’s supposition about Solomon Burke – again, a convincing human universal, powerful (and beautiful) enough to serve a welcome soul-cleansing riposte.
P.S. to Landini: I had no idea ELSS originated with Dinah Washington! That might be enough to make me reconsider my visceral negative reaction – just as Leontyne Price made me reconsider my unwavering antipathy to ‘Climb Every Mountain!’
Oops! I made an error here. Surprised no one caught it. “The Door Is Still Open To My Heart” was done by the Cardinals & not the 5 Keys! It was written by Chuck Willis. Sorry sports fans!
Is this how Ron Miller got started at Motown?
Ok was’nt there a character named Tony Martin or modeled after aTony Martin in the movie “Valley Of The Dolls”?
I may need another day off.
Lamar said:
“Everybody Loves Somebody” was recorded by a number of people when it was first written, circa 1947. Sinatra’s version was the only one to chart- #25 in 1948.
The “Tony” in “Valley of the Dolls” (Tony Polar actually) wasn’t modeled on Tony Martin but he was played by Tony Scotti of Scotti Brothers Records fame-they put out records by James Brown, Leif Garrett, Survivor, Susan Anton, Weird Al Jankovic, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band-quite an eclectic group.
I’m not surprised Gordy/Motown signed Tony Martin in the mid 60s. I think the comments that Gordy signed him to establish himself as more than a black music label are probably correct. Tony Martin started charting hits when Gordy was around 8 years old. He charted hits well into the 1950s-in fact his best ten years as a recording artist were 1946 to 1956, so Gordy would have definitely been aware of him. In 1964 Martin was still a Vegas headliner, often teamed with his wife Cyd Charisse-the best looking (and most talented) dancer from the Hollywood Golden Age of Movie Musicals. As for Tony’s Motown recordings-cut the guy some slack. Many of the comments here refer to the effectiveness of the songs and people enjoying them, in spite of the cheesy trappings and the knowledge that they shouldn’t admit to it. Tony Martin was just a singer plying his trade, which he did almost until he died. Youtube had videos of him singing at a nightclub when he was well into his 90s-and singing very well. We all should be so lucky.
Another brilliant MOR ballad that Ron Miller seemed to be able to churn out with ease. Admittedly it’s influenced by “Everybody loves somebody”, but if Dean Martin had recorded this it would have been another #1 for him. Instead, another wonderful Motown pop ballad got nowhere. Shame. Tremendous production from Davis And Gordon as well. The only down side is Martin’s voice which has very little charm to my ears.
This is a decent Pop song, with a decent arrangement and instrumental. The singing is okay, but not with a lot of emotion. I’d give it a 3.5.
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Tommy 45 by Reparata and The Delrons
“Tommy” was one of my favorite girl songs of the 1960s. It was a fairly big hit in New England but only reached number 92 on the BILLBOARD MAGAZINE Pop Singles Chart, which means it received little airplay in most parts of the country.
Reparata and The Delrons was a female pop trio from Brooklyn consisting of Mary Alese (Reparata), Sheila Reillie, and Carol Drobnicki.
“Tommy” was a catchy, mid-tempo song with some tight harmonies in support. It is one of those lost songs that deserved more commercial success than it achieved.
Comments Off on Tommy 45 by Reparata and The Delrons | Small Record Reviews: The 45 | Tagged: Reparata and The Delrons, Tommy | Permalink
Fulfillingness First Finale by Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder was at his artistic peak during the 1970s, which resulted in a series of albums that has rarely been equaled in the history of American music.
He released Fulfillingness’ First Finale, July 22, 1974, and it quickly became his second number one album and first to receive a platinum award for sales. While it may not have been as consistently strong as its predecessor, Innervisions, that may be splitting hairs as songs such as “Boogie On Reggae Woman” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” are among the strongest of his songs.
He was now in full control of his career. He continued his recent tradition of writing all the tracks, except for one with co-writer Yvonne Wright, and playing most of the instruments. The biggest change was using backing vocalists more than in the past.
It was another group of eclectic songs that had no real unifying theme. There were gentle love songs, funky classics, and lyrics with biting political commentary. Still, it was another album of songs that stood on their own and ultimately formed a release united by their quality.
“You Haven’t Done Nothin’” occupies a place near the top of the Stevie Wonder pantheon of songs. The explosive and funky keyboards, one of the first uses of a drum machine, the Jackson 5 providing background vocals, and the biting anti-Nixon lyrics, added up to one of the most creative political statements of the early 1970s.
I have always been amused that “Boogie On Reggae Woman” was really a funk song and had little to do with reggae music. What it did have was a synthesizer bass line that combined with his harmonica playing to create a unique sound.
There are a number of other tracks that have withstood the test of time well. “They Won’t Go When I Go” was one of those spiritual songs that he was producing at the time. It was a stark tune about belief vs. non-belief. It was also one of the songs he performed at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. “Bird Of Beauty” contained anti-drug lyrics with some of the quirkiest music of his career. “Too Shy To Say” was a haunting ballad. “Creepin’” was another stark song with Minnie Ripperton’s wonderful backing vocal.
Fulfillingness’ First Finale was another stunning release from the fertile mind of Stevie Wonder. It remains one of his career defining albums.
Article first published as Music Review: Stevie Wonder – Fulfillingness’ First Finale on Blogcritics.
Comments Off on Fulfillingness First Finale by Stevie Wonder | Stevie Wonder Reviews | Tagged: Fulfillingness First Finale, Soul Music, Stevie Wonder | Permalink
Marauder by Mickey Thomas
Mickey Thomas has one of those unforgettable and instantly recognizable voices. His career has now spanned four decades, from his early group The Jets, to his time with Elvin Bishop, his tenure with the Jefferson Starshipand then just the Starship, to a long and creative solo career. He is best remembered as the lead singer on such Starship number one hit singles as “We’ve Built This City,” “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” and “Sara,” the first two with Grace Slick.
Marauder is his first new solo studio album in seven years. Unlike his past releases, this new album has a fuller sound with horns, keyboards, backing singers, and even a choir in support. Still, it is a rock album and has a harder edge than much of his past work.
It is an album of cover songs. They include the well-known and the obscure. The unifying theme is they represent artists who have influenced his career or songs that are personal favorites. It may add up to an eclectic group of material, but they also coalesce into a satisfying listen.
The first two tracks set the tone for what will follow. The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” is the perfect vehicle to strut his vocal chops. He is supported by the Unity Community Choir and some interesting and unusual slide Dobro work by Mark McGee. He is able to give a creative interpretation while maintaining the menace of the original. He transitions into Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” complete with brass and a little funky-style Memphis soul just to be different.
He has always cited seeing the Beatles in concert during their 1965 American tour as one of the seminal musical events in his life. That influence comes home to roost on Marauder as the album is dotted with several group and individual covers. His choice of the rarely covered “Rain” was inspired as he extends and expands the vocal melody and makes use of tight background harmonies. “Oh Darling” and “Across The Universe” are songs for singers and his voice soars above the mix. He gives Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” a rougher edge than the original, but it is his cover of George Harrison’s “Wah-Wah” that is the most interesting. He strips the song to its basics which allows his vocal to present the lyrics clearly.
The album’s material meanders in a number of directions. There is the raucous rock of Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights.” The Leon Russell composition, “Delta Lady,” contains one of the album’s passionate vocals plus some acoustic and electric slide guitar. AC/DC’s “Moneytalks,” Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is A Highway,” and the Oasis power ballad “Champagne Supernova” all provide vehicles for his inspired vocals.
Mickey Thomas remains a singer’s singer and continues to age well. Marauder clearly shows that he can still sing and rock with the best.
Article first published as Music Review: Mickey Thomas – Marauder on Blogcritics.
Comments Off on Marauder by Mickey Thomas | Music Reviews: Everything Else | Tagged: Marauder, Mickey Thomas, Starship | Permalink
Ahab The Arab 45 by Ray Stevens
Ray Stevens placed 27 singles on the BILLBOARD MAGAZINE Pop Charts during the 1960s and 1970s, most of which were of the comedy variety. The biggest exception was his 1970 number one hit, “Everything Is Beautiful.”
His first big hit, and one of the most memorable singles from the early 1960s pre-Beatles era was “Ahab The Arab.” Released June 30, 1962, it reached number five on the National singles charts.
It was one of the more amusing singles of its era featuring a shiek named Ahab, Fatima the harem girl, and Clyde the camel. Clyde would appear in a number of Ray Stevens songs and become a symbol on many of his records.
Throw in a catchy melody and you have the makings of a hit song.
Comments Off on Ahab The Arab 45 by Ray Stevens | Small Record Reviews: The 45 | Tagged: Ahab The Arab, Ray Stevens | Permalink
Let’s Live For Today 45 The Grass Roots
Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan were studio musicians who produced all sorts and types of music. They formed The Grass Roots and during 1966 produced the top 30 hit, “Where Were You When I Needed You.”
They then went out and recruited an entire goup, which would take over the name and produce 21 singles that made the BILLBOARD mAGAZINE Pop Singles Chart.
The key was lead singer Rob Grill, who passed away a few weeks ago. His voice would blast out over the radio airwaves on a series of hit singles for years and he would tour with the Grass Roots for decades.
Their first big hit featuring his vocals was released May 13, 1967. “Let’s Live For Today” reached number eight on the National charts.
It was typical of their sound as it was catchy pop/rock. The Grass Roots may not have changed the face of rock ‘n’ roll, but they made it more pleasurable for several years.
Comments Off on Let’s Live For Today 45 The Grass Roots | Small Record Reviews: The 45 | Tagged: Grass Roots, Let's live For Today, P.F. Sloan, Steve Barri | Permalink
String Of Pearls 78 by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra
1942 began with a bang for Glenn Miller as he three of his releases occupied the top spot on the singles chart 17 of the first 18 weeks.
“String Of Pearls” was his second number one single of the year, reaching the top February 7, was replaced on the 14th by Woody Herman, and then returned to the top on the 21st for one more week.
The title comes from how the notes of the melody look on the music page. It was an instrumental with a piano solo in the middle that was just right.
“String Of Pearls” may have been another smash for Glenn Miller, but his big hits of the year were still to come.
Comments Off on String Of Pearls 78 by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra | Number One Billboard Pop Singles: Reviews | Tagged: Glenn Miller, String Of Pearls | Permalink
Guitar Man 45 by Elvis Presley
The mid-1960s found Elvis Presley making commercially successful, if critically panned films.
His musical output was mostly limited to soundtrack work and for the most part was forgettable. Every once in awhile, however, a song would be pulled from one of the films and issued as a single that was actually very good.
“Guitar Man” was taken from the CLAMBAKE soundtrack and released as a single January 27, 1968. While it would only reach number 43 on the BILLBOARD MAGAZINE Pop Singles Chart, it marked the beginning of better quality single, which would push him back into the commercial mainstream over the nest several years.
“Guitar Man” was the 99th single of his career to make the charts.
Comments Off on Guitar Man 45 by Elvis Presley | Elvis Presley Reviews, Small Record Reviews: The 45 | Tagged: Clambake, Elvis, Guitar Man | Permalink
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mykeystrokes.com
"Do or Do not. There is no try."
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“Mass Amnesia”: Mitt Romney Bets On Forgetfulness Of The American People
I’ve said this before, but in light of Mitt Romney’s economic speech today, it bears repeating: Virtually his entire case against Obama’s economic record rests on the assumption that the American people have developed a case of mass amnesia about the depth and severity of the economic crisis the President inherited.
A few months ago, Romney liked to claim that Obama made the economy “worse.” But the good economic news forced Romney to revise that argument, and he took to claiming that, yes, okay, the economy is getting better, but only in spite of Obama’s policies, which are slowing down the natural recovery.
Today Romney upped the ante yet again, offering still another explanation for why Obama should be denied a second term, even though the economy is recovering: It’s all about freedom! From the prepared remarks:
The Obama administration’s assault on our economic freedom is the principal reason why the recovery has been so tepid — why it couldn’t meet their projections, let alone our expectations. If we don’t change course now, this assault on freedom could damage our economy and the well-being of American families for decades to come…
The proof is in this weak recovery. This administration thinks our economy is struggling because the stimulus was too small. The truth is we’re struggling because our government is too big.
Relatedly, this morning, Romney said: “The economy always comes back after a recession, of course. There’s never been one that we didn’t recover from. The problem is this one has been deeper than it needed to be and a slower recovery than it should have been, by virtue of the policies of this president.”
The common thread here is obvious, and it’s important. The pace of this recovery, according to Romney, is sluggish compared to that of previous ones — proving that Obama’s policies, or his “assault on freedom,” are the reason why. Missing from this telling, of course, is the most important reason this recovery is different from previous ones: It came after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Romney’s argument that the recovery’s pace would otherwise have been normal if not for Obama’s polices rests on a bet that the American people will forget about this, or won’t factor it into their decision this fall. Perhaps some enterprising reporter will ask Romney the obvious follow-up questions: What would you have done as president in early 2009? Is it really your contention that the economy would have recovered at a typical pace from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s if government had done nothing at all?
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, March 19, 2012
March 20, 2012 Posted by raemd95 | Economic Recovery, Election 2012 | Depression, Economy, Financial Crisis, Freedom, Mitt Romney, Politics | Leave a comment
“From The Pitiful To The Ludicrous”: The Bad Advice Stage Of The GOP Presidential Primary
The Republican primary has now reached that dread phase where we are required to feign interest in Mitt Romney’s victory in Puerto Rico — amongst voters who will not vote this November unless they catch a plane to Orlando — and to wonder whether Rick Santorum can repeat his Missouri victory in the delegate-awarding reenactment of that state’s nominating contest. Yawn.
But there is one bonus: with Romney struggling to close out the nomination against candidates who are having trouble getting on the ballot even in their home states, we get to see people of all sorts offering him advice that ranges from the pitiful to the ludicrous. First, there was Maggie Haberman’s advice to Romney last week in Politico, urging him to drop his blatant pandering in the South for a more ironic approach:
Change will take some measure of discipline, but it’s something Romney can pull off. For example, instead of a joke about grits, Romney could relate more easily to voters if he joked about being from southern Michigan.
Ba-da-bum. And then in Saturday’s Washington Post, Philip Rucker extracted this gem from religious-right leader Richard Land:
Among those being courted [by Romney] is Richard Land, a longtime leader of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a practice, Land said, he does not endorse political candidates, but he is considered a powerful barometer of the evangelical community.
Land said that after a private dinner with Romney last year at Acadiana, a Washington restaurant, Romney’s advisers have been in regular touch. Land said he recently told them that Romney could win over recalcitrant conservatives by picking Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) as his vice presidential running mate and previewing a few Cabinet selections: Santorum as attorney general, Gingrich as ambassador to the United Nations and John Bolton as secretary of state.
Ah yes. Condom confiscation at CVS stores by federal marshals, and Newt and Bolton tag-teaming our Iran diplomacy. That’ll do the trick, Mitt!
By: Alex MacGillis, The New Republic, March 19, 2012
March 20, 2012 Posted by raemd95 | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | Conservatives, John Bolton, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Republicans, Richard Land, Rick Santorum | Leave a comment
“It’s A Question Of When”: Study Predicts Keystone Pipeline Will Spill
Republicans have sought to frame the Keystone XL pipeline as a job-creating project being thwarted by “radical environmentalists.” Is it? A new Cornell University study claims that the pipeline could actually have a negative impact on the economies of the states it would pass through.
“In the national debate, job creation has been set alongside environmental concerns in a rigid either-or fashion,” says Sean Sweeney, one of the study’s authors, “But oil spills also kill jobs, they consume resources, they have an impact on health, and can also lead to a lower quality of life.”
The range of estimates of jobs vary widely. TransCanada claims the pipeline will create 20,000 jobs. A State Department report estimates that only 20 permanent operating jobs would be created in the six states along the pipeline route. By comparison, those same states are home to robust agricultural, ranching and tourist industries that are dependent on water and vulnerable to environmental contamination. Across the six states agriculture employs 571,000 workers and tourism 780,000; the total revenue from those sectors, respectively, is $76.3 billion and $67 billion.
Sludge not crude
Tar sands oil — known in energy circles as diluted bitumen — may be more damaging to environments and communities than regular crude. Said Sweeney, “Diluted bitumen is an irregular substance — it runs thick and thin, hot and cold. It’s basically a sludge, not like regular crude — it behaves differently.” Tar sands also seem more likely to spill than conventional crude: The spill rate for diluted bitumen in the northern Midwest between 2007-2010 was three times the national average for conventional oil. This may be because the heavy, corrosive material puts greater stress on pipelines.
The already existing Keystone I pipeline, which runs 2,100 miles from Alberta to Illinois, began operating in 2010; in the two years since, 35 spills have occurred. In the pipeline’s first year of operation alone, its spill rate was 100 times TransCanada’s projection. All told the amount of tar sands oil being transported through the United States has more than tripled in the past decade to 600,000 barrels in 2010. Keystone XL, if built, would add another 830,000 barrels per day.
John Stansbury, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Nebraska, analyzed spill data from the Keystone I pipeline to estimate that 91 spills would occur over the course of 50 years of Keystone XL’s operation — close to two spills each year. In a worst-case scenario, he says, a spill could contaminate 4.9 billion gallons of groundwater in Nebraska’s Sand Hills with benzene, a known carcinogen.
The threat the pipeline poses to Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer, which provides 30 percent of the irrigation water in the U.S., has been much-discussed, but the pipeline would also cross another 1,747 bodies of water, including the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers and the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the third largest aquifer in Texas.
If Keystone were to leak — or worse, rupture — the consequences could be serious. In July 2010, a pipeline operated by the company Enbridge ruptured — the company has never explained why — spilling 1 million gallons of tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. The oil drifted 40 miles upstream, causing 145 reported instances of illness and health problems for people living in the riverside community of Marshall, Mich. Marshall residents living within 200 feet of the river were eligible for a buyout program; about 130 people sold their houses to Enbridge, leaving some areas uninhabited.
The Kalamazoo cleanup has cost $725 million so far — twice as much as Enbridge estimated — and the river remains closed to fishing, hunting and other recreational activities over a year and a half after the spill occurred. Officials in the Calhoun County Health Department have said some bitumen will likely remain in the river “indefinitely.” Sweeney points out that the rural areas along pipeline routes are unprepared to cope with spills. “They had to bring someone in from the Gulf to deal with Kalamazoo,” he explained.
While the Kalamazoo spill was the biggest-ever tar sands spill, pipeline spills occur with startling frequency. In 2011 alone, there were 600 reported pipeline incidents. TransCanada’s website argues that “if they do occur, pipeline leaks are small,” yet pipeline spills caused 17 deaths and 68 injuries, and over $335 million in property damage. In 2010, when the Kalamazoo spill occurred, the damages from pipeline spills topped $1 billion. While pipeline spills don’t get the attention of disasters like the Exxon-Valdez and BP, they point to a familiar pattern of underestimating risk and underpreparing for disaster.
TransCanada insists that it will comply with all federal regulations, and construct and operate Keystone XL “to the highest industry standards.” Danielle Droitsch, an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, argues that we don’t know enough about diluted bitumen to be able to transport it safely. “We’re building these pipelines as if they were conventional oil pipelines,” she said. “We don’t have any special regulations in place to deal with the fact that these are tar sands pipelines and they are very different. Until we have a new regulatory system in place there are no safety measures proposed that would make this pipeline safer.”
And in the meantime? “There’s no question this pipeline will spill — it’s a question of when.”
By: Allyssa Battistoni, Salon, March 19, 2012
March 20, 2012 Posted by raemd95 | Energy, Environment | Jobs, Kalamazoo River Spill, Keystone Pipeline, Nebraska Ogallala Aquifer, Politics, Republicans, Tar Sands, TransCanada | Leave a comment
“Creating A Whole New Meaning” In Utah: The Difference Between Contraception And Mainlining Heroin
Utah Governor Gary Herbert vetoed an abstinence-only sex ed bill, prompting the measure’s co-sponsor to go on the offensive.
Last week, I mentioned two state legislatures had passed abstinence-only sex education bills. While Wisconsin’s governor was already supportive of the measure, in Utah, Governor Gary Herbert was less certain. The measure would have banned any discussion of contraception, or for that matter, homosexuality. The current law in Utah already requires parents to “opt-in” if the course includes discussion of contraceptives, but this measure would have actually removed even the option for students to learn about more than simply abstinence. It had passed overwhelmingly in both chambers, despite protests and opposition from the state PTA and teachers’ groups.
Late Friday, after protests, phone calls, and significant pressure from both sides, Herbert announced he had vetoed the measure. In his statement, he said he was unwilling to say “the State knows better than Utah’s parents,” noting a majority of parents choose to have their children learn about contraception. Herbert described himself as pushing “the reset button” on the conversation around sex-ed in the state.
But given the national rhetoric around sex right now, I’m not so sure a simply flourish of his pen will put the genie back in the bottle. Senate co-sponsor Margaret Dayton told the Salt Lake Tribune that “teaching children about contraception is comparable to telling kids not to do drugs, then showing them how to ‘mainline’ heroin.”
The national conversation around sex has shifted radically. Dayton is not alone in seeing sex as akin to one of the most dangerous street drugs around. A dangerous and corrupting activity that puts our youth at risk. Meanwhile, non-radical conservatives generally see sex as a healthy and normal activity, at least among adults, and teaching teenagers to use contraception means teaching them to be responsible. There’s such a major rift between the two sides right now, it’s hard to see what kind of conversation can be had.
Of course, a poll in Utah showed 58 percent of residents favored sex-ed that included contraceptives. So maybe they don’t need to have a conversation in the first place.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 19, 2012
March 20, 2012 Posted by raemd95 | Women, Women's Health | Conservatives, Contraception, Gary Herbert, Margaret Dayton, Politics, Sex Education, Utah, Wisconsin | Leave a comment
“Twisted Minds, Politics Edition”: Mitt Romney’s Remarkable Work of Staggering Dishonesty
As Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, and others have amply demonstrated, Mitt Romney has a problem with the truth. Throughout his campaign, he has openly lied about his previous positions, his beliefs, and the records of his opponents, Republican or otherwise. In a speech today on economic freedom at the University of Chicago, Romney continued the trend, building a mostly substanceless case against President Obama on the basis of half-truths and falsehoods. You can read the whole speech if you’d like. For now, I’d like to highlight a few passages that sum up Romney’s case against Obama in fact-free aplomb. First, there’s this:
For three years, President Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people. He’s put us deeper in debt. He’s slowed the recovery and harmed our economy.
There are a few things missing from this account. First is the fact that the Great Recession began in 2008 and was already on its way to reach its nadir by the time Obama took office. By the time the stimulus began to take effect, the economy was well on its way to the bottom, and independent analyses agree that the administration’s policies kept the country out of a depression, even if it wasn’t enough to juice the recovery.
What’s more, neither the stimulus nor the administration’s later policies were responsible for the deficit explosion of 2009 and 2010. The recession—and the drastically reduced tax revenues it produced—was responsible for a good portion of the deficit. The rest was the result of Bush-era policies like tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As economist Mark Thomas points out, government spending under Obama has increased at a lower rate than under Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or George W. Bush. The only president to have a lower rate of spending was, you guessed it, Bill Clinton.
On to the next passage, which is brazen in its disregard for the truth:
President Obama has proposed raising the marginal tax rate from 35% to 40%. He has proposed special breaks for his favorite industries, further increases for businesses he dislikes, and endless credits and subsidies intended to shape our behavior in this society. […]
If you invest your savings in a new business and are one of the fortunate few who see success – and make a profit – President Obama wants to take 40% of it.
President Obama wants to restore marginal tax rates on the rich to where they were before George W. Bush took office. While the American public might not understand marginal tax rates, it’s almost certainly true that Mitt Romney has a handle on the concept. Which means that the former Massachusetts governor is lying to his audience when he says that “President Obama wants to take 40 percent” of your income. An increase in marginal tax rates, or even a millionaire’s surtax, would only apply to income over a certain point. If the Bush tax cuts were repealed, and the top marginal rate went up to Clinton-era levels for income over $250,000, then it’s only the $250,001st dollar that would be affected.
Beyond that, the claim that Obama has proposed tax increases for “businesses he dislikes” only makes sense if you include policies designed to lower rates and broaden the tax base. “You could portray the president’s call to remove subsidies for oil and gas companies that way, and also his call to end the carried-interest loophole, which benefits hedge funds and investment companies,” says Michael Linden, director for tax and budget policy at the Center for American Progress. You might disagree with those policies, but Obama isn’t playing favoritism.
On that note, here is how Romney concludes his speech:
But, now, after spending three years attacking business, President Obama hopes to erase his record with a speech. In a recent address, he said that, “We are inventors. We are builders. We are makers of things. We are Thomas Edison. We are the Wright Brothers. We are Bill Gates. We are Steve Jobs.”
The only thing that’s true here are the quotes from Obama. The rest? False. Here are some excerpts from speeches the president has given over the last three years (all emphasis mine).
All across America, even today, on a Saturday, millions of Americans are hard at work. … They are the more than half of all Americans who work at a small business or own a small business. And they embody the spirit of possibility, the relentless work ethic, and the hope for something better that is at the heart of the American Dream.
Government can’t guarantee success, but it can knock down barriers that keep entrepreneurs from opening or expanding. […] This is as American as apple pie. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They are central to our identity as a nation. They are going to lead this recovery. The folks standing beside me are going to lead this recovery.
As part of the bipartisan tax deal we negotiated, with the support of the Chamber, businesses can immediately expense 100 percent of their capital investments. And as all of you know, it’s investments made now that will pay off as the economy rebounds. And as you hire, you know that more Americans working will mean more sales for your companies. It will mean more demand for your products and services. It will mean higher profits for your companies. We can create a virtuous circle.
[I]f you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making your products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.
The point is simply to say that the only Barack Obama who has spent his presidency criticizing business is the Barack Obama that exists in Mitt Romney’s head. Indeed, the same goes for this speech, and his entire campaign—Romney is running against policies that haven’t happened and an Obama that doesn’t exist. Exaggeration is normal in politics, but this goes beyond garden-variety embellishment—Romney’s speech, along with much of his rhetoric, is a remarkable work of staggering dishonesty. So far, he hasn’t really suffered for it.
By: Jamie Bouie, The American Prospect, March 19. 2012
March 20, 2012 Posted by raemd95 | Election 2012 | Bush Tax Cuts, Deficits, Economy, Mitt Romney, Politics, Recession, Republicans, Tax Rates, Tax Revenue | 1 Comment
Kicking the Can
“The Unrelenting Hostility Of Washington’s Courtier Press”: The Media’s Crusade Of Scandals Against Hillary Clinton July 28, 2016
“Endorsing This Philistine”: The Christian Right Has Surrendered To Trump July 24, 2016
“Cop Killers Serve No Cause”: It’s Getting To The Point Where No Lives Matter July 24, 2016
"The Turbulence Of The Post-Soviet Period": Sochi's Opening Ceremony Forgot To Mention A Few Things About Russian History
"A Stupid Poopy Head": Is it Game Over For Grover Norquist?
"The Inconvenient Truths Of 2012": A Party That Wants To Govern Has To Do More Than Run Against Government
"Definitive Proof Of Failure Of Supply-Side Economics": Kansas’ Experiment In Right-Wing Economics Is Still Failing Miserably
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Rae in Maine
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Research examines effect of pot legalization on policing
Mary Stohr
PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University researchers are undertaking a $1 million, three-year study of how the state’s legalization of marijuana has affected law enforcement and crime. The study will look at state, county and tribal police jurisdictions, as well as policing in neighboring states.
Mary Stohr, principal investigator and professor of criminal justice and criminology, said legalization has created a “great natural experiment” for studying the effect of changing marijuana policies on law enforcement and society in general.
“There are plenty of people starting to look into this area because it has such a huge potential impact on our communities and families and because it’s a retreat from the war on drugs,” she said. “Our investigation will look at the people with the boots on the ground in that war, the folks who actually have to deliver policy and have to interact with the public and deal with the implications of the policy.”
A model for other states
The study could lead to a set of law enforcement “best practices” and be instructive to other states that legalize cannabis, said Dale Willits, a co-investigator and assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology.
Dale Willits
“They don’t have to go into it blind,” he said. “They can say, ‘Here’s what agencies in Washington tried. These things really didn’t work. These things really did work.’ And they can use that as a jumping-off point.”
Washington voters approved Initiative 502 in 2012, legalizing small amounts of marijuana for adults 21 and older. Colorado passed a similar measure the same year. Another five states—Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada—have adult-use measures on the ballot this November.
Policing before and after legalization
Funding for the research is coming from the National Institute of Justice, a research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The study will compare how law enforcement handled crime and offenders, particularly those involving marijuana, before and after legalization. It will examine the effects of legalization on crime, clearance rates (crimes that result in charges) and other activities across the state, as well as in urban, rural, tribal and border areas.
As the researchers note in their grant application, supporters of I-502 claimed legalization would reduce crime and the numbers of people in jail and prisons while focusing limited law enforcement resources on more serious crimes. Opponents said legalization would increase marijuana use by minors and increase the incidence of drug-impaired driving.
Effect of I-502 varies across state
So far, the evidence of I-502’s impact is mixed. According to research collected by the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a federal anti-drug program, Spokane, Wash., police have found that possession and theft crimes have increased since commercialization, while the Seattle Police Department has indicated that marijuana-related incidents have decreased for both adults and juveniles since legalization.
Seizures of marijuana during traffic stops dropped by more than half between 2012 and 2014, according to the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. However, the program has seen a doubling of the percentage of drivers involved in fatal accidents with THC, marijuana’s main active ingredient, in their blood, although this could be the result of increased testing.
Craig Hemmens
Marijuana-related traffic arrests could go down as legalization has created a higher threshold for police to act, said Craig Hemmens, another co-investigator and chair of the WSU Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. Legalization could also be freeing police up for other work, he said.
“If they’re not spending time booking people for marijuana possession, maybe they can spend more time on heroin dealers or crack dealers or burglaries or something else,” he said.
Agencies and communities compared
The researchers plan to attack their project three ways. They will conduct in-depth case studies of 10 agencies using historical and statistical information, interviews, focus groups and an analysis of camera footage. A second tier of research will analyze arrests, reported crimes, crime clearance rates and traffic stops in the 10 jurisdictions both before and after implementation of I-502.
The third tier will involve a similar analysis for cities, counties and statewide in Washington, Idaho and Oregon.
Other researchers on the project are David Makin, Darryl Wood, John Snyder and graduate student John Turner from criminal justice and criminology and Nicholas P. Lovrich from the WSU Department of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs.
Mary Stohr, WSU criminal justice and criminology, 509-335-4042, mary.stohr@wsu.edu
Criminology / Criminal Justice
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Rob Thomas Discusses 'Chip Tooth Smile,' Carlos Santana's "Unbelievable" New Record, and His Son's Awesome Band
Also, find out how Rob handles his son's budding music career!
Rob Thomas spent the evening with a room full of lucky NEW 102.7 listeners for an 'Up Close & Personal' concert at Chelsea Music Hall in New York City on Thursday, April 25th. During the event, morning personality Karen Carson spoke with Rob about a lot of different things, ranging from his relationship with his wife Marisol and son Maison, his life as a resident of NYC, his brand new album Chip Tooth Smile and more.
One of the stand-out moments was when Rob spoke about his former "Smooth" collaborator Carlos Santana. He explained that the two of them are currently working on new music at the same time and often talk about the process with each other.
"Carlos Santana has a new record coming out that's not a pop record...it's straight up Afro-Cuban, bad-a**, just **** you in the ear, kind of a record," Rob says.
"I've heard most of it, and it's unbelievable."
(Photo: Joe Cingrana/WNEW)
Click here to see photos from Rob's Up Close and Personal
Audience members also had the opportunity to ask Rob some questions. One of the first was about collaborating with his son, Maison. Rob says his son's band Hand Made House is "better than I ever was at their age," and explained how he tries to let them do their own thing without his rock star help.
"I don't helicopter around him. I'm available for any questions he has, but I don't give him unsolicited advice because I want him to make the same decisions I made, and the same mistakes I made."
(Photo: NEW 102.7)
Click here to see meet and greet photos from Rob Thomas' Up Close and Personal
Rob's new album, Chip Tooth Smile, was released on April 26th and features the single "One Less Day (Dying Young)." Watch the video below.
Video of Rob Thomas - One Less Day (Dying Young) [Official Music Video]
Related: Matchbox Twenty's Rob Thomas Returns with New Album, Single “One Less Day (Dying Young)”
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Locations, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Freddy vs. Jason,
Springwood, Ohio
Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital is a fictional psychiatric hospital that officially specialized in the study of dreams, dream suppression, and their effect on the person. Unofficially, the hospital was testing and studying the prevention of dreams, specifically nightmares.
The Original film series
Westin Hills before its remodel in 2001
The hospital was built some time in the 1980s and immediately began admitting people. It is a prevention stop to keep people from needing to be admitted to Fairview Hospital. This was implied by Dr. Neil Gordon (ANoES3) while speaking to Nancy Thompson. The hospital also deals with other types of psychosis, with only one wing being dedicated to "The Program" as Max referred to it.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
The last of the Elm Street Children are at the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital.
A few years later, after Dr. Gordon retired, Dr. Campbell took over. The town of Springwood had finally accepted the existence of Freddy in their children's nightmares. Under Dr. Campbell they found a way to control the effected population and have had complete success until 2003 when Mark Davis and Will Rollins escaped. Inadvertently reconstituting Freddy's power temporarily and discovering the length to which the town went to safeguard the children. As to date, no new information has been learned about the hospital, but it has been upgrading as technology improves.
Book adaptations of the original film series by Bob Italia
It was built by the Catholic Church in the 1920s.
Retrieved from "https://nightmareonelmstreet.fandom.com/wiki/Westin_Hills_Psychiatric_Hospital?oldid=22650"
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Top 10 Stolen Works of Art (Life Lesson: Just because it’s missing doesn’t mean it’s gone)
My husband and I are cleaning out our condo — getting rid of boxes and boxes of junk. (We did not read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but still got the message: Only keep things that spark joy).
As we’ve carted stuff off to Goodwill, I’ve worried: what if I miss these things? Am I throwing out a memory? Will I forget something once it’s gone? It brought me so much joy in the PAST, am I really ready to get rid of it?
This process made me think about other things I’ve lost. Things given away, misplaced, or stolen…
But the truth is, those missing things still have power. I still remember them. They still happened. I still OWN them, even if the physical item is gone. It doesn’t matter that I can’t put my hands on the THING. The THING still exists somewhere (even things lost in fires or to death still exist in my memory, my heart, and in the history of the world)…
Just because something is missing, doesn’t mean it’s gone.
This made me think of all of the art masterpieces that are missing — lost to time, war, or thieves. Many have been recovered (including Munch’s Scream, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, and the “takeaway Rembrandt” portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III which has been stolen and recovered four different times), but specialists estimate over 150,000 stolen works may never be recovered.
But just because they are MISSING does not mean they are GONE. They still resonate with us. They still have power. They still exist.
So the next time you lose something — a treasured item, a mate, a home — let THIS list of Stolen Art remind you: it is not gone. It still lives with YOU.
1: The Concert by Johannes Vermeer
Any reference to stolen art MUST begin with the 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston where thieves dressed as policemen made off with 13 masterpieces estimated at over $300 million including The Concert, one of only 36 known Vermeers in existence. The painting has been gone for 25 years, but that does not diminish its power — I still feel like I am in that room, listening to that 17th century music… Also lost in the Gardner heist were 5 Degas paintings, 3 Rembrandts, and a Manet…
2. Madeleine Leaning on Her Elbow with Flowers in Her Hair by Pierre Auguste Renoir
In 2011, an armed robber entered a private home in Houston and demanded money and diamonds. Worried about the intruder finding her young son sleeping upstairs, the lady of the house pointed to the Renoir. “That’s the most valuable thing I own,” she said, and the robber took the painting — frame and all — and fled, leaving the family unharmed. I love this Renoir (worth over $1 million), the lady pictured, and the woman who sacrificed a bit of art to protect her family.
3: Le Pigeon Aux Petits Pois by Pablo Picasso
In 2010, a single thief stole five works — valued at over 100 million — from the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris including works by Modigliani, Matisse, Leger, Braque, and this masterpiece by Picasso. The thief later claimed he threw the five paintings into a trash bin and they were destroyed by a compactor. The painting may very well have been destroyed, but Picasso’s effect on art and history will never be forgotten.
4. Waterloo Bridge by Claude Monet
In 2012, a team of robbers stole 7 paintings from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal museum including a Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, and two Monets — one this impression of Waterloo Bridge. One suspect’s mother claims she burned the stolen works in an attempt to protect her son (although she later recanted the claim). The paintings may be on the black market or they may be ash, but you can still be moved by that blue haze over the Thames.
5. Auvers sur Oise by Paul Cezanne
This painting was stolen during a high-tech burglary worthy of a film plot. Lifted from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England on December 31, 1999, the thieves used the cover of the millennium fireworks celebration to nab this Cezanne masterpiece. Renoirs, Rodins, and Toulouse-Lautrecs hung in the same gallery, but the thieves left those behind; they seemed to be specifically targeting this Cezanne. The heist took only 10 minutes, but the piece has been gone for 15 years with no signs of resurfacing.
6. Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence by Caravaggio
On a stormy night in October 1969, thieves broke into the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo and cut this Caravaggio masterpiece from its frame where it had been hanging for over 300 years. The painting has not been seen since. Caravaggio died young — at only 39 years old — so we only have about 70 of his paintings; the loss of this $20 million masterpiece was a blow to Western Art. The world lost the artist and this painting too soon, but Michelangelo Caravaggio’s impact on art and culture is indelible.
7. Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen by Vincent Van Gogh
In 2002, thieves entered the famed Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam through the roof; within a few minutes, they had escaped with two Van Gogh masterpieces. The robbers were arrested and convicted in 2004, but the paintings were not recovered. The second stolen painting was View of the Sea at Scheveningen (below). These may not be the most famous Van Goghs, but Vincent’s heart and soul still beat in both.
8. Two Balconies by Salvador Dali
In February 2006, four armed thieves used the raucous Brazilian party of Carnivale to cloak their heist of the Museu Chacara do Ceu in Rio de Janeiro. As millions celebrated in the streets, the robbers made off with this Dali — the only one by the artist on display in Latin America. The gunmen also lifted a Matisse, Picasso, and Monet, robbing Brazil of some of their most valuable masterpieces, but never of the Brazilian spirit.
9. The Just Judges panel from the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan and Hubert van Eyck.
Arguably one of the most important works in Western Art (it is history’s first major oil painting), the Ghent altarpiece has been through a lot: it was nearly destroyed in a fire, stolen by Napoleon, and hunted by the Nazis (famously rescued by the Monuments Men). It is arguably the most stolen painting of all time. Then, in 1934 one of its 12 panels — the Just Judges — was stolen and has never been returned, although there is always hope of a reunion of the entire altarpiece. Sometimes it is comforting to dream of the return of things lost.
10. Storm of the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt van Rijn
We end back where we began: with the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft. The Storm of the Sea of Galilee is Rembrandt’s only known seascape — and this painting makes me wish he had painted more. With the boat on the verge of capsizing, it reminds me of the fragility of all life — we are always on the verge of losing it all, so might as well appreciate art — and life — while we still have it.
There are rewards offered for the safe return of all of these paintings. For more information — or if you have a tip to help with recovery — you can always check with the FBI’s Art Crime Team.
Stephanie Storey
Art for Your Life, Blog
Art Theft, Black Market, Caravaggio, cezanne, Ghent Altarpiece, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist, Jan Van Eyck, Kunsthal Gallery Heist, picasso, raphael, Renoir, Salvador Dali, Stolen Art, van gogh, Van Gogh Museum Robbery
One thought on “Top 10 Stolen Works of Art (Life Lesson: Just because it’s missing doesn’t mean it’s gone)”
Nellie.
Love this….will pass on to some art living friends….but can’t keep track of passwords !!
Aunt Nell 🙂
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Meghan Picerno & Gardar Thor Cortes Will Lead the Love Never Dies Tour
August 16th, 2017 | By Ryan Gilbert
Come along and follow them! Award-winning opera stars Meghan Picerno and Garðar Thór Cortes will lead the North American tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies, The Phantom Returns as Christine Daaé and The Phantom, respectively. The touring production—a sequel to Lloyd Webber's blockbuster musical The Phantom of the Opera—will begin with a special preview engagement at Baltimore's Hippodrome Theatre on October 3, before making its way to cities all across the country.
In addition to Picerno and Cortes, the cast of Love Never Dies will feature Karen Mason as Madame Giry, Sean Thompson as Raoul, Mary Michael Patterson as Meg Giry, and Casey Lyons and Jake Miller sharing the role of Gustave. The trio of The Phantom’s henchmen include Katrina Kemp as Fleck, Richard Koons as Squelch and Stephen Petrovich as Gangle.
The ensemble includes Chelsey Arce, Erin Chupinsky, Diana DiMarzio, Tyler Donahue, Yesy Garcia, Alyssa Giannetti, Michael Gillis, Tamar Greene, Natalia Lepore Hagan, Lauren Lucacek, Alyssa McAnany, Rachel Ann Moore, Bronson Norris Murphy, Dave Schoonover, Adam Soniak, Kelly Swint, Lucas John Thompson, Correy West, Arthur Wise and Borris York.
Directed by Simon Phillips, Love Never Dies takes place in 1907 and picks up 10 years after the Phantom's disappearance from the Paris Opera House. He has escaped to a new life in New York where he lives amongst the screaming joy rides and freak-shows of Coney Island. In this new electrically-charged world, he has finally found a place for his music to soar. All that is missing is his love—Christine Daaé. Now one of the world’s finest sopranos, Christine is struggling in an ailing marriage to Raoul. So, it is with excitement she accepts an invitation to travel to New York and perform at a renowned opera house. In a final bid to win back her love, the Phantom lures Christine, her husband, and their young son Gustave from Manhattan; to the glittering and glorious world of Coney Island…not knowing what is in store for them.
Love Never Dies features music by Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Glenn Slater, a book by Lloyd Webber, Slater, Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth, and additional lyrics by Charles Hart. The unforgettable score includes such songs as "Beneath a Moonless Sky," "Why Does She Love Me?," "'Til I Hear You Sing," "The Beauty Underneath," "Once Upon Another Time" and "Look with Your Heart."
The new touring production will reflect an extensive re-working of the material by an Australian creative team for the original Australian premiere in 2011. Since its premiere in 2010, Love Never Dies has enjoyed productions worldwide in London, Australia, Denmark, Japan and Germany. The North American tour brings the musical to the U.S. for the first time.
To find out when Love Never Dies, The Phantom Returns is headed to your city, click here.
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Tony Committee Weighs in On Eligibility for On Your Feet! & More
January 7th, 2016 | By Ryan McPhee
The Tony Awards Administration Committee met today for the second time this season to determine the eligibility of six Broadway productions for the 2016 Tony Awards. The committee will meet a total of four times (twice more) throughout the 2015-2016 season to decide the eligibility for the 70th Annual Tony Awards, which will take place on June 12, 2016 at the Beacon Theatre.
The productions discussed were King Charles III, On Your Feet!, Allegiance, A View from the Bridge, Misery and China Doll.
The committee made the following determinations:
Tim Pigott-Smith will be considered eligible in the Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play category for his performance in King Charles III.
Ana Villafañe and Josh Segarra will be considered eligible in the Best Performance by an Actress/Actor in a Leading Role in a Musical categories for their respective performances in On Your Feet!.
Telly Leung and Lea Salonga will be considered eligible in the Best Performance by an Actor/Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical categories for their respective performances in Allegiance.
Donyale Werle and Darrel Maloney will be considered jointly eligible in the Best Scenic Design of a Musical category for their work in Allegiance.
Phoebe Fox, Russell Tovey, Michael Zegen, Michael Gould and Richard Hansell will be considered eligible in the Best Performance by an Actor/Actress in a Featured Role in a Play categories for their respective performances in A View from the Bridge.
All other eligibility rulings were consistent with opening night billing.
The committee met previously in November to determine the eligbility rules for 10 shows, including Hamilton and Spring Awakening.
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Let Prison Inmates Vote
Mass incarceration is now a bipartisan concern. Its effects on our democracy should be, too.
By Robert P. Alvarez | May 14, 2019
Should Americans caught up in the justice system be stripped of their right to vote?
Senator Bernie Sanders catapulted the issue into the spotlight when he declared his unequivocal support for the voting rights of prison inmates at a recent town hall.
“I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy,” he said. “Once you start chipping away and you say, that person committed a terrible crime, not gonna let him vote… you’re running down a slippery slope.”
Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren were more cautious, but didn’t explicitly disagree. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke said he was in favor of allowing “non-violent” offenders to vote while incarcerated.
South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, alone among Democrats, was a hard no on any inmate voting.
Republicans, by contrast, have raised the idea of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev or white supremacist murderer Dylan Roof voting as a way of shooting down the entire discussion.
Of course, Tsarnaev and Roof are but two of the over 2.3 million prisoners locked up in “the land of the free.” Using one or two examples to justify condemning over 2 million people is always unsound. But it’s especially repulsive in this instance.
In all, 14 states and D.C. bar prisoners from voting. Twenty-two other states, to varying degrees, restrict voting during parole or probation.
Twelve more ban people with felonies from voting for a time even after their release — and in Kentucky and Iowa, permanently. (Virginia bans them permanently too, but the state’s governor has been automatically restoring voting rights to people who complete their sentences).
The impact of all this on our democracy is striking.
One in 10 Kentuckians can never vote again due to a felony conviction. For black Kentuckians, the rate of permanent felony disenfranchisement is even greater, at one in four.
It’s not hard to understand why Republicans want to keep it this way. Thanks to a racially biased justice system, black and Hispanic adults are much more likely to be convicted of felonies. They’re also much more likely to vote for Democrats.
Republicans know this. Just last November, a super-majority of Floridians voted to re-enfranchise 1.5 million folks with prior felony convictions — including 1 out of 5 black Floridians. Yet before the ink could even dry, Florida’s GOP-led House passed legislation restricting the measure and applying a poll tax on returning voters.
The gamesmanship gets even more perverse when you consider the Census, which counts prisoners as residents of the areas where they’re confined.
That inflates the populations of Republican-leaning small towns and rural areas where most state prisons are located. That means more federal money and more legislative seats, even though the inmates can’t vote for who holds them. Are you seeing the hypocrisy yet?
Forbidding inmate voting, disenfranchising them after release, and counting them as residents where they’re imprisoned are all components of a terrible practice known as prison gerrymandering.
It looks and smells a lot like the 3/5 compromise — an old constitutional practice allowing Southern states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population when apportioning House seats, Electoral College votes, and federal funding.
For too long, inmates have been an easy punching bag for politicians. Voting should be an inalienable right — even for inmates, and especially for those who’ve served their time. No amount of single-case scare tactics should ruin it for the lot.
Mass incarceration is now a bipartisan concern. Its effects on our democracy should be too. And if that’s a problem because it could swing a few elections, the problem isn’t prisoners — it’s the system that locks up an entire voting bloc.
I Was Threatened with Two Years in Prison for Voting
Dying in Prison
Republicans Don’t Want Your Vote to Count
Prison Labor is Slavery by Another Name
By Robert P. Alvarez
Robert P. Alvarez works in communications at the Institute for Policy Studies. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
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Tech Boom: Intel’s Earnings Up an Astounding 875%
Posted February 19, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Industry Stories.
We thought Zillow’s 2011 IPO was a good sign for the tech and Internet market. Intel has not only just confirmed that notion, but blown everybody’s expectations right out of the water.
The world’s largest chipmaker just wowed Wall Street and the tech world with its latest earnings report. The publicly-traded company reported a net income of $2.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, up an amazing 875% from its $234 million earnings in the fourth quarter of 2008. This more than beat Wall Street expectations.
While we won’t go into detail over the financial numbers (you can do that here PDF ), we do want to highlight some of the key stats:
– Revenues in Q4 2009 rose to $10.6 billion, a climb of 28% from $8.3 billion last year.
– However, if you look at the big picture, Intel had a better 2008 than 2009. 2009 revenues were $35.1 billion, while 2008 revenues reached $37.6 billion. That’s a 7% difference.
– Intel predicts revenues of approximately $9.7 billion in Q1 2010, above Wall Street estimates.
– Around a year ago, at the heart of the economic collapse, Intel decided to invest $7 billion into new chip plants. It looks to be paying off.
Intel’s Q4 report is one of the first to come out this year, but it won’t be the last. If Intel’s numbers are any indication though, we’re nearing the light at the end of the tunnel.
Tags: intel
USB 3.0 Finally Arrives
Posted February 16, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Percento.
When you’re in front of your PC, waiting for something to transfer to removable media, that’s when seconds feel like minutes, and minutes feel like hours. And data storage scenarios such as that one is where the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0’s greatest impact will be felt first. As of CES, 17 SuperSpeed USB 3.0-certified products were introduced, including host controllers, adapter cards, motherboards, and hard drives (but no other consumer electronics devices). Still more uncertified USB 3.0 products are on the way, and they can’t get here fast enough.
Glance Backward
The beauty of USB 3.0 is its backward compatibility with USB 2.0; you need a new cable and new host adapter (or, one of the Asus or Gigabyte motherboards that supports USB 3.0) to achieve USB 3.0, but you can still use the device on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance. In reducing some overhead requirements of USB (now, the interface only transmits data to the link and device that need it, so devices can go into low power state when not needed), the new incarnation now uses one-third the power of USB 2.0.
The theoretical throughput improvement offered by USB 3.0 is dramatic — a theoretical 10X jump over existing USB 2.0 hardware. USB 2.0 maxed out at a theoretical 480Mbps, while USB 3.0 can theoretically handle up to 5Gbps. Mind you, applications like storage will still be limited by the type of drive inside; so, for example, you can expect better performance from RAIDed hard drives or fast solid-state drives (SSDs) than from, say, a standalone single drive connected to the computer via USB 3.0.
The real-world examples are fairly convincing — and underscore USB 3.0’s advantage for high-def video, music, and digital imaging applications. Our early test results are encouraging as well: We tested Western Digital’s My Book 3.0, the first USB 3.0-certified external hard drive. The performance was on a par with that of eSATA-but the benefit here is that USB 3.0 is a powered port, so you don’t need to have another external power supply running to the drive (as you do with eSATA; unless the eSATA drive you’re using is designed to steal power from a USB port while transferring data over the eSATA interface).
While the WD drive was the first to announce, a slew of other hard drive makers either announced products at the show, or discussed plans to release products in the coming months. Among them: Seagate (which is doing a portable drive), LaCie, Rocstor, and Iomega. Even non-traditional hard drive vendors like Dane-Elec and A-Data showed products they billed as USB 3.0 (the latter two even had USB 3.0-connected SSDs, the first external drives to use solid-state storage inside.
One of the things to look for in the coming months is the certified SuperSpeed USB 3.0 logo. Products are currently filling the queues at the official certification testing labs, but presence of that certification logo will give you some peace of mind that the product you’re buying truly does live up to the USB 3.0 spec.
Given that the certification labs are jammed up, though, you can expect companies to release USB 3.0 products without official certification. (Buffalo Technologies’ drive, released late 2009, is not certified; LaCie’s drives are in the process of certification, but will initially carry LaCie’s own logo for USB 3.0, and will gain a sticker on the box once certification is completed.) And in those cases, it will be hard to know whether the device truly lives up to its performance potential.
Compatibility Guarantee
And this time around, the way the USB spec is written, says Jeff Ravencraft, consumers should have an easier time finding products that are truly USB 3.0. Before, in the transition from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0, the USB 2.0 spec was written in a way where it “encompassed low, full and high-speed USB,” explains Ravencraft, president and chairman of the USB Implementers Forum. “Since those are all encapsulated in the USB 2.0 spec, [vendors] could have a certified product that’s low-speed, but still call it USB 2.0.
“We don’t have that issue with USB 3.0 To claim you’re USB 3.0, you have to deliver 5Gbps. There’s no other way to get the certification.”
Ravencraft adds that the group is prepared to protect the USB 3.0 logo, to make sure that only manufacturers who go through certification use it. “We’ll take legal action if anyone infringes on our marks.”
By end of year, Ravencraft says the loggerjam of products awaiting certification should be past, and the organization’s network of worldwide test labs will be handling USB 3.0 certification.
According to In-Stat Research, by 2013, more than one-quarter of USB 3.0 products will support SuperSpeed USB 3.0.
Ravencraft says this is the fastest ramp up of USB products he’s seen in the past ten years, across the previous versions of USB.
I say the change can’t come fast enough. The trick, though, will be getting the interface into our notebooks (without requiring a kludgy ExpressCard adapter). So far, though, only HP and Fujitsu have announced limited USB 3.0 support on notebooks. And Taiwanese notebook and desktop maker MSI indicated that it wouldn’t have USB 3.0 until, at the earliest, the third-quarter of this year; product managers for both notebooks and desktops cited manufacturing concerns like chipset availability in large quantities, and the need to test USB 3.0 chipsets.
And in the meantime, the only announced peripherals remain storage devices. At next year’s CES, it’s likely we’ll hear more about specific consumer electronics devices such as digital cameras and camcorders and video cameras moving to USB 3.0. Hopefully by then we’ll start getting a critical mass of PC hardware with USB 3.0 integrated, too.
Google Plans Ultrafast Internet Broadband
The search giant say it’ll build experimental 1-gigabit-per-second broadband networks in a small number of test locations.
Google on Wednesday said that it plans to build a series of experimental high-speed networks that will provide broadband connectivity at speeds 100 times beyond typical U.S. broadband connections.
Under The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law in February 2009, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was directed to create a National Broadband Plan to promote better online communication and scientific, economic, and cultural development.
Google has been advising the FCC on the plan’s development. With 35 days until the FCC unveils its plan, Google has decided to build high-speed broadband networks in a small number of test locations. The company is promising Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, through fiber-to-the-home connections.
Google said it will offer network access to between 50,000 and 500,000 people at a competitive prices.
“We doing this because we want to experiment with new ways to make the Web better and faster for everyone, allowing applications that would be impossible today,” said Google product manager James Kelly in a video.
Examples of such applications include 3D medical imaging over the Web, downloading high-definition feature films in less than five minutes, and collaborating with geographically dispersed classmates while watching a live, 3D lecture.
Google expects that the availability of high-speed Internet access will allow developers to create new applications that haven’t yet been imagined.
The company says that its experimental networks will be operated under “open access” principals, so that users have a choice of service provider, and that its networks will be managed in an open, transparent, and non-discriminatory way.
Google is soliciting involvement from community partners through a Request For Information (RFI). Government officials and members of the public can nominate their communities to be test participants at Google’s Web site before March 26.
Source: InformationWeek
If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe
Posted January 22, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Industry Stories, Information Technology Security, Percento.
Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”
Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”
Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google’s e-mail service, many people have reacted to the break-ins with a shrug.
According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users still decides to leave the digital equivalent of a key under the doormat: they choose a simple, easily guessed password like “abc123,” “iloveyou” or even “password” to protect their data.
“I guess it’s just a genetic flaw in humans,” said Amichai Shulman, the chief technology officer at Imperva, which makes software for blocking hackers. “We’ve been following the same patterns since the 1990s.”
Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou, a company that makes software for users of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it. (RockYou, which had already been widely criticized for lax privacy practices, has advised its customers to change their passwords, as the hacker gained information about their e-mail accounts as well.)
The trove provided an unusually detailed window into computer users’ password habits. Typically, only government agencies like the F.B.I. or the National Security Agency have had access to such a large password list.
“This was the mother lode,” said Matt Weir, a doctoral candidate in the e-crimes and investigation technology lab at Florida State University, where researchers are also examining the data.
Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”
More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.
That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.
“We tend to think of password guessing as a very time-consuming attack in which I take each account and try a large number of name-and-password combinations,” Mr. Shulman said. “The reality is that you can be very effective by choosing a small number of common passwords.”
Some Web sites try to thwart the attackers by freezing an account for a certain period of time if too many incorrect passwords are typed. But experts say that the hackers simply learn to trick the system, by making guesses at an acceptable rate, for instance.
To improve security, some Web sites are forcing users to mix letters, numbers and even symbols in their passwords. Others, like Twitter, prevent people from picking common passwords.
Still, researchers say, social networking and entertainment Web sites often try to make life simpler for their users and are reluctant to put too many controls in place.
Even commercial sites like eBay must weigh the consequences of freezing accounts, since a hacker could, say, try to win an auction by freezing the accounts of other bidders.
Overusing simple passwords is not a new phenomenon. A similar survey examined computer passwords used in the mid-1990s and found that the most popular ones at that time were “12345,” “abc123” and “password.”
Why do so many people continue to choose easy-to-guess passwords, despite so many warnings about the risks?
Security experts suggest that we are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we have to remember in this digital age.
“Nowadays, we have to keep probably 10 times as many passwords in our head as we did 10 years ago,” said Jeff Moss, who founded a popular hacking conference and is now on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “Voice mail passwords, A.T.M. PINs and Internet passwords — it’s so hard to keep track of.”
In the idealized world championed by security specialists, people would have different passwords for every Web site they visit and store them in their head or, if absolutely necessary, on a piece of paper.
But bowing to the reality of our overcrowded brains, the experts suggest that everyone choose at least two different passwords — a complex one for Web sites were security is vital, such as banks and e-mail, and a simpler one for places where the stakes are lower, such as social networking and entertainment sites.
Mr. Moss relies on passwords at least 12 characters long, figuring that those make him a more difficult target than the millions of people who choose five- and six-character passwords.
“It’s like the joke where the hikers run into a bear in the forest, and the hiker that survives is the one who outruns his buddy,” Mr. Moss said. “You just want to run that bit faster.”
Antivirus makers applaud, mock Microsoft Security Essentials
Posted January 9, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Industry Stories, Information Technology Security, Percento.
Four antivirus makers have weighed in on the release of Microsoft Security Essentials, and their opinions are all over the place. We asked various security companies for their opinion on MSE, which launched yesterday, and Symantec, ESET, Avast, and AVG responded with their thoughts.
Microsoft claims it is targeting consumers who currently don’t have any protection on their Windows PC, but of course MSE will end up on many computers that already have third-party security software installed. Since MSE is free, the software security market is going to get a serious shake-up, and here’s what Microsoft’s new competitors think about what’s about to happen.
Symantec, maker of the Norton line of products, says MSE doesn’t stand a chance in today’s market: “While we applaud any vendor that heightens consumer awareness of the need for computer security, it’s clear that the threat landscape has moved on from the product Microsoft is launching,” a Symantec spokesperson told Ars. “Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a stripped down version of their old OneCare product which was poorly rated by industry experts and users alike. From a security perspective, this Microsoft tool offers reduced defenses at a critical point in the battle against cybercrime. Unique malware and social engineering tricks fly under the radar of traditional signature-based technology alone—which is what is employed by free security tools such as Microsoft’s”
ESET, maker of the NOD32 line of products, is unfazed by the product’s launch: “Certainly basic, but free, protection is better than no protection,” Christopher Dale, Public Relations Manager of ESET, told Ars. “For those whose primary concern is price, we would imagine MSE will hold great appeal while making the freeware market more competitive. The product doesn’t directly impact ESET as we offer a full-featured security solution w/ more configuration choices and free phone support.”
Avast is perfectly fine with Microsoft entering the market: “We are glad to see Microsoft joining us in offering free anti-virus/security protection to users,” Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast, told Ars. “We have long believed that top notch security protection should be freely available—that is why nearly 100 million users around the world protect their computers and data with our free avast! antivirus. Around the world there are about 500 million home computer users that need [to be] protected while using the Internet. We believe only around 20 percent of these users are using a traditional paid security product while 250 million are using avast! or one of the other high-quality free products. Users have already decided that security should be free—there are more users of free avast! than users of all paid products combined. But, free users should not be subjected to inferior or ‘basic’ protection.”
AVG, on the other hand, thinks Microsoft will push its product via as many anticompetitive ways as possible: “Microsoft will likely push MSE out via every automated channel available to them—which in and of itself poses all sorts of interesting anti-trust questions,” Siobhan MacDermott, VP Head of Public Policy, Corporate Communications, and Investor Relations for AVG Technologies, told Ars. “They will focus on gaining consumers through the simplicity of installing the product via routine channels of connection. On paper it makes sense, but in reality, we believe this will force consumers to unwittingly enter into a situation that makes them more vulnerable. Experts agree that the biggest nemesis to Windows was not the vulnerability of its code but rather the popularity of the operating system. It is a law of numbers; large communities create large pools of opportunities for thieves. If Microsoft leverages the power of its OS market to rapidly create a large community of MSE users, we believe those customers will be doubly vulnerable.”
There you have it; two antivirus makers are fine with Microsoft Security Essentials and the other two aren’t. We’re more surprised with the ones that are fine with it, since MSE can potentially steal customers away from them (in fact, many of our readers and users on other forums have already declared they are switching). In our first look at MSE yesterday, we were impressed with what Microsoft was offering as a free download for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. For those who have had a chance to install it, how do your thoughts compare to the above statements?
Tags: antivirus, microsoft
MagicJack’s next act: disappearing cell phone fees
Posted January 8, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Cool Technology, Industry Stories.
LAS VEGAS –
The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that’s been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that’s sure to draw protest from cellular carriers.
The new magicJack uses, without permission, radio frequencies for which cellular carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive licenses.
YMax Corp., which is based in Palm Beach, Fla., said this week at the International Consumers Electronics Show that it plans to start selling the device in about four months for $40, the same price as the original magicJack. As before, it will provide free calls to the U.S. and Canada for one year.
The device is, in essence, a very small cellular tower for the home.
The size of a deck of cards, it plugs into a PC, which needs a broadband Internet connection. The device then detects when a compatible cell phone comes within 8 feet, and places a call to it. The user enters a short code on the phone. The phone is then linked to the magicJack, and as long as it’s within range (YMax said it will cover a 3,000-square-foot home) magicJack routes the call itself, over the Internet, rather than going through the carrier’s cellular tower. No minutes are subtracted from the user’s account with the carrier. Any extra fees for international calls are subtracted from the user’s account with magicJack, not the carrier.
According to YMax CEO Dan Borislow, the device will connect to any phone that uses the GSM standard, which in the U.S. includes phones from AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA. At a demonstration at CES, a visitor’s phone with a T-Mobile account successfully placed and received calls through the magicJack. Most phones from Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. won’t connect to the device.
Borislow said the device is legal because wireless spectrum licenses don’t extend into the home.
AT&T, T-Mobile and the Federal Communications Commission had no immediate comment on whether they believe the device is legal, but said they were looking into the issue. CTIA — The Wireless Association, a trade group, said it was declining comment for now. None of them had heard of YMax’s plans.
Borislow said YMax has sold 5 million magicJacks for landline phones in the last two years, and that roughly 3 million are in active use. That would give YMax a bigger customer base than Internet phone pioneer Vonage Holdings Corp., which has been selling service for $25 per month for the better part of a decade. Privately held YMax had revenue of $110 million last year, it says.
U.S. carriers have been selling and experimenting with devices that act similarly to the wireless magicJack. They’re called “femtocells.” Like the magicJack, they use the carrier’s licensed spectrum to connect to a phone, then route the calls over a home broadband connection. They improve coverage inside the home and offload capacity from the carrier’s towers.
But femtocells are complex products, because they’re designed to mesh with the carrier’s external network. They cost the carriers more than $200, though some sell them cheaper, recouping the cost through added service fees. YMax’s magicJack is a much smaller, simpler design.
Tags: cell phone, cellular carrier, electronics, magic jack
Google hopes to change wireless retail game with Nexus One
Posted January 8, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Cool Technology.
It wasn’t much of a secret, really, but the sleek, Android-powered Nexus One is finally here, and yes: you can buy it directly from Google, over the Web. As expected, the unlocked, no-contract Nexus One will cost you a pretty penny, but subsidized versions will also be available from T-Mobile and … what’s this, Verizon Wireless? You betcha.
Announced this afternoon during a press conference at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, the Nexus One (designed by phone maker HTC under Google’s strict supervision) is available for purchase right now on Google’s new Web store rather than through a carrier—a twist that some observers see as a paradigm shift in the wireless market, where the balance of power is usually tipped in the carrier’s favor.
Then again, Google is sticking with the practice of charging an arm and a leg for an unlocked, no-contract handset. If you want it unlocked for use with any SIM card and without a contract, the phone will set you back a cool $530. Here in the U.S., you’ll be able to use the Nexus One with either an AT&T or T-Mobile SIM card; that said, AT&T users will only be able to tap into the carrier’s EDGE data network, while T-Mobile customers can use both EDGE and 3G.
Another option is to opt for a traditional two-year contract with T-Mobile, which brings the price of the Nexus One down to $180. That detail has already been well leaked; one of the surprises Tuesday, however, was the news that Verizon Wireless in the U.S. (which currently has the Android-powered Motorola Droid) and Vodafone in Europe are also on board with the Nexus One, with versions of the handset for those networks due in the spring. Interesting. (I should note, though, that the current unlocked Nexus One will only work on GSM-based networks, not CDMA carriers like Verizon or Sprint; I’m assuming that the eventual Nexus One for Verizon will be a CDMA phone.)
If you’ve been following all the rumors over the past few weeks about the Nexus One, few of the hardware details revealed by Google on Tuesday will come as a surprise. Yep, the Nexus One is slim and trim, alright, measuring about 0.45 inches thick and weighing in at a relatively light 4.6 ounces, and as predicted, it’ll come with a speedy 1GHz “Snapdragon” processor under the hood, a five-megapixel camera with an LED flash, Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth, a slot for microSD memory expansion, and a standard 3.5mm jack for headsets. Missing in action: a slide-out keypad and “multitouch” for the Web browser (for “pinching” or “zooming” Web pages).
Also on board the Nexus One: the latest version of Android (version 2.1, to be precise), which adds a series of interface enhancements, more home screens (five, up from three), live news and weather widgets, “live” wallpaper (which, as demonstrated during Google’s press conference, might feature a forest scene with falling leaves and water that ripples when at your touch), and even built-in voice recognition for any text field on the phone (meaning you can simply speak rather than type out a text message).
Now, I haven’t personally seen the Nexus One yet, but the bloggers at Engadget have, and their praise is, well … somewhat guarded. No question, they say, the Nexus One is a sleek, sexy, and speedy handset, but the bloggers conclude that the much-vaunted 2.1 version of Android doesn’t look all that different from the Droid’s version of Android. Also, while the Nexus One is “fast,” says Engadget, it’s “not so much of a leap up from the Droid.”
So yes … it sounds like the big news with the Nexus One is the way in which it’s being sold, not so much the handset itself (although the hardware certainly does sound impressive). But while I’m pleased that Google is selling the Nexus One unlocked out of the gate, the unsubsidized $530 price tag is awfully steep.
In any case, that’s the scoop; if you’re interested in more details about the Nexus One, you can check out Google’s site right here. Nexus One
So, show of hands: Who’s interested in snapping up the unlocked Nexus One?
Tags: android, google, nexus one
The top 10 tech ‘fails’ of 2009
Posted January 7, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Percento.
It was a big year for technology: Twitter and Facebook’s popularity exploded, while new smartphones, e-readers and a host of other gadgets cropped up to compete for our plugged-in affection.
But into each electronic life a little digital rain must fall.
We polled a handful of the most tech-savvy folks we know for their thoughts on the worst moments in technology from 2009 — the most epic “fails” of the year.
Your mileage may vary. If you think something doesn’t deserve to be here, or think we missed a noteworthy clunker, let us know in the comments section. And now, in no particular order, our 2009 Tech Fails …
Y2-what? Zune gets off to a bad start
Technically it was a New Year’s Eve surprise. But many owners of Microsoft’s Zune media player started 2009 with little more than a paperweight with LED lights.
At midnight on December 31, all Zune’s 30-GB MP3 players froze up. Microsoft explained the problem as a problem with the way the device’s internal clock recognized (or didn’t recognize) leap years.
The glitch only lasted a day, but didn’t help a device that was already failing to gain ground on Apple’s iPod.
TwitterPeek fails to pique interest
The reaction of many in the tech community to the release of the TwitterPeek device was a collective, “Huh?”
Sure, there are some people who don’t have smartphones and don’t want to pay for expensive mobile plans. But is there really a market for a $199 device that does nothing but let you manage yourTwitter feed?
“I already have a $200 device to update Twitter,” said one techie we spoke to. “It’s called my iPhone.”
The folks at Peek, makers of TwitterPeek, had already made the Pronto — a device that handled only texts and e-mails. Maybe a combination of the two gadgets is in the works. But even then, would enough people be interested? Probably not.
Facebook backtracks on owning your stuff
OK … so every time Facebook makes even the most minute changes, it sparks an outcry among its 350 million members, not to mention (irony alert) dozens of new Facebook groups geared at making the site change back.
But a terms-of-service change in February went further, implying that Facebook owned the rights to anything users uploaded to the site. Another change suggested that Facebook held those rights forever, even if people quit the site or took the material down.
Facebook responded that it simply needed those rights to be able to post information to other users. But when the backlash continued, the site eventually switched the terms back to their former wording.
Sidekick punts user info
In what one observer called “an almost incomprehensible data disaster,” T-Mobile told users in October that a server error at a Microsoft subsidiary had lost users’ personal data it had stored for the devices.
All of it.
Phone numbers, contact lists, calendars and other information was gone — and even new data would disappear if users turned off or recharged the phone.
Users were offered free service and rebates in the wake of the mess, as T-Mobile scrambled to recover what little of the data it could. But that didn’t stop the lawsuits, Internet griping and ill will generated by the snafu.
Hacking Twitter
It started as a story about someone hacking the accounts of several Twitter employees. Then, after Twitter said the attack was limited to personal information, not sensitive, company-related stuff, the hacker behind the attack struck again — in a different way.
He sent 310 documents to leading technology blog TechCrunch. The blog published a small portion of them and sent the documents to Twitter, which is when the company learned that they included financial projections and notes from high-level executive meetings.
Twitter responded by reportedly closing the security holes that allowed the attack.
Enough with the updates, already!
This was the year that online social media exploded. That’s good news for the future of Facebook, Twitter and the like.
But sometimes it just got to be a bit too much.
Members of Congress abandoned any pretense of paying attention to President Obama’s State of the Union speech by updating their Twitter feeds as he was speaking.
There was the groom who updated his Facebook relationship status at the altar. And the women who tweeted during childbirth. [In fairness, the most high-profile tweeting new mom was Sara Williams, wife of Twitter CEO Evan Williams].
And that’s not even mentioning all those friend requests you got from your grade-school teachers and members of your mom’s knitting circle.
Hyped-up Conficker fails
This is a failure we’re glad to report.
The Conficker worm was, by all accounts, a serious bit of malware that infected as many as 10 million computers worldwide. Instead of attacking those computers, it was designed to control them, paving the way for later attacks.
When researchers spotted the date April 1 in the worm’s coding, speculation began mounting that a major April Fools’ Day attack was on its way. Instead, it was mostly quiet — a false alarm of Y2K proportions.
“I think the joke’s on us a little bit, which you would have expected, having an April 1 date,” Holly Stewart, threat response manager for IBM’s X-Force, a computer security service, said at the time.
Attacks cripple Twitter, Facebook
On August 6, the concept of computer addiction didn’t seem so silly.
A massive denial-of-service attack hit Twitter, Facebook and the LiveJournal blogging site. Twitter was by far the hardest hit, completely blacking out for several hours.
The attacks were believed to have targeted a blogger in the country of Georgia who had been critical of Russia. The attacks, the blogger said, coincided with the one-year anniversary of renewed violence between the two countries.
What was telling was how freaked out people became. Users described feeling naked, jittery and upset without the ability to post on Twitter. When the site came back up, the top topic of conversation was the hashtag for “When Twitter Was Down.”
Gmail crashes
We heard some different views on this year’s string of outages or slowdowns of Google’s popular e-mail system.
Some thought coverage was overblown.
But as more computing power moves “into the cloud,” people and businesses are relying on programs like Gmail not just for e-mails, but to archive documents, chat with friends or co-workers and store contact information.
Gmail went through several high-profile crashes in 2009, including one in February and two in September. While e-mail crashes are nothing new to any provider, 2009’s were the first since Google begain offering offline support.
Response to the crashes simultaneously showed how many people depend on Gmail and how easy it is to make fun of those people. Social-networking blog Mashable responded with a list of five things to do while Gmail is down (No. 1: “Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming, ‘Gmail is down!’ and inquiring, ‘Is Gmail down?’ “)
I got Google Wave — now what?
OK, so it’s a little early in the game to call this one a total fail. But after the breathless anticipation that greeted Google Wave and the hot rush to get an invitation for its beta testing, lots of users found themselves asking, “OK … now what?”
Google, for its part, released an 80-minute tutorial video — leading some observers to argue that if you need an hour and 20 minutes to explain what your product does, you might be in trouble.
It’s designed as a platform to allow users to communicate and collaborate in real time — a tool some predict will be used effectively by developers in the future.
But for now, it’s inspired the creation of a Web site — Easier to Understand Than Wave — on which users compare the online tool to other sometimes obtuse subjects (Both Ozzy Osbourne and the geopolitical climate of Southeast Asia are easier to understand than Wave, users voted, while Sarah Palin and Scientology are both more difficult).
Windows 7 leaving Redmond’s help desk less busy
Posted January 6, 2010 by Anthony Baggett & filed under Industry Stories, Percento.
There are many ways to measure how Windows 7 is doing. There are reports on new PC sales, tallies of boxed copy sales, and surveys of planned enterprise adoption, to name a few.
But one of the most encouraging signs for Microsoft is the lack of phone calls it is getting from people with problems. Overall, Microsoft said the volume of calls to its support lines is half of what it expected.
“Overall we are finding our call center volume is down significantly more than we expected,” said Barbara Gordon, vice president of customer support for Microsoft.
The drop in calls isn’t just due to the fact that Windows 7 appears less problem-plagued than its predecessor, though. In the weeks leading up to and following the operating system’s release, Microsoft also added two new ways to get help–through an online forum called Microsoft Answers and via the Microsoft Helps feed on Twitter.
“What we have found is we are seeing far more take-up of self-service…forums and Twitter to get responses,” Gordon said in an interview this week.
With the Microsoft Answers forums, which launched late last year, users submit questions and experienced community members offer answers that Microsoft workers later validate to make sure they are correct.
So far, Microsoft has validated some 60,000 solutions. The company says that 83 percent of English-language queries are answered within seven days. Those in other languages have a slightly lower rate, but even of those 78 percent are taken care of within a week.
Meanwhile, Microsoft went live with its Twitter help site in October. Users can post a tweet with “@microsofthelps” in the message and Microsoft will respond. A team of seven employees dedicated full time to the project work with the broader support organization to respond to the many tweets. The goal is to either answer simple questions or to point people to a place where they can get a more detailed answer.
“It’s hard to answer (most questions) in 140 characters,” Gordon said.
But, she said, social networks like Twitter, Gordon said, allow the company to realize a problem that could be affecting thousands of people via a single short message.
“It’s really like a customer megaphone,” Gordon said.
Gordon hopes the new online options will not only cut down on call center expenses, but ultimately improve overall customer satisfaction with Windows. Customer satisfaction an area where the Mac has traditionally outpaced the various PC brands.
But Gordon says she hopes to see Windows gain ground. “We are really working on this,” she said.
Although Apple touts its personal touch with its stores, Gordon suggests Microsoft’s high-tech approach might ultimately win it more fans. “If I can help myself without having to go to the mall and sit at a geek bar I will be happier,” she said.
Nonetheless, one of the main features of Microsoft’s two retail stores is an answer desk very similar to the “Genius Bar” found in Apple stores.
As for the questions people ask on Twitter, they range from the expected range of bugs and problems to inquiries about future versions of products. This week, for example, one user asked when to expect Windows 8. Although vague, the answer was at least as direct as anything a reporter would get by asking Redmond.
“It will be a few years until the next official version comes out,” Microsoft replied on the Twitter feed. “Keep an eye out on microsoft.com for future updates.”
In addition to building goodwill and cutting costs, the online forums also allow Microsoft to quickly see when a problem is affecting a significant number of users. Such mechanisms helped Microsoft to recognize and then solve a video driver problem that was causing some users to have their systems hang when they reached 62 percent completion on an upgrade to Windows 7.
Within a week, Microsoft had a solution on its Website and shortly thereafter it posted an automated “Fix It,” essentially a script that a user can click on to have the proper steps done automatically. The Windows 7 upgrade fix has already been used more than 35,000 times, Microsoft said.
“We’re getting people able to meet their needs themselves,” Gordon said.
Tags: microsoft, windows 7
Good Guys Bring Down the Mega-D Botnet
For two years as a researcher with security company FireEye, Atif Mushtaq worked to keep Mega-D bot malware from infecting clients’ networks. In the process, he learned how its controllers operated it. Last June, he began publishing his findings online. In November, he suddenly switched from defense to offense. And Mega-D–a powerful, resilient botnet that had forced 250,000 PCs to do its bidding–went down.
Targeting Controllers
Mushtaq and two FireEye colleagues went after Mega-D’s command infrastructure. A botnet’s first wave of attack uses e-mail attachments, Web-based offensives, and other distribution methods to infect huge numbers of PCs with malicious bot programs.
The bots receive marching orders from online command and control (C&C) servers, but those servers are the botnet’s Achilles’ heel: Isolate them, and the undirected bots will sit idle. Mega-D’s controllers used a far-flung array of C&C servers, however, and every bot in its army had been assigned a list of additional destinations to try if it couldn’t reach its primary command server. So taking down Mega-D would require a carefully coordinated attack.
Synchronized Assault
Mushtaq’s team first contacted Internet service providers that unwittingly hosted Mega-D control servers; his research showed that most of the servers were based in the United States, with one in Turkey and another in Israel.
The FireEye group received positive responses except from the overseas ISPs. The domestic C&C servers went down.
Next, Mushtaq and company contacted domain-name registrars holding records for the domain names that Mega-D used for its control servers. The registrars collaborated with FireEye to point Mega-D’s existing domain names to nowhere. By cutting off the botnet’s pool of domain names, the antibotnet operatives ensured that bots could not reach Mega-D-affiliated servers that the overseas ISPs had declined to take down.
Finally, FireEye and the registrars worked to claim spare domain names that Mega-D’s controllers listed in the bots’ programming. The controllers intended to register and use one or more of the spare domains if the existing domains went down–so FireEye picked them up and pointed them to “sinkholes” (servers it had set up to sit quietly and log efforts by Mega-D bots to check in for orders). Using those logs, FireEye estimated that the botnet consisted of about 250,000 Mega-D-infected computers.
Down Goes Mega-D
MessageLabs, a Symantec e-mail security subsidiary, reports that Mega-D had “consistently been in the top 10 spam bots” for the previous year (find.pcworld.com/64165). The botnet’s output fluctuated from day to day, but on November 1 Mega-D accounted for 11.8 percent of all spam that MessageLabs saw.
Three days later, FireEye’s action had reduced Mega-D’s market share of Internet spam to less than 0.1 percent, MessageLabs says.
FireEye plans to hand off the anti-Mega-D effort to ShadowServer.org, a volunteer group that will track the IP addresses of infected machines and contact affected ISPs and businesses. Business network or ISP administrators can register for the free notification service.
Continuing the Battle
Mushtaq recognizes that FireEye’s successful offensive against Mega-D was just one battle in the war on malware. The criminals behind Mega-D may try to revive their botnet, he says, or they may abandon it and create a new one. But other botnets continue to thrive.
“FireEye did have a major victory,” says Joe Stewart, director of malware research with SecureWorks. “The question is, will it have a long-term impact?”
Like FireEye, Stewart’s security company protects client networks from botnets and other threats; and like Mushtaq, Stewart has spent years combating criminal enterprises. In 2009, Stewart outlined a proposal to create volunteer groups dedicated to making botnets unprofitable to run. But few security professionals could commit to such a time-consuming volunteer activity.
“It takes time and resources and money to do this day after day,” Stewart says. Other, under-the-radar strikes at various botnets and criminal organizations have occurred, he says, but these laudable efforts are “not going to stop the business model of the spammer.”
Mushtaq, Stewart, and other security pros agree that federal law enforcement needs to step in with full-time coordination efforts. According to Stewart, regulators haven’t begun drawing up serious plans to make that happen, but Mushtaq says that FireEye is sharing its method with domestic and international law enforcement, and he’s hopeful.
Until that happens, “we’re definitely looking to do this again,” Mushtaq says. “We want to show the bad guys that we’re not sleeping.”
Tags: Botnet, IT Security
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New York City Police Academy
Queens, New York
A Consolidated Campus for NYPD
Training police recruits has emerged as a focus in major U.S. cities, with fast-evolving considerations of public safety, community outreach, and technology adoption.
The New York City Department of Design & Construction engaged our team to design a consolidated campus to serve all 50,000 members of the New York City Police Department.
The design story takes place on a massive 32-acre underutilized and environmentally-challenged brownfield site, which we recaptured into a highly sustainable and resilient new campus. The project improves the site and at the same time, enhances occupant conditions. For example, in response to issues of site flooding and its mission critical nature, we designed all infrastructure above the 100-year flood plain, and at the same time our team deployed Active Design principles to boost occupant health and well-being.
As such, this has been the first building ever to apply for the LEED Active Design Innovation Credit, and it is also the largest public building in New York to achieve LEED Gold certification.
We are proud to have delivered for the city a campus that enhances the NYPD’s ability to protect the lives, rights, property, and dignity of all New Yorkers and visitors.
Client: NYC Design and Construction
Size: 67,819 square meters
Sustainability: LEED Gold certified
Best of the Year Award, Institutional Category
Interior Design Magazine, 2015
Make it Work Awards, Make it Healthy:Green Solutions
CFAD (Center for Active Design) Excellence Awards, 2015
Diamond Award
ACEC (American Council of Engineering Companies) Engineering Excellence Awards, 2015
BxW NYC (Built by Women New York City) Award
Conceived as a “horizontal skyscraper,” the building’s spaces are laid out for convenient access and efficient movement of the training cohorts of recruits as they move through enclosed walkways and stairs.
“This facility is designed to meet LEED Gold with bio-filtration for storm water run-off, rainwater harvesting, daylight harvesting, low VOC and recycled materials...and we owe this to the designers that worked diligently to try to capture the essence of what NYPD wanted and what [the DDC] wanted.”
Pena Mora, Commissioner (former), New York City Department of Design and Construction
The New York Police Academy has set a new benchmark in environmental sustainability for the City of New York. The many sustainable design accomplishments of the building were recognized when the project achieved LEED NC Gold, the largest public building in New York to achieve that rating.
NYPA was designed for the building and site to be a physical reflection of the commitments of the communities it serves including environmental stewardship, health, and wellness.
Mobility and Active Design
A wide pedestrian link extends the length of the campus and serves double duty as the conduit for the building infrastructure hidden overhead.
High-performance Facade
The exterior provides shading, controls solar gain, and optimizes daylight. Shading devices serve double-duty as light shelves, bouncing daylight deeper into interior spaces.
Energy consumption and carbon emissions have been minimized through an energy efficient central plant connected to a high performance building envelope, mechanical system and enhanced daylighting.
Improving, Restoring and Connecting
The Police Academy is an example of how design and construction can be used to fundamentally improve an existing site, restoring ecosystems and connecting back to the neighborhood. The NYPA site functions as a natural filtration system for the adjacent neighborhood’s stormwater, a 5-acre landscaped bioswale naturally cleans the water of toxins and oils before releasing it to the nearby Flushing Bay. Some of the water is retained on site and used to flush toilets, thereby reducing the burden on municipal water systems.
The building and site are designed to enhance the physical health of occupants through active design strategies which encourage physical activity throughout the day.
Paul Eagle
Joan Blumenfeld
LAPD Metropolitan Division Facility Renovation
United States Coast Guard Headquarters
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Tag Archives: aquinas
On the Evolution of the Soul: Descartes Versus Aristotle & St. Thomas Aquinas
ARISTOTLE, THOMAS, AND DESCARTES’ MEDITATIONS
In his Discourse on the Method of 1637, Descartes ridicules the Aristotelian/Thomist maxim, “there is nothing in the intellect that is not previously in the senses.” Descartes intended to expose the logical absurdities that follow from giving sense perception priority in the rational soul’s operation of understanding:
The reason for this is that they never raise their minds above things which can be perceived by the senses: they are so used to thinking of things only by imagining them (a way of thinking specially suited to material things) that whatever is unimaginable seems to them unintelligible. This is sufficiently obvious from the fact that even the scholastic philosophers take it as a maxim there is nothing in the intellect which has not previously been in the senses [Ce qui est assez manifeste de ce que mesme les Philosophes tienent pour maxime, dans les Escholes, qu’il n’y a rien dans l’entendement qui n’ait premierement este dan le sens]; yet it is certain that the ideas of God and the soul have never been in the senses.
According to Descartes, the soul knows neither itself, nor God through sense images because it is not the substantial form of the human body— certainly not in the Aristotelian/Scholastic sense of the soul as the form of the body. Descartes’ methodological doubt furnishes him with the requisite conditions for dispensing with the Aristotelian theory of knowledge that asserts the primacy of sense images in matters of rational intelligibility. If the soul knows nothing through sense-images, the only available avenue for indubitable knowledge of the existence of God and the soul is via “separation of the mind from the senses” [abducere mentem a sensibus] to discover the innate knowledge of the existence of God and the separabilty of the mind from the body.
Like his Regulae, Descartes’ Meditations become intelligible when read as a conversation with Aristotle and his Scholastic descendents, such as Scotus, Ockham, and above all, Aquinas. When Descartes broaches the question of the nature of the soul in his prefatory letter to the Sorbonne in the Meditations, he has nothing other than the opening of Aristotle’s De anima in mind, writing, “As regards the soul, many people have considered that it is not easy to discover [non facile investigari] its nature…” Aristotle’s procedure for inquiring into the soul in De anima begins with what is perceptible and moves to the underlying principle or mechanism that makes objects intelligible to the mind: “…in the order of investigation the question of what an agent does [movement] precedes the question, what enables it [i.e., the soul] to do what it does.”
The completely separable and independent essence of the mind, Descartes argues, involves two modifications of the Aristotelian/Thomistic account of man as a rational animal. First, Descartes rejects the Aristotelian/Thomistic conception of the rational soul, whose mode of understanding is “through an intelligible species,” or “turning toward phantasms” [se ad phantasmata)]. Second, Descartes rejects the Aristotelian/Thomistic conception of the substantial union of rational soul and body by denying not only the verity of the knowledge of species gained through the senses, but also entertaining the possible non-existence of all bodies. The two latter steps are necessary for Descartes to affirm the superior epistemological status of “the thinking thing” [res cogitans] over extended things [res extensia]. Only the “thinking thing” distinguishes the true from the false and uncovers the ontology of the soul in an intuitive, self-reflexive act (Descartes’ cogito). Only when the mind is free of sensory interference can it apprehend the innately contained ideas of the existence of God and the separability of the mind from the body.
On the contrary, Aristotle and Thomas assert that the soul is the mover of the body. The soul/mind, according to Descartes, is not responsible for the movement of the body; rather, the mind’s only operation is thinking. That is the reason why, after rejecting the Aristotelian/Thomistic account of the soul as the mover of the body, Descartes’ chief problem in the Meditations is demonstrating how the soul or mind is connected to the body. The circulatory system, Descartes argues, is responsible for the movements of the body; the mind is only aware of the body in respect to the sensation of pain, or other corporeal necessities, such as the body’s sensation of hunger or thirst. Aside from the rational mind’s embodiment in the human animal, the mind, so to speak, owes nothing to the body, and vice-versa. Hence, the mind, Descartes, argues, has no need of the bodily senses to grasp the essential nature of objects. The senses do not think, only the mind does. Thus, the mind’s innate ideas of concepts such as the existence of God, the ego, or the essence of wax need no corresponding tie to objects in the material world (which, for Descartes, may not even exist). Accordingly, the ego’s act of existence cannot be said to depend on the beginning or end of the body to which it is somehow attached. The very nature of the Cartesian mind is found through foundational ideas that have no exact correlative in the material world, such as the existence of God and the separability of the mind from the body.
Like Descartes, Thomas Aquinas’ obligation to abide by the Catholic Church’s dogma of the soul’s immortality required demonstrating that the soul, as the form of the human body, is separable from the body. Reckoning Christian doctrine with Aristotelian philosophy necessitated Thomas’ modification to Aristotle’s account of the soul in De anima. Because the question of the immortality of the intellective soul is left open in the Aristotelian account, Thomas argues for the substantiality of the rational soul per se. On the other hand, Descartes’ theory of cognition presupposes the body and senses as being obstacles to the mind’s knowledge of the truth. The mind can continue all of its cognitive operations independent of any contribution from the body’s sense organs because the objects of cognition do not come without, but from within the mind (“only the mind inspects” [inspectum mentus; or alternately, sed solius mentis inspectio]). Descartes seeks to demonstrate that the mind alone understands, and that only knowledge contained innately in the mind is indubitable. Confirmation of this fact is stated explicitly by Descartes: “…it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.” The “soul as the form of the body” [anima corporis forma] of Aristotle and his Scholastics descendents is eradicated by the first act of Cartesian doubt— calling the reliability of the senses into question. The only operation of the Cartesian mind, thinking, does not require a substantial union with a particular kind of body, or a body at all. In spite of his claim that the soul forms a substantial union with the body, Descartes broke the substantial union.
DESCARTES’ ANTI-ARISTOTLEIANISM IN THE DEDICATORY LETTER TO THE SORBONNE
To gain the commendation of the Sorbonne for his Meditations, Descartes required a subtle method of aligning his ostensibly anti-Aristotelian conception of God and the human soul with the views upheld by the conservative Aristotelians of the Sorbonne faculty:
…I have noticed both that you and all other theologians assert that the existence of God is capable of proof by natural reason, and also that the inference from Holy Scripture is that the knowledge [cognitional] of God is easier to acquire than the knowledge we have of many created things…”
Descartes presents his conception of man’s knowledge of God’s existence and the immortality of the soul in an attempt to persuade the theologians that his metaphysics does not diverge from the main topics of prior systems, but serves to reckon together and codify all “arguments that have been put forward on these issues by the great men.” Descartes praises his predecessor’s arguments as having “the force of demonstrations.” But Descartes’ claim of upholding orthodoxy in his dedicatory letter should be considered further alongside the claim he makes in his Letter to Voetius. In his letter, Descartes argues that Thomas’ proofs for the existence of God have all been found to contain invalid conclusions, and are therefore inconclusive, if not faulty proofs. If anyone is guilty of Atheism, Descartes declares, Thomas is the more culpable, pointing out that Thomas’ proofs for the existence of God have been disproven, whereas his never can be.
In his prefatory letter to the Sorbonne, Descartes strategically combines established doctrines of the Church with the traditional Scholastic endeavor to generate proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. However, in his Meditations, he ingeniously modifies the purpose of speculative philosophy and natural theology to support the practical ends of science. It is noteworthy that the Sorbonne letter only contains one passing mention of science, when in fact, the purpose of the Meditations is an attempt to establish a firm foundation upon which to raise the sciences.
Because Descartes’ physics derives entirely from his metaphysics, he is able to sidestep the fact that his speculative metaphysics overturns the speculative physics of Aristotle. The two main points Descartes addresses in his dedicatory epistle to the Meditations are proving the existence of God and demonstrating the immortality of the soul. He frames the latter problems in terms of the historical search for definitive philosophic proofs. If the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are provable, then atheism and religious skepticism can be combated with the assurance of victory. Descartes’ project of providing a firm metaphysical foundation for the sciences is carried out according to the established template of the Scholastic philosophers, and consists of a synthesis of speculative metaphysics and Christian theology. But by taking a reductionist approach to the history of philosophy and, indeed, to the act of philosophizing itself, Descartes is able to critique and sweep aside the writings of his Scholastic predecessors with his claims of logical soundness and indubitability for his proofs in the Meditations.
Descartes’ conception of one universal science, whose “roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences…,” requires that the method used for augmenting the sciences be single, in order for truth to be demonstrated in a systematic order. The indemonstrability of Aristotle’s first principles for reasoning is transformed, under the auspices of the Cartesian method, into the test of indubitability for arriving at epistemological certainty in derived propositions. Descartes’ synthesis of speculative metaphysics and Christian theology differs from the Scholastic’s metaphysics and theology in the respect that the aim of discovering a method to derive indubitable metaphysical principles to augment the sciences was never present for Scholastic philosophers. For Descartes, the theological imperative to demonstrate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul developed out of a rationale opposed to the Aristotelian/Scholastic concept of theoria (the contemplation of truth) as the utmost goal of philosophizing.
The philosophers of Antiquity commonly divided human activity into two spheres derived from two modes of understanding: the active life, derived from “opinion,” or subjective experience, and the contemplative life, derived from the mind’s rational faculty to apprehend objective concepts and objects. For Aristotle, life begins in the sphere of practical activity and ends in the act of philosophic contemplation of the unmoved Divine. For Aristotle as well as Thomas, metaphysics is the most logical and objective of the sciences, and crowns the investigation of being as being. The other sciences, which take practical activity as their end, are naturally inferior to metaphysics, and form a basis for the rational investigation of the Diving.
Descartes accepts the premise that metaphysics is superior to all the other sciences. Yet metaphysics is, as he calls it, the roots of his system, and not the speculative crown that metaphysics represents to Aristotle and Thomas. Philosophy, for Descartes, need no longer be speculative; first principles need no longer be sought for their own sake. The tradition of speculative philosophy is no longer viable in the scope of a theoretical philosophy with practical ends. For Descartes, the end of philosophy is not the science of the search for first principle— or, the speculative exploration of Divine attributes. Rather, the practical end of philosophy is the project of applying indubitable principles to formulate and discover practical aids to remedy the ills of human existence. In his Discourse on the Method, Descartes states that raising the sciences on a rational and indubitable foundation will recapture for man the position he once owned in the Garden of Eden— “master and proprietor of nature.”
By replacing speculative philosophy with practical philosophy, Descartes rejects not only the contemplation of truth as the goal of philosophic activity, but takes religious and philosophical skepticism as his chief enemy from the beginning, rather than the thought of Aristotle and the Scholastics. Descartes held that the proofs found in the writings of the Schoolmen for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul failed to attain their objective, and amounted in the end to a mere demonstrations that the truths of faith and the truths of reason do not lie in opposition to each other. Such demonstrations, Descartes held, were insufficient to combat the tendency in the 17th century toward atheism and religious skepticism. The only sufficient criterion for the test of indubitable knowledge is the mind’s perception of a truth that impresses itself with such force and vivacity that the mind cannot help but assent to the validity of the proposition (e.g., that God exists). According to Descartes, such truths are what the mind perceives “clearly and distinctly.” All other families of propositions fall within the realm of Aristotle’s indemonstrable first principles and Thomas’ secondary causes.
In his Dedicatory Letter to the Sorbonne, Descartes presents his Meditations to the Dean and Doctors as a work of Christian apologetics. However, he is not forthcoming about his incendiary goal of demolishing the whole of the Aristotelian metaphysics, physics, and psychology. Descartes’ principle of “methodological doubt” [rationem dubitandi] functions as a tool for overturning what Aristotle and his Medieval Scholastic followers took for granted — the reliability of the rational soul’s knowledge of the material world acquired through the senses. In the 17th century, Aristotelianism and Thomism predominated among the faculty members of the Sorbonne. According to the prevailing Aristotelian doctrine in the Schools, the first principle of man’s knowledge is the sensible apprehension of objects in the material world. The sensible apprehension of objects depends upon the sensible object received by the agent intellect via the phantasm, or image. Without the sensible object, neither the agent nor the possible intellect could be, in a sense, activated. Without the particulars of sense knowledge, the intellect’s abstraction from particular objects to grasp the intelligible species could never take place. Cognition as such would be impossible for Aristotle’s man. Except as a peripheral question, neither Aristotle nor any Scholastic philosopher prior to Descartes ever took seriously the question of the reliability of sense perception as a conduit of genuine knowledge.
Descartes begins his Meditations by inquiring into whether the rational mind is capable of a type of purely rational mental activity comparable to Aristotle’s conception of contemplation [theoria]. To do so, however, Descartes reverses Aristotle’s procedure for inquiring into the nature of the soul. To see how this is done, it is necessary to point out that Aristotle does not begin his inquiry into the nature of the soul with cognition, since thought itself is neither perceptible, nor is it an intelligible species that takes itself as its own object. In other words, Aristotle’s account of the rational soul does not begin with a demonstration of rationality. Philosophy begins, according to Aristotle, by setting out principles that, for the rational mind requiring material particulars to abstract universals from, are indemonstrable principles. The famous principle of non-contradiction is one example of Aristotle’s indemonstrable “first principles.”
In the Sixth Meditation, Cartesian philosophy’s crowing project of the “mastery of nature” ends up where Aristotle’s philosophic project (in De anima) begins. Descartes’ last chapter in the Meditations gives an account of the movement and activity of the animal possessing a rational mind. The purpose of his account is twofold: first, to developing cures for the infirmities of the body to which the mind is attached as “a pilot in his ship”; second, Descartes hoped to raise man through the development of the sciences to the status of the “master and proprietor of nature.” Descartes’ theory of the separability of the mind and body stands in opposition to his theory of the substantial union of the mind and body, which, he writes, is not merely the relation of mover to the thing moved, but a relation where the mind and body are “very closely joined” so as to “form a unit.” Translated into the Aristotelian vocabulary, the Cartesian theory of cognition states that the universal or essential nature of an object is known prior to, and more easily, than the particular material object in the world grasped through the corporeal senses. The first principle of knowledge, according to Descartes, is not objects in the material world or concepts that abide the principle of non-contradiction. Rather, the first principles of knowledge are contained in the innate ideas that the mind has of all objects, including God and the self, independent of all sensory perceptions. These principles, Descartes holds, are indubitable, and therefore more logically consistent than Aristotle’s indemonstrable first principles that seem to assert the priority of the objects of knowledge over the knower.
In the Dedicatory Letter of the Meditations, Descartes’ argument from the Bible regarding the mind’s intuitive or innate knowledge of the existence of God implicitly corroborates the argument given in the Meditations for why the soul’s nature is easily discovered. The mind’s innate idea of God is demonstrable from the essence of the mind itself, which, as an incorporeal thinking substance, is entirely distinct and separable in its operations from the body and its senses. Descartes’ celebrated phrase, sed solius mentis inspectio, or “the mind alone inspects,” reverses the Aristotelian order of operation by which the rational soul understands external objects. To meditate, according to Descartes, is to detach the mind from the senses, because the sensory-dependent body is an obstacle to knowing the truth.
Descartes sought to align his proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul with the long-accepted proofs of his Scholastic predecessors. In his dedication, Descartes calls his addressee’s attention to the fact that his project of proving the existence of God and the immortality of the soul corresponds to the traditional Scholastic enterprise. Further, Descartes cites the eighth session of the Lateran Council held under Pope Leo X (Apostolici Regiminis, 1513) to legitimize his philosophical investigation into the existence of God and the human rational soul. By adopting Leo X’s mandate for Christian philosophers to refute the arguments of irreligious philosophers who hold “that the soul dies along with the body,” Descartes hoped to gain the commendation of the Sorbonne’s Aristotelian/Thomist faculty members.
Be that as it may, Descartes’ mission as a philosophical apologist for the truth of Christian doctrine involved more than simply upholding the tenets of the Faith with rational arguments, as there was nothing innovative in doing so. The sense that Aristotelian philosophy was a stagnant body of knowledge prompted Descartes to look afresh at the foundations of philosophy. In making Thomas Aquinas its representative theologian, the Church had implicitly “Christianized” the thought of Thomas’ master, Aristotle. Descartes considered the alliance of Christian and pagan philosophy to be hazardous to the central doctrines of Christianity. Making Christian philosophy dependent in crucial ways on the philosophic principles and reasoning of a pagan philosopher left the Faith vulnerable to the attacks of atheist and religious skeptics. In his Meditations, Descartes hoped to free Christian philosophy from the bonds of Aristotelian philosophy by abrogating its epistemic foundations. By framing the traditional questions of philosophy in a Christian context, Descartes hoped to secure an indubitable foundation for the two main tenets of Christian philosophy: that God exists and that the soul is immortal. Descartes demand for an undiluted foundation for religion set the stage for a new philosophy that depended on neither sense perception, nor the dogmas of Aristotelian Scholasticism.
DESCARTES’ CONCEPTION OF MIND VERSUS THE ARISTOTELIAN
CONCEPTION OF THE SOUL
The publication of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) originated the analytic approach to Cartesian thought. Unfortunately, analytic commentators of Descartes’ writings take little account of the historical background of the 17th century in formulating their interpretations; nor do they give little more than a sign of acquaintance or interest in the writings of Thomas or the Scholastic philosophers. Such interpretations have little to offer the historian of philosophy. Commentary that ignores the anti-Aristotelian/Thomist position of the Meditations arrives at conclusions that are conceptually dazzling, but ultimately refer only back to themselves, rather than the historical sources of Descartes’ writings. The validity of Descartes’ arguments have been borne out or disproven according to the whims of History’s mistress, lady Fortune. The internal logical consistency or inconsistency of Descartes’ Meditations does not illuminate the main themes or reason for his writing the book. No does the analytic approach consider for whom Descartes wrote the book. An historian of philosophy might fruitfully beg Aristotle’s question, “were the Meditations persuasive to Descartes contemporaries?” Descartes aimed to construct a metaphysics that did not depend on the Aristotelian account of material reality or the speculative metaphysics and dogmas of the Schools. To do so, he had to contend with the prevailing thought of the Schools, which happened to be principally Aristotelian/Thomist. Reducing the status of Cartesian metaphysics to a sterile series of mental acts of consciousness misses Descartes’ dual point that a metaphysical foundation must first be in place in order to generate indubitable scientific principles. Only after a system of metaphysics is in place can the programme originating in the writings of Francis Bacon, viz., making man “the master and proprietor of nature,” be realized.
In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes’ demonstration of the separabilty of the mind/soul from the body consists precisely in the clarity and distinctness of the perception of what belongs to the essence of thinking things [res cogitans]. Regarding extended things [res extensia], the same clarity of perception does not apply. Extended things are perceived only distinctly, which is to say, not essentially. The meditator’s essence consists in “absolutely nothing else” than that he is “a thinking thing…” Descartes cancels Aristotle’s formulation of the soul as the form of the body, which assumes the givenness of the objects of perception, in his demonstration of the incorporeal existence of mind/soul as being more clearly and distinctly known than the existence of objects extended in space and perceived by the corporeal senses. In Aristotelian teleological thought, the difficulty in giving an account of the soul lies with the process and methods of investigation: beginning with sensible perception of particulars, the faculty or ordering principle (soul) is abstracted from observing the respective activities of sentient beings. Conversely, in order to determine the existence and nature of the soul, the Cartesian method bypasses the information gathered through the senses and inquires instead into the origin of the mind’s ideas, which are divided into three types: adventitious, composite, and innate.
Turning to the Aristotelian conception of the soul, in De anima II, Aristotle formulates his doctrine of cognition through abstraction as, “the soul never thinks without an image.” In other words, the intellect, whether human or animal, is activated by sense images, and neither cognizes nor wills prior to the mind’s reception of sense data. Like the sensitive soul of animals, Aristotle’s third type of soul, the rational soul, is dependent on the image, or phantasm, gathered by means of the senses. The rational soul’s faculty for abstract cognition is activated by sense images and impressions. Considering the operations of the rational soul (movement, sense perception, abstraction), the cognizing activity of the potential intellect called abstraction cannot take place without the object of thought having first passed through the agent intellect, whose activity is the passive reception of sense data. However, for its abstract cognitive operations, the rational soul is exempt from further dependence on sense impressions. Insofar as the rational soul neither grows nor senses as such, its operation of abstraction from sense images does not dependent on further contribution from the body’s sense organs.
Aristotle’s proof for the soul begins with evidence derived from motion in the order of corporeal being, such as the fact that animals possess the power of self-movement and growth. The empirical fact of motion is requisite to all of Aristotle’s claims about the soul. If nothing were in motion, as in the static world of Parmenides, the senses would have no purpose for existing, as there would be nothing to sense. Thus Aristotle states that the sense’s primary reason for existing is to convey images of objects in motion to the passive intellect. Abstraction of images from the passive intellect are understood by the active intellect, the faculty of the mind responsible for rational thought. On the basis of movement, Aristotle causally deduces the formal principle from the material principle. For example, creatures that grow and reproduce must themselves be animated by some kind of mover, which Aristotle tells us is the soul. Moving creatures are animated by two of Aristotle’s three types of soul: the nutritive and sensitive. The existence of the soul proven from the evidence of motion in the sensible world is a naturalized account of the soul. Because objects are intelligible, sense perception has, for Aristotle, the nature and value of a principle of knowledge. Consequently, to gain any certain knowledge of what the essential nature and properties of the soul are, the operations of the senses must be considered.
In response to Aristotle and his Scholastic followers, Descartes’ treatment of the soul in the Meditations begins with the question of what, if anything, can be known with any epistemological certainty, and proceeds by applying the methodological doubt to everything dubitable by the light of valid reasoning (propter validas & meditates rationes). The possibility of material objects serving as the source of the first principle of metaphysical knowledge is rejected, and the project of discovering a source of indubitable knowledge on which to found the sciences is directed toward the discovery of the innate cognitive perceptions of God and the ego. The methodological doubt and the hypothesis of the malin génie, detailed in the first two Meditations, furnishes Descartes with the necessary conditions for abrogating any theory of knowledge that asserts the primacy of sense images in matters of rational intelligibility. Descartes’ argument against the soul as the form of the body reverses the Aristotelian/Scholastic axiomatic sense of the soul as the form of the body [anima corporis forma]. According to Descartes, information or data derived from sense-images is subject to the methodological doubt precisely because the soul is understood to be something other than the substantial form of the body. Hence, any dependence on the senses to confirm the truth or falsity of ideas must be forsworn at the outset if the criterion for telling the true from the erroneous has premises more robust than a posteriori. If the soul cannot know anything through sense-images, the only available avenue for indubitable knowledge, particularly indubitable knowledge of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, is through “separating the mind from the senses.”
In the Second Meditation, Descartes’ phrase, “the mind alone inspects” represents a kind of pastiche of Aristotle’s definition of the soul in De anima II, where the soul defined as “the form of a natural body having life potentially within it” (or capable of living). Aristotle’s formulation precludes the question of “whether the soul and body are one”— which question, he concludes, is as meaningless as inquiring “whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one.” The view of the wax as inseparable from the stamp given to it assumes, by analogy, that that which organizes (soul), and that which is organized (body) cannot be distinguished. In two ways the Aristotelian rational soul is inseparable from the body: first, because the soul is the form of the body; and second, because the soul depends on the corporeal sense faculties in order to satisfy the goal, or telos toward which its operations of growth, nutrition and reasoning tend.
When Descartes exposes a quantity of beeswax to fire, the intention is to distinguish two separate modes of perception, sensuous and cognitive, and thus argue for why the demonstration of the distinction between the soul/mind and the body is necessary. The perceptible “stamp” of the beeswax remains even once its recognizable qualities have been altered by exposure to the fire; viz., its taste, fragrance, odor, figure, sound, &c., are not done away with because the essence of the beeswax is not contained in any of its innumerable accidental properties. Descartes states, “the perception I have of it [wax, or any material object] is a case not of vision or touch or imagination — nor has it ever been, despite previous appearances — but of purely mental scrutiny [sed solius mentis inspectio]…” Objects, such as the beeswax, can be “sensed”; but the corporeal senses do not “think.” Hence, the ideas of objects perceived by the mind cannot bear any relation to the properties of objects perceived by the corporeal senses: “perception derives not from their [objects] being touched or seen but from their being understood.”
Moving from the idea that the mind alone inspects the essence of objects, Descartes is in a position to inquire into the essence of the rational soul. If the mind alone knows objects through their essences, the mind can presumably inspect itself, or perceive its own essential nature. “I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else,” Descartes concludes. He then overturns the common sense opinion that “the bodies which we touch and see” are perceived aright by the senses. The mind or soul grasps the essential nature of material objects without the aid of the corporeal senses. Thus, a question considered by Aristotle to have a self-evident answer, namely, whether the soul and body are joined in an interdependent relation, is considered in Descartes’ inquiry into perception to have been given a less than satisfactory answer.
In the case of man, according to Aristotle, rationality is not a superficial addition to animality, but rather comprises a substantial union proper to man alone. Aquinas’ account of the soul follows Aristotle’s on this point, maintaining that, “it is with respect to the intellective soul that we are said to be men; to the sensitive soul, animals; to the nutritive soul, living beings.” Descartes’ attack on Aristotle in the Meditations first addresses, and then overturns specific Aristotelian doctrines with the intention of starving out the roots of Aristotelian first philosophy by destroying its branches — namely, the somatic and psychic doctrines associated with Aristotle’s conception of man. Aristotle’s doctrine that states, “the soul never thinks without an image” is connected in every respect with the doctrine of the soul as the form of the body, and with his conception of man as a rational animal.
Descartes does not recognize the validity or the self-evident empirical nature of Aristotle’s first principles. On the contrary, his refutation in the Second Meditation of the Aristotelian doctrine that the soul never thinks without an image sets up a reductio ad absurdum chain of reasoning that destroys Aristotle’s conception of man by calling into question the reliability of the senses to convey any true knowledge to the understanding. If Descartes rephrased Aristotle’s doctrine of cognition, it might have read something like, “the soul knows nothing through the medium of an image.” Indeed, the meditator discovers that the mind’s essential understanding of objects only resembles the world of material objects. Accordingly, Descartes infers that “what is called ‘having sensory perceptions is strictly just… thinking.”
In the First Meditation, Descartes’ hypothesis of the ‘evil genius” [malin genie in the French edition] raises Pyrrhonian skepticism to a new pitch of intensity. If it were the case that all knowledge, and the faculties for acquiring and judging knowledge, were under the influence of some malicious deceiver “of the utmost power” [summe potens], the mind’s criterion for examining its ideas, and the source of its ideas is open to question on every conceivable level, and at every point. The force of Descartes’ argument lies in the fact that it would be impossible for the mind to know or tell if it were under the control of a most powerful deceiver. The Aristotelian theory of cognition, which emphasizes the primacy of the individual senses and their particular objects in the process of “coming to know,” has no defense against Cartesian skepticism. Descartes’ cogito necessarily has neither a basis in, nor any reference to the world of material particulars. In the Second Meditation, Aristotle and his 17th century adherents are parodied by Descartes in such questions as, “What then did I formerly think I was? A man. But what is a man?”, “what is an animal?”, and “what is rationality?” Descartes concludes that he “does not now have the time to waste on subtleties of this kind.” Under Descartes’ hypothetical circumstance, grounds for discovering any epistemological certainty are theoretically impossible.
THE PROBLEM OF DESCARTES’ TERMINOLOGY AND THE ATTACK ON THOMAS AND SCHOLASTICISM IN THE MEDITATIONS
In the Meditations, the doctrine of the cogito, flanked by the doctrine of “the mind alone inspects,” represents a thoroughgoing epistemic critique of the Aristotelian empiricist doctrine of “the soul never thinks without an image.” That Descartes overturned centuries of philosophical reliance on Aristotelian physics and metaphysics is well documented in the literature of the history of ideas. What is less obvious is whether Descartes’ attack on the philosophy of Aristotle in the Meditations was meant as a covert attack on the philosophy of St. Thomas. We can ask whether Descartes’ self-professed intention of offering the Meditations to the Dean and Doctors of the Sorbonne as work in the grand Scholastic tradition of giving demonstrative proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul can be taken at face value.
In both the Meditations and the Discourse on the Method, Descartes’ attack on Aristotelian realism is waged, in part, through the terminology he adopts to undermine the claims of Aristotelian philosophy. For example, certain recognizable Aristotelian phrases and terms occur in the Meditations, such as “rational animal,” “power of self movement,” “common sense,” “nutrition,” and “imagination.” Descartes’ technical use of these terms and phrases were no doubt adopted for either one or both of the following reasons. First, the term “imagination” and the phrase “rational animal” are characteristic of the language of the Scholastic opponents Descartes is attempting to refute. By employing the Aristotelian language, Descartes caricatures his opponent’s views. The second reason that Descartes adopts the Aristotelian terminology, particularly in the Second and Sixth Meditation, is likely because of the fact that no other terminological apparatus was available in the 17th century. Moreover, the philosophical tradition frowned upon the invention or introduction of novel terms for the sake of novelty. As previous commentators have noted, Descartes’ terminology in the Meditations contains next to nothing in the way of novelty. Only his unique redefining of the battery of pre-existing Ancient and Scholastic terms can be said to be original. Descartes’ acceptance of what the primary goals of philosophy are, as well as the standard array of terminology, as handed down from both the Ancients and their Scholastic descendants, is explicitly present in the Meditations.
Even Descartes’ earliest commentators and critics recognized his subversive use of Aristotelian/Scholastic terminology in the Meditations. When Descartes topples Aristotelian realism in the Second Meditation by demonstrating that the nature of the soul/mind can be asserted as an object of knowledge prior to the knowledge of bodies, he is attacking the classic Aristotelian doctrine of “the soul never thinks without an image.” As a close reader of the writings of Aristotle, Descartes was likely acquainted with the phrase, “the soul never thinks without an image.” However, when the Meditations and the Discourse on the Method are searched for the classic Aristotelian phrase, one finds that Descartes never uses the phrase as it occurs in Aristotle’s writings. In the fourth partition of the Discourse on the Method, Descartes has instead rendered into French a Scholastic variant of Aristotle’s phrase:
“…there is nothing in the intellect which has not previously been in the senses [qu’il n’y a rien dans l’entendement qui n’ait premierement este dan le sens].” Again, in the Sixth Meditation we find it worded thus: “In this way I easily convinced myself that I had nothing at all in the intellect which I had not previously had in sensation [facile mihi persuadebam nullam plane me habere in intellectu, quam non prius habuissem in sensu].”
In the latter two examples, Descartes employs what previous commentators have noted to be a Scholastic variation on Aristotle’s phrase. As these commentators indicate, a likely source for the variation used by Descartes is the writings of St. Thomas.
In Thomas’s writings we find a variation on Aristotle’s phrase that silently introduces the terminological and verbal modifications that Descartes was to later adapt into his writings: “There is nothing in the intellect that is not previously in the senses” [nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu]. Although Thomas nuances the phrasing of the established idiom, he does so without corrupting Aristotle’s empirical doctrine. The question arises: if, in his Discourse on the Method and the Meditations, Descartes’ use of the phrase as it occurs in Aquinas’ writings is deliberate, is it meant as a shrewd critique of the Doctor angelicus? Does Descartes inadvertently strike a blow at the foundation of Catholic orthodoxy by refuting Aristotle via the doctrines of Thomas?
To the extent to which Thomas’ conception of the soul agrees with or derives from Aristotle’s account of the soul, this is the conception of the soul Descartes attacks in the Second Meditation. However, Descartes’ proof for the separabilty of the mind from the body, or of the mind’s self-subsisting nature, agrees with Thomas’ account of the separable soul, on the point that both are an affirmative answer to the Christian theological imperative to uphold the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. We may point out, however, that the theological imperative to argue for the soul’s immortality was not present for Aristotle as it was for Thomas. While there are passages in De anima that seem to promote the idea of the rational soul possessing an immortal nature, other passages clearly associate the mortality of the body with the mortality of the soul. Yet in De anima Aristotle states that, “that while the faculty of sensation is dependent on the body, mind is separable from it.” It was a matter of dispute among the Scholastics whether Aristotle meant that the intellect only engages in operations in which the body has no part, as when he writes that, “…some [parts of the soul] may be separable because they are not the actualities of any body at all.” Also open to dispute among the Scholastic philosophers was Aristotle’s opinion on whether the rational soul could be classed as a substantial form: “When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal… mind in this sense is impassable… and without it nothing thinks.”
In any case, the question whether the soul survives the body’s death, and whether the rational or intellectual soul is mortal or immortal necessitated Thomas’ chief modification to the Aristotelian conception of the soul. Indeed, Thomas’ modification involved altering the ontological status of the rational soul, thus disengaging it from the questions of mortality and substantiality. The soul, according to Aristotle, is a faculty of thought that makes up a substantial form only when united to the matter of the human body. In Thomas’ account of the rational soul, he argues that the soul itself is a substantial form in its own right. That is, the intellective soul is non-destructible, self-subsisting and immortal by definition. Yet the conversion of a rational faculty of thought into an intellectual substance does not resolve the inherent difficulties in how the separable soul operates after the death of the body, since Thomas retains the Aristotelian doctrine that “there is nothing in the mind that was not previously in the senses.” In sum, the active and possible intellect, and the bodily sense organs on which the soul depends for the delivery of its proper object are inseparably connected.
DESCARTES’ CONCEPTION OF MIND VERSUS THE SCHOLASTIC CONCEPTION OF THE SOUL
The question of the soul’s immortality in Descartes’ Meditations is a reiteration of a long-standing theme of the Scholastics. The means by which Descartes goes about proving the immortality of the soul constitutes a departure from the accepted convention of either lending ultimate support and authority to a rational proof of the soul’s immortality. In his Sorbonne letter, Descartes cites relevant passages from Scripture and rejects the teaching that no rational proof of the soul’s immortality is available to the natural light of reason alone, as did Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. In any case, no Scholastic discussion of the soul’s immortality ever sought to supplant the doctrine of immortality that the Church maintained is revealed through the Scriptures, and held as a verity of religion by faith alone. Scholastic proofs adduced for the existence of God or the immortality of the soul were “demonstrated” a posteriori to the belief that God exists and that the soul is indeed immortal — that is, these proofs assume the validity of what they have yet to prove.
Descartes’ demonstration of the existence of God in the Third Meditation is an a priori proof that precludes the presupposition of any “long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God,” and proceeds from the starting point that “everything said about God is a fiction,” including his existence. Similarly, Descartes’ proof for the separability of the mind from the body in the Second Meditation begins with the meditator’s categorically doubting the existence of all extended bodies in order to uncover, in the order of being, the nature of the soul per se.
The investigation of the soul, under the respective considerations of Aristotle and his Scholastic followers, had traditionally begun with sensible particulars, applying an inductive method of examination to such phenomena as the perceptible self-movement of living things, and proceeding to inquiring as to the cause of movement. The somatic psychology of Aristotle and the Scholastic philosophers offers a naturalized account of the soul. As the form of the body, the soul of man is a rational faculty that depends on the sense’s apprehension of material particulars in order to operate. Knowledge, in this sense, is essentially embodied, and in De anima, Aristotle writes that the soul has been justly referred to as “the place of forms,” on account of the fact that the rational intellect has no organ, and hence no operation apart from the medium of the phantasms intuited by the sense organs.
According to Aristotle’s account of the soul, the nature of the substantial union of the soul and body is a union of such a kind that the corruption of the instantiated soul cannot occur without corruption coming to the body as well, and vice-versa. Plato’s celebrated metaphorical image of the relation between the soul and body as a sailor in a ship is a negative example in Aristotle’s usage, for the union between soul and body is not such that the soul directs the movements of the automaton body in which it is emprisoned. What connects the soul and body in Aristotle’s account, and in Thomas’ account as well, is the fact that the intellectual soul requires the faculties of imagination and sensation in order to operate, and imagination and sensation are carried out through corporeal organs; hence, as Thomas puts it, the formal principle, the soul, and the material principle, the body, are “joined together in the unity of one act of being.”
THOMAS’ CONCEPTION OF THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
For Descartes, the emphasis in the Sixth Meditation is on the problem of how the soul is joined to the body, and stands in contrast to the operations of the pure understanding (Meditation Two), where the mind is shown to function independent of any attachment to a body, and is thus by definition separable. For Thomas, the soul is joined in a substantial union with the body, and the existence of bodies is self-evident, and therefore indubitable. Regarding the question of the soul’s immortality, Thomas emphasizes the issue of the soul’s separability from the body. The intellectual soul first needs to be demonstrated as substantial per se. Substantiality, according to Aristotle, is tantamount to self-subsistence and impassibility, and the status of substantiality that Thomas grants to the intellectual soul provides the gateway for his proof of the soul’s immortality.
Generally, then, the difference between Descartes’ revival in the Meditations of the question of immortality addressed by Thomas and other the other Scholastic philosophers is the question of how the soul’s immortality can be demonstrated. Descartes agrees with the Scholastic philosophers about the immortality of the soul. The point at which Descartes diverges from Thomas and the Scholastics is in method rather than principle. The meditative exercise of withdrawing the mind from the senses is an epistemological method that neither Aquinas nor any other Scholastic philosopher ever employed to arrive at the conclusion that the intellectual soul is separable from the body, and that God exists.
The efforts of Thomas Aquinas to solve Aristotle’s open question of the immortality of the soul involved modifying two notable doctrines of Aristotle. The first point, that the soul is the form of the body, argues that the soul and the body form a substantial composite that cannot be split apart or corrupted without destruction coming to the whole. Hence, neither the body nor the soul is self-subsisting, due to the function of each being wholly dependent on the other part for its respective operation. Briefly then, the rational soul that animates the human body, and the sense organs of the human body that supply the rational soul with phantasms, from which operation all intellectual knowledge derives, are co-constitutive. Man, in the last analysis, is human on the condition that he comprises a particular substantial combination of rationality and animality.
It follows from this that decay in the function of the sense organs, or the total demise of the body, erects an insuperable barrier between the operation of the rational soul, and the sense object upon which its operation depends. There is indeed nothing for the rational soul to think without the senses first receiving the phantasm of a sensible object. On two counts, then, it would seem that the soul could not legitimately be a substance by definition; first, by virtue of the material nature of the sense organs, and second, by virtue of the phantasm’s origination in corporeal objects.
Thomas begins to resolve the question of the soul’s apparent mortality by establishing the soul’s subsistence thus:
I answer that, it must necessarily be allowed that the principle of intellectual operation, which we call the soul of man, is a principle both incorporeal and subsistent. For it is clear that by means of the intellect man can know all corporeal things. Now, whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature, because that which is in it naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else… Now every body has its own determinate nature. Therefore it is impossible for the intellectual principle to be a body. It is also impossible for it to understand by means of a bodily organ, since the determinate nature of that organ would likewise impede knowledge of all bodies…
A number of important points are asserted here. First, Thomas writes that the substantial composite of the body and soul (the soul being the form of the body) is separable. Second, he asserts that this separation does not impede the action of the intellective operation of the soul. Last, it follows from this that the operation of the bodily senses that the gathering of phantasms is not essentially prior to the operation of the intellectual soul. Following Aristotle, Thomas proceeds to elaborate the separability of the intellectual soul from the body by making a crucial distinction between the operations of the soul that are dependent on the senses, and those operations of the soul in which the corporeal sense organs have no part, such as understanding and willing:
Therefore the intellectual principle, which we call the mind or the intellect [mens vel intellectus], has essentially an operation in which the body does not share. Now only that which subsists in itself can have an operation in itself. For nothing can operate but what is actual, and so a thing operates according as it is… We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.
Sense images are the first principle of the intellectual soul’s knowledge, but the action of the intellectual soul is rendered neither substantial nor mortal according to the mode by which it wills and understands; rather, this is precisely the point by which the intellectual soul is known to be separable and self-subsisting after the death of the body. Thomas likens the per se mode of understanding in the separated soul to a similar mode of understanding found in separate substances. The separated soul, like the separate substance, receives a “more abundant influx” of those objects known only by the pure understanding, and furthermore, Thomas asserts that,
…the more the soul is freed from preoccupation with its body, the more fit does it become for understanding higher things… Consequently, when the soul shall be completely separated from the body, it will be perfectly likened to separate substances in its mode of understanding, and will receive their influx abundantly.
This fragment provides an outline of the intellectual soul in a state of separation from the body; but a disembodied state is not the existence proper to the intellectual soul, defined as such, and Thomas points out that the existence of the intellectual soul neither predates its being united to a body, nor will it subsist apart from the body without end, but it will instead be clothed once more with an imperishable body; and in this is the separated soul wholly distinctive in its mode of being from separate substances.
THE MIND’S SEPARABILITY VERSUS THE SOUL’S IMMORTALITY
Concerning the survival of the incorporeal soul after the dissolution of the body, Aristotle does not give a consistent opinion in De anima, except on the point that the rational soul is “capable of existence [i.e., functioning] in isolation from all other psychic powers [i.e., those faculties of the soul involving such things as nutrition and sensation].” The demonstrable fact that the rational soul engages in operations such as calculation, speculation and contemplation, in which the body has no share, is not tantamount to the Thomistic claim that the soul has an existence — not merely an operation — entirely independent of the body that it is the form or actuality of. If the human intellectual soul, as the actuality of the human body, possesses operations that are in no way dependent on the body’s operations, then it follows that the intellectual soul is capable of continuing its operation of intellectual apprehension (intelligere corrumpitur) after the dissolution of the body.
In his Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas arrives at conclusions about the human intellectual soul that are contrary to the views of Aristotle. Thomas iterates Aristotle’s conception of the soul that has no operation apart from the body:
Further, if the soul were something subsistent, it would have some operation apart from the body. But it has no operation apart from the body, not even that of understanding; for the act of understanding does not take place without a phantasm, which cannot exist apart from the body.
Thomas offers two solutions to the problem of how the soul in a state of separation from the body operates. Thomas’ first answer situates the problem in a specifically Christian context: the resurrection of the body and the reuniting of body and soul is a tenet of the orthodox Christian faith, and Thomas was bound to uphold its truth. The second answer, also supporting the resurrection of the body, is found in Thomas’ demonstration:
…the soul is naturally united to the body, for in its essence it is the form of the body. It is then contrary to the nature of the soul to be without the body. But nothing which is contrary to nature can be perpetual. Perpetually, then, the soul will not be without the body. Since, then, it persists perpetually, it must once again be united to the body; and this is to rise again. Therefore, the immortality of souls seems to demand a resurrection of bodies.
Considering that the dubitability of the evidence obtained through the senses calls into question the validity of any proof presupposing the reliability of the senses (such as Thomas’ proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul), Descartes considered finding indisputable proofs for the existence of God and the separability of the soul from the body of particular importance. Descartes maintains that such a posteriori proofs are inconclusive because man’s knowledge of ontological objects is made to depend on the perception of the fallible senses as the first principle of knowledge.
In his letter to the Dean and Doctors of the Sorbonne, Descartes claims that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul “are prime examples of subjects where demonstrative proofs ought to be given with the aid of philosophy rather than theology;” and further,
…that the only reason why many irreligious people are unwilling to believe that God exists and that the human mind is distinct from the body [mentemque humanam a corpore distingui] is the alleged fact that no one has hitherto been able to demonstrate these points.
That no prior proof for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul is immune to contradiction or refutation is precisely what Descartes is claiming to be the case, stating that, “I would add that these proofs are of such a kind that I reckon they leave no room for the possibility that the human mind will ever discover better ones.”
However, a rational proof for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul would invalidate the necessity for God’s participation in revealing Himself to man. Nor would the soul’s survival or salvation require God’s grace or intervention after the death of the body. Aquinas was particularly aware of the fideistic dimension to the question of the soul’s immortality. If the self-subsistence of the soul could be conclusively demonstrated, then God’s act of preserving the soul after the body dies would be rendered unnecessary, since the soul would invariably be immortal, and would not need divine support to secure its subsistence.
In the dedicatory epistle to the Sorbonne, Descartes maintains that man’s rational knowledge of the true distinction of the mind and body is an antecedent evident enough to validly deduce the soul’s immortality as a consequent, without any further recourse to the Scriptures or the teaching of the Church. In a letter to Mersenne on December 24, 1640, roughly four months before the Meditations received its finishing touches, Descartes responded to Mersenne’s disappointment at not finding the immortality of the soul demonstrated as promised in the proofs of his Meditations:
You say that I have not said a word about the immortality of the soul. You should not be surprised. I could not prove that God could not annihilate the soul, but only that it is by nature entirely distinct from the body, and consequently it is not bound by nature to die with it. This is all that is required as a foundation for religion, and is all that I had any intention of proving.
As a theological matter, the immortality of the soul is guaranteed by an act of faith in what the divinely revealed Scriptures declare to be true, rather than reason’s discovery that the soul persists after the death of the body. Descartes’ statement that a philosophical demonstration that the operations of the mind are distinct from the mechanical operations of the body does not violate or infringe upon the domain of the soul’s immortality as a religious doctrine held by faith. As the doctrines of the Church command the faithful to believe without rational or visible proof, Descartes’ reproach of Mersenne for his improbable expectation that the Meditations would contain a certain proof “that God could not annihilate the soul” is in accord with the doctrinal mystery of the soul’s immortality.
Philosophically, Descartes justifies the consequent that the soul “is not bound by nature to die” with the body with his demonstration in the Second Meditation of the mind’s separability from the body. Descartes is not ignorant that since the soul’s immortality is a religious question of fundamental doctrinal importance. However, the issue of whether God can or cannot annihilate the soul is ultimately a theological concern that goes beyond what is “required as a foundation for religion.” According to Descartes, a foundation for religion is simply no more than adherence to the tenets and doctrines as established by the Church. In his letter to Mersenne in December 1640, Descartes addresses a charge regarding “to what extent the immortality of the soul can be demonstrated in light of man’s necessarily incomplete knowledge of the infinite will and mind of God”:
…you [Mersenne] go on to say that it does not follow from the fact that the soul is distinct from the body that it is immortal, since it could still be claimed that God gave it such a nature that its duration comes to an end simultaneously with the end of the body’s life. Here I admit that I cannot refute what you say. For I do not take it upon myself to try to use the power of human reason to settle any of those matters which depend on the free will of God.
The consideration given so far to those features of the Cartesian doctrine of the mind’s separability from the body, and the fact that the doctrine was a reaction to Scholasticism, open up the question of whose conception of the separated soul Descartes’ account better corroborates. Aristotle claims in De anima that mind is separable from the body, but what status it holds after the death of the body is ambiguous. Thomas deduces the immortality of the soul from the fact that it is separable from the body. The answer to this question does not lie in the novelty of the idea of the soul’s separability from the body, for this idea is common to Aristotle, Aquinas and Descartes. The answer lies in Descartes’ hesitancy to attach to his doctrine of the mind’s separability from the body the immortality of the soul as a necessary or a logical consequent.
Even though Descartes’ account of the soul in the Meditations agrees with Aquinas’ account of the soul on the point that the Church’s dogma of the immortality of the soul established a necessary starting point for both philosophers, the vision of the human soul in the Meditations is a secularized one, stripped of its sacred origins and theological definition. Under Descartes’ considerations, the beatitude of the soul is not a necessary consequence of its separability from the body any more than that the soul be the individuating or animating principle of any specific kind of body. The rational mind could just as easily be housed in the body of an ass, as in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses.
Descartes’ proof for the separability of the mind from the body contains a nominalistic tendency wholly lacking in Thomas’ account of the separated soul. In the Synopsis of the Meditations, Descartes maintains that “the premises that lead to the conclusion that the soul is immortal depend on an account of the whole of physics,” which, in Aristotle’s and Thomas’ minds, includes final causes. In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes states,
For since I know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the [impenetrable] purposes of God.
If we read the fragment from the Synopsis into the passage from the Fourth Meditation, it becomes apparent why a demonstration of the immortality of the soul is impossible. The nature of such a demonstration would mean answering the question of why the soul is not by nature bound to die with the body, which would be the same as grasping the final cause, or end, of the soul separated from the body.
In the Second Meditation, the soul’s separability from the body is accounted for from within the order of essential causality in a way strikingly similar to the means by which the meditator in the Third Meditation proves the existence of God from the essential order of causation. This in turn accounts for the reason why the meditator is able to “perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the same faculty which enables me to perceive myself.” Descartes pays no mind to the reasons for why the soul is separable from the body, only the means of how it is, or can be known to be separable, which he demonstrates in the Second Meditation with the example of the wax. In his thought experiment, the essential nature of the wax is perceived by detaching the mind from the senses (abducere mentem ad sensibus), and the experiment concludes with the doctrine that the mind alone inspects (sed solius mentis inspectio) the essential nature of objects as ideas.
However, there is no account in the Meditations of the final cause of the mind separated from the body. Descartes gives his reason: “I have tried not to put down anything which I could not precisely demonstrate.” The ideas innate in the mind are secondary to God, who is the first cause in the order of causes. Descartes characterizes all ideas as secondary causes throughout the Meditations. The case with Descartes’ proposition that the investigation of final causes in physics is useless covers the same ground as the inscrutable futures of Thomas’ separated soul. To give an account of final causes in physics would be probing into the infinite and incomprehensible nature of God. If man is incapable of accomplishing that, then his knowledge of how the soul will subsist in a future state can be illuminated no further.
Descartes regarded the defense of the dogma of the immortal soul of man as a theological responsibility more than a philosophical one. That the soul of man is imperishable is a teaching and dogma of the Church known by the light of Scriptural revelation, and held to be true by the light of faith alone. Descartes’ demonstrative proof in the Second Meditation that the soul “is not bound by nature to die” with the body can never amount to an indubitable guarantee that the soul is not bound by nature to die with the body. The rational soul is not necessarily immortal, but it is, as Descartes demonstrates, separable. Considered independent of its Scriptural and theological underpinnings, the doctrine of the separabilty of the mind from the body is a doctrine no more specifically Christian than the proof for the existence of God as an innate idea in the mind in the Third Meditation is the same God as that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
When confronted with the theological implications of his philosophic doctrines, Descartes expressed little more than diffidence towards spinning out the theological implications of the philosophic doctrines established in his Meditations. He was aware that he would have show how the principles of his philosophy could either establish that the truths of faith and the truths of reason are not mutually contradictory, or that his philosophy lends explanatory support to the type of theological issues “where it is notoriously difficult to reconcile philosophy to theology,” such as the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Eucharist. As a theological matter, the immortality of the soul is not guaranteed by the powers of reason’s discovery that the soul persists after the death of the body. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is, properly speaking, an act of faith in what the divinely revealed Scriptures declare to be true. Descartes’ statement that a philosophical demonstration of the fact that the operations of the mind are distinct from the mechanical operations of the body does not violate or infringe upon the domain of the soul’s immortality as a religious doctrine held by faith. As the doctrines of the Church command the faithful to believe without rational or visible proof, Descartes reproach of Mersenne for his improbable expectation that the Meditations would contain a certain proof “that God could not annihilate the soul” is in accord with the doctrinal mystery of the soul’s immortality.
Philosophically, Descartes justifies the consequent that the soul “is not bound by nature to die” with the body with his demonstration in the Second Meditation of the mind’s separability from the body, reminding Mersenne that since the soul’s immortality is a religious question of foundational importance doctrinally. For Descartes, however, the issue of whether God can or can not annihilate the soul was ultimately a theological concern that goes beyond what is “required as a foundation for religion,” which is simply no more than adherence to the tenets and doctrines as established by the Church.
The Church’s doctrine of the soul’s immortality, as derived from the teaching of Thomas, underwent a radical transformation in the Cartesian synthesis of the Scholastic doctrine of the immortality of the soul with the epistemic critique of knowledge. In the Synopsis of the Meditations, Descartes asks his readers not to mistake his proof for the mind’s separability from the body as a demonstration of premises that he does not endeavor to prove. These premises are those “which lead to the conclusion that the soul is immortal,” and which depend for their validity on “an account of the whole of physics,” or, in other words, the clear knowledge “that absolutely all substances, or things which must be created by God in order to exist, are by their nature incorruptible and cannot ever cease to exist unless they are reduced to nothingness by God’s denying his concurrence to them.”
Descartes aimed to give an account of the whole of physics, and thereby establish the immutability of the laws governing the universe. However, in order to accomplish this, Descartes needed to prove, as he endeavors to do in the Meditations, that God, while not bound to abide by the laws that He has instantiated in creation, is not a deceiver, and therefore will not alter or change laws He has established. The clarity and distinctness of the mind’s perceptions of its own ideas is the benchmark for determining that not only does God exist, but also that the mind is separable from the body. Recalling Descartes’ letter to Mersenne in December 24, 1640, we can conclude that what is at stake in an irrefutable proof of the soul’s immortality is whether the soul is by nature immortal, and without any need for God to lend His concurrence for it to survive, or whether the soul does require God’s intervention to survive. Descartes concedes that the survival of the soul after the death of the body presents too large a task for philosophy to accomplish:
I could not prove that God could not annihilate the soul, but only that it is by nature entirely distinct from the body, and consequently it is not bound by nature to die with it.
DESCARTES’ MIND AND THOMAS’ SEPARATE SUBSTANCES
Descartes’ doctrine of the mind’s innate knowledge of essences states that the mind or understanding knows or inspects those ideas that are innate within it. Accordingly, once the soul is separated from the body, its mode of understanding is not mediated or impeded by anything external to it. On the contrary, according to Thomas, the intellectual soul depends on intelligibles taken from sensible things in order to activate the understanding, or possible intellect. However, when in a state of separation from the body, the soul
will understand through itself, in the manner of substances which in their being are totally separate from bodies… And from those substances… the separated soul will be able to receive a more abundant influx, productive of a more perfect understanding on its own part.
Since Aristotle did not consider the rational soul to be a substance in its own right, it was a necessary precondition of Thomas’ ontology to demonstrate that the soul is a substance. Thomas accepted Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul as the form of the body, as well as his doctrine that the body and soul are united in a substantial union; the question that remained for Thomas was, how is it possible to divide an indivisible substantial union without corruption coming to the whole? Thomas’ answer was this: while the body is itself divisible, being a composite of matter and form with many accidental parts and qualities, the intellectual substance, which is not composed of matter and form, is indivisible since “all corruption occurs through the separation of form from matter.” When the intellectual soul is separated from the body, its substantial character, its per se unity, persists in the same respect that “roundness is in a circle through itself, but is by accident in a coin; so that the existence of a non-round coin is possible; whereas it is impossible for a circle not to be round.”
In Thomas’ Summa Contra Gentiles, the discussion of separate substances (angels) comes right after his considerations concerning the union of the human body to the intellective, or rational soul. Thomas’ discussion of separate substances treats the question of whether a form can exist apart from matter; and if so, what sort of nature that form would have:
That which is by itself [per se] must be prior, in the order of being, to that which is by accident [per accidens]; incorporeal intellectual substances [or separate substances] exist per se, while material being exists per accidens; there must exist intellectual substances, prior in nature to souls, which, by virtue of the nature of their being, enjoy a higher substantial form without participation in a lower material nature.
A comparison of Descartes’ rational soul to Thomas’ separate substances can be made under the following points. First, Descartes’ rational soul differs in the order of existence from Thomas’ separate substance in the respective degrees of perfection accorded them by their Creator. The rational mind of man is the highest grade of intelligence accorded to the sphere of corporeal nature. The intellect of separate substances is more perfect than man’s intellect, yet they are less perfect than the intellect of God in the sphere of intellectual nature. In the case of man, angels, and God, the difference in intellect is one of quantity as measured by infinity. Man’s rational mind is to an angel’s as a finite nature is to an infinite nature; and the intellect of angels is distinct from the intellect of God, again, magnified by an infinity. Hence, intellect in the order of existence can be measured on a scalar magnitude of perfection, from highest to lowest.
The second point of comparison of Descartes’ rational soul to Thomas’ separate substances comes from Descartes’ hypothetical consideration of an angel joined to a human body. Writing to Regius, Descartes states that, “if an angel were in a human body, he would not have sensations as we do…” The reason that an angel in a human body would no have sensation is because of the distinction between the rational soul and Thomas’ separate substance, namely, the respective mode of understanding that each enjoys, but does not share with the other. The nature of the act of understanding in rational soul and separate substance can be distinguished in terms of their respective objects. Separate substances apprehend intellectual things because they are intellectual natures; they do not uncover the intelligible buried in the sensible by means of abstraction, which is the mode of the rational soul inhering in a material nature. The respective mode of understanding of the rational soul and the separate substance is marked by the difference between discursive reasoning and a priori reasoning. An intellectual nature does not acquire a sensitive soul merely by means of accident, and vice versa. Sensation in the human body is a necessary component for the rational soul’s mode of understanding, because sensation is the means of the rational soul’s acquiring its object, viz., intelligibles, by means of phantasms. Accidental properties inhering in matter individuate things, and the task of the rational soul is to abstract from material particulars in order to make them intelligible to itself. The perception of a plenary of distinct objects does not amount to categorical knowledge; that is to say, knowledge of universals. Thus, sense perception is the first principle of human understanding, and via a series of channels, we come to knowledge of things per se, or free of matter. The mode of understanding for angels, on the other hand, is not discursive or subject to the vicissitudes of corporeal organs, but rather a perception of intelligibles per se. Thomas states that angels know material things, and further, that they know particular material things. But this scale of intellective competence is not vertical; rather it is descending. The higher species (i.e., a specific kind of intellectual nature) must contain in some way, and to a greater degree of perfection, what is contained in the lower (e.g., a form in material nature). Whatever exists in material substance in a material way is present to intellectual substance in an intelligible way. Accordingly, angels, and God for that matter, do not require corporeal sense organs in order to know particular material things. Because there is no principle in nature that unites an intellective nature whose mode of understanding is pure to an intellective nature whose mode of understanding depends on bodily senses, it is unnecessary, as it is impossible for an angel to dwell in a body.
Thomas’ rational soul in a state of separation from the human body does not make a good parallel to the embodied/disembodied Cartesian mind for the following two reasons. First, God must preserve the separated soul after the death of the body. Without Divine support to conserve it, the separate soul has no more way of existing than members of either the vegetative or the nutritive category of soul. Second, Thomas’ separated souls require “an influx of divine species” to understand. In other words, to know anything at all, separated souls require images that come from something besides material objects of perception. God must both conserve and feed images to the human mind after the death of the body. Consider Thomas’ own comparisons of separated souls to separate substances:
To exist apart from bodies is an accidental competence on the part of souls, since they are naturally the form of bodies — this indicates that intellectual substance is neither equivalent to the rational soul of man, since it does not inhere in any material form, nor, on the contrary, do souls, after the body dies, qualify as substance occupying a corresponding division of existence to that of intellectual substances.
The characteristic act of intellectual substances is the act of understanding; we can specify the nature of this act from its object: things can be grasped by the intellect insofar as they are free from matter. Separate substances apprehend intellectual things because they are intellectual natures; they do not uncover the intelligible buried in the sensible by means of abstraction.
Concerning the origin of the Cartesian mind, Thomas’ separated souls bear a certain likeness to Descartes’ concept of mind, but fail to explain many characteristic features of the Cartesian mind, such as the fact that the rational mind does not require external objects of perception to know anything. The noetic contents of the Cartesian mind are not activated by external objects of perception. The Cartesian mind understands all concepts per se, without mediation, and it does not cease to understand when in either a temporary or a permanent state of separation from the body.
We have shown that Descartes’ rational mind is comparable to something like Aristotle’s rational soul turned inside out. To find a likely source for the origin of the Cartesian mind, another source closely allied to Aristotle’s rational mind must be considered— Thomas’ separate substances (otherwise known as angels ). The superior correspondence of Thomas’ separate substances to Descartes concept of mind can be seen in Thomas’ contrast between the separated soul and the separate substance’s respective mode of understanding:
The operation of understanding exercised through a corporeal organ is an imperfect means by which to understand. The substance of a thing must be commensurate to its operation, and understanding is the only proper operation of an intellectual substance… intellectual substances have no need of a body to apprehend their object [i.e., insofar as intelligibles are taken from material things, the faculty of understanding is imperfect, as is the case with the rational soul]. The proper objects of intellectual substance are things that in their very nature are intelligible, or things that are intelligible in themselves. In contrast, objects grasped by rational souls are things known by the intellect through the intermediary means of phantasms [i.e., images of objects of sense perception] received through sense organs. So, things in this way are not known through themselves, but through abstraction [i.e., conceptually].
Accordingly, Thomas himself argues that his separate substances are not equivalent to Aristotle’s rational soul. Separate substances are not formed of a compound of soul and body, while the rational soul, as Aristotle defines it, is always the form of the human body. Thomas’ separate substances bear a far greater likeness to the Cartesian mind in the respect that separate substances understand all essences directly (thus, they know material things and singulars as well ), and they understand without Divine mediation. From here we can draw the further parallel of the Cartesian mind to the Divine mind.
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THE MIND OF GOD AND THE RATIONAL MIND IN THE MEDITATIONS
In order to build a case in his letter to the Sorbonne for the proof for the existence of God he gives in the Third Meditation, Descartes draws on Biblical citations that assert man’s knowledge of the existence of God to be “manifest.” Indeed, Descartes’ proof for the separabilty of the soul from the body in the Second Meditation hinges dialectically on his proof for the existence of God as an innate idea of the mind in the Third Meditation. Descartes’ substitution of the Scholastic term “soul” with the term “mind” is present in the Sorbonne letter, and so too is his doctrine of innate ideas: “everything that may be known of God” through the Scriptures, including man’s knowledge of God’s existence, “…can be demonstrated by reasoning which has no other source than our own mind.”
Descartes’ curious phrase, “no other source than our own mind,” introduces a subtle shift in his argument to the Sorbonne Dean and Doctors. Man’s empirical knowledge of the existence of God, according to Thomas and his 17th century adherents at the Sorbonne, is derived from God’s sensible effects throughout His creation. Under the idealist auspices of the Cartesian method, Thomas’ empiricism is abrogated to the realm of a fiction of the mind. According to Descartes, the mind’s knowledge of God’s existence is not discursive. According to Descartes, the Aristotelian/Thomistic claim that the mind’s knowledge of the existence of God can be derived from His sensible effects is a fallacy in the order of knowledge. The corporeal organs of sense only sense what is sensible; and God, who is incorporeal, cannot be apprehended in His existence through the corporeal senses. The dubitability of the objects of sense perception undermines the validity of knowledge derived from the material world. If man’s knowledge of the existence of God is drawn from sensible effects, then the existence of God can be called into doubt through the same channels by which His existence was asserted. Famously, Descartes does precisely this in his Mediations. Yet what was taken as evidence of Descartes’ atheist-skepticism by his critics was in reality Descartes’ rejection of Aristotle and Thomas’ rational soul that understands itself though the senses in favor of the understanding of the undiluted rational mind. The question of how good a Catholic was Descartes becomes clear when it is realized that the answer has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with competition between schools of thought. Competition between the Aristotelian and Platonist/neo-Platonist schools of thought was extremely wide-ranging in the 17th century. The Church’s shadow over intellectual life has been equally over-exaggerated by both commentators and historians of philosophy. In 1641, Descartes celebrated the birth of his mechanical man animated by William Harvey’s discovery of the heart that pumps blood. Such a conception of man represented a triumph over Aristotle’s rational soul animated by the fantasy of phantasia, not a victory over the claims of man’s revealed religion.
Of the three types of intellect treated in Descartes’ writings (Divine, angelic, and human), it is the Divine mind that most closely parallels the ego of the Meditations. Like the Divine mind, the Cartesian mind requires no medium, sensory or otherwise, to be activated. The ego, like the Divine mind, knows its essence directly. As opposed to the Aristotelian soul, the ego has no need of sensory or bodily organs to transmit images to the agent or passive intellect. Nor does the Cartesian ego require universal forms, as do Thomas’ angelic minds. Because no image is necessary to activate the Cartesian ego, it “does not ‘traverse,’ as do Thomas’ separate substances, the ontological distance from potentiality to actuality.” Nor is the Cartesian mind divided into the agent intellect and potential intellect. The Cartesian mind is always actual in the same way the Divine mind is, but in a finite, as opposed to an infinite sense. The ego is always, first and foremost, an act or intuition of existence, and is in act prior to any conscious mental act. The Cartesian mind, unlike the Aristotelian God that is thought thinking itself, is actualized before it thinks itself. One might ask what thought thinking itself was before it thought of itself. Finally, the Cartesian mind does not require a body (and therefore the external world) to be.
The nature of the ideas innate in the Cartesian mind (God, the ego, wax) are all encompassing, in the sense that the mind has an idea of all essences. In other words, the mind does not require the particulars of sense perception to grasp universal concepts. Logic, for instance, is not based on the particulars of sense, but on concepts reducible to mathematical or physical principles and properties. Cartesian man’s act of being— thinking— is not a bodily act. The self, or the mind, is not individuated by matter, whereas material objects are. The Cartesian mind knows the same universals as the Divine mind, but the difference is that the Cartesian mind is embodied, and thus subject to error:
..so long as I think only of God, and turn my whole attention to him, I can find no cause of error or falsity. But when I turn back to myself, I know by experience that I am prone to countless errors.
In terms of further limitation, the mind is created by God, as Descartes states in the Third Mediation; Cartesian man’s act of being is not an act of self-creation, but an intuition of the self and an understanding of the essential nature of all things (e.g., Descartes’ experiment with the wax in the Second Mediation). In this respect, Descartes’ proof for the existence of God from the principle of causality in the Third Meditation is the only way of measuring the powers of rationality and the contents of the mind that has a rational understanding of all things.
The approximate identity of the Cartesian mind with the Divine mind is further underscored by Descartes’ emphasis on the ease with which the existence of God is “thinkable.” To discover the existence of God, Descartes substitutes the chain of causes in the sensible order for the chain of causes in the order of ideas. That the existence of God, according to Descartes, is more self-evident than the existence of the sensible world contradicts the Aristotelian/Thomist conception of the intellectual soul, which apprehends its object via the simple class of objects that Aquinas refers to as “sensible by accident,” or objects which are intelligible in themselves. Thomas argues that man’s knowledge of the existence of God, deriving from the order of created things, points to the necessity of His existence as the first cause of the material world, and the requirement that there exist in the universe intellectual creatures that bear “a likeness to its source, according to its being and its nature, wherein it enjoys a certain perfection.”
In the Third Meditation, the necessity of the mind’s a priori knowledge of the existence of God is deduced from the infinite nature of God. Descartes argues that the rational mind possesses the idea of an infinite being; the rational mind is finite, hence the finite mind’s idea of an infinite being must have a source outside of itself. Because a finite mind cannot generate the idea of an infinite being, it stands to reason that God put the idea of Himself in the rational mind. There is no other means, Descartes argues, by which a finite mind could be in possession of the idea of an infinite being. Descartes maintains that,
…the mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness, and that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the same faculty which enables me to perceive myself.
The proposition that the mind is made in God’s image and likeness rests upon the assumption that the mind possesses judgment, rationality, and will — in other words, those communicable attributes that God possesses infinitely and perfectly, and the human mind to a limited and finite degree. Because the meditator perceives both God and the ego through the same faculty (the understanding), what is predicated of God (infinity and perfection) is also predicated of the mind, but to a diminished degree of perfection. The intuitive assertion of the “cogito” is ego cogito, ego sum; je pense donc je suis; I think, therefore I am. The parallel of Descartes’ philosophical doctrine to God’s answer to Moses on Mount Sinai was probably not lost on him. After all, the title of his Le Monde de M. Descartes ou le traité de la lumière, too, was intended as a reference to the command of God Himself, on the first day of the world, “Let there be light!”
In the final analysis, the Cartesian mind is not identical to the Divine mind, but bears a similarity to it in the same respect that the mind’s idea of extension only bears a similarity to extended things. An analogous parallel can be found in the cognitive lacuna that divides Thomas’ Divine mind from his separate substances, the angels. We can formulate a tripartite ontological lacuna in Descartes’ distinction of the thinking thing as such, and extended things as such; second, his distinction between the mind’s ideas of extended things, and extended things as such; and third, his account of the mind’s idea of God, and God as such.
The rational mind is, as Descartes phrases it after Augustine, caught between “being and nothingness.” The lacuna between the mind’s ideas of essences and material objects existing in time and space is the same ontological lacuna that obtains between being and non-being. What commentators term the “similarity thesis” refers to the objects of sense experience bearing a similarity to the mind’s ideas of objects of perception; the two are not identical, and therefore not dependent on one another for their respective operations. The body is a mechanism that functions on the circulation of blood, performing all of the same movements even if there is no mind in it. Hence, the lacuna between the rational mind and the body-machine is identical to the lack of correspondence between being and non-being as such.
Like Thomas’ separate substances, the Cartesian mind is caused by the Divine mind, and reflects the Divine mind in an imperfect, finite way. The difference between the modes of being enjoyed by God, who possesses both an infinite will and mind, and the limited faculties and powers enjoyed by man is such that “no essence can belong univocally to both God and his creatures.” What can be predicated essentially of man depends, according to Descartes, on the rational clarity by which the truth is perceived by the mind. “No actions,” Descartes claims, “can be reckoned human unless they depend on reason.”
The distinction again applies in the case of the ontological lacuna between the rational mind and the Divine mind. What is predicated of the rational mind, such as the mind’s knowledge of the truth or falsity of ideas, cannot likewise be predicated of the Divine nature. The mind and will of God is free in the absolute sense, and beyond truth and falsity. Thus, the limitless will and power of God enjoys an indifference to the created and uncreated as such. God, considered as an infinite, perfect substance, determines the order of things to be such for no other reason than that He wills it to be so. In the Sixth Set of Replies Descartes states, “the way in which it [viz., the freedom of the will] exists in God is quite different from the way in which it exists in us.” Descartes’ admission that he could not demonstrate that God could not annihilate the soul stems from his conception of the absolute freedom of an infinite God.
God’s freedom derives from His absolute indifference, or in Descartes’ words, “it is impossible to imagine that anything is thought of in the divine intellect as good or true… prior to the decision of the divine will to make it so…there is no “priority of order, or nature, or… rationally determined reason [that] impelled him to choose one thing rather than another.” Lastly, the rational mind is distinguished from the Divine mind in the respect that the rational mind perceives concepts that are immutably true, while the Divine mind, the infinite, perfect, incomprehensible originator of all is omni potens, and above rationality. Rationality is by definition a property of finite creatures that observe rules and operate according to mechanistic laws. God’s essence, according to Descartes, is not identical to the universal laws of mechanics; God’s essence consists of a will of “inexhaustible power,” hence the “cause or reason why he requires no cause.”
Aquinas, Thomas, St. 1956. Translated from Latin and edited by James F. Anderson.
On the Truth of the Catholic Faith: Summa Contra Gentiles, 4 vols. (Image
Books, Garden City, New York).
Aristotle, 1956. Richard McKeon (ed). The Basic Works of Aristotle (Random
House, New York).
Boehner, Philotheus, O.F.M. 1990. William Ockham: Philosophical Writings: A
Selection, translated and edited by P. Boehner, O.F.M. (Hackett Publishing
Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge).
Copleston, Frederick, S. J., 1960. A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy:
Descartes to Leibniz, volume 4 (Image Books, Garden City, New York).
Descartes, Rene, 1964-71, Œuvres. Ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery. New
edition 12 vols. (Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 1996).
—. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Mardoch, and Anthony Kenny. 3 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
Fowler, C.F., 1999. Descartes On the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of
Christian Doctrine (International Archive of the History of Ideas, 160; Kluwer
Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London).
Marion, Jean-Luc, 1986. “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of
Divinity, trans. by Frederick P. Van de Pitte, in Essays on Descartes Meditations,
ed. by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (University of California Press, Berkley).
Popkin, Richard, 2003 (revised and expanded edition). The History of Skepticism:
From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford University Press, New York, New York).
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged 17th century, aquinas, aristotle, atheism, atheist, book review, catholic, catholic philosophy, college paper, descartes, descartes cliff notes, epistemology, french philosophy, god, greek philosophy, history of ideas, history of philosophy, history of science, medieval, medieval philosophy, middle ages, modern philosophy, philosophy, philosophy paper, plato, renaissance, renaissance art, science, st thomas aquinas, theodicy, thomas aquinas on April 4, 2014 by philosophymajor.
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by Matthew Strauss and Amanda Wicks
A Nightmare on Elm Street Vinyl Box Set Announced
The 8xLP set collects scores from Wes Craven’s horror franchise
Artwork by Mike Saputo
Mondo has announced a new box set, collecting the scores from seven films in the A Nightmare on Elm Street horror franchise. The 8xLP set is called Box of Souls and goes on sale on October 25. It includes Charles Bernstein’s music for the original 1984 movie, as well as work by Angelo Badalamenti (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors) and others. James Plotkin remastered the records, which are pressed on 180 gram black vinyl. They also include original artwork for each film score by Mike Saputo. Below, check out some of Saputo’s artwork and the full list of records included in the box set.
Read Pitchfork’s “5 New Releases That Continue Horror’s Metal Obsession.”
A Nightmare on Elm Street Box of Souls:
Charles Bernstein: A Nightmare on Elm Street
Christopher Young: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge
Angelo Badalamenti: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Craig Safan: A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Jay Ferguson: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Brian May: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare
J. Peter Robinson: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
Watch Common rate Halloween on Pitchfork’s “Over/Under”:
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Recovering Uchebo hopes to return to form
This is the second installment of a two- part story on Pitt basketball player Joe Uchebo. The first installment appeared in the Nov. 18 edition of The Pitt News.
Trust would also be paramount in Pitt center Joe Uchebo making an optimal recovery. He’d have to trust his right knee, something he wasn’t doing after testing it out in non-contact drills at Chipola College.
“He was visibly favoring that [left] leg and not confident, so it never got past that one day,” Uchebo’s junior college head coach Patrick Blake said.
From a broad standpoint, Pitt men’s basketball trainer Tim Beltz’s plans and goals for Uchebo were simple. If he could convince Uchebo to trust his right knee again, the brunt of Beltz’s work would be done.
“Making sure from a muscular standpoint that they have bilateral symmetry is always a paramount goal,” Beltz said. “Making sure from a health standpoint, they don’t favor one side versus another side, that’s always going to be part of the process.”
To get there, the pain in his right knee had to subside enough for him to stop favoring his left leg.
“It’s trying to find a pain free range of motion. With any surgical procedure, the objective from a performance standpoint is getting in a position where things aren’t painful,” Beltz said.
Uchebo arrived at Pitt in June 2013, and after evaluating him, Beltz and the rest of Pitt’s staff developed a rehabilitation plan to strengthen the surrounding structures of his knee and develop a pain free range of motion. Beltz used terminal knee extensions and isometrics, among other exercises, to do so.
From June to November, Uchebo went to rehab two or three times a day, starting at 6 a.m. The schedule was hectic, alternating between Beltz and Pitt’s athletic trainer Tony Salesi for rehab sessions and fitting in classes and tutoring in between.
“It was tough. Some people would quit, but I kept on pushing,” Uchebo said.
Following the initial six months, he stopped having to attend rehab as frequently each day. His knee was healthy enough for him to play sparse minutes for Pitt in the 2013-14 season, and his first appearance was against Maryland on Jan. 6, logging 23 minutes of playing time on the year (including postseason). But he was far from full health, still visibly favoring his right leg, which was hindering his running and jumping.
“It was tough, but I don’t have to show it. But now it’s really different, there’s less pain,” Uchebo said.
Despite the benefits of the rehab, Uchebo can’t play basketball like he did before the injury.
“If I’m on the right side on the post trying to muscle people, they try to block that place. To spin around, that knee, it doesn’t let me do all that stuff, it’s kind of tough. So I have to finish up on the same side where the defense is getting me. If my knee was OK, I would just spin, and it’s a dunk right there,” Uchebo said.
There’s also the mental aspect, because it’s hard for Uchebo to trust his pre-injury abilities when the knee still hurts.
“I have to watch how I jump. Sometimes when they pass me the ball, when I’m trying to go up and somebody’s coming, I have to be kind of scared due to my knee. But I’m still going to finish up,” Uchebo said. “Yeah, I’m still thinking about my knee because it still hurts. But that is not going to take anything out of me.”
Uchebo’s doctor said the pain is something he’ll have to deal with. He tries to focus away from his knee when he’s playing.
“The more I’m thinking about my knee, the more it’s taking my game away. I have to focus on the game, not trying to focus on the pain, so I won’t feel it that much,” he said.
Despite the pain and other limitations, Uchebo has made significant strides. Though not yet 100 percent, he’s getting closer to running without a hitch or favoring the knee. Also, he’s been able to make a substantial increase in the amount of pressure he can put on the knee, especially in weightlifting.
Uchebo trimmed down since arriving in Oakland, losing 40 to 50 pounds since he got to Pitt, with most of it coming off after last season. After the injury, he put on some unnecessary weight and had to lose it, especially to put less pressure on his knee.
“Ideally, you want to put the least amount of stress as you can on the body in a sport like basketball, where it’s an up and down game and it’s a game that involves a high level of fitness,” Beltz said. “So obviously, the leaner and lighter you can be, the more durable your body can be.”
Recent results have been encouraging. He dominated the Pittsburgh Basketball Club Pro-Am summer league, averaging 20.2 points and 20 rebounds per game in the regular season and was Pitt’s best center in its four-game summer tour in the Bahamas, averaging 7.5 points and 12.5 rebounds per game. Both performances helped earn him a spot in the Panthers’ starting five.
“It’s giving me hope. I keep pushing,” Uchebo said. “The Bahamas and summer league, it’s giving me an idea how the game is going to be, how it’s going to look like during the season.”
If Uchebo wants to return to his pre-injury form, Beltz said, he’ll need to continue to rehab daily, strengthening and pushing the surrounding structures of his knee,
Still, Uchebo is happy to be in his current position, feeling indebted to Pitt for having faith in his abilities. Now, Uchebo is ready to give back to the Pitt staff.
“They gave me a great chance, now it’s time for me to return the favor,” he said.
Next Read: Float on »
featurejeremy tepperpitt basketball
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Potomac Middle School » News » 2018-19 News » WSHS Girls Varsity BB are state champs
Woodbridge High School girls’ varsity basketball team wins first ever state title
Capping off an amazing basketball season, the Woodbridge High School Lady Vikings have won the Class 6 State Title claiming the first state title in school history. The state championship game was played against five-time reigning champion Crosby High School at the Siegel Center at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), on Wednesday, March 6.
An additional highlight of the game was when Aaliyah Pitts reached 1,000 points scored during her high school basketball career.
Congratulations to the student-athletes and coaches for this tremendous achievement!
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BOLOGNE 2018 - PONTS DE PAIX > ARCHIVE > MÜNSTER 2017 - CHEMINS DE PAIX > SPEECH OF DANIELA POMPEI
12 Septembre 2017 09:00 | Rathaus Muenster - Rathausfestsaal
Speech of Daniela Pompei
“Solidarity is contagious”. Catia, from Matera, will not complain if I “steal” her this expression. Catia is a member of one of the families lining up for welcoming refugees, after listening to media news about the Humanitarian Corridors project. Catia’s family is not one of practitioners, just people who never before experienced welcoming people at home. They are not specialists, nor experienced, nor do they belong to some religious or civic community. They are small entrepreneurs who have something to give and perhaps a say. In her unpublished paper titled “Solidarity is contagious” Catia describes the complexity of welcoming refugees, as well as her expectations, which were met only partially: “It is very difficult – I quote – to describe in short the complexity and the intensity of what we have experienced. Taking care of people with a very different culture and background, has been quite challenging, not to mention language issues”. However, at some point Catia observes: “Allow me to underline another aspect of what we experienced. Through the foster project we uncovered how surprisingly generous and gifted are the people of our town. A broad and crosscutting network of helpers was created; irrespective of their social, cultural, political, religious and national background, our people identified with enthusiasm in this project (…). [We received] many tributes (to the point of embarrassment). We were repeatedly told that we were doing something wonderful and that people were grateful for the chance of giving a small hand. Now that refugees left we benefit from a network of new friendships and relationships.” This network of friendship and relations is the sustainable legacy of welcoming.
The end of August I went to Northern Italy, to visit the Syrian families welcomed through the Humanitarian Corridors Project, a success story of welcoming refugees, launched in February 2016 by the Community of Sant’Egidio together with the Waldensian Table and the Evangelical federation of Churches, in collaboration with the Foreign and Home Affairs Ministries of the Italy. While witnessing the pace of integration I was struck by the amazement of the Italian hosts: amazement indeed, because integration is actually easier than what expected; because a few low hanging fruits are been collected; because the Syrian boys and girls already speak Italian, less than a year from their arrival. Most of all, this is what I have been told at the outset, they experienced amazement for the impact that welcoming has had on their own community, i.e. the Italians: “Now everybody gives a hand”. Activities such as accompanying people to receive health care, administrative clearance, job seeking, shopping, language teaching, in sum, the responsibilities deriving from a welcoming project, require joining hands, mutual understanding, in a nutshell: the existence of a community, of a proactive civil society.
May I now open a small parenthesis and address the issue of the role of civil society. A recent discussion originated in Italy but known to all Europe, and unjust and inacceptable controversy: in three years, civil society saved the life of more than 100.000 people shipwrecked in the Mediterranean Sea and is providing a remarkable contribution to welcoming and integration. Such a resource requires support and promotion. I close the parenthesis.
I just described how the community is revamped by welcoming. I now focus on what to me is one of the most significant features of the Humanitarian Corridors proposal, which also accounts for the good results achieved so far: sponsorships. Sponsorships are not a new proposal, albeit new for Europe. Canada has practiced it for a long time. Sponsorships are a form of scaling-up legal access, planned in advance under specific criteria. It foresees active involvement by civil society in its diverse manifestations: associations, relatives, friends, etc. The sponsor takes responsibility to finance the first year of integration by a household of single refugees, or economic migrants.
Sponsorships are just one among many modalities to grant regular and checked access. In this way, migration is managed and not suffered. Sponsorships avoid human trafficking, dangerous journeys, overcrowded centers, issues of integration, ex-post or late management when people are already in our territory, etc. Sponsorships guarantee a widespread welcoming, with less social impact, easier job opportunities. It is not only a good management proposal. They is something more. The Community, every community, grows and strengthens by welcoming; dies or becomes unfertile by building walls. It is a fact.
Levinas, the philosopher, wrote: “The starting point of brotherhood is my responsivity vis-à-vis a face that looks to me as an absolute stranger” . This quote addresses a foundation of the human community: my responsibility vis-à-vis a face, not a familiar one, which resembles me. It is not “me” in the mirror but an absolute stranger. The Christian perspective is embodied in the words of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19). Disciples of Jesus that is described by Paul as “our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” (Eph. 2:14).
Every human community, of political, social or religious origin, grows and strengthens by meeting the other; it withers when closing itself. This happened also with community known as European Union. Born after World War II under a vision, this project of integration has been forged by the richness of diversity. In his last works, Umberto Eco makes an important point about immigration. I quote him: “Europe resulted, since fall of the Roman empire, from a successful cultural melting pot”. What is true for immigration applies to all situations: “The foundational principle underlying human issues – I quote again Umberto Eco- is the one of negotiation (…) which stands at the basis of cultural life” .
Welcoming others produces the miracle of revamping communities, groups, parishes in small towns, groups of friends, entire Nations vis-à-vis a staring face, the one of a child or elderly refugee, or migrant. It is at the opposite of closed, self-centered, communities, in search for people “like me”, under the illusion of controlling global complexity by marking borders or simplifying the world by separating “us” from “the others”, or even “us first, then the others”.
For the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Rome Treaties, Pope Francis stated the following: “Europe finds new hope in solidarity, which is also the most effective antidote to modern forms of populism (..) Forms of populism are instead the fruit of an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and “looking beyond” their own narrow vision, “The European Union, too, is called today to examine itself, to care for the ailments that inevitably come with age, and to find new ways to steer its course”. Indeed the discussion about migration is a window of opportunity to achieve a “new youthfulness” for Europe .
Face to this window of opportunity, Europe is late, and stiffened in old mindsets. A case in point is the Dublin Regulation identifying the country responsible for asylum application, on which discussion was reopened thanks to the proactive initiative of Chancellor Merkel. As it stands, the Dublin regulation is an old answer to new phenomena, which requires fresh instruments, also legislative ones. It well represents Europe today: stiffened and locked into 25-year old rules, with a few amendments. These rules are part of the problem, having created a new category of inconvenience: the so-called “Dubliners” affected by a tragic ping-pong between country of entry and country of destination. For example, a refugee, also many years after his/her entry in a European country, can be forcibly relocated to the first European country of entry.
Why is migration on the front page of the European media? Today more than in 2015? Datasets do not provide a credible answer. In 2015, migrants crossing into Europe by sea were more than a million (namely 1.015.078). In 2016, they lowered dramatically to 362.753 (around one-third of 2015). As of 31 August, migrants entering by sea were 123.950 . The year 2017 has not ended, but there is a very low probability that the 2015, nor the 2016 figure, be attained. This reduction has occurred before the agreements with Libya, which are notoriously in force only since last month. Perhaps the revamped discussion about immigration is driven by the electoral agendas, more than by actual figures (important European countries, among which Germany and Italy will soon face elections).
I agree with those who argue that the first victory of populism is not in the electoral booth, but when it is successful in setting the agenda of the political debate with a theme, as today occurs with immigration. More meaningful and urgent issues should actually be addressed. I will never buy the populistic refrain by which my problems will be magically solved, a wall would be enough, keeping problem people away would serve and solve… etc. These are only dangerous lies.
It could be useful to resort to a methodology proposed by a great Italian National Alessandro Manzoni, always valid, who in his Promessi Sposi advised avoiding speaking so lengthened and crooked (Ch. XXXI). He was referring to the irrationality and chaos by which the plague was being addressed. The guilt was placed on the foreigners, thus also on the protagonist of the book, the poor Renzo. Speaking so lengthened and crooked is in tune with the simplification and irrationality of the present debate on immigration. The method proposed by Manzoni, which we should resort to, was the one of “observing, listening, comparing, and thinking, before speaking”. Thinking and listening before speaking is a method to be urgently applied today while we witness with concern the revamp of intolerance and fascism, we had relinquished to the past as a horrible nightmare.
Since February 2016 the Humanitarian Corridors Project flied to Italy around 900 Syrians who were in Lebanon: women, children, sick men, elderly accomplished a journey of hope on a regular airline and not on the boats of death. They overflew the sea, needing not to put their lives at risk by sailing. Ten journeys have been organized and the last one took place on 29 August.
In October, we will welcome the first group of refugees from the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia). This operation is possible thanks to a new protocol signed by The Italian Catholic Bishop’s Conference, with Caritas Italy and Migrantes, the Community of Sant’Egidio and the Foreign and Home Affairs Ministries of Italy.
In France, a first group of refugees came through always thanks to the Humanitarian Corridors Project, which in that case foresees the arrival of a number of 500 prim Lebanon. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Federation of the Protestant Churches of France, The French Catholic Bishop’s Conference, Secours Catolique, Sant’Egidio and the French Government. Negotiations are underway in Belgium, Andorra, Monaco and other countries.
Allow me to highlight the lessons learned from this experience and the knowledge of the plight of migration, the Community di Sant’Egidio has been active in addressing, and to put forward a few proposals, recently announced by Marco Impagliazzo.
As described before, promoting sponsorships for refugees and vulnerable groups. This modality should be mainstreamed into European legislation. Italy simply requires restoring it in its domestic legislation, as it existed before. Every country, on an annual basis, could determine the number of visas to be extended for this very modality. This would allow structuring practical forms of synergy with the civil society in its various forms and the public institutions.
Facilitate and broaden the opportunities for Family Reunification (actually a recognized right). At present, Family Reunification cases in some European Countries are blocked or unduly delayed (more than 2 years in some cases). Many journeys of death in the Mediterranean Sea are undertaken by relatives, sons and daughters, brothers, to join family members already in Europe.
Scale-up the quotas for Relocation of refugees from transit countries to European destination countries. The past two years witnessed a figure of 22,000 relocated in 27 EU countries. The experience was positive. It may be scaled up.
Apply the European Directive on Temporary Protection by granting humanitarian permits in cases of massive influx of people due to violence, war and natural disasters.
Consider Legal gateways also for economic migrants or environmental refugees. Sorting out between asylum seekers and economic migrants is not at all simple. A Senegalese arriving by sea to Italy and stating that his “land has become a desert” is an economic migrant or and environmental refugee? Europe must overcome the ban of labor permits, which today are authorized only for highly skilled migrants. Bilateral agreements with countries with high migration risk can result in quotas for specific countries with special legislation. Italy could sign up bilateral agreements with Nigeria, Guinea, Morocco, Bangladesh, etc. In any case, we cannot continue with the schizophrenia of maintaining at the same time that, on the side migrants are necessary (ore very necessary) to our economies and welfare systems, on the other side that “we do not want them. Banning and not managing is not a solution.
Strengthen Development co-operation and relationships with African countries. We need to consolidate progress made with the increase of Official Development Assistance (ODA), making the increase of Italian and European Aid permanent. This a Euro-African message of hope of the young generations of the South.
In conclusion, allow me to go back to Bauman’s reflections. I remember when, last year in Assisi, we dared embark upon a very difficult them for our times: happiness. There is no happiness without problems but there is happiness in addressing and overcoming problems.
Happiness is something we gave up to, as Andrea Riccardi has observed, while being pressed by the deadly dream of terrorism with its obscure project of death and unhappiness. Attacks are on the increase and not by chance in places which are considered symbols of coexistence, such as the Ramblas in Barcelona, the restaurant in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. In Barcelona, someone observed that the attack affected people from 34 different nationalities.
Happiness results from accepting the challenge of living together, the need of living with other – a very difficult art. This is what we mean for integration but also the future for any life based of relationship that does not end up into isolation: we need to listen, to discuss, to negotiate, to re-negotiate, to strike the right balance, to start again. I am aware of the difficulties of integration, of the steps forward, the backwards, or the anxiety for a teenager that has a pessimistic attitude, the failed interviews and those with few chances of mending up. Briefly, I am aware of successes and failures, the fatigue of integration, thrilling but still tiring. Who experiences life, knows that living together is complicated. Nevertheless, this is life! Simplifying life ignoring problems or not addressing them is a cheat and not a solution! Integration, not an easy word, not to be taken for granted, not exempt of problems, but the indispensable path for living together. Which would be the best solution? Accepting the daunting challenge, the very difficult art of living together permanently in diversity. It is the path of integration, a complex one, but only one we can afford in order to achieve happiness.
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You are here: Home / Students / Spotlight on:
Ana Maria Zárate Moreno
Currently, GW Regulatory Studies Fellow with the World Bank Doing Business Unit
Previously, Research Assistant at the GW Regulatory Studies Center
Second year MPP student at the GW Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration (TSPPPA) with a concentration in regulatory policy
Second-year MPP student and former GW Regulatory Studies Center research assistant, Ana Maria Zárate Moreno, was recently selected for a highly competitive internship with the World Bank. She is gathering information for the Bank’s Doing Business Unit on measures to support its credit information indicator and will assist in preparation of comparative analysis related to credit indicators on a country by country and regional basis.
After excelling in her regulatory analysis coursework, Ana Maria worked with the GW RSC from May through December 2015, providing valuable analysis on domestic and international regulatory issues. She focused on cross-country analysis of regulatory reforms and best practices, examined international approaches to the regulatory process and analyzed data on regulation, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Before starting her graduate studies, Ana Maria worked for 5 years in the Colombian Government contributing actively to a new regulatory policy proposal and to the process of accession of Colombia to the Regulatory Policy Committee of the OECD. Her interests include comparison and adaptation of the best international practices for improving regulatory systems.
Ana Maria is thriving in her intellectually challenging role with the World Bank in part due to her experiences in the Trachtenberg School and the GW Regulatory Studies Center. Ana Maria will graduate from the GW TSPPPA in May of this year and we’re looking forward to seeing where her future career in regulatory policy takes her.
PJ Austin
Legislative Assistant for U.S. Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE)
Previously, Associate Director of Government Affairs for Citizens Against Government Waste
MPA (2014) from the GW Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration (TSPPPA) with a dual concentration in budgeting and federal policy.
Because of PJ’s outstanding academic performance while a student at TSPPPA and his interest in regulatory policy, he was asked to submit a comment as part of the GW Regulatory Studies Center’s Retrospective Review Comment Project. PJ’s comment focused on a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed rule regarding the sanitary transportation of human and animal food, and broadly encouraged the FDA to commit to measuring the costs of the regulation after implementation.
PJ's legislative portfolio with Senator Fischer includes budget, tax, financial services, labor, and small business issues. Prior to his current role in the Senate, PJ was a lobbyist for the non-profit group Citizens Against Government Waste, and also served in Daimler’s Office of External Affairs and Public Policy for North America and the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.
PJ is certain that his TSPPPA coursework has been invaluable to his professional growth. In his spare time, PJ enjoys playing soccer and watching his beloved Michigan Wolverines football team.
Tanner Daniel
Financial Services Policy Advisor at Third Way
Previously, Financial Services staffer for Rep. Scott Peters (CA-52)
MPP (2013) from the GW Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration with a concentration in regulatory policy and a focus in financial services
GW RSC Fellow in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) (Summer 2012)
Tanner started his MPP at Trachtenberg in 2010 knowing that he had a passion for politics, policy and Wall Street, but not knowing exactly how he was going to tie all three together. With the support and guidance from Trachtenberg faculty, specifically Susan Dudley, Tanner found courses that fit his passions and created his own concentration in regulatory policy and financial services including an RSC fellowship at OIRA.
After graduation in 2013, Tanner continued on the path of public service working on Capitol Hill. While there, Tanner worked for several members of Congress, most recently Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), where his portfolio included financial services, housing, tax, and small business. In addition to working for Rep. Peters' personal office, Tanner volunteered on the Congressman's successful 2014 re-election campaign.
Recently, Tanner took a new position at the centrist think tank, Third Way, where he is a Policy Advisor on their Economic Program doing research on financial services, securities law and housing policy. Tanner has been published covering topics ranging from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Federal Housing Administration.
Tanner has no doubt that his experience at TSPPPA and opportunities like the RSC Fellowship at OIRA led him to where he is today. In his free time, Tanner enjoys spending time with his dog Ginger and newly engaged fiancée who is currently a 3L at Georgetown Law School. Tanner is also an avid runner, and loves to golf and fly fish whenever he gets the chance.
Lindsay Scherber
Regulatory economist at the Office of Economic Research within the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Advocacy
MPP (2015) from the GW Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration with a concentration in regulatory policy
GW Regulatory Studies Research Assistant (‘14-‘15), RSC Fellow in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) (Summer 2014)
Lindsay chose the Trachtenberg School for her MPP in part because it is one of the few schools that offers a concentration in regulatory policy, and during her two years at GW she took full advantage of the opportunities available through the GW Regulatory Studies Center. In the summer of 2014, after excelling in the Regulatory Comment Clinic, she was awarded a Regulatory Studies Center fellowship to work as an OIRA policy analyst. The Center then selected her to be a Research Assistant for the following academic year, where she was an integral and valued member of the team, researching, writing, and submitting several regulatory comments. The knowledge she gained, combined with her outstanding analytic and writing skills, led to her position as regulatory economist with SBA Advocacy upon graduation.
In her role with SBA Advocacy, Lindsay spends about half her time on regulatory research and the other half on performing economic analyses of regulatory proposals to evaluate their economic and regulatory implications for the small business community. Her portfolio includes agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Lindsay is thriving in her intellectually challenging role with SBA Advocacy in part due to her experiences in the Trachtenberg School, the GW Regulatory Studies Center, and her OIRA fellowship.
Joseph "Joe" Nye
Full-time policy analyst in the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)
GW Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, MPA '15
GW Regulatory Studies Center Fellow, Summer 2014
Joe was bitten by the regulatory policy bug while getting his MPA from the GW Trachtenberg School. Following his successful completion of the core regulatory comment course, Joe was selected for the GW Regulatory Studies Fellowship opportunity to spend the summer of 2014 working as a policy analyst in OIRA. He found the experience so rewarding—and coworkers were so impressed with him—that he was offered and accepted a full-time position with the agency upon graduation.
Joe's hard work and his GW experience have prepared him well for the demanding job of an OIRA regulatory policy analyst. The challenging coursework involved in his Regulatory Policy concentration, combined with the invaluable on-the-job experience as a Regulatory Studies Fellow, have equipped Joe well for his new position providing what President Obama has called “a dispassionate and analytical second opinion on agencies actions.”
Congratulations, Joe!
@RegStudies
Tweets by @RegStudies
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Laurie Hernández Is the Second Puerto Rican Gymnast to Represent Team USA at the Olympics
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
By Yara Simón | 3 years ago
When Cuban-born gymnast Annia Hatch represented Team USA at the 2004 Olympics, Laurie Hernández – whose grandparents are Puerto Rican – hadn’t even familiarized herself with the 39-by-39-foot floor that’s now set her apart in the sport. Back then, 4-year-old Laurie had been taking ballet for a year, though she didn’t stick with it too long, because by the next year, she became bored and asked her mom if she could switch to gymnastics. On Sunday, she earned a spot in the ultimate gymnastics competition, joining Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas, and Madison Kocian at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Photo by Anthony Hernandez
Having just turned 16 in June, Laurie is the youngest team member, and she only started competing as a senior this year. This year’s team skews a little older than the 2012 team – the gold-medal winning team known as the Fierce Five averaged 16.2 years old. This year’s team is an average of 19.2 years. In the leadup to the Olympic trials on July 8-10 in San Jose, the NBC commentators didn’t see her as a sure bet – that is until the last day.
Though it’s a lot of pressure to represent the US on one of the world’s largest stages, Laurie has kicked off a new stage in her career on a stellar note. She made her senior debut at the 2016 City of Jesolo Trophy, where she won an all-around bronze medal. She’s kept up with veterans Douglas, Biles, and Raisman. She bounced back from a knee injury this year and only competed in a few events in early June, but when June 23 rolled around, she participated in all events at the Women’s P&G Gymnastics Championships, where she placed third all-around, beating Olympic champ Douglas.
Between the trials and the P&G championship, Laurie has proven she’s a solid team player, even though her specialties are floor and the uneven bars. While she’s altogether poised and resolute – traits that will prove beneficial to the US team – something happens when she takes to the mat. Dancing to a remix version of WTF!’s “Da Bop,” the New Jersey native equally shows off her dancing abilities, technical skills, and bubbly personality. She first performed this new floor routine on June 24, and Márta Károlyi was very here for it. She oohed and aahed with the rest of us watching the dazzling young performer from our homes, of if you were lucky, in the audience.
PHOTO: Laurie Hernandez with Martha Karolyi and VP of Women's Program Luan Peszek! pic.twitter.com/NzNNxs4JOr
— USA Gymnastics (@USAGym) July 4, 2013
She went into Sunday’s competition in second place. Taking place at the SAP Center in San Jose, the arena made her nervous. “When I first walked in… we had a practice that night and I saw how big the arena was, I was a little bit intimidated, ‘Oh, the biggest arena I’ve ever been to,'” she told the Los Angeles Times. During practice, she fell on the uneven bars. When it came time to the competition, she nailed that part, but stumbled on a pirouette that went into a handstand. She wanted to hold the pose for a “wow factor,” but very nearly fell off.
On the second day, she started off with her strongest event, but she ended up stepping out of bounds, giving her a lower than usual score. Though she didn’t have any major mess ups throughout the night, her score didn’t reflect that. She closed off the night’s performances with her impressive beam work, and all of her teammates supported her on the sidelines. Regardless, she still finished ahead of two Olympics champions and everyone but the world’s best gymnast.
Hernández’s family after the beam
Laurie is not the first Latina to represent Team USA; she’s actually following in the footsteps of Mexican-American Tracee Talavera (1984 Olympian who won silver along with her teammates) and Hatch (who won silver in the 2004 Olympics on both vault and team). She’s also not the first Boricua, as Kyla Ross (1/5 of the Fierce Five) has also represented the US.
Yet, Laurie doesn’t take this position lightly. Gymnastics is still a very white sport. In the spring of 2007, a survey of the Member Clubs of USA Gymnastics found that Latino participation stood at just 3.63 percent. Meanwhile, white participation came in at the biggest share at 74.6 percent. Things may have shifted some since then, but even four years ago, cost still kept many women of color from participating in the sport. Laurie’s mom, Wanda Hernández, knows that her daughter “can open doors to other young Latina girls that would like to try gymnastics.” Before the trial, Laurie spoke to The Guardian and talked about being a role model. “Si Dios lo quiere, to represent the US as the only Latina gymnast would be such an honor,” she said. “I feel I could be a role model to other Hispanic gymnasts interested in the sport but I also want them to understand the importance of being focused, determined, and not giving up, despite all the struggles.”
For Laurie, this means starting her day off at 8:30 a.m. and going hard until 4:30 p.m. Training for the trials means that she shuffles around between two gyms – one is where she practices her floor routine, the other is where she uses the uneven bars. Despite her and her teammates’ performance at the Rio games, this group of young women will inspire a new generation of gymnasts. This is one of the most diverse teams in the history of US women’s gymnastics. Other than Laurie, there’s two African-American members: Biles – the heavy favorite – and reigning Olympic champ Douglas.
Update July 11, 10 a.m.: This article has been updated to include Kyla Ross, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Originally, the post stated that Hernández was the second US-born gymnast, but she is actually the third.
gymnastics, laurie hernandez, olympics, Rio 2016. Sunday, July 10, 2016 at 10:38 PM EDT July 11, 2016 by Yara Simón
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Community news for the Quincy, Washington, area since 1949
Business/Agriculture
Classifieds: July 10, 2019
Home » Opinion » Renewable energy has a dark side: Column
Renewable energy has a dark side: Column
Before our country, in haste, dives totally into renewable energy, we must carefully evaluate its impacts. By just focusing on eliminating natural gas, liquid fuels (gasoline and diesel) and coal to combat climate change, we ignore the effects of other forms of pollution generated by processes in which renewable energy components are made.
Under the Green New Deal, the United States would become 100 percent reliant on renewable energy in a decade and eliminate CO2-producing fuels. It would cost up to $93 trillion over 10 years.
While further reducing greenhouse gases is vital, we can’t ignore the fact that last year only 18 percent of the nation’s energy consumption came from renewables.
And, we can’t disregard the significant water pollution caused from mining and processing copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt ore. They are primary elements used in batteries for cellphone, laptops, electric cars and electrical grid storage.
Before the Green New Deal was announced, demand for copper globally was set to jump 22 percent within five years because of increased usage of the metal in electric vehicles, solar and wind power sectors, Bloomberg reported. Copper in electric cars alone was projected to increase by 1.2 million tons annually.
Nowhere is the growth in copper consumption more evident than China. As it upgrades its industry to “smart factories,” annual demand for copper is set to grow by 232,000 tons by 2025.
Copper mining and processing create acidic and heavy-metal-laden wastewater, which is commonly stored in tailing ponds. In Colorado, the Gold King Mine pond blowout in 2015 coated the Animas River bed with a layer of toxic orange muck. State officials found 230 other old mines statewide leaking heavy-metals-laced sludge into headwaters of its rivers. The EPA calculates that 40 percent of river headwaters in the West are marred by acid mine drainage.
Lithium is toxic in water supplies as well. In 2016, protesters in Tagong, a city on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, threw hundreds of rotting fish onto the streets. The dead fish along with cow and yak carcasses were plucked from the Liqi River, which was contaminated by lithium mining operations owned by China’s BYD, the world’s largest supplier of lithium-ion batteries.
According to Cairn Energy Research, the lithium-ion industry is expected to grow eightfold by 2027. Much of that growth is in Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in Chile, which is rich in lithium. Mining activities now consume 65 percent of the region’s water. Chilean farmers and local residents near the mining area are already forced to truck in fresh water for household and farm use.
Wired.com reports that lithium may not be the most problematic ingredient in modern rechargeable batteries. Cobalt and nickel mining and processing create big environmental problems as well.
Finally, as lithium-ion batteries reach the end of their useful life, disposal becomes a giant headache. Today, only a small portion are recycled. The average lifespan of a lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery, the dominant type in China’s electric vehicles, is around five years.
According to Quartz.com in 2020, nearly 250,000 metric tons of batteries are set to be retired – nearly 20 times those depleted in 2016. But recycling these batteries isn’t easy, due to the sophisticated chemical procedures involved. If it’s not done properly, the heavy metal contained in the batteries can lead to contamination of soil and water if disposed in landfills.
Hopefully, our political leaders will carefully evaluate the entire spectrum of impacts of all energy sources before establishing sweeping government mandates for our nation. It is too important to our environment, economy and affordable living.
Don C. Brunell is a business analyst, writer and columnist. He can be contacted at theBrunells@msn.com.
Intersection closure unexpected, but a smart move: Column
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News briefs, week of July 10, 2019
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Order Now on VOD on iTunes
Synopsis and About
ELIZABETH KARR
RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH is Elizabeth’s first feature film as a producer. She has also produced a Disney Channel pilot, WEBGIRL aka VIRTUALLY CASEY, based on Elizabeth’s treatment, optioned by Suzanne De Passe Entertainment. Treatment was based on Elizabeth’s experiences as ‘Netgirl’—a girl next door cyber Dear Abby—for AOL’s Love@aol site. Consistently one of the top ten visited sites on AOL during Elizabeth’s tenure as sole writer responsible for creative content.
Elizabeth has also produced and directed several short films. She was recently selected to direct a PSA in the highly prestigious Women In Film (WIF) Charitable PSA Program. Elizabeth directed a PSA for New Directions, a Veterans Outreach organization that provides social services, housing and substance abuse treatment veterans in Santa Monica. New Directions PSA
On the other side of the camera, TV guest appearances include HOUSE, WOMENS MURDER CLUB, VERONICA MARS, SLEEPER CELL, ER, WEST WING, YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS, DAYS OF OUR LIVES, GENERAL HOSPITAL, PASSIONS, NEW ATTITUDES and commercials. Film includes SHILOH SEASON, PAWN, THE HUNTED, SLEEPWALK, MY NORMAL LIFE, ICE CREAM, JANUARY MAN.
Elizabeth’s first foray into producing was in theatre. Elizabeth has produced numerous critically-acclaimed theatrical productions in LA and New York, including UNCLE VANYA (with Orson Bean, 12 week sold out run), AN IDEAL HUSBAND AS VICTORIAN NOIR, BIG LOVE, The ATrainPlaysLA and WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE. Elizabeth is one of the founders and producers of Classical Theatre Lab/West Hollywood’s annual FREE SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARKS. (initially funded by a Grant from the City of West Hollywood, permanent financing secured in 2009).She is currently in pre-production for Classical Theatre Lab/West Hollywood’s 25th Silver Anniversary production of Tennessee Williams’ SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS, directed by John Alan Simon.
Elizabeth is a leader in the Los Angeles Theatre community: Director/Producer/Founder of Cedarburg Productions. Company member/Producer of Pacific Resident Theatre. Former company member and Board member of Classical Theatre Lab for fourteen years, Chairman of the Board for four. LA Theatre Ovations Award voter for ten years. She is a Professional Theatre Teaching Artist on the Music Center roster and LA’s Best.
Elizabeth is regularly seen in starring roles on stage, including THE ACCOMPLICES, written by Bernie Weinraub, directed by Deborah La Vine, at the Fountain Theatre, WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, and AN IDEAL HUSBAND AS VICTORIAN NOIR, directed by John Alan Simon, AS YOU LIKE IT, directed by Alfred Molina and Jack Stehlin, INFORMED CONSENT, directed by Peter Levin, UNCLE VANYA, directed by Bruce Katzman, and TROJAN WOMEN at the Getty Museum for an International Theatre Symposium of Greek Scholars and Dramatists, hosted by Olympia Dukakis.
Elizabeth is partnering again with Writer/Director John Alan Simon to produce NOTHING MORE THAN MURDER, an adaptation of Jim Thomspon’s classic Noir novel. Other feature projects in development include IN FROM THE COLD, with writer/director Dominika Waclawiak; THANKSGIVING and BALLOON HEIST, written by Emer Gillespie, based on treatments written by Elizabeth; and THE DIVIDE, written by Rashmi Singh.
Elizabeth is a graduate of Cornell University, British American Drama Academy in London and Yale Drama’s Summer Program at Oxford University.
elizabethkarr.com
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HomeNewsCapital News ServiceAssembly approves anti-abortion amendment
Assembly approves anti-abortion amendment
By Staff/Contributed April 4, 2013 Capital News Service, Health and Healthcare, Politics/Government, The News Feed Comments Off on Assembly approves anti-abortion amendment
By Mark Robinson
Capital News Service
RICHMOND – The General Assembly on Wednesday narrowly approved an amendment by Gov. Bob McDonnell that will prohibit certain health insurance companies in Virginia from providing coverage for women seeking an abortion.
McDonnell added the anti-abortion amendment to House Bill 1900, sponsored by Delegate Thomas Davis Rust, R-Herndon. The assembly passed the bill in February to comply with the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Under the system, Virginians who cannot afford health insurance will participate in a federally operated health insurance exchange.
McDonnell’s amendment will prohibit insurers participating in the exchange from covering abortion except in the case of rape or incest or if the mother’s life is in danger.
Legislators reconvened Wednesday to vote on the Republican governor’s recommendation and other matters. The Republican-dominated House voted 55-37, with one abstention, to approve McDonnell’s recommendation. But the vote was much closer in the Senate, which is divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
After more than an hour of deliberation, the Senate voted 20-19 to approve McDonnell’s amendment. Democratic Sens. Phillip Puckett of Tazewell and Charles Colgan of Manassas joined 18 Republicans in voting for McDonnell’s recommendation. The other 18 Democrats and Republican Sen. John Watkins of Powhatan voted against the measure. Sen. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, abstained from the vote.
Watkins said publicly that he did not support the governor’s amendment. On the Senate floor, Watkins questioned whether the anti-abortion amendment was germane and urged the Senate to block it.
“I don’t believe adequate attention has been given to its potential impact,” Watkins said.
Democratic senators also voiced opposition to the amendment.
“This is just a further attempt to expand the assault on women’s reproductive health rights in this commonwealth,” said Sen. Ralph Northam, D-Painter. “It needs to stop.”
Sen. Mark Herring, D-Loudoun, agreed. “Women should be able to make decisions about their own health care without interference from politicians here in the state Capitol,” he said.
The governor’s amendment states:
“No qualified health insurance plan that is sold or offered for sale through an exchange established or operating in the Commonwealth shall provide coverage for abortions, regardless of whether such coverage is provided through the plan or is offered as a separate optional rider thereto, provided that such limitation shall not apply to an abortion performed (i) when the life of the mother is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, or (ii) when the pregnancy is the result of an alleged act of rape or incest.”
The General Assembly passed a similar measure in 2011 when Virginia was planning to operate a state-run exchange for health insurance coverage. But the assembly had to vote on the issue again after McDonnell opted for an exchange operated by the federal government.
Here is how the Senate voted Wednesday in concurring in the governor’s recommendation regarding House Bill 1900.
Vote: 20-Y, 19-N
Yeas – 20: Black, Blevins, Carrico, Colgan, Garrett, Hanger, Martin, McDougle, McWaters, Newman, Norment, Obenshain, Puckett, Reeves, Ruff, Smith, Stanley, Stosch, Stuart and Vogel
Nays – 19: Alexander, Barker, Deeds, Ebbin, Edwards, Favola, Herring, Howell, Locke, Lucas, Marsden, Marsh, McEachin, Miller, Northam, Petersen, Puller, Saslaw, Watkins
Not voting – 1: Wagner
In the House on Wednesday, Delegate Bob Marshall, R-Manassas, said he voted “present” on the amendment because he believes it is not strict enough to prevent abortion. Marshall called the language of the bill “pathetic.” He objected to making exceptions for victims of “an alleged act of rape or incest” or women whose lives are threatened by their pregnancy.
“It’s designed to get people off the hook,” Marshall said. “It doesn’t stop abortion … You don’t need any life-of-the-mother exceptions in the United States.”
Late Wednesday, the Virginia Society for Human Life, an anti-abortion group, praised the General Assembly for supporting McDonnell’s amendment.
“Without this amendment, starting in 2014 Virginians would have been forced to pay for all abortions on demand done in the Commonwealth through the new federal health care law. Virginia taxpayers owe a debt of gratitude to Gov. McDonnell and the General Assembly for taking this reasonable action today.” said Olivia Gans Turner, the society’s president.
Capital News Service is a student news-gathering program sponsored by the School of Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Sit. Stay. It’s storytime.
School and sports news for April 4
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Home Real Estate Marin remains among most expensive counties to rent
Marin remains among most expensive counties to rent
Marin County, Calif., shares the top spot for most expensive places in the nation to rent a home, according to a new study.
Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties again tied for No. 1 in the annual National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” study. The report notes tenants in the three counties must make $60.96 an hour to afford to rent a modest, two-bedroom home estimated to cost $3,170 a month.
The top seven most expensive counties on the list are in the greater Bay Area, and nine of the top 10 are in California.
“Our clients are faced with no options but to move out of the county if their rents go up too high,” said Stephanie Haffner, executive director of the San Rafael-based Legal Aid of Marin, which provides legal services to low-income and undeserved residents. “Seniors, immigrants, workers, all are increasingly vulnerable to having no place to call home in Marin.”
The numbers show affordability in the region hasn’t improved in the last year. There’s still a significant gap between the Bay Area’s rent prices and its minimum wage.
“It’s worse,” said Amie Fishman, executive director of the Non-Profit Housing Association of California, which partnered with the National Low Income Housing Coalition to promote the report. “What we’re seeing is that it’s just continually getting worse.”
The report based its findings on the “fair market rent” for each jurisdiction — a number calculated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to estimate what a family moving into a new place today can expect to pay for a modest rental home and utilities. Using those estimates, the researchers determined how much a worker would need to earn to afford a home without spending more than 30 percent of salary on housing.
For Marin, the study found an annual income of $126,800 is needed. That’s about $61 an hour, significantly more than the state and local minimum wage. That compares to $72,165 a year in California and $47,756 nationwide.
The average renter in Marin makes about $20 per hour, the study shows. At that wage, three full-time jobs would be needed to afford rent alone. For perspective, the wage needed to afford to rent a two-bedroom home in Marin back in 2014 was $37.62, according to the 2014 “Out of Reach” study.
And the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better, as the number of low-wage jobs is expected to grow significantly in the next 10 years, according to the “Out of Reach” report. Seven of the 10 occupations with the largest projected growth between 2016 and 2026 — including waiters and waitresses, janitors and medical assistants — pay less than the hourly wage needed to afford both a one and two-bedroom home.
“The fundamental problem, as ‘Out of Reach’ makes clear, is the mismatch between what people earn or otherwise have available to spend on their homes, and what housing costs,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Housing shortage
A shortage of cheap housing is another factor. The country is short 7 million homes for extremely low-income renters, meaning there are just 37 affordable homes for every 100 households in that income bracket.
Part of the problem is that construction of affordable housing hasn’t kept pace with demand. San Rafael, for example, has built 37 units of affordable housing between 2015 and 2018, which makes up about 26 percent of 141 housing built in the same time period, according to city Community Development Director Paul Jensen. While the city is reviewing an additional 350 housing units as well as approving accessory dwelling units, Jensen said more must be done in San Rafael and beyond.
“I agree that the construction of affordable housing has not kept pace with demand,” Jensen said.
City staff are set to update the City Council later this year on the challenges and constraints that hinder housing development, Jensen added.
Countywide, there are more than 4,600 affordable rental units of various types, according to Marin County planner Molly Kron. There were about 37,550 rental units in Marin between 2013 and 2017, according to the “Out of Reach” study.
Meanwhile, the county has adopted programs that seek to promote further development and preservation of affordable housing through acquisition of multi-family rental properties, landlord incentives and grant funding for developers, according to county senior planner Debbi La Rue.
Federal housing assistance also is lagging behind demand, due to a lack of funding, according to the report. Three out of every four households eligible for aid does not receive help — compared to two out of every three households in the late 1980s.
Lewis Jordan, executive director of the Marin Housing Authority, which manages local public housing and the Section 8 voucher program, said the authority agrees with the report’s findings, especially its calls for the federal government to fully fund improvements to public housing and the Section 8 rental subsidy program to support vulnerable tenants.
“What ends up happening is that HUD submits a budget on behalf of the housing authorities to Congress and it’s a rarity if ever we get anywhere near 100% of what we ask for,” Jordan said.
This year, HUD amended its fair market rent values for Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties for 2019 after the housing authority argued the original rent values were too low. The change was made after a housing authority-contracted study showed the rents were actually higher.
Even after the change, HUD did not provide extra funding for the Section 8 program, Jordan said. As a result, Marin’s Section 8 program is about $350,000 underfunded this year. Jordan said HUD has agreed to pay the shortfall in the future, but the housing authority cannot issue any more housing vouchers for this year as a condition.
Congress is considering a bill this year that would provide more than $13 billion over five years to combat homelessness and increase affordable housing production. The Ending Homelessness Act of 2019, which would fund housing vouchers, new construction and case management services for homeless people, passed in the House Financial Services Committee in March.
Renter protection
Marin County and several local cities have also taken steps to keep current and future renters from being displaced.
Some like mandatory mediation require landlords to meet with tenants to discuss rent increases above a certain threshold. But as rents continue to rise, some Marin residents are calling for regulations with more teeth, such as rent control.
San Rafael, Fairfax and Marin County recently adopted “just cause” ordinances requiring landlords of properties with three or more units to give tenants a reason for their eviction. Several local governments have also adopted “source of income” ordinances to prohibit landlords from discriminating against tenants who use housing vouchers from third parties, such as Section 8 vouchers.
All are not in favor of these mandates. Jack Wilkinson, a San Rafael-based real estate agent and landlord, said the housing issue comes down to a number of factors, including lack of housing stock and people with higher salaries taking what supply there is. However, he argues that “onerous” demands by the government to subsidize tenants through eviction regulation and rent mediation also restrict the market and impede further development.
“The government, at the demand of the tenant, steps in and tells the property owner how they, the property owner can, utilize their asset,” Wilkinson said. “A third, non-invested partner, the government, interferes with commerce.”
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Leftmedia
Project Veritas and the Botched Sting
The problem with the WaPo's Moore stories wasn't credibility, it was political timing.
Nate Jackson · Nov. 28, 2017
“Veritas vos Liberabit” — the truth will set you free — has been The Patriot Post’s motto since our inception in 1996. A well-funded group called Project Veritas uses the same Latin word to describe its efforts to expose leftist hypocrisy, bias and lies. Unfortunately, that group failed to live up to its name this week.
First, some background. Project Veritas’ founder, James O'Keefe, has made a living with undercover “sting” videos. His first claim to fame was cracking the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in a series of videos revealing that ACORN would help certain patrons skirt the law. ACORN soon lost government funding and went defunct. O'Keefe, however, learned some of the wrong lessons. It wasn’t long before he was arrested for a stunt involving Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu. His shenanigans continued, even if sometimes with rewarding “gotcha” videos against the Left.
O'Keefe’s latest adventure saw him trying to take down The Washington Post for its politically timed hit job on Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. O'Keefe used a woman to try to plant a false story with the Post so as to discredit the paper’s other reporting. “In a series of interviews over two weeks,” the Post reported, “the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15.” The Post was already on guard for such attempts to undermine its credibility, however, and easily sniffed out the “inconsistencies in her story.” The game was up when the Post’s reporters saw her entering the offices of Project Veritas.
O'Keefe’s ill-conceived sting actually makes the Post more credible. Unlike the affair with Rolling Stone, the problem with the Post’s stories on Moore wasn’t the credibility of the paper’s reporting or the accounts of Moore’s accusers — which are largely believable and which the candidate has yet to convincingly deny. The problem with the Post’s blockbuster scoop was the timing. We strongly suspect the Post sat on the story, waiting to release its report until after Moore won the GOP Senate primary. O'Keefe’s attempt to discredit the Post and Moore’s accusers, all while theoretically getting Moore off the hook, doesn’t address the real issue.
In fact, conservatives shouldn’t mistake the Post’s bias for a lack of professionalism. There’s a reason why the Post is one of the nation’s leading newspapers — its reporters are good at what they do. That’s true even if the paper is a propaganda outlet for the Democrat Party, courtesy of its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos.
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Copyright On!
Copyright Law Enthusiasm
Heirs Go Crazy: Prince’s Estate and Copyright’s Termination of Transfer
The fight over Prince’s estate will dig deep into copyright law for a very long time
When Prince passed away on April 21, 2016, he left no will, and now his heirs appear ready for a long fight over his estate. Apparently, their first meeting about the estate ended in shouting. Heirs can battle over any substantial estate, and there are particular complications when it involves an artist. Some of what Prince’s heirs are fighting over is the ownership of his works — his published and unpublished music compositions and recordings. Copyright law will have a significant impact on who has what rights, and for how long. Three particular areas affecting their rights are the termination of transfer (17 U.S.C. § 203), the term of copyright for published and unpublished works (17 U.S.C. § 302), and the contracts already in place. The drafting of a will for an artist, or the administration of a late artist’s estate, should include a consult from an attorney for copyright due diligence.
After 35 Years, Artists and their Estates Get Another Bite at the Apple
There is an inherent feeling of unfairness for an artist when they sign away the rights to their works, which against all odds go on to become popular and make a fortune for the rightsholder — and not the artist. To address this, the Copyright Act built in a “termination of transfer” provision that gives an author an opportunity to claw back their works after 35 years, essentially giving the artist “another bite at the apple.” 17 U.S.C. § 203. There are court cases about termination of transfer for “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” Winnie the Pooh, Archie Comics, Ray Charles, the Village People and a few others, but there aren’t very many published opinions offering guidance about interpreting the law. The battles over the Prince estate may explore these issues for decades.
Most of Prince’s Works are Owned by the Estate and Licensed to Warner Bros.
Prince’s first album For You was released in 1978, but still earns money for its publisher Warner Bros. Records to this day. Had Prince wanted to, in 2013 he could have rescinded the rights to distribute his 1978 album from Warner Bros. In 2014, he could have terminated the transfer of his 1978 or 1979 albums, and reclaimed control over them. Had he wanted, he could have kept terminating transfers as his most popular albums hit their 35 year mark: Controversy (2016), 1999 (2017), Purple Rain (2019), Around the World in a Day (2020), Parade (2021), Sign o’ the Times (2022), Lovesexy (2023), Batman (2024), Graffiti Bridge (2025), Diamonds and Pearls (2026) and so on. Instead, in 2014 Prince and Warner Bros. Records redid their deal, which apparently resulted in Prince’s reclaiming ownership in his back catalogue, and Warner Bros. retaining certain rights to distribute his music. This effectively resets the clock on the termination right, which can’t be exercised against Warner Bros. for the works covered by this agreement until 2049. Warner Bros. and other record labels appear to be quite flexible in redoing deals with their artists with still-popular back catalogues that are approaching their 35-year termination of transfer dates. Musicians are finding that the evolution of digital recording and distribution give them much more of an ability to exploit their works without the help of a record label, which gives them even more leverage to get even more favorable deals if they renegotiate. The termination of transfer right and technological advances are giving artists just the second bite at the apple envisioned by the termination of transfer clause’s authors — as long as the artists and their heirs have the legal counsel to help them take advantage of it. Warner Bros. chose to do what it could to lock up Prince’s most lucrative works in the face of a termination of transfer.
Prince’s Estate can Already Claw Back Some of his Other Works, and More Every Year
However, there may be other licenses and transfers of rights in Prince’s works that were not affected by the Warner Bros. agreement. The oldest of these licenses and transfers are eligible for termination, and more will be in the coming years. The mechanics of the termination are a bit complicated, but are based on the passage of 35 years since the initial transfer of copyright. For the purposes of illustration, imagine that shortly after Prince released “Purple Rain” in 1984, he licensed the song to Hallmark for exclusive use in musical greeting cards. Even if the contract said that Hallmark had the right to make “Purple Rain” greeting cards for the entire duration of copyright, Section 203 allows Prince to terminate that license after 35 years. The termination can take place as early as 2019, or within five years after that in 2024. It’s a five-year window to terminate — after that, Prince would have lost his chance. To terminate a transfer related to “Purple Rain” as early as possible in 2019, Prince would need to notify Hallmark between 2009 and 2017, since the law calls for written notice no more than 10 and no less than two years before the termination would take effect. During that time between the notice and the termination, the original parties can renegotiate their deal, in this case Prince and Hallmark. If they couldn’t come to an agreement, the termination takes effect, and the greeting card rights to “Purple Rain” would revert to Prince. Only after the termination took effect could Prince make a new deal with another party for “Purple Rain” greeting cards. There are many other contours to the law, and there is very little caselaw on how it works, so it is ripe for controversy and error without the guidance of an attorney who understands the process. And because Prince has passed, there is the further question of who (if anyone) can terminate a transfer in the first place.
Who can Pull the Trigger? Not Prince’s Siblings
There may end up being an interesting split between who owns the copyright to Prince’s work, and who has the right to terminate a transfer. Under Minnesota state law, Prince’s estate, including his copyrights, will descend to his sister Tyka Nelson and their five living half-siblings. (More than 700 people have claimed to be Prince’s half-sibling, but none have yet been recognized by the court.) But under the termination of transfer law, siblings of the author do not have the right to terminate. Section 203 says that widows/widowers, children and grandchildren are the family members who have termination rights. Prince left no living widow, children, or grandchildren, so none of that applies to his works. According to the termination law, siblings are not next in line — “In the event that the author’s widow or widower, children, and grandchildren are not living, the author’s executor, administrator, personal representative, or trustee shall own the author’s entire termination interest.” So who will “inherit” Prince’s right to terminate the transfers in his works? Who will actually get the second bite at the apple?
The Fight to be the Administrator
As of this writing, the termination of transfer right is owned by the court-appointed “special administrator” the Bremer Trust, which provided financial services to Prince for many years. “Administrator” is one of the entities recognized by the termination of transfer law. The Bremer Trust was appointed special administrator by request of Prince’s sister Tyka Nelson. The Bremer Trust could exercise Prince’s termination rights for older works now, and may even find it necessary to do so given the strict deadlines of the termination right. However, the special administrator should be replaced within six months by a more permanent representative. Tyka or any of the other siblings could seek to be named Prince’s administrator, and the court could also name the Bremer Trust or another neutral party. An administrator is typically thought of as being a functional role, carrying out the best interests of the estate, distributing property by function of law and not operating for its own benefit. However, the termination of transfer creates a strange situation where the administrator him or herself becomes the owner of the terminated right (or work, if it was transferred in its entirety). It is not clear whether the administrator is required to redistribute any terminated rights to Prince’s heirs, all of whom would be well-advised to raise these issues before the permanent administrator is appointed by the court. There may be a contractual agreement among the administrator and the heirs or a court order concerning the exercise of the termination of transfer right, but the actual termination must be made by the court-appointed administrator, the only party recognized by the Copyright Act. Unless addressed by the court, this means that the heirs who own Prince’s works by the mechanics of estate law could lose their rights to their own administrator slowly over time through termination of transfer. There will certainly be a struggle among the parties over the selection of a favorable administrator, who may not be bound by any restriction with regards to termination of transfer. There could be a contractual agreement between the heirs and the administrator, but the statute may make such an agreement unenforceable. The court’s order in establishing the administrator — and its interpretation of the statute — could be worth a fortune.
Most of Prince’s Works are Protected through 2086
The fight will likely go on for a long time. But it will come to an end on a date certain for most of Prince’s works. It is very unusual for works to be commercially valuable through their entire term of copyright. There are millions of works in the Copyright Office registry that have been all but forgotten. But Prince is the kind of iconic, transformational artist whose works could very well still be earning money for generations. Under current law, the term of copyright protection is the life of the author plus 70 years, which in Prince’s case is 2086. This applies to both Prince’s published and unpublished works.
Who is Alexander Nevermind?
Prince also wrote under several pseudonyms, including Jamie Starr, Joey Coco, Alexander Nevermind and Christopher, and occasionally used those names for the copyright registration. Copyright for pseudonymous works lasts for 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. 17 U.S.C. 302(c). Some of these were registered with the Copyright Office to Prince, even though they were publicly credited to one of his pseudonyms. However, if a simple supplement is filed with the Copyright Office, the term of copyright and the termination of transfer rights remain the same, as if Prince had been credited as the author in the first place. 17 U.S.C. 302(c), § 408(a), (d). This has already been done for many of these pseudonymous works, such as “Manic Monday.” The heirs could choose to leave the registration pseudonymous, but that would likely result in a shorter term of copyright. Prince used pseudonyms primarily in the early part of his career, and works published pseudonymously before 1991 and left unclaimed would expire earlier than the 2086 expiration of works credited to Prince.
Some of Prince’s Jointly Authored Works will be Protected Even Longer
In the case of a joint work prepared by two or more authors who did not work for hire, the copyright endures for a term consisting of the life of the last surviving author and 70 years after such last surviving author’s death. 17 USC 302(b). Prince occasionally wrote with co-authors who have also passed, so the copyright in those songs will last (under current law) until 2086. Many of Prince’s co-authors are still alive, such as Madonna for “Love Song,” so the copyright expiration cannot yet be determined, but will last beyond 2086.
The Works Made for Hire Battleground
Prince’s heirs may challenge any assertion that any of Prince’s works were “works made for hire.” When a company hires an artist to create a certain kind work and follows certain statutory requirements, the company is considered the author of the work as a work for hire. For a work for hire, term of copyright is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. Songs like Prince’s embody two copyrights: the copyright in the composition, and the copyright in the recording. Record contracts typically provide that the recording is a work for hire created by the record label as author, not the artist. As such, the termination of transfer is unavailable for works made for hire. However, that status has been regularly challenged in courts, and it may turn out that despite the language of a particular record contract, Prince’s recordings were authored by Prince and transferred to the record label, rather than considered authored by the record label as works for hire. Although this determination affects the term of copyright, it is more impactful on the termination of transfer right, and likely to be a source of litigation as the termination rights in Prince’s works mature over the next seventy years.
Joint Authorship will Complicate Everything
Most Prince songs are credited in the copyright registration solely to Prince, like “Purple Rain” and “1999.” Other songs have multiple authors. The Prince and the New Power Generation song “7” has three authors — Prince and the late blues musicians Lowell Fulsom (d. 1999) and Jimmy McCracklin (d. 2012). Joint authorship affects both the term of copyright and the termination of transfer.
The termination of transfer is granted to any majority block of owners of the right to terminate. If Prince wrote a song with one other living co-author, then termination can only be affected by the co-author plus Prince’s administrator. Where Prince is co-author with more than one person, the transfer could be terminated without Prince’s administrator’s participation. However, even if Prince’s heirs and administrator object to such a termination, they are entitled to an equal share of any further exploitation of such works.
It gets more complicated where Prince’s collaborators are also deceased. Prince co-authored some songs with his jazz musician father, the late John L. Nelson, such as “Computer Blue” from the Purple Rain album. In such a case, the termination of transfer will depend on both Prince’s administrator and his father’s heirs. John L. Nelson has several living children (Prince’s siblings) and grandchildren who could claim an equal part of the right to terminate transfer. Whichever of them (or their descendants) is alive at the time of the maturation of the right to terminate a transfer of one of those co-authored songs will need to cobble together a majority group of Nelson’s children and grandchildren that owns the right to terminate, and also Prince’s administrator. This complexity is multiplied where there are multiple deceased authors, as with the song “7.” It is possible that heirs who were shut out of a will would nonetheless own or share the late author’s right of termination. These rights can be organized by an attorney in the present, even if they can’t be exercised until some future date.
Post Mortem Rights of Publicity
Although not a part of copyright law, the right to exercise certain copyright rights will intersect with Prince’s rights of publicity. Certain states have laws or court decisions that allow people to protect the use of their personas in commerce. As of this writing, Minnesota protects rights of publicity through court rulings (Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 N.W.2d 231 (Minn. 1998); Ventura v. Titan Sports, Inc., 65 F.3d 725 (8th Cir. 1995)), but does not have a right of publicity statute, and is silent on whether those rights exist after the celebrity has passed. However, Minnesota’s Senate and House of Representatives recently introduced a new bill that would establish a broad right of publicity that would cover Prince — the Personal Rights in Names Can Endure Act. The PRINCE Act would grant extended publicity control to the artist’s estate and limit commercial use of his name and likeness by others. It would last for the celebrity’s life plus at least 50 years, thereafter for as long as it is still in use, and would apply retroactively to celebrities who died within 50 years before the law’s passage. In Prince’s case, the right would descend to his siblings, and be further sellable or descendible by them, until at least 2066. Any exercise of copyright in Prince’s work would likely be accompanied by a consideration of his post mortem rights of publicity.
Change in Copyright Law will Likely Benefit Prince’s Heirs
Because we’re talking about such a long time, copyright law itself may change. Copyright law has gone through major revisions in the United States that have affected the term of copyright. Each copyright regime has stayed in place for decades since the first Copyright Act of 1790. Major changes came in 1831 (which was essentially preserved in the Confederacy under 1861 and 1863 Confederate acts, and honored after the war) and again in 1909. The current regime is the Copyright Act of 1976, which federalized copyright law, removed formalities, and came into effect on January 1, 1978 — coincidentally the dawn of Prince’s career. Each of these revisions expanded the rights of authors and more forcefully protected intellectual property. This gradual increase in copyright protection is not surprising, as the United States evolved from a country that largely imported the creative works it consumed, into the world’s largest exporter of intellectual property. One recent change in copyright law added the administrator as a possible claimant for termination of transfer — previously, it had only been children or grandchildren. We can expect another change in the law between now and the expiration of copyright in Prince’s works in 2086. We can further expect that such a change will increase protection of his works, either in length of term or some unforeseen manner.
Prince as a Model for Future Application of Copyright Law
Because of the administrator’s ownership of the right to terminate, there must be an administrator in power at least through 2086, when Prince’s works finally enter the public domain. The administrator will have responsibilities beyond 2086, to exercise the termination rights for works Prince co-authored with collaborators who have not yet passed as of 2016. During his lifetime, Prince was a tireless advocate of his rights as an artist, using copyright law to control and protect his artistic footprint, even when it seemed like it would cost him more than it would gain. For different reasons, it appears that more contentious exploration of copyright law will continue to be part of his legacy. Needless to say, it will be a long time before Prince’s estate is fully settled. Any successful artist would be wise to consult with an attorney about the effect of copyright law on their estate, and not leave behind the uncertainty faced by the Prince heirs.
17 usc 203; 17 USC 302.
Lawyers Begin Digging Into Prince’s Estate
Prince’s sister says he had no known will, asks court to appoint an executor to oversee estate
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-prince-estate-no-will-20160426-story.html
Prince’s estate: Potential legal red tape highlights importance of a will
http://www.cbc.ca/news/prince-will-siblings-estate-1.3569831
Prince Ahead Of His Time On Many Things Including His Business Dealings And Copyright Terminations
http://www.musicthinktank.com/mtt-open/prince-ahead-of-his-time-on-many-things-including-his-busine.html
Prince Gains His Catalog in Landmark Deal With Warner Bros.; New Album Coming
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6062423/prince-deal-with-warner-bros-new-album-coming.
Prince Brings Publishing In-House
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/prince-brings-publishing-house-693754
A link to the PRINCE Act
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=SF3609&session=ls89&session_year=2016&session_number=0&version=latest
Rothman’s Roadmap to the Right of Publicity: Minnesota
http://www.rightofpublicityroadmap.com/law/minnesota
Minnesota state legislature introduces bill inspired by Prince’s death
http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/05/minnesota-state-legislature-introduces-bill-inspired-by-princes-death/
Posted in Case Analysis, Practical Law and tagged copyright, estate, heirs, prince, termination of transfer, will on May 23, 2016 by brittonpayne. 7 Comments
← Works for Hire and the No Moonlighting Clause: If you write an app on the side, does your boss own it anyway?
jensell10 says:
Reblogged this on Jen Sell and commented:
As if my heart were not broken enough.
Great, and heartbreaking post. Being a copyright post and all, is there citation information and permission to reshare that awesome last image of the Symbol to use with attribution? Some Creative Commons license perhaps? 😀
brittonpayne says:
Hey, thanks for the compliment! To the extent that I own any IP in the image, it is licensed under CC BY-NC: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.
YAY CREATIVE COMMONS Uou just made my little heart squee. I mean the I was *literally* just dressing to go get an estimate on a little heart-shaped cc tattoo today. NO LIE. Clearly his Purpleness wants it! ❤ RIP Prince, you changed my life profoundly. Thanks @brittonpayne!
I just added a cc variant of the Prince symbol at the bottom of the article. Enjoy!
marc greenberg says:
Nicely done. I have a book on this subject, entitled Copyright’s Termination and Recapture Law: A Tale of Good Intentions Gone Awry, coming out in August by ABA Publishing, that goes into great detail about the work made for hire issues and the recapture process.
Elissa Feinberg says:
Finally! An article written by an actual attorney on the subject. Thanks for explaining in detail about the copyright law. I’m one of the crazy conspiracy theorists who still thinks there was foul play… Cannot wrap my head around the idea of Prince not having a will. He was known for being meticulous and a “control freak” (in a good way). And like you said, “Prince was a tireless advocate of his rights as an artist, using copyright law to control and protect his artistic footprint, even when it seemed like it would cost him more than it would gain.” It makes no sense that he of all people would not have a strict will in place. Some of the deadlines you described just make the Warner Bros. conspiracy theory a little too plausible.
Works for Hire and the No Moonlighting Clause: If you write an app on the side, does your boss own it anyway?
Ellen, J-Law, and the Monkey: Copyright Registration for Selfies
Copyright and Music: My Appearance on Shameless Maya (Part II)
Caselaw Chitchat: Harrisongs and [title of show] with Jeff Bowen
Elissa Feinberg on Heirs Go Crazy: Prince’s Estat…
marc greenberg on Heirs Go Crazy: Prince’s Estat…
brittonpayne on Heirs Go Crazy: Prince’s Estat…
jensell10 on Heirs Go Crazy: Prince’s Estat…
Audio Casebook
Casenotes
Video Casenotes
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Bennie Fowler Eli Manning Zak DeOssie Tony Lippett Sports Sports transactions Sports business NFL football Professional football Football
Long-snapper DeOssie returning for 13th season with Giants
EAST RUTHEFORD, N.J. (AP) — Long-snapper Zak DeOssie is returning for a 13th season with the New York Giants.
The team announced the re-signing of its second-longest tenured player Tuesday, a day after giving Eli Manning a $5 million roster bonus that almost guarantees the 38-year-old quarterback will be back for a 16th season.
They are the only two active Giants' players from their Super Bowl wins over the Patriots after the 2007 and '11 seasons.
The Giants also re-signed wide receiver Bennie Fowler and defensive back Tony Lippett.
DeOssie joined the Giants as a fourth-round draft choice in 2007 and has played in 188 regular-season games. He made the Pro Bowl twice.
Fowler played in 10 games last season, catching 16 passes for 199 yards and a touchdown. Lippett had one tackle in three games and was inactive for six.
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Travis Scott NFL football Professional football Football Sports Jermaine Dupri Celebrity Entertainment Arts and entertainment
Denver Nuggets at Houston Rockets 2/9/2018
FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2018, file photo, hip hop artist Travis Scott watches warmups before an NBA basketball game between the Houston Rockets and the Denver Nuggets, in Houston. Big-name entertainers believe social injustice needs to be addressed during the Super Bowl and are ensuring the topic that ignited a political firestorm that engulfed the NFL will be in the spotlight. Scott has fallen under scrutiny for his upcoming Super Bowl appearance. The rapper agreed to participate in the halftime show if the NFL made a joint donation to an organization fighting for social justice.(AP Photo/Eric Christian Smith, File)
Jan. 25, 2019 02:36 PM EST
FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2018, file photo, hip hop artist Travis Scott watches warmups before an NBA basketball game between the Houston Rockets and the Denver Nuggets, in Houston. Scott and Jermaine Dupri have been criticized for taking part in Super Bowl-related events, but their shows among others will still go on. Dupri will host a concert series called Super Bowl Live while Scott is expected to perform at the Pepsi Super Bowl Party two days before performing at Super Bowl 53 on Sunday, Feb. 3, 2019. (AP Photo/Eric Christian Smith, File)
Feb. 02, 2019 02:58 AM EST
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Progressive Youth Organization – Kansas City
Dare To Struggle! Dare To Win!
Dump Trump on His Ass for His Crimes and His Class: Statement on Our Black Friday Action and the Necessity for Anti-Fascist Resistance
We live in a period of ascendent fascism. From Trump and his followers in the United States, to Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France, to the Golden Dawn in Greece, fascism and reaction are on the move across the imperialist countries. This is the result of both the general crisis of capitalism in which economic stagnation continues to deepen, as well as the cessation of the normal functioning of the so-called “democratic” political systems in the imperialist countries. In the U.S. this was made particularly clear in this latest election with the systemic instances of voter suppression and rigged elections. The masses of people are no longer even clinging to the belief that the system is merely rigged against them, but that the entire political system exists not for them, but for the ruling class. It has been throughly exposed, even to those who didn’t want to accept it, that the entire political system in the United States is rotten to the core and completely bankrupt and therefore is to be rightly rejected.
As a consequence 46% of the country passively, or actively, boycotted the election. It was clear to many that the choices presented by both major parties, and even the inconsequential third parties, were repugnant or ineffective. What the Democratic Party presented was more disastrous neoliberalism, more war, and more brazen corruption. What the Republicans presented was a toxic blend of fascism, white nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and sexism. In short, a choice between a Reagan or a Thatcher, or Mussolini. Such as choice we must on principle oppose as akin to choosing to die slowly or to have your life snuffed out quickly. The various third parties, locked out of political participation, formed an amusing sideshow to the spectacle of the election, but no serious challenge. Of course this was by design, as American “democracy” from the days of the Founding Fathers has been explicitly crafted as an apparatus designed, in the words of James Madison, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.” This was made clear to those who still doubted the anti-democratic nature of American democracy by the behind the scenes maneuvering that led to the neutralization of the populist candidate Bernie Sanders, which proved that not only is working within any major party fruitless, but that the political and economic system cannot accommodate even moderate social democratic demands and reforms. The neoliberal consensus has become so entrenched that the possibility of change from within, so long propagated by liberal idealists as the only viable strategy, has gone up in flames in front of their face. Funneling mass resentment and energy into the Democratic Party presents no viable alternative and will inevitably end in cooption, and thus neutralization, or will be stamped out.
Donald Trump, and the conglomeration of fascist groups coalescing around him, represent the most vile and dangerous elements of the same “democratic” system that Hillary and the Democrats stood for. Our orientation towards Trump should be the same as our orientation to Hillary, the Democrats, and the entire U.S. empire, militant resistance with the goal of smashing them to bits. With the rise of Trump comes the rise of the so-called “Alt-Right”, or, more accurately, Neo-Nazis and white supremacists that long ago traded in their brown shirts and armbands for a suit and tie and an undercut. We uphold that it is wrong to stand idly by and preach pacifism in the face of a fascist threat. Through our study of the history of fascism we know that fascism is based on reactionary violence, and therefore cannot be defeated with hugs or love, as the liberals of today preach, but only with organized, disciplined, direct action. As with all things reactionary, if you don’t hit it, it will not fall. Fascism is not to be debated but smashed.
Today we aim to strike at the pocketbooks of those who financially supported Trump, and thereby facilitated the rise of fascists to power. We will block foot-traffic, and obstruct shopping to those businesses that donated to Trump’s campaign in a militant effort to strike directly at what the fascists hold dear, cold hard cash based on exploitation and their economic power structures. We understand that this action alone will not remove Trump and his cronies from power, but it will shock those fascists and their enablers who feel emboldened by Trump’s victory into the realization that we are serious. That the beginnings of organized resistance are under way. We will become steeled through every action we take against Trump and his fascist goons, steeled through struggle, hardened through direct action that strikes at the very heart of this decaying machine of exploitation and terror. Our long term goal must be to construct a determined, militant, and disciplined anti-fascist movement capable of striking at the roots of Trumpite fascism, and its basis, decaying capitalism itself. This must necessarily be a protracted process, but now, more than ever, such a process must be initiated, which is what we are doing today. Furthermore, we must construct such a movement on the basis of principled unity and on a sound theoretical basis. Those who refuse to recognize the interlocking nature of fascism, capitalism, and imperialism will fail in their struggle against any of them. It is absolutely urgent to grasp this connection in its all-sidedness in order to effectively fight and resist.
We must also oppose those who support Hillary and the Democrats, as they represent and constructed the same monstrous system that Trump now controls. The same system that bombs innocents overseas, the same system birthed from colonial genocide and slavery, the same system that pushes down further the working class into the depths of despair and economic misery, and the same system that terrorizes the black nation with its police and prisons. Our oppressed nations comrades, especially the black nation, have lived under fascist terror for 400 years. Fascism is an old, but very real enemy to them. An ever-present reality built into America as a political entity itself. Which is why we have a duty to oppose fascism, capitalism, imperialism, and the prison house of nations that is the United States. We must also isolate and ruthlessly criticize those who wish to divert people’s energy into pointless petitions to the Electoral College or other such nonsense, as again, appealing to structures of power that are anti-democratic by nature is an exercise in futility and utopianism. The Alt-Right and Trump laugh at such toothless displays of resistance, and they are right to. Power does not concede power to signatures on paper, it never has and it never will.
Those who refuse to directly confront fascism and instead muffle the voices of the marginalized, oppressed, and exploited people with the mouthpiece of pacifism must be opposed and criticized as well. They stand in the tradition of the old liberal collaborators in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Chile that made absurdities of democratic absolutes of free speech, and thereby facilitated the rise of fascism. They led the vulnerable into the arms of death in the name of unprincipled peace. We recognize no peace with fascists because fascism means death for us, for our LGBTQ comrades, our black and brown comrades, and for our Muslim comrades. It is right to fight back against them, to resist them in the name of self-preservation and self-defense. We see no value in providing a platform for fascists to air their views in the name of “democracy” either when their expressed goal is to smash the very platform they are given, and to drag us to the depths. Such a view is a paradoxical display of tolerance gone awry. We must expose and defeat fascists and their enablers by any means necessary, to not do so is to be complicit with it and to naively and dangerously lead others on the road to doom.
We don’t defend the rotten capitalist system and the fraudulent democracy of the United States from fascism, because both are two sides of the same coin. In fact, the discontent engendered by the worsening economic conditions for the masses here, combined with a deadlocked and unresponsive political system, is what birthed Trumpite fascism. To believe that we can continue on the road of capitalist-imperialism in the face of a heightened world crisis and impending economic and environmental catastrophe is pure utopianism. We, and the downtrodden here and across the world, want out of this cycle of destruction and calamity. We won’t fight for a system with one foot in the grave. We will fight for something better, a world free from the maniacal reign of capitalist-imperialism and its decayed and brutal outgrowth, fascism. We will never cease our struggle no matter the odds. We have the People’s cause on our side and we know one day we will be victorious.
Today is only the beginning of developing that anti-fascist struggle that can one day declare fascism extinct. Be proud to be the first on the front lines, but don’t let today be the end. Let it be the dawning of a new period of courage in the face of reaction, an opening in the great struggle to come for the liberation of the oppressed peoples the world over from the bootheel of tyranny. You stand with millions in opposing Trumpite fascism. From the Philippines, to India, to France, to our comrades in Progressive Youth Organization-Saint Louis rising up in anti-fascist resistance today in solidarity with us, you are not alone in your fight. You must make your actions felt at work, in the streets, and on your campuses, not just here today. The fight against fascism extends to every sphere of life. If we are to succeed we need each and every one of you to stand bravely and defiantly with us. To declare “never again will fascism draw breath”. The time has come to cast aside all ballots, petitions, and idealistic fantasies and prepare for struggle. Today, we salute you as bold and fearless comrades in that tireless struggle against the fascist leviathan.
LONG LIVE THE ANTI-FASCIST RESISTANCE!
SMASH REACTION ALL ALONG THE LINE!
DOWN WITH THE ALT-RIGHT AND TRUMP!
SMASH CAPITALIST-IMPERIALISM TO SMASH FASCISM!
RedZeal PYO Statements Leave a comment November 25, 2016 November 25, 2016 7 Minutes
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The UMKC Student Body Is Rising Up! Our Sexual Assault Campaign To Date!
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Rape Culture, Live from UMKC Admin and their “Independent” Newspaper!
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Frank A. LoBiondo & Mike Gallagher
Compare the voting records of Frank A. LoBiondo and Mike Gallagher in 2017-18.
Frank A. LoBiondo
Represented New Jersey's 2nd Congressional District. This is his 12th term in the House.
Represented Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District. This is his 1st term in the House.
Frank A. LoBiondo and Mike Gallagher are from the same party and agreed on 87 percent of votes in the 115th Congress (2017-18).
Sept. 28, 2018 — Protecting Family and Small Business Tax Cuts Act of 2018
July 19, 2018 — Making appropriations for the Department of the Interior, environment, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes
June 21, 2018 — Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018
Dec. 20, 2017 — Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Nov. 30, 2017 — Ensuring a Qualified Civil Service Act
Nov. 16, 2017 — Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Oct. 26, 2017 — Establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2018 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2019 through 2027
May 4, 2017 — American Health Care Act
May 2, 2017 — Working Families Flexibility Act of 2017
March 9, 2017 — Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act
July 18, 2018 — McHenry of North Carolina Amendment No. 87
July 18, 2018 — Smith of Missouri Amendment No. 70
July 18, 2018 — Jody B. Hice of Georgia Amendment No. 69
July 18, 2018 — Gosar of Arizona Amendment No. 63
July 18, 2018 — Pearce of New Mexico Amendment No. 60
July 18, 2018 — Gallego of Arizona Amendment No. 51
July 18, 2018 — Goodlatte of Virginia Amendment No. 50
July 18, 2018 — Lamborn of Colorado Amendment No. 49
July 18, 2018 — McMorris Rodgers of Washington Amendment No. 46
June 7, 2018 — Tsongas of Massachusetts Part B Amendment No. 13
May 17, 2018 — Faso of New York Amendment No. 13
April 26, 2018 — King of Iowa Part A Amendment No. 63
April 26, 2018 — DeFazio of Oregon Part A Amendment No. 42
On Motion to go to Conference
Dec. 4, 2017 — Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
Nov. 1, 2017 — O’Halleran of Arizona Amendment No. 3
Oct. 25, 2017 — McEachin of Virginia Part A Amendment No. 4
Oct. 24, 2017 — Conyers of Michigan Part B Amendment No. 6
Oct. 5, 2017 — Establishing the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2018 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2019 through 2027
Sept. 14, 2017 — Huizenga of Michigan Amendment No. 207
Sept. 14, 2017 — Gohmert of Texas Amendment No. 195
Sept. 13, 2017 — Walberg of Michigan Amendment No. 173
Sept. 13, 2017 — Meadows of North Carolina Amendment No. 172
Sept. 13, 2017 — Courtney of Connecticut Amendment No. 164
Sept. 13, 2017 — Lowey of New York Amendment No. 161
Sept. 13, 2017 — Clark of Massachusetts Amendment No. 154
Sept. 13, 2017 — Meng of New York Amendment No. 138
Sept. 13, 2017 — Pocan of Wisconsin Amendment No. 134
Sept. 7, 2017 — Biggs of Arizona Amendment No. 29
Sept. 7, 2017 — King of Iowa Part B Amendment No. 80, as modified
Sept. 6, 2017 — Smith of Missouri Part B Amendment No. 56
Sept. 6, 2017 — King of Iowa Part B Amendment No. 51
July 26, 2017 — King of Iowa Amendment No. 23
July 14, 2017 — Franks of Arizona Amendment No. 13
July 13, 2017 — Hartzler of Missouri Amendment No. 10
July 12, 2017 — DeSaulnier of California Part C Amendment No. 5
March 16, 2017 — Walz of Minnesota Part A Amendment No. 2
March 10, 2017 — Jeffries of New York Part A Amendment No. 4
March 9, 2017 — Jackson Lee of Texas Part B Amendment No. 7
March 1, 2017 — Cummings of Maryland Amendment No. 12
Feb. 28, 2017 — Krishnamoorthi of Illinois Amendment No. 6
Jan. 5, 2017 — King of Iowa Amendment No. 12
Jan. 5, 2017 — Nadler of New York Amendment No. 9
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Cathy McMorris Rodgers & Collin C. Peterson
Compare the voting records of Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Collin C. Peterson in 2017-18.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
Represented Washington's 5th Congressional District. This is her 7th term in the House.
Collin C. Peterson
Represented Minnesota's 7th Congressional District. This is his 14th term in the House.
Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Collin C. Peterson are from different parties but agreed on 51 percent of votes in the 115th Congress (2017-18).
It is unusual for two members of different parties to agree on so many votes. Out of 1146 votes in the 115th Congress, they agreed on 585 votes, including 146 major votes.
Sept. 27, 2018 — Family Savings Act of 2018
May 9, 2018 — Standard Merger and Acquisition Reviews Through Equal Rules Act
March 15, 2018 — Regulation At Improvement Act of 2017
March 7, 2018 — Blocking Regulatory Interference from Closing Kilns Act
Feb. 14, 2018 — Protecting Consumers’ Access to Credit Act of 2017
Jan. 19, 2018 — Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act
Dec. 6, 2017 — Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017
Nov. 7, 2017 — Save Local Business Act
Oct. 25, 2017 — Sunshine for Regulations and Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act
Oct. 24, 2017 — Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act
Oct. 3, 2017 — Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act
Sept. 26, 2017 — Increasing Opportunity and Success for Children and Parents through Evidence-Based Home Visiting Act
July 12, 2017 — Gaining Responsibility on Water Act
June 29, 2017 — No Sanctuary for Criminals Act
March 30, 2017 — EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2017
March 29, 2017 — Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act
March 22, 2017 — Small Business Health Fairness Act
March 10, 2017 — Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act
March 1, 2017 — OIRA Insight, Reform, and Accountability Act
Feb. 16, 2017 — Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the final rule submitted by Secretary of Health and Human Services relating to compliance with title X requirements by project recipients in selecting subrecipients
Feb. 15, 2017 — Disapproving the rule submitted by the Department of Labor relating to drug testing of unemployment compensation applicants
Feb. 3, 2017 — Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the final rule of the Bureau of Land Management relating to “Waste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation”
Jan. 24, 2017 — To prohibit taxpayer funded abortions
Jan. 11, 2017 — Regulatory Accountability Act of 2017
Jan. 5, 2017 — Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2017
Jan. 4, 2017 — Midnight Rules Relief Act of 2017
Dec. 12, 2018 — Providing for consideration of the conference report to accompany H.R. 2, the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018, and for other purposes
Sept. 12, 2018 — To authorize early repayment of obligations to the Bureau of Reclamation within the Northport Irrigation District in the State of Nebraska
Sept. 6, 2018 — Pallone of New Jersey Part B Amendment No. 1
Table the Appeal of the Ruling of the Chair
May 15, 2018 — To amend the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act of 2000 to provide additional resources to State and local prosecutors, and for other purposes
May 8, 2018 — Providing for consideration of H.R. 5645, the Standard Merger and Acquisition Reviews Through Equal Rules Act of 2018; H.R. 2152, the Citizens’ Right to Know Act; and S.J.Res. 57, providing for congressional disapproval of the rule relating to Indirect Auto Lending and Compliance with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act
April 12, 2018 — Proposing a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution of the United States
On Motion to Fix the Convening Time
On Ordering a Call of the House
Jan. 18, 2018 — Providing for consideration of H.R. 4712, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act; providing for proceedings during the period from January 22, 2018, through January 26, 2018
Dec. 7, 2017 — Providing for consideration of H.R. 477, Small Business Mergers, Acquisitions Sales, and Brokerage Simplification Act of 2017; providing for consideration of H.R. 3971, Community Institution Mortgage Relief Act of 2017; and providing for consideration of H.J. Res. 123, Making further continuing appropriations, FY 2018
Dec. 6, 2017 — Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 38) to amend title 18, United States Code, to provide a means by which nonresidents of a State whose residents may carry concealed firearms may also do so in the State
Nov. 30, 2017 — Grijalva of Arizona Amendment
Nov. 8, 2017 — Rush of Illinois Amendment No. 4
Nov. 7, 2017 — Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 3043) Hydropower Policy Modernization Act and providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 3441) Save Local Business Act
Nov. 1, 2017 — Pearce of New Mexico Amendment No. 7
Nov. 1, 2017 — Khanna of California Amendment No. 2
Oct. 24, 2017 — Cicilline of Rhode Island Part B Amendment No. 5
Oct. 24, 2017 — Jackson Lee of Texas Part B Amendment No. 4
Oct. 24, 2017 — Johnson of Georgia Part B Amendment No. 3
Sept. 14, 2017 — Palmer of Alabama Amendment No. 192
Sept. 13, 2017 — Flores of Texas Amendment No. 124
Sept. 13, 2017 — Mullin of Oklahoma Amendment No. 74
Sept. 7, 2017 — Lowenthal of California Amendment No. 39
Sept. 7, 2017 — Jayapal of Washington Part B Amendment No. 84
July 26, 2017 — Pingree of Maine Amendment No. 54
July 26, 2017 — Norcross of New Jersey Amendment No. 39
July 26, 2017 — Castor of Florida Amendment No. 38
July 20, 2017 — Tsongas of Massachusetts Part C Amendment No. 1
July 19, 2017 — Beyer of Virginia Part A Amendment No. 3
July 18, 2017 — McNerney of California Amendment No. 5
July 18, 2017 — Polis of Colorado Amendment No. 4
July 18, 2017 — Tonko of New York Amendment No. 2
July 18, 2017 — Castor of Florida Amendment No. 1
June 22, 2017 — Lowenthal of California Part B Amendment No. 2
Table Appeal of the Ruling of the Chair
June 7, 2017 — Providing for consideration of H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017, and for other purposes
May 25, 2017 — Jackson Lee of Texas Part B Amendment No. 1
May 24, 2017 — Huffman of California Amendment No. 2
March 2, 2017 — Jackson Lee of Texas Part A Amendment No. 3
March 1, 2017 — Connolly of Virginia Part B Amendment No. 6
March 1, 2017 — Raskin of Maryland Amendment No. 10
Jan. 31, 2017 — Providing for consideration of H.J. Res. 38, disapproving the rule submitted by the Department of the Interior known as the Stream Protection Rule
Jan. 24, 2017 — Providing for consideration of the bill (H.R. 7) to prohibit taxpayer funded abortions
Jan. 11, 2017 — Grijalva of Arizona Part A Amendment No. 14
Jan. 11, 2017 — Tonko of New York Part A Amendment No. 13
Jan. 11, 2017 — Scott of Virginia Part A Amendment No. 12
Jan. 11, 2017 — Ruiz of California Part A Amendment No. 11
Jan. 11, 2017 — Johnson of Georgia Part A Amendment No. 10
Jan. 11, 2017 — Castor of Florida Part A Amendment No. 8
Jan. 11, 2017 — Goodlatte of Virginia Part A Amendment No. 1
Jan. 5, 2017 — Cicilline of Rhode Island Amendment No. 5
Jan. 5, 2017 — Grijalva of Arizona Amendment No. 3
Jan. 5, 2017 — Messer of Indiana Amendment No. 2
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News and views >
Nick Butter hits 50 marathons
"Cars were bumping me out of the way and people trying to mug me"
Five months after beginning his global fundraising challenge of running a marathon in all 196 countries, Nick Butter has just clocked up his 50th in Togo. We spoke to him after his 49th in Ghana about the challenges of washing his clothes, avoiding stray dogs and staying alive in Haiti.
In - Real life stories Our supporters Running
After 149 days, 102 flights and four pairs of trainers, how do you feel it’s going so far?
More or less as expected. I do feel like I need to push pause every now and then because I'm tired. I finish a run at 11 or 12 o'clock at night and start again at 5 or 6 in the morning, so I don't even have time to dry or wash my clothes. I'm literally filthy the whole time!
What’s been the best part of it all?
It’s people that have really made the trip. In Panama, I was visiting a school and turned the corner to be surprised by thousands of kids. I also visited a cancer centre there, which was really emotional. Then in Ghana, I ran with a Paralympian called Alan. He’s got one leg yet properly ran four miles beside me on crutches. There are loads of amazing people like that I could mention.
What’s been the hardest part?
I got a tooth gum infection, which wasn’t the kind of running injury I was expecting. It caused me a lot of pain and ultimately resulted in me going home to a dentist. Then there was a dog bite in Tunisia. I’ve had dogs chase me a few times, especially in South America, but this one jumped up and took a chunk out of my thigh. It didn’t hurt that much but bled a lot. Right now I’m worried that I could have malaria. I’m seeing the doctor tomorrow.
Do you keep in touch with our ambassador, Kevin Webber, your inspiration for this adventure?
We message pretty regularly. Kev is so good to find the time. I feel so bad because he's got so much stuff going on and ultimately a shortened life and I think: ‘what are you doing, Kev? Don't talk to me’. The attitude he has is just unwavering. He’s human but you never see the fear that he must be feeling. He's a brilliant man and I'm really hopeful that he’ll be able to join me for a few marathons, even if it's just in Europe. I've not run with him since the first time we met on the Marathon de Sables.
You came back to London to run the marathon in April with our other Prostate Cancer UK runners. Did you enjoy it?
I love the London Marathon. It's home and you get thousands of people cheering you on, which makes it special. I didn't feel like I was really pushing it that much yet I still did an okay time, 3hr40m – my fastest so far. It was good to see Kev and my family, too. A little bit of an interview on Tower Bridge, which is good. That gave us some good exposure as well.
You’re about to run your 50th marathon in Togo. What’s been your favourite marathon so far?
I can't give one. London, of course, and running all day past an erupting volcano in Guatemala was pretty cool [see bottom photo]. There were thousands of people out in support in El Salvador and they handmade me a trophy of glass in the shape of their national bird. Even their elite athletes came out to join us [pictured below]. So that was special, too.
And which one’s been the toughest?
Haiti, because I hadn’t yet learnt not to run in the heat of the day. It was 43 degrees, really busy and really dangerous. Cars were bumping me out of the way and I had people coming up trying to mug me. It was just mentally gruelling. I was only on marathon number five and I was thinking, what am I doing if it’s going to be like this the whole time? Then I learnt my lesson and started running at 5 or 6 in the morning.
You’ve run in temperatures as low as -25 degrees in Toronto and as high as 43 in Haiti. Which is worse?
Heat. Because in the cold you can wrap up warm and just grin and bear it. But there's no escaping the heat. You feel like you want to take all your clothes off. It’s the humidity as well that makes you instantly drip with sweat and need to take in more water. Temperature-wise, I think it's going to get worse in West Africa – especially with the rainy season just starting.
Have you spoken to anyone about prostate cancer along the way?
Yes. I’ve talked to six people about getting checked and they’ve told me afterwards they have. Five said they were in the clear and one said they did find prostate cancer but it was in the early stages. I’ve realised this trip is not just about raising money and overall awareness of prostate cancer, but also the many moments of individual contact too. Speaking to random taxi drivers in broken English then getting a WhatsApp message later saying I’ve been checked and I'm okay – that brings a smile.
Check out Nick's progress and donate to him via his website.
Nick Butter begins global marathon challenge inspired by heroics of our charity ambassador
Attempting to set a world record for running a marathon in all 196 countries, Nick Butter starts his 550-day adventure this weekend. We talk to him and Kevin Webber, who inspired him to take on the challenge and raise £250k for Prostate Cancer UK.
"I realised saving my leg for another day that may not happen was both selfish and hypocritical"
Having helped raise more than £200k for us since he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2014, our incredible ambassador Kevin Webber has been chosen as the Charity Champion for this year's #GivingTuesday initiative. In this exclusive blog he describes his latest ultramarathon in the wilds of Iceland, and why helping a friend finish his own marathon challenge afterwards was worth a very painful leg.
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The University of Virginia
A Era de Jefferson
Universidade da Virgínia
This course provides an overview of Thomas Jefferson's work and perspectives presented by the University of Virginia in partnership with Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Together, UVA and Monticello are recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Great Course! Not being from here, this course helped me understand some fundamental differences between Canadian and American history; and the obvious differences in our cultures today.
Really insightful course giving a really amazing insight to the past political climate of the US, but also really shedding light on the current climate as well.
Founding the University of Virginia in 1819 was the most obvious example of Jefferson’s interest in education, but it was by no means the first time he considered the subject. Indeed, education was one of Jefferson’s constant preoccupations. In this session, we’ll discuss Jefferson’s ideas about education as they developed over the course of his life, from the ambitious plan for a state-supported system of schools outlined in his “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” to his conclusion in the early nineteenth century that the other institutions of higher learning that existed in the United States just weren’t suited to forming the leaders of a free republic. Throughout the discussion, we’ll try to understand why Jefferson was so focused on education by asking what he believed was at stake if Americans failed in their duty to provide proper instruction for future generations.
A Civic Education Outside the Schoolhouse7:56
The University of Virginia13:43
Professor Peter S. Onuf
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, Emeritus
Selecionar um idiomaChinês (simplificado)CroataEspanholInglês
We were talking about how Jefferson, at some
level, believes that people are getting the mass of
people are getting educated by other means, but he
doesn't give up on the idea of higher education.
He doesn't give up on other education either, but in terms
of his support for his interest in higher education, that persists, obviously.
We're sitting here today. But, the idea
of college, university, that tip of the pyramid, how does that,
how does that play out throughout the rest of Jefferson's life?
>> It's an interesting question, Jim.
In some ways we begin with Jefferson obsessed with the virtue of the people,
and the need for civic education, and that's from the ground up.
As he proceeds through his career, he is more and
more concerned with failures of statesmanship.
>> And that is the people at the top,
are, well, they're closet aristocrats.
Or in the case of Alexander Hamilton, it's not even closet, he's out of the closet.
And so, how, how can we prepare
a generation of, the new generation of statesmen?
It's a, it's now where our focus has shifted up the pyramid to the very top.
And what's the concern in Virginia? Well, we can put it in
pretty simple concrete terms.
Virginia's brightest, or brightest or wealthiest, we
should say, with some combination of the two.
It's [CROSSTALK].
>> Sometimes. >> Sometimes.
Sometimes those rich people are not totally dumb.
But they're going to go to university or to college outside of Virginia.
I mean, Jefferson himself got a kind of education despite William Emory.
But he's never going to recommend
anybody go there. >> Why Why?
>> Well it's, it's.
>> What's wrong with William and Mary?
>> Well, it's part of the old regime, I think is the simple way to put it.
It's old Virginia, and it was designed to prepare,
well, I don't know what it was designed to prepare.
It was largely, the professors were clergyman.
He was lucky to get William Small.
>> The Scot.
>> Great scotish, enlightened, he was only there shortly,
but providentially for Jefferson, made a big impact for him.
>> Big impact.
>> He didn't credit, and he credited George With, his
great legal mentor and patriot, but he didn't credit the institution.
For him, William and Mary was a joke.
The Ren building was a pile of bricks, it's and he.
>> With those brick kilns.
>> Did make good efforts. Yeah, that's something like a brick kiln.
He made efforts to reform William and Mary.
He had ambitious
designs for the curricular reform.
And it's not as if William and Mary hadn't changed.
But the big problem for Jefferson, as time went on is, well just as the capital of
Virginia moved west to Richmond, more central to
the population, to the white population of the state.
So Jefferson, thinking very much in these terms of centrality, at least
that was the language he used, believed that the
institution, the college, to serve Virginians should be centrally located.
You can't make it equally, available to all people in all places.
There's a basic problem here.
>> But there is a Republican logic that suggests that, accessibility is important.
This is a period, and it wasn't just Virginia, but Pennsylvania and
many other states are moving their capitols,
and often, there's, a question about where, the
university is going to be as well, if there's going to be a state university.
This is moving on to a later time because of course, there aren't many
at first, and most of the colleges
are, like William and Mary, were, colonial colleges.
Some are established during the Revolutionary period,
like, in Sydney, or Virginia, and so forth.
But there are two problems with colleges.
One is they come out of the Colonial old regime.
Two, is they're primarily oriented towards the education of clergy.
[CROSSTALK] >> They're religious.
>> Right.
>> And you might disestablish the church in Virginia.
William and Mary might become therefore a secular institution.
But it has a sort of a stink
of incense about it.
For Jefferson well there's, there's still this aura of, of religiousity.
And that, that's something that is
remarkable about the university, and that is,
of course, it is not going to be the site for religious education.
He told us before, younger kids should not be
implicated, indoctrinated in religious stuff before they're ready for it.
And he doesn't
want people here at the university to be, well,
to be captured by say, for an example, the Presbyterians.
>> You're thinking here of Princeton, or.
>> Yeah, yeah.
[CROSSTALK] That's what I was getting at, when you leave Virginia.
>> That's even worse in some ways.
>> And you can't go to William and Mary which is to go backward in time, in a way.
When you leave Virginia, you're going north
to the college of New Jersey, that's modern
day Princeton. It's even unthinkable to go to Harvard.
>> James Madison's alma mater.
>> Oh, or Yale.
These are places that still, have a religious orientation.
And by the time of the foundation of
the university, when Jefferson's trying to drum up
that crucial support, there is an issue that
galvanizes, the entire country and that he's particularly
attuned to, and that is the Missouri controversy.
>> Over the future of Missouri and its admission to
the Union as a slave state, which for Jefferson is
absolutely imperative because you can't tell the people what they
should do what they should do about their own constitution.
They want to have slaves.
Of course in the long run slavery will disappear mm, we'll do something about it.
But you can't deprive the people of their liberties,
on the delusion that you are intervening on behalf of the poor slaves because
after all, what's really important is the
future, the civic vitality of the white republic.
Okay, so people would go north to college,
as he writes to a correspondent at this time.
And they would, and I'm now
quoting, imbibe anti-Missouri principles at these places.
So we have this oh
very modern sounding issue of political correctness.
>> And and then I think that, it's easy then to dismiss
Jefferson and say, oh god it's all part of this partisan political project.
The, the states rights or the pro-slavery guy, this is pretty
sick end to his life, and it looks that way to us.
Particularly that I'm a Yankee, and you come from the
western reserve of Ohio, so you're sort of a Yankee yourself.
it's, it's it's not an attractive picture.
>> Right, but what, what does he think is at stake here?
>> Oh yeah, no, well listen, it's important because for him, take the
whole picture, that civic picture I've been talking about, the health of the
commonwealth and think about the law professor and his curricular suggestions.
I mean, he give, gives us a reading list,
which is really revealing of, of the things that
must be taught.
And this law professor is the one professor who's gotta be an American.
And he's gotta be a card carrying Republican.
Because we can't have some kind of Federalist
anglophile here, corrupting the commonwealth at its very core.
And what's important is we have these texts, you
might even say they're the sacred texts of Republicanism.
They include the
Federalist Papers, but of course the first and foremost, in addition to some of the
classics of the Wig Republican tradition, Algernon Sidney
and so forth, is the Declaration of Independence.
So in a way, the regime, the Republic, its health
depends on fidelity to first principles and returning to them.
And at the highest level of education, we must continue to remind and
reinvigorate our students, our future statesmen, in the
principles that are going to sustain the regime.
It's a measure of Jefferson's desperation at this time.
He's afraid the Union's going to fall apart over the slavery issue.
That if it falls apart, they'll be a loss of American independence,
and that we'll have a turn toward, a return to monarchy, and well,
aristocracy.
So this obsession with what's happening in national politics, I said in a
way, concern with national politics is an
educational experience for, oh with ordinary Americans.
Well obsession with how you could screw it up at the highest levels
makes Jefferson increasingly obsessed with, with
the dangers of failed statesmanship, and that's
the big concern here.
And so what us, to us, looks like, nakedly
self interested promotion of Virginia's interest, and it is.
I'm not going to argue against that.
But for Jefferson, this is a, we don't just have one canary
in a mine shaft, there's a whole, what do they come in flocks?
>> I don't know.
Be a lot of canaries, and they are telling him, we got a problem here.
>> Yeah. >> And we have to have
this capstone of of that educational system.
But that's, Jefferson, Jefferson had, of course, great
hopes for Virginia and it wasn't that it would
be the center of a slave holding Republic, it
was that it would be a font of enlightenment.
He even thinks, worried as he might be about Virginia boys
going north, this would attract Virginia boys, this would attract northern kids,
would come to Virginia.
It could be the center of the enlightened world.
I mean, of course, we now think in Charlottesville
that it is the center of the enlightened world,
but it's really hard to make that argument for
about, a century and a half of the institution's history.
>> Right. >> So we have to keep this in mind.
There is a certain pathos to Jefferson's vision that is
in so many ways, it failed and it was not implemented.
Yet it would be a mistake to obsess about those failures,
because in the broader sense that his idea of civic education,
his idea that ultimately it's not the existence of the university
and little red schoolhouses, it's an
enlightened and virtuous public that matters.
It's the very possibility for moral improvement,
and in the Republic that is made possible by the education of the people.
Well, we've gotten there by other means,
we're maybe not as enlightened as he'd like
us to be, and he certainly is not as enlightened as we'd like him to be.
But this centrality of education to the history
of the United States and to to our sense
of what the United States can be and
could be, that education is not merely vocational.
It's not preparing us to make a lot of money,
even though that's the way we pitch college these days.
It's to create good citizens on the primary level,
and it's to create good leaders on the university level.
Well, we can't call it anywhere near perfection.
It doesn't even resemble it in
many ways.
But the spirit, I think, is there, at least when we think about what
we could be doing in our schools and for our children and for the future.
>> And we, we've talked a lot about Jefferson's,
Jefferson's central ideas, the ideas of generations, concern for generations.
And the UVA, in some ways, it's one of
the three accomplishments Jefferson decided to put on his tombstone.
Not the president,
but founder of University of Virginia.
So, can we see this as kind of, he's doing this in his late retirement years?
That has to play into this idea of, of generations and his concern for it right?
>> Oh, there's no question about it. And this would be his legacy.
And what the generation, the living generation, should
do, as we know, is to be good stewards
of the common estate, the commonwealth, to pass it on to the next generation.
And they should invest in the next generation, it's not
a question simply of keeping the estate entire though that's important.
We don't want to waste, we don't want to go deeply into
debt, but we want to prepare young people to take their place.
We're not going to achieve perfection, and he makes this quite clear.
But it's not infinite
improvement as he puts in the Rockfish Gap report, it's indefinite.
Interesting distinction.
It's open ended, there's an ellipsis at the end of
this, which means we're not going to get to the millennium itself.
But for him, it's absolutely central to believe that knowledge does accumulate.
Every succeeding generation has the benefit
of the wisdom of preceding generations.
Building on that, and building within the
institutions, within the Republican governments that have
been bequeathed to us by the fathers,
what a marvelous opportunity for well, indefinite improvement.
>> Thanks Peter.
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Ratt Lose Drummer Jimmy DeGrasso
Scott Dudelson, Getty Images
Ratt drummer Jimmy DeGrasso confirmed he had left the band ahead of a tour they previously described as exhibiting a “new breed” lineup.
With guitarists Warren DeMartini and Carlos Cavazo also apparently out, it remains to be seen who will take the stage alongside singer Stephen Pearcy and bassist Juan Croucier on July 7 in Mulvane, Kan.
SiriusXM host Eddie Trunk tweeted about the development. “[DeGrasso] is no longer a part of Ratt and opted to move on," he wrote. "Stephen & Juan remain the sole original members. The new guitar players & drummer TBA but likely not in advance of first show.”
The band has been attempting to reboot its career since apparently winning a battle over naming rights against former drummer Bobby Blotzer in 2017 – though Blotzer denied the dispute was over. Earlier this year, he described Pearcy’s lineup as “Camp Chaos” but said a reunion wasn’t impossible, arguing “if we were together and had our shit tight within the band, the sky's the limit, is the way I always saw it.”
Announcing the 2018 relaunch, Pearcy said in a statement that “we have not had an all-original member line up since 1991 and sadly with the passing of Robbin Crosby, that chapter is over. However, if you still want to see the original band, there are many videos on YouTube and other places to enjoy. That was a fucking great band, but I guarantee that the new breed of Ratt that we put onstage every night will be in your face, energized and fully engaged. Simply put, the band our fans deserve."
Last month, George Lynch revealed he’d been invited to join the band, but the parties “just couldn’t come to an agreement.” The tour consists of 12 dates from July 7 to Oct. 25.
Next: Alexi Lalas' Top 10 Ratt Songs
Source: Ratt Lose Drummer Jimmy DeGrasso
Filed Under: Ratt
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A Trailblazing Designer Debuts New Highly Detailed Jewelry
Colorful, tropical flora and fauna feature prominently in Sevan Bıçakçı’s new collection.
By Carolyn Meers on December 11, 2018
At the age of 12, Sevan Bıçakçı began an apprenticeship with a goldsmith in Istanbul. By the age of 18, he was working as a jewelry artist in the city’s Grand Bazaar, where he earned a reputation as the local “problem solver”—no technique or setting was too difficult for him to take on. Today, Sevan Bıçakçı’s abilities are revered around the world and his jewelry has won numerous awards for innovative design—many of his pieces incorporate labor-intensive ancient crafts such as metal-based painting, engraving, calligraphy, reverse intaglio carving, and micromosaic settings.
A delicate scene inside a pendant in Bicakci’s latest collection.
Now, for the first time in his decades-long career, Bıçakçı is debuting a collection inspired by a location outside his home city. The new Colección Paraiso was inspired by locales in the Caribbean and consists of 50 one-of-a-kind pieces, many of which play with colorful parrots, tropical flowers, and scenes on the streets of Havana, Cuba. To truly appreciate Bıçakçı’s designs, one should look closely. Magnificent details in each of his pieces reveal themselves upon closer inspection. In this new collection, notice the precise petal striations on a blooming hibiscus or the vibrant colors on the cheeks of a green parrot—an effect that is the result of layers of color painted onto a reverse intaglio (a gemstone carved from the inside), a signature feat of Bıçakçı’s that creates enchanting depth.
A reverse intaglio carved citrine parrot ring made with a multicolored micromosaic ($26,650). Courtesy Sevan Bicakci
Some of the new collection’s standouts include a pair of cufflinks in 24-karat yellow and rose gold and sterling silver with parrots covered with colored diamonds, rubies, and sapphires ($15,500), and a reverse intaglio carved citrine parrot ring in 24-karat yellow gold and sterling silver, made with a multicolored micromosaic ($26,650).
Cufflinks with diamond, ruby, and sapphire parrots ($15,500). Courtesy Sevan Bicakci
Each of his new pieces can take between three months and a year to complete, with a single design possibly passing through the hands of as many as eight artisans (including Sevan) who assist with carving, painting, stone-setting, and molding.
This collection follows the launch of Bıçakçı’s Timepiece Collection and the unveiling of his first-ever U.S. boutique in Miami last spring.
Sevan Biçakçi
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Will Disney's 'Lone Ranger' Ride On Without Gore Verbinski?
by Sandy Schaefer
It's been a crazy couple of weeks for Disney's Lone Ranger movie. More than a few jaws dropped when news leaked out about the film's $250 million estimated cost - and word that it was originally going to feature werewolves. That's assuming you weren't still hung up on the prospect of Johnny Depp playing American Indian Tonto, that is.
Director Gore Verbinski is still working to salvage the situation by cutting down the bloated budget. However, there's some question now as to whether or not Disney might consider him part of the problem.
Deadline caught up with Disney executive Rich Ross at D23 over the weekend, where he told the site that "no one wants to work more with [producer Jerry Bruckheimer] and Johnny [Depp] more than me," with respect to Lone Ranger. Does his omission of Verbinski's name mean anything?
That's the question being asked right now - and, at first, this sounds like a bunch of fuss over nothing. Verbinski has a tried-and-true history with the Mouse House, having directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies; plus, it's not as though he'd get a salary for Lone Ranger big enough to make money the reason for the delay in production (again, see the $200 million + budget).
However, when you look closer at the situation, the idea of Verbinski being booted off Lone Ranger does sound more likely. Disney reportedly wants the budget cut down to $215 million, which could in part be done by hiring a cheaper director than Verbinski. Plus, as Deadline also points out, it wouldn't be the first time the company kicked an A-list director off an expensive western project in order to lower costs (see: Ron Howard and The Alamo, back in 2002).
[caption id="attachment_89210" align="aligncenter" width="539" caption="Will Verbinski not re-team with Bruckheimer and Depp for 'Lone Ranger'?"][/caption]
One thing that ought to be clarified: If Verbinski were to leave Lone Ranger, it's unlikely the film would completely drop the "unconventional interpretation" he's been championing up to now - assuming that Disney doesn't just scrap the project in its current state and start over. Either way, the lackluster performance of this summer's Cowboys & Aliens has left many an industry figure wary of tackling any sort of western-flavored project, especially an old-fashioned one.
You could cite True Grit as a great example of a traditional western that struck a nice balance between gritty action and humorous elements, and still managed to become a hit at the box office. Plus, the former cost less than a fifth of the proposed Lone Ranger budget and was still plenty fun in its own right. So who's to say there's not an audience willing to pay top dollar to watch a decent Old West adventure on the big screen?
Verbinski and Depp have worked together four times in the past, so there's also the concern that the latter will walk away from Lone Ranger if Verbinski is either kicked off or chooses to move on. In short: this whole situation is just (for lack of a better description) messed up.
There is no doubt that Disney will eventually make a Lone Ranger movie, since the title character is an American icon whose name is recognizable even to young people who have never been exposed to the masked hero in any form (radio drama, TV show, comic book, spinoff movie) before. However, the studio could ultimately decide to start over on the project and invest its $200 million in a more surefire Depp-starring hit like, say, Pirates of the Caribbean 5. We shall see.
In the meantime, we'll keep you posted on the status of Lone Ranger.
Tags: the lone ranger
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You Can Own A Futurama "Shut Up And Take My Money!" Credit Card
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Peggy Mason, President
Peggy Mason’s career highlights diplomatic and specialist expertise in the field of international peace and security, with a particular emphasis on the United Nations, where she served as Canada’s Ambassador for Disarmament from 1989 to 1995.
Since 1996 Ms. Mason has been involved in many aspects of UN peacekeeping training, including the development of ground breaking UN principles on the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former fighters, the reform of UN arms embargoes and the dramatic evolution of UN peacekeeping in the 21st century. Until 2014, she regularly brought the UN political/diplomatic perspective to a range of UN, NATO and EU training exercises to help prepare military commanders for complex multidisciplinary peace and crisis stabilization operations.
For 10 years Peggy Mason was a Senior Fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University, where she lectured, participated in training for Iraqi and Kuwaiti diplomats and chaired the Advisory Board of the Canadian Centre for Treaty Compliance (CCTC). She has long been active in a range of Canadian non-governmental organizations engaged in foreign policy, peacebuilding and global governance issues. A graduate and gold medallist of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Common Law, Peggy Mason was inducted into its Honour Society in September 2003.
Bruce Campbell is the former Executive Director (1994-2015) of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). He was awarded the 2015 Law Foundation of Ontario, Community Leadership in Justice Fellowship, and spent 2016 as Visiting Fellow, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. His latest book: The Lac-Mégantic Rail Disaster: Public Betrayal, Justice Denied, was published, October 2018, by James Lorimer & Co. He is currently Adjunct Professor, York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies.
Monia Mazigh
Dr. Monia Mazigh is a Canadian author, columnist and academic. born and raised in Tunisia. She speaks Arabic, French, and English fluently and holds a Ph.D. in finance from McGill University. Catapulted onto the world stage in 2002 in her ultimately successful effort to secure not only the release of her husband from a Syrian prison, but also reparations for his wrongful treatment, she has continued to champion social justice issues and the fundamental importance of effective oversight of Canada’s intelligence agencies.
Kathleen Ruff
Kathleen Ruff is a former director of the Court Challenges Program and a former director of the BC Human Rights Commission. She was the founding editor and publisher of the Canadian Human Rights Reporter and host of the CBC TV program Ombudsman. She is presently Coordinator of the Rotterdam Convention Alliance, which represents environmental and health organizations around the world that are working to defend and promote the Rotterdam Convention. She is founder of RightOnCanada.ca and Senior Advisor on Human Rights to the Rideau Institute.
Steven Staples, Vice-President
Founder of the Rideau Institute and a Board Member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Peace Bureau, the world’s oldest and largest peace network, Steven Staples is an accomplished policy and research strategist, published author, and award-winning peace and social justice advocate with over 25 years of experience in community organizations and the labour movement. He is the owner of Public Response, a digital agency that services non-profit organizations and trade unions in the fields of online engagement and government relations.
Steven Shrybman, Sack Goldblatt Mitchell LLP
Steven Shrybman’s practice focuses on international trade and public interest litigation, including issues concerning the environment, health care, human and labour rights, the protection of public services, natural resources policy, and intellectual property rights. Steven frequently speaks, and has written extensively, on the impact of international trade law on diverse areas of Canadian policy and law. He has also been involved in drafting and promoting conventions on cultural diversity and access to water as a human right.
Steven obtained his law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School. After articling with SGM, and organizing SGM’s articling students, he was called to the Bar in 1981.
Nipa Banerjee, PhD
Visiting Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, School of International Development and Global Studies
Peter Coombes
Co-founder of Ceasefire.ca and Job Evaluation Representative for CUPE
Political commentator and author
Walter Dorn
Professor of Defence Studies, Royal Military College of Canada
Peter Langille, PhD
Director, Global Common Security
Dominic Leger
Public relations professional and social media expert, researcher for Chaire Raoul-Dandurand in Strategic and Diplomatic studies (UQAM)
Anil Naidoo
International water policy analyst and Project Organizer of the Blue Planet Project
Bill Robinson
Former Program Associate, Project Ploughshares
Douglas Roche
Author, former Ambassador for Disarmament, parliamentarian and senator (retired)
Erika Simpson
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Western Ontario
Alice Slater
Director, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, N.Y.
Special Advisors
Jeremy Wildeman, PhD
Visiting Fellow at the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath (UK) and a Member of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa (Canada).
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Tag: Pollution in Rio
Olympic Preparations in Rio ‘On Track’ According to IOC
By Lisa Flueckiger, Contributing ReporterRIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has visited Rio this week in order to assess the progress of the preparations for the 2016 Olympic Games that at one time had been...
Petrobras Accused of Dumping Waste: Daily
Contributing Reporter - September 11, 2012
By Julia Averbuck, Contributing ReporterRIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Federal Police has opened an official in inquiry in the Division of Environmental Crimes in Rio in which it accuses national oil company Petrobras of dumping highly-toxic residues in...
Leblon Beach Water Pollution Challenges
Contributing Reporter - April 24, 2012
By Ana Gabriela Ribeiro, Contributing ReporterRIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - The neighborhood of Leblon is perhaps the most exclusive and expensive in the city, yet bordered on two sides by canals draining into the sea, polluted water is often...
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Bank robbers have sex during hold-up!
A modern day Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank and then had sex publicly, right in the middle of the bank, while the stunned customers and tellers watched with their feet tied and their hands up!
Christo Balenze and Stellina Macrosta, two sexy bank robbers who are still at large, flabbergasted the morning crowd at Banco Federali, in Fruizzi, Sicili, when they began to madly kiss each other just after the terrified tellers had handed over two hundred thousand lira at gunpoint, the equivalent of 20,000 dollars.
Bonnie and Cliyde
“They were hot to trot,” says Calvini Rotonzo, the branch manager. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, except in the movies.
“They were mean as snakes until they got the money. They put their guns to our heads and tied all of our feet. Then they were all over each other. It almost got embarrassing to watch.
“I would have offered them my office, or the vault, except they were armed robbers. I didn’t want to say anything that would cause them to get angry and hurt somebody.
“They told us to reach for the sky, and that anybody who moved would be shot. We didn’t want to test them. They’ve killed people before. We were as still as stone, and they were moving all over the place.”
Throughout the entire ordeal, both of them kept guns in their hands and one eye on the onlookers, who they had warned would be shot for making even the slightest move.
“It was incredible,” says Alfredo Milino, a regular customer at the bank. “We were all frozen, fearing our lives and wanting these crooks to be caught, but we couldn’t do anything because they are so dangerous.
“At the same time, we were further humiliated by watching them rip off each other’s clothes and make passionate love in the middle of the bank. It was an experience I’ll never forget.
Afterwards, Christo winked at all the women tellers. And Stellina made eyes at the men in the bank.
“It was shocking,” says Milino. “I just thank God no one was hurt.”
The hot-blooded couple is now in hiding.
Investigators, who say they are hot on their trail, have watched the film of the robbery over and over. They expect the couple will lay low for a few weeks after this one.
“Their days are numbered,” says police detective Marco Rossini. “We’ve got some clues that are getting us very close to them. They’ve gone too far this time. In the meantime, we’ve got a whale of a video to watch.”
One Reply to “Bank robbers have sex during hold-up!”
staiano says:
Isn’t Italy using Euros and not Liras now?
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Mani Madhava Chakiar
I present to you, Sir, Sri Mani Madhava Chakiar. Sri Chakiar belongs to the hereditary community of chakiars of Kerala who for centuries have been the custodians of Chakiar Koothu, the theatre form known as Koodiattam. Born in 1899 Sri Chakiar studied Sanskrit from an early age. At the same time he began training in Koodiattam under his uncles, Neelakanthan Chakiar, Parameswara Chakiar, and Narayana Chakiar. He made his debut at the age of 14. He is the author of a book on Koodiattam which was given an award by the State Sahitya Akademi. Sri Mani Madhava Chakiar is today one of the most eminent teachers in the field and has numerous disciples to his credit. He was the first to take Koodiattam outside the precincts of the temples of Kerala. Sri Mani Madhava Cbakiar has received numerours awards from distinguished institutions. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 1964. For his eminence in the field of traditional theatre and his contribution to its enrichment Sri Mani Madhava Chakiar has been elected Fellow of the Akademi.
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← Before Noda Goes to Moscow, Mori
The TPP into the DPJ Manifesto? →
The DPJ’s Third TPP Attempt? (Edited)
President Putin was unable (日) to juggle his schedule and his aides had become concerned about his “condition.” A December meeting between Putin and Noda was suddenly put off until January at the earliest. Noda was apparently also concerned about how the Russia meeting was going to affect plans to deal with the domestic political situation.
Probably. It is also likely a sign that negotiations are not progressing as well as had been hoped.
Either way, an important date was cleared from Noda’s December schedule, begging some questions regarding his strategy around calling an election.
Wasting no time, it was also revealed that Noda was now considering calling an election after all. Of course this is after having cowed the opposition into doing what they were always going to do anyway – agree to pass the budget financing bills – and got the bleating about the need to call an election stopped for one day (日). It seems that Noda has decided that the time is right to consider (after caving (日) in on the bill that would superficially fix the lower house vote disparity) dissolving the lower house in late November/December (election then likely to actually take place in January).
There has been talk in the last week of the DPJ actually already engaging in preparation/constructing an “environment” friendly for calling an election. The DPJ is going around the country over the next week to talk (日) to the public about what they have actually achieved in the last three years. Articles appeared in newspapers calling for “fresh ideas” as an implicit form of apology for the DPJ not having lived up to the manifesto and reform expectations. The party has identified that it needs to run in the election as the centrist party option and sole remaining bulwark against the “conservative” forces of Abe’s LDP, Ishihara and Hashimoto. And Noda has now dangled (日) in front of the media the idea that the nation will officially enter TPP negotiations, seemingly more plausible now that Obama has been reelected (meaning he can discuss sensitive issues regarding Japan and the TPP without worrying about the impact on key battleground states like Ohio, Michigan, etc).
The strategy, according to media reports (日), is for Noda to commit Japan to enter the TPP, and then soon after that call an election.
Let’s be sure of a couple of things.
First, Japan announcing that it will enter negotiations may not result in much progress actually being made. Whether Obama can realistically hold back US auto industry demands for “prior concessions,” which makes it close to impossible for Japan to enter the TPP, is less than clear and will require leadership/bravery on his part. In fact one source (日) suggests that the US has no intention on going back on the requirement for “prior concessions” due to the importance the Obama administration has placed on saving the auto industry in his policies and then in his campaign rhetoric against Romney. Japan will also still need to get the agreement of all of the other nations involved before actually entering negotiations. Also, now with Canada involved, which has its own protectionist interests in the agricultural sector, gaining this permission to enter negotiations is going to get somewhat harder. Obama will also have to think carefully about how discussions about Japan joining the TPP will affect any attempt to gain “fast-track” authorization for the TPP negotiations from Congress, which is a subject than cannot be put off for too long – although the slow progress, and apparently deadlocked negotiations, may provide some breathing room in terms of urgency.
Second, it may ultimately not save Noda. The LDP will likely still gain the highest number of seats in the next election. But such a strategy could have an interesting impact upon the way an election, and its immediate aftermath, unfolds, that could benefit some in the DPJ.
First, depending on the order of events, it may well enhance Noda’s ability to construct a truly “centrist” party in terms of both narrative and personnel management. Either the remaining anti-TPP advocates (日) in the DPJ will have to leave before an election will be held, or vote along with the LDP on a no-confidence motion regarding the TPP (if announced before the end of the current Diet session on November 30), which will result in the same outcome. One less problem (日) for Noda, and he can reward those reformist, pro-TPP loyalists, with a more likely chance of being reelected. It could even be a “less is more” outcome as a DPJ unencumbered by worrying about alienating certain interests may perversely be more electable.
If these anti-TPP DPJ members (along with – or initiated by – Ozawa’s separatists) specifically sponsor a no-confidence motion for the purposes of assailing Noda on the TPP, then the LDP will have to be careful to manage the atmospherics around this. The LDP will have to condemn Noda for making such an important, but “illegitimate” decision without consultation just before an election he had already promised to call “soon.” But the LDP will also have to articulate their own view on the TPP for electoral consumption. If Noda calls an election without even waiting for the no-confidence motion (or calls it after November 30), thereby turning the election into one about the TPP, which Abe himself is against, this to be sure will not gain the DPJ anything close to a majority, and will probably not save Noda…but it could still play well enough in public to give the DPJ a chance to gain more than they would likely right at this moment, based on this new, more coherent and “centrist” branding. With the consumption tax and the entering of TPP negotiations under his belt Noda may well be able to pick up a few votes due to an emphasis on “decisive politics” ( or “politics that can decide” if you like), no matter how unpopular the policies may be (also if Noda holds strong and calls the election “when he wants to”, this will only enhance this narrative).
As noted it will force Abe et al to make a decisive statement themselves. If they also come out in favor of the TPP then they jeopardize their ability to retake the rural seats that the DPJ managed to divert from the LDP in 2009 and will almost certainly lose as they did in the 2010 House of Councillors election. Abe will also be mindful of under-performing in an election given that he was not even his party’s no.1 choice in the first place. I would put my money on an anti-TPP line prevailing especially given Abe’s preexisting proclivities. If they do come out against the TPP they will have to make a decision on just what they will do with Noda’s TPP “present” if they get back into government.
Perhaps along with the nuclear power issue, this may be the DPJ’s equivalent of the Futenma ‘leadership opportunity’ which the LDP lovingly left the DPJ to deal with along with their conflicted coalition partners in 2009. If Abe and the LDP still gain the largest number of seats in a TPP-centered election (with the LDP on one side and the DPJ on the other), and has to forge a working relationship with the likes of Hashimoto, Watanabe, and Ishihara (who all have various opinions on the TPP), then this could be a ticking time bomb that could destroy an Abe administration. Even if somehow Abe manages to avoid this and his minority government manages to preserve a likely anti-TPP line, then (as Noda has already committed Japan to negotiations) this will require Abe, one of the DC establishment’s favorite sons, to burn a few bridges. Either the Abe administration will have to drag its feet on the TPP with the long-term intention of failing, or it will have to decisively pull out of negotiations. Either option will likely greatly complicate Abe’s management of its relationship with the US, and will also likely hurt him greatly at home where there is an even split in regards to whether Japan should join TPP negotiations or not. Abe may just as quickly lose the Keidanren’s endorsement that was picked up after his election to LDP presidency. * And voters may quickly remember why they turfed out the LDP in the first place.
While the situation will have become more complex for “PM Abe” et al,** the DPJ will potentially for the first time become a coherent opposition, possibly behind a new, likely younger, leader. In theory. If this all transpires before next year’s House of Councillors election then the DPJ may well manage a mini-comeback.***
This could all be another trial balloon/political diversion for the LDP and Noda’s opponents, which could force themselves in compromising themselves. One hopes not – this is a strategy that is becoming more obvious and less effective over time and is actually now hurting the DPJ more than anyone else. To be sure the TPP “nuclear” option is also still only being “investigated” as an approach to resolving the current political deadlock – many in the DPJ still want to hang around and play a part in drafting the next budget.
But it could also be a good sign that Noda has realized there is very little to gain by loitering and being timid at this point in time, and is grasping the situation by the horns. It will also be very obvious to Noda that the “third pole parties” are precisely at this point unclear about how to deal with each other (日) and forge the common front essential for any reasonable electoral success and after election influence. Waiting too much longer may give them the time they need (and seemingly, want (日)) to iron out the differences.
We may know more about this on Wednesday, November 14, when Abe and Noda go head to head (日) in parliament. Noda, now having the LDP’s explicit support in passing the budget related bills, and implicit support on the other requirements (日) for a lower house dissolution he had previously articulated (the fixing of the constitutional vote disparity and the establishment of a national commission on social security), will struggle to avoid being more specific on the issue of when a lower house election will be held.
* The Keidanren has essentially said (日) that this month’s East Asia Summit in Cambodia may well be a “last chance” for a meaningful TPP announcement for Japan.
** Remembering the LDP will be almost more certainly anti-TPP after the election than it will be even before it irrespective of Abe’s own views.
*** There is always the (very hopeful) possibility that the LDP will be so compromised and mismanage the situation so badly that an effective double election will be held anyway in late 2013 and that the “new” DPJ and some collection of third pole forces will be in a position to align themselves on issues of reform and have control of the lower house.
Posted in Abe Shinzo, Domestic Politics 2012, TPP
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'Real Pizza of New York' iPhone App Is a Pizza Lover's Must-Have
You may know Jeff Orlick of Jeffrey Tastes from his 5-Boro Pizza Tour this past summer. Looks like that was all research work for his newly released Real Pizza of New York iPhone app.
I've kicked the tires on this thing a bit and just rated it 5 stars in the iTunes App store, where it sells for the bargain basement price of 99¢
I will just quote myself from my App Store review:
As the founder and editor of a pizza blog ("Slice"), all I can say is that this app is a must-have for hardcore and newbie pizza fans alike. Mr. Orlick gets all the classic places in here as well as some real hidden gems. And his taste is impeccable. This guide is authoritative, accurate, and accessible. Bravo! Wish I would have come up with something like it myself!
I truly do love this app, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some hinkiness. It's from a company called Sutro Media, which appears to offer a number of guides, all with the same (or similar) underlying template. My issue is with the template itself, not Orlick's info (which is stellar).
At times, the Sutro guide navigation is a little wonky, with a "Done" button standing in for what should rightly be a "Search" button. This leads to confusion at times. After punching in a set of search parameters, for instance, you're left with "Done" as your only option — does pressing it mean you're canceling out of the search? Just the opposite, in fact.
After a few flubs, however, you'll get used to the navigation, so I'm willing to let it go.
The app is divided into handy sections, among others: borough, genre (bar, coal, new wave, old school), "Godfathers of Pizza" (basically, can't-miss joints), and "Pilgrimages" (also can't-miss joints — lots of overlap between those two). The most helpful feature for folks on the go, though, might be the "nearby" filter. Since the app covers all five boroughs and gets to all corners, there's almost always a decent slice that it can recommend to you.
There are about 100 pizzerias in the app now. Mr. Orlick tells me he's hoping to get to 200 in the near future.
It's 99¢. Well worth the price of admission, folks.
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Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968
Showing 1 - 1 of 1 for search: 'Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968'
Hrozny hněvu /
by Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters," and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature.
During his writing career, he authored 27 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels ''Tortilla Flat'' (1935) and ''Cannery Row'' (1945), the multi-generation epic ''East of Eden'' (1952), and the novellas ''Of Mice and Men'' (1937) and ''The Red Pony'' (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning ''The Grapes of Wrath'' (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. Provided by Wikipedia
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Fernando Torres - Nike Ad
He's got everyone speaking Spanish
I missed this video - it's from a while back, but it's an ad for Torres and how he's turned everyone on at Liverpool to the Spanish culture. He was the first player since legend Robbie Fowler to score more than twenty goals in one season, no wonder the fans are so fond of Spanish culture.
Here's the Kop singing a song for Torres (El Nino) after he's scored.
(The Kop is a nickname for the part of the stands where Liverpool's fans are situated that's much like a hill or steep terrace; the Kop is in reference to the Battle of Spion Kop in the Second Boer War in South Africa - and the Kop means hill or look out)
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Nicole Colson
ICE is guilty of the murder of Frank Fuentes
The death of a man who had lived in the U.S. since he was a toddler--and who perished trying to return--is the direct result of anti-immigrant policies, reports Nicole Colson.
FRANK FUENTES was 2 years old when his parents brought him to the U.S.
And he was just 19 when he died trying to come back home--the victim of the federal government's deepening crackdown on immigrants.
Fuentes was one of some 100 undocumented immigrants discovered in a tractor-trailer truck in the parking lot of a Walmart near San Antonio, Texas, on July 22.
At least eight, including Frank, had died from suffocation and heat exposure by the time they were discovered, and two more died later. Twenty-eight people had to be hospitalized--some reportedly suffered permanent brain damage and other severe ailments as a result of the ordeal.
In Fuentes' case, the fact that the U.S. had been the only home he knew for the majority of his life only highlights the brutality of the expanded war on immigrants being waged by the U.S. government.
Fuentes, who was originally from Guatemala, spent the majority of his life in Northern Virginia after his parents emigrated to the U.S. He graduated from J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia, in 2015. The young aspiring rapper, who loved skateboarding, worked in construction while taking classes at Northern Virginia Community College.
Frank Fuentes
Because he was not born in the U.S., however, he was one of the hundreds of thousands of young adults who remain in a kind of legal limbo--at risk of deportation despite knowing no other home but the U.S. since they were small children.
Fuentes had been covered under the Obama administration's Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but his status changed, according to the Washington Post, when in March 2016, he pleaded guilty to simple assault and battery by a mob and grand larceny/pickpocketing.
Though the details of the case remain unclear in press accounts, one report suggested that Fuentes was changed with assault after he and three others yelled at someone for waiting for the bus on a particular corner and got into an altercation.
After his death, authorities smeared Fuentes in the media, claiming he was a member of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13--a gang with roots among Salvadoran immigrants that has become a convenient target for anti-immigrant politicians looking to whip up hysteria. In late July, Trump used a speech in front of law enforcement officers at Suffolk County Community College in Long Island, New York, to talk tough about MS-13, calling members of the gang "animals."
WHILE TRUMP and other officials exploit fears of crime and gang activity to smear undocumented immigrants, Frank Fuentes and those along with him in the back of that truck were treated as worse than animals.
Fuentes was never charged with, much less convicted of, gang activity. But that hasn't stopped authorities and the media from repeating the claim as if it was a fact.
Former classmate and friend Juan Benitez, however, said the government was wrong, and that Fuentes was not involved with MS-13 or any other gang. "Growing up where we grew up, it was just easier for the government to label him as a statistic and say that he was affiliated with a gang," Benitez told the Post. "Growing up in a rough neighborhood, we stayed away from people like that. It was the only way to be safe."
Another high school friend, Chelsea Luna, agreed, telling WUSA Channel 9 news that Frank was "a great friend... He was never part of any gang. I've seen him every day here. There's not a day I go without seeing him. He's not in a gang."
When Fuentes' permission to stay in the U.S. under DACA expired in June 2016, he filed again--but his claim was turned down by the government "based on a number of public safety concerns," according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Part of DACA eligibility requires that applicants not be convicted of felony or significant or multiple misdemeanors, and not pose a threat to public safety or national security.
In July, Fuentes was arrested by federal agents. He was deported in February 2017--sent back to a country he barely knew.
Kelly Barrios-Mazariegos, a childhood friend of Fuentes' who had spoken to him recently, told the Post that he had been struggling to adjust to life in Guatemala. "He's been [in the U.S.] forever," she said. "He doesn't know what Guatemala was. His home is here, his friends are here, his family is here."
According to reports, Fuentes's parents, themselves undocumented and at risk of deportation, helped pay for a "coyote," or smuggler, to transport him back to the U.S. Fuentes was one of at least six immigrants from Guatemala on a truck that crossed into the U.S. from Mexico in a desert zone near Laredo, Texas. They were expecting to go to Houston before their journey ended in tragedy in a Walmart parking lot.
Such tragedies are more likely as the Trump administration expands its assault on immigrants--forcing more to choose dangerous methods in any desperate attempt to reach the U.S. According to the UN's Missing Migrants Project, deaths already have spiked along the U.S.-Mexico border--with 232 migrant deaths in the first seven months of 2017, an increase of 17 percent compared to the same period last year.
THE TRUMP administration's escalation of the war on the undocumented has included more aggressive moves to deport those whose cases might previously have made them a low priority for deportation.
In one chilling instance, two brothers living in Gaithersburg, Maryland, who were originally from El Salvador, were deported during what was supposed to be a routine check-in with ICE.
Nineteen-year-old Lizandro Claros Saravia and 22-year-old Diego Saravia came to the U.S. in 2009, according to the Washington Post. Lizandro, the Post reported, "is a standout soccer player who had secured a scholarship to play college soccer in North Carolina," while Diego "took extra classes to graduate from Quince Orchard High School on time and 'has a heart of gold,' a former teacher said."
The brothers have no criminal records. In 2013, the pair was granted a stay of removal--essentially allowing them to remain in the U.S.--but later applications for stays were denied.
When they went for what was supposed to be a routine check-in with ICE on July 28, they were arrested. On August 3, they were on a plane, deported to San Salvador--one day after Lizandro was supposed to have left to begin soccer practices at Louisburg College.
"The ICE agents told me they were deporting the kids because Lizandro got into college, and that showed they intended to stay in the U.S.," Nick Katz, senior manager of legal services at CASA de Maryland, who is representing the pair, told the Post. Katz said this was the fastest deportation process he has seen in his career.
Now, their family fears for their safety--El Salvador has the highest murder rate in the hemisphere. "[M]y brothers did nothing wrong," another brother, Jonathan, said at a press conference outside the CASA headquarters. "They've had their futures taken from them."
Members of the community are organizing a defense campaign. On Monday evening, members of Lizandro's high school soccer team rallied in front of the Department of Homeland Security in protest, and CASA is planning a march to the White House on August 15.
Despite the widespread support, the fact that the brothers have already been deported makes it unlikely they will be granted legal re-entry into the U.S.
WHILE THE Trump administration's crackdown on immigrants has been especially vicious, it's worth pointing out that the Obama administration also ripped families apart. Frank Fuentes, for example, was ordered to be deported by the Obama administration, not Trump. The Obama administration deported more people than any previous presidential administration in U.S. history.
Or there is the case of David Watson--who was imprisoned beginning in 2008 for three-and-a-half years by ICE, despite repeatedly telling ICE, jail officials and a judge that he was a citizen.
Watson didn't have a lawyer, because immigrants in detention do not have the right to a court-appointed attorney. Eventually, the New Yorker was released--in rural Alabama, with no explanation, even as the government continued deportation proceedings against him for another year.
In another twisted development, a federal appeals court recently ruled that Watson cannot receive the compensation a lower court found he was entitled to, because "the statute of limitations actually expired while he was still in ICE custody without a lawyer," NPR reported.
For the Democrats, who present themselves as champions of immigrant rights even as they push policies that harm immigrants, there's a political calculus involved in appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment, while also trying to not alienate Latino voters.
Thus, when Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, was asked to comment on the death of Frank Fuentes, he didn't question a system that sent someone who has been in the U.S. since they were a toddler to a foreign country--nor ask whether U.S. border policies are humane when desperate people are increasingly losing their lives in an attempt to enter the U.S.
Instead, McAuliffe underscored the need to keep undocumented people out: "We here in America, we need to number one secure our borders," McAuliffe told Fox News, before adding, "No individual should be deported out of the country and then immediately be able to get back in the country."
As a friend of Fuentes' posted on Facebook following his death, Frank Fuentes and his family deserved better: "Frank learned from his mistakes, but he was robbed at a shot to fulfill his dreams. A broken immigration system within a broken, less-than-fortunate community."
Kris Parker
U.S. border violence stalks Tijuana every day
Thousands of asylum seekers wait in Tijuana while the U.S. processes their claims, despite the lack of services and terrible violence.
Amanda Bloom
What I saw in Tijuana was solidarity
A health care worker returned from a border solidarity mission in Tijuana describes the conditions facing members of the caravans.
Lucy Herschel
Targeting immigrants on public assistance
The Trump administration is opening up a new front in its anti-immigrant campaign, this time taking aim at visa holders and visa seekers.
Brian Huseby and Steve Leigh
Live from immigration detention
Immigrant justice protesters heard about the horrible conditions inside a Tacoma, Washington, detention center from the detainees themselves.
Interview: ShaCorrie Wimbley Tunkara
Fighting for her detained husband’s life
A woman who is trying to free her ill husband from ICE detention talks about what it has taken to make the agency accountable.
The road that brought us to Standing Rock
SW contributors tell what they saw and heard on a trip to bring support and solidarity for the historic resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Interview: Lance Selfa
Who’s to blame for Trump’s victory?
The author of The Democrats: A Critical History dissects some of the myths and distortions that are already settling in as conventional wisdom.
Elizabeth Schulte
A voice for socialism for 40 years
The first issue of Socialist Worker was published 40 years ago in April 1977, and the need for a revolutionary socialist press is still key today.
Danny Katch
How do socialists take on gun fundamentalism?
The emergence of student anti-NRA protest as a vibrant new wing of the anti-Trump resistance requires us to reckon with modern gun politics.
Our voices ring out in Times Square
After successfully defending its encampment, Occupy Wall Street in New York City reached a new high point with a massive protest in Times Square.
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Lewisville, TX (75057)
Some clouds. Low near 80F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph..
Some clouds. Low near 80F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.
A memorial will be held next Friday, July 19, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Lewisville Municipal Building's Community Room, 1197 W. Main St.
Beloved teacher passes away
In the senior classrooms of government and economics classes at Lewisville High School, Patta Jossart was a staple. A rare combination of inspiration, passion, warmth and a reservoir of knowledge, Jossart was a beacon of hope for anybody that stepped into the four walls of her classroom. The social studies teacher of 34 years passed away last week, laying heavy in the hearts of every student and staff member she touched along the way.
Jossart began her career as a bright eyed teacher in 1977. Her charisma quickly earned her a reputation as one of Lewisville’s best teachers, harnessing the respect of not just her peers but also her students. Whether it was being just a homeroom teacher or a professor of government, Jossart seemingly created an instant rapport with everyone she meant. Her greatest skill perhaps wasn’t the knowledge she effortlessly deposited on the structure of government, but her ability to put people at ease within minutes of meeting them.
“We will always remember Mrs. Jossart for her love of Lewisville High School, our students, and the many Social Studies classes she taught. RIP Patta Jossart. The legacy you left will last forever,” Lewisville ISD said in a statement.
Words do not to justice to the deep reservoir of stories that people have about her. Stories that they can’t help but smile when they are told. One man, who chose to leave his name anonymous due to the sensitivity of the story, talked about how Jossart reached out to him when he was going through a hard time as just a homeroom student.
“She knew, she just knew I needed it. I did not know her for very long but she stays with me. She always had her door open to talk to you and her words of encouragement were always there for me,” the man said.
Jossart ended her career in 2012, leaving an impeccable record of service to the community. Teachers talk of how she was an “inspiration” to them and how she helped guide anybody through their first years of teaching in the district. Her legacy, in that way, still lingers in the same halls she used to call home. The teachers that now occupy her social studies wing attempt to live up to her calling and her nature.
People responded the the district’s press release by inundating the internet with their stories of her. People said she was “one of a kind”, “special” and “passionate”.
“All friends and former students are invited to her Memorial. It will be held on Friday, July 19, 2019 from 4:30-6:30 in a come and go format at the Lewisville Municipal Building's Community Room, 1197 W. Main St.,” the district released.
Patta Jossart
Lewisville High School
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Liberty Bell (Celebration) Artist Proof
Item #:AP993
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) Liberty Bell (Celebration), 1976 cover for American Artist magazine. Media print lithography on paper This is a limited edition print. A total of 970 prints of this kind were produced. A set of 950 were numbered. Another set of 20 were numbered using Roman numerals. All of the prints made were signed in pencil by Norman Rockwell.
The original painting of the Liberty Bell (Celebration) with its pendant self-portrait was commissioned for the cover of their American Artist magazine to mark the national celebration of the country's Bicentennial. In his 80s at the time, Norman Rockwell was challenged by cataracts and was losing some of the dexterity and control that had been hallmarks of his work. Even so, he does a creditable job of creating a recognizable self-portrait, which would be the last magazine cover illustration in his long career. He died two years later in 1978, at the age of eighty four.
The purchase of any limited edition Norman Rockwell prints is accompanied by an Authenticity Certificate signed by our Museum Director, a complimentary one-year Museum family membership, and care and handling instructions for the print. Payment plans are available. All hand signed reproduction print purchases contribute directly to the Norman Rockwell Museum to preserve and present the art and legacy of Norman Rockwell. Please contact us for more information at 413.931.2237 or 800.742.9450 Or Email: MDuffy@nrm.org
You're reviewing: Liberty Bell (Celebration) Artist Proof
America Marches Ahead Signed Print
Growth Of A Leader Signed Print
Definitive Catalog, Limited Edition Signed by Mollie Rockwell
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It’s been nearly two years since your last novel, The Character. Why so long a wait for the new novel?
This book was very surprisingly and very seriously traumatizing to me. I didn’t expect it to be because my story and Jessie’s are quite different. But I was horrified and moved to my core at the research this book uncovered. I think I got a little overwhelmed at the various plights children face every day. At my church, we had a group come to enlighten us on sex trafficing, a practice in which girls as young as six are sold into prostitution and then brought here to America. My other books detail childhood abuse in various formats. Divorce. Instability. Alcoholism. Any of these environmental circumstances can dramatically alter a child. But touch deprivation is one of the saddest. I could only handle writing half a chapter a day for a long time because I’d start crying and be incapable of finishing. Sometimes, Jessie would be persistent and I’d manage to wade through two chapters. That inevitably caused a hiatus of a week or so. It was slow because the issue deeply touches me.
What was some of the research that most affected you?
A German emperor named Fredrick II wanted to know what language children would speak if no one spoke to them at all from birth. So he took babies away from their mothers and raised them in total isolation. All of the babies died. Children in orphanges in WWII died and were found dying despite proper nutrition and medical care. Only human touch prevented some of them from dying. In the early centuries, many children developed a mysterious ailment that doctors called marasmus. Eventually, they realized that the children who were not being held or touched were quite literally starving themselves to death. In all cases of touch deprivation, sleep is affected. The effects of sleep deprivation are horrific, partly because it kills you slowly. Children were separated from their parents and raised for a while in an institution. Even upon being reunited with their parents, the children experienced significant sleep disturbances; this spoke to me because it told me how lonely the children were. Harlow, of course, also did the experiment with the wire versus cloth monkeys, where monkeys were offered a wire mother who provided nutrients but no comfort and other monkeys were offered a cloth mother who did not provide nutrients. The monkeys preferred the cloth mother. I think part of what touched me so deeply is that we really do need touch. We cannot thrive without it. Children, especially, must know positive touch. It really is a basic life necessity that you don’t even think abou, because you just take for granted that you’ll be touched by someone during the course of the day, even if it’s just a pat on the back. The truth is that there are children who have not been touched, and I couldn’t fathom how horrible that must have been for them.
Many of your other books focus on the dangers of child sexual and physical abuse, where the problem is too much touching. Shouldn’t we be careful when we touch a child so that we don’t do so inappropriately?
We should be respectful. If a child’s body language, or certainly her voice, is withdrawn or skittish, then we need to respect those boundaries. But if we are too careful, if we are too afraid of getting in trouble because we hugged a child, then we are abusing that child too by denying her the basic life necessity of positive touch. Touch is like food. There is poisonous food. If you eat poisonous food, it will kill you. But if you don’t eat food at all, it will kill you. So you eat, but carefully so. The same should apply to touching children. We need to hug them and hold their hands and give them high fives. We don’t need to view them in any sexual manner whatsoever. Both are equally traumatizing and dangerous. As adults, we have the ability to decipher correctly a child’s body language. We must care enough to take the time to do so.
Where did the inspiration for this book come from?
Jessie. I saw her and knew what the end of her story was, but I didn’t know why it was that. Then, one day, she asked me what would happen if she wasn’t touched. That led to the research. And once I saw the research, I knew what the story had to be.
I want to talk about Jessie’s mother. And her father. And her teacher. And her doctor. But especially her mother.
You sometimes seem to downplay their roles as abusers. You did it in The Character—we never find out what happened to that father, or to John. You rarely focus on the person responsible for the pain. Why is that?
Because once pain is inflicted, it does not matter how it was inflicted. The point is that it was. Getting angry and placing blame will shift attention away from the child and onto justice—whatever that is. Of course, I want whoever is to blame to be held accountable, but what I want more is to reverse as much of the emotional damage as I can in the child. Once you start looking at the parents as abusers, your goal shifts from caretaker and comforter to judge and jury; the child is often left, unintentionally, by the wayside. It’s more important to me that the child learns she is valuable than it is for me to see justice served. I can make a positive difference and help her to still reach adulthood with some semblance of self-esteem and hope. I can’t help the abuser.
What was the hardest part of writing the story?
I desperately wanted to introduce Jessie to Ash, the driving force behind The Character. He oozes comfort, and he symbolizes hope. I wanted Jessie to have a little bit of that, very, very much, and it was hard to resist the urge to reinvent Ash for her benefit. But I couldn’t do that. Neither Ash nor Jessie seemed interested.
Describe the writing process.
I always read this question and stand amazed. There’s a process? Really? I need to get on board, so I can become a real author! The process is that there isn’t one. The only thing that hasn’t changed about my writing in recent years is that I am still driven by the characters. First, a character will show up in my mind. I will know what she looks like and her approximate age. Sometimes she tells me right away what the story is, but more often she just stands there and lets me get familiar with her. The longer she’s quiet, the more intrigued I become and the more I start to care. When she’s ready, I see a “scene” in my head that tells me what happens in the first chapter—or the one she wants me to write first. And then I write. After that scene, I usually have three or four more that I know need to be written. I jot down the point of each chapter and then wait on the character. When the character is ready to tell me the next scene, I am ready to write.
Why did you incorporate Pain?
I needed an adult voice. Jessie, as smart as she is, is still eight years old and wouldn’t have had the foresight to discuss pain.
Do you like Pain’s voice?
I like what Pain has to say. Pain’s chapters are among my favorite because they have a lot of important things to say. The sensation of pain is biologically a good thing; it is supposed to help us. If I couldn’t feel pain, and I cut my finger while cooking, I would bleed to death. Pain is not the enemy; it’s what we do with it that really matters. Furthermore, an interesting thing happened during the course of the book, particularly the latter chapters. Initially, this was a story of extreme touch deprivation but Pain’s chapters made it evolve into something bigger so that now it’s really about touch deprivation and emotional pain all at the same time. Rather brilliant of Jessie, actually.
Is that a pat on the back?
(smiles)
No. I love my characters. They are my friends. And I am proud of them. When one of them has a particularly moving or worthwhile story, it makes me so excited to know that their story is being told. You know, there have been several times when people have been talking about one of my books to me and I have to literally remind myself that I did write the words in those pages because I don’t feel I have that much to do with the stories themselves. The characters lead; I follow.
In the study questions, you ask if Pain is masculine or feminine. Which is it?
That’s a question each individual person must answer. It’s a fascinating question, though, and one I’d love to discuss in a book club.
What makes Jessie different from, say, Anna in The Character? And what do you most like about her? Is there anything you dislike?
Well, for one, Anna had Ash. That’s a huge difference. Ash is hope. Jessie doesn’t have an Ash and that, in itself, makes for an interesting difference between the girls. Anna is complacent, passive, but Jessie is often defiant. In a weird way, Jessie’s fight is her hope. She fights for a reason. She wants to be accepted, even if she has to fight to obtain that acceptance. Most of the time, Jessie seems older than Anna because of her tough-girl facade, even though Anna is actually the eldest. I think what I like most about Jessie is the magic because it’s really the place that her innocence and age show the most. She is scared of the woods, and believes in things that not a single one of any of my other characters ever have, things like witches and trolls. I like her language too: her eyes “leaked water” instead of “cried.” I thought that was brilliant and heartbreaking at the same time. I don’t dislike anything about her, although I related a lot more to Anna, because I can’t remember ever acting defiantly on purpose myself.
You mentioned the chapters with Pain’s voice. Did you have an overall favorite chapter?
Usually, I don’t but, this time round, I do. The chapter “The Promise” really struck a nerve. It broke my heart in about ten thousand pieces. And it was the chapter in which Jessie told me the title of the book, and that made me really very excited. I also have a favorite line in this book that I wish I could highlight.
And what is that?
When Jessie, talking about the broken glass, says, “I’m old enough to pick up the pieces.” It’s such a bone chilling statement because, no matter how young they are, children do pick the pieces up from their parents’ mistakes, failed marriages, anger. Divorce, abuse, whatever—the children carry on. They come out scarred, but they somehow manage to carry on and, most of the time, admirably so. When you think about all the environmental junk children hear, see and live through daily and then compare that with the number of children who reach adulthood as fairly intelligent, law abiding, compassionate adults…. it gives you a whole new round of respect for children. I mean, let’s put it in perspective. If I was married and my husband never, ever, not ever wanted to touch me, not even to hold my hand, I think I’d last, at most, week before I burst into tears. Because I’d know that it wasn’t normal. The lack of that knowledge in and of itself really does incredible things to children—on the one hand, it hurts them, because they accept abuse as normal but, on the other hand, it allows them to still see some beauty in the world because they don’t realize how bad their situation really is.
Well, after finishing a book, I usually take a short break. I often spend a day or two re-reading some of my favorite scenes from other books, and then I spend a few days just being a reader. I write a blog a week. If you mean what’s next novel wise—as soon as I have a new character, I’ll let you know.
Reading what, for example?
I just finished Every Last One by Anna Quindlen. And, before that, it was The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Quindlen is an emotional writer for me, and it was very thought provoking. The Book Thief is officially one of my all-time favorite books, ever. It was brilliant. Less recently, I also read Emma Donahue’s Room.
Do you ever read anything less serious?
Sure. I have a weak spot for romances, particularly historical ones. I would pay Judith McNaught good money to write another one in the style of Whitney, My Love or Almost Heaven. I have both of those just about memorized, word for word.
Let’s talk about the title of Forget Me Not.
Okay. It wasn’t the original title.
What was?
Felt. But Jessie didn’t like it. I got a little ill with her about that, actually, because I did like it. I believe it totally encapsulated the point of the book because she felt the lack of touch, almost as though it were tangible pain. I knew it didn’t sound poetic or pretty; it was kind of stark and to the point. But it “got” the book. So I liked it. Jessie didn’t. Then, one day, Jessie told me I was going to write the last chapter of the book, something I really strongly did not want to do. But I did. And, midway through it, she gave me the title. I was so freaking excited because I loved it. It made me cry, and that’s when I knew it was perfect. My characters are usually right, and I rarely win a battle with any of them.
Why is Forget Me Not better?
My eleventh grade English teacher once gave me a hug during a really, really hard time in my life. After that, he wrote me a letter that said, “I’m glad I was able to give you a hug to show that I do care about your welfare.” More recently, after a poignant conversation, I asked my pastor for a hug. After obliging, he said, “You asked for a hug. There’s trust in that.” You see, a touch is like a meaningful conversation. It can be tender and wonderful, or it can hurt, but it does speak. And, when it’s positive, touch leaves the subliminal message that we are important to someone, that we matter, that we are deemed worthy of time. If you were never touched, at all, ever, then, over time, I imagine you’d start to wonder if anyone even saw you at all. Sigmund Freud once said that the greatest childhood need was a father’s protection. Well, I think the greatest human need is to feel valued and remembered. Touch suggests that if you were gone tomorrow someone would remember you. Jessie just wanted to be loved. She wanted to be seen. But no one did that. So, her last wish, her last hope, is that no one will forget her. It breaks my heart every time I think about it, and it is perfect for the book.
Not a lot of children suffer from severe touch deprivation these days.
Oh, but they could and they likely will. That’s the point. Right now, there’s a stigma against touching children because the adult is afraid of being accused of something inappropriate. I commend these well-meaning teachers, sports coaches and even parents for taking seriously the need to respect children’s bodies. One in three little girls and one in five little boys will be sexually abused before adulthood and that eats at me. It has got to stop; it robs children of more than I can explain. But, once again, it’s a double-edged sword. Positive, physical touch is not optional to the development of a healthy child. Without it, growth in children is stunted, evidence suggests the brain’s development is delayed, and they become emotionally alienated beings with no sense of worth. In essence, then, the consequences of touch deprivation are similar to those of childhood sexual assault. We cannot trade one for the other.
You always sound so passionate about your novels and your issues. What does writing give you?
Writing is like a breath of fresh air to me—still, even after some 20 years. But it also does more than just give me pleasure. At my core, I’m a relational activist even more than I am a writer. I truly am passionate about the emotional, physical and psychological well-being of children. I really care. God has entrusted to me a beautiful gift called writing, and if I can use that to bring awareness to His children, to make people see little ones in a new way, even if it’s only one person whose heart I wake up, then I have done something worthwhile. Writing is my friend. My characters are like members of my family. They talk to me. I can see them. And, together, we tell the stories of the silent.
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News of Yore 1950: News of Yore 1924
A Glance Back to 1924 In First E&P Directory
By Jane McMaster (E&P, 7/29/50)
Publication of the 25th annual Editor & Publisher Syndicate Directory's 68-page cross-indexing of 1,653 features prompts observation that feature quantity has about doubled in a quarter of a century.
The first syndicate directory was published Oct. 25, 1924 as 18 pages of a regular issue. (No directories were published in 1943 and 1944). It listed 900 features and some titles showed a charming reflection of current history.
The newfangled horseless carriage was enshrined in comic strips such as "Gas Buggies" and "Down the Road," by Beck; "Carrie and Her Car"; "Joe's Car," and "Gasoline Alley." The latter, by Frank King, is the only survivor of this group. [untrue -- Joe's Car continues as Joe Jinks]
Ullman Feature Service, which had several of the 14 other automobile features listed, proclaimed in an ad: "'That Motor Car of Yours' helps motorists with their parking, their driving and their tinkering." It "stimulates interest in the mid-week automobile page" and had no "bothersome diagrams and technical talk," according to the ad. Ullman said its four auto features were running in 200 newspapers.
Model-T readers (Ford's Model A wasn't introduced until 1927) were also to get a special aviation feature, courtesy of McClure and Chicago Tribune Newspaper Syndicate. It was the story of an around-the-world flight by U. S. Army aviators - a story at first denied newspapers by the Government.
"Love," the lead title word in only two 1950 syndicated features, was a word 1924 syndicate people didn't shy away from. "Love Letters of a Newspaper Man," "Love Gossip," "Love Immortalized in Song," "Luxury of Love" and "Love or Fame?" were some of the titles.
But in women-voting, Prohibition 1924, there were big names and talents too. Frederick Opper's broad political barbs were distributed by New York American Features, his "Happy Hooligan" strip by International Feature Service. Editorial cartoons with a gentler sting, by John T. McCutcheon, were offered by Chicago Tribune Newspaper Syndicate, J. N. "Ding" Darling was doing perceptive editorial cartoons for the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate, and cartoonist Clare Briggs' effect on the language ("When a Feller Needs a Friend," "Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling," etc.) made him the subject of a full-page ad.
John Held, Jr. was doing a comic, about a long-waisted Jazz Age cutie for United Feature Syndicate. Famed "Tad" (Thomas A. Dorgan) who was adept at spotting and humorously depicting phonies was turning out "Indoor Sports" for International Feature Service. Machine Age burlesquer Rube Goldberg was busy. "Little Nemo," by Winsor McCay, "The Gumps," "Bringing Up Father" and "Mutt arid Jeff" were going strong.
Column's Future Forecast
"Feature service of various sorts is new," Hallam Walker Davis wrote in a book, "The Column," which was published in 1926. "It has had the advantage of high-powered promotion. It is still riding on the crest of the first big wave its own splash sent out."
But Mr. Davis did think that in a decade or two the newspapers might be promoting their columns along with their comic strips. The World had started the ball rolling with billboard advertising of Heywood Broun's "It Seems to Me."
The McNaught Syndicate was sitting pretty with O. O. McIntyre, Will Rogers and Irvin S. Cobb on its list. The New York Herald Tribune offered Don Marquis and Franklin P. Adams rhymed satirically in "The Conning Tower" for the New York World Syndicate. "A Line o' Type Or Two," Bert Leston Taylor's verse column in the Chicago Tribune, was now being done by Richard Henry Little.
Other offerings: Humorous Sketches, by Damon Runyon; O.Henry Stories; Editorials by
Arthur Brisbane; Ring Lardner letter; "Rippling Rhymes," by Walt Mason; literary articles by R. L. Mencken.
The 1924 syndicate directory listed 17 radio features, an auction bridge column, but no Canasta.
Labels: News of Yore
Nice catch on "Joe Jinks." I would have recognized "Joe Jinks," but wouldn't have connected it to "Joe's Car."
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Study Buddhism › Advanced Studies › Science of Mind › Cognition Theory
Logical Pervasions between Objects
Totally Pervasive, Mutually Exclusive and Dichotomous Sets of Objects
Trilemmas and Tetralemmas
Same Essential Nature
Inseparable
Mutually Exclusive or Totally Pervasive Facts
Identical or Different
Same Essential Nature, but Different Conceptually Isolated Items
Same Natal Source
Obtaining Causes and Simultaneously Acting Conditions
Simultaneously Arising Causes
Two sets of objects may be totally pervasive (don-gcig) or mutually exclusive (‘gal -ba).
Two sets are totally pervasive if every element in set A is also a member of set B, and vice versa – for example, the sets of stars and suns. All stars are suns and all suns are stars.
Two sets are mutually exclusive is they do not share any common locus (gzhi-mthun). A common locus is an item that is a member of both sets. The sets of ways of cognizing an object (shes-pa) and of forms of physical phenomena (gzugs) are mutually exclusive. There is no phenomenon that is both.
Two mutually exclusive sets may or may not constitute a dichotomy (dngos-‘gal). They form a dichotomy if all existent phenomena must be in either one or the other mutually exclusive set.
For example, the sets of static (permanent) and nonstatic (impermanent) phenomena are mutually exclusive and dichotomous. All existent phenomena must be either static or nonstatic, and nothing exists that is both. The sets of ways of cognizing an object and of forms of physical phenomena are mutually exclusive, but not dichotomous. Phenomena exist that are members of neither one nor the other set – for example, abstractions.
Two sets may also constitute a trilemma (mu-gsum) or a tetralemma (mu-bzhi).
The relationship between two sets is a trilemma if there are three possibilities. There are phenomena that are members of
Both set A and set B
Neither set A nor set B
Only set A, but not set B.
There are no phenomena that are members of set B that are not also members of set A. In other words, all elements of set B are also members of set A, but not all elements of set A are elements of set B.
Consider the relationship between the sets of mammals and animals. Something may be both a mammal and an animal – for example, a dog. Something may be neither a mammal nor an animal – for example, a rock. Something may be only an animal, but not a mammal – for example, a snake. Nothing exists, however, that is only a mammal, but not also an animal. In other words, all mammals are animals, but not all animals are mammals.
The relationship between two sets is a tetralemma if there are four possibilities. There are phenomena that are members of
Neither set A not set B
Only set A, but not set B
Only set B, but not set A.
Consider the relationship between the sets of our relatives and our friends. There are four possibilities. Someone may be both a relative and a friend, a relative but not a friend, a friend but not a relative, or neither a friend nor a relative.
Two things are of the same essential nature (ngo-bo gcig, one by nature) if they are two facts about the same attribute (rnam-pa) of a phenomenon. In other words, they are two facts about the same attribute of the same phenomenon perceived from two different, yet valid points of view.
A classic example is the two truths (bden-pa gnyis, two levels of truth) about something, as defined by the various Mahayana schools. According to the common assertion shared by the divisions of Madhyamaka, for example, they are:
The appearance of an object as “this” or “that,”
The mode of existence of the appearance.
The former is the superficial truth (kun-rdzob bden-pa, relative truth, conventional truth) about the object, and the latter is the deepest truth (don-dam bden-pa, ultimate truth) about it. Both truths are facts about the same attribute of an object, in this case its appearance. The two facts simply describe the appearance from different points of view: what it appears as and how it exists as that.
For example, an apple appears to be red. Its appearance as red is devoid of existing in impossible ways. The appearance of the apple as red and the void nature of that appearance are two facts about the same attribute of the apple: its color. On the other hand, the facts that the color of an apple is red and that its taste is sour may both be true. However, they are not facts about the same attribute of the apple. One concerns the appearance of the apple; the other concerns its taste. The apple’s color and taste do not share the same essential nature.
Two facts about the same attribute of an object are always inseparable (dbyer-med). One cannot be the case without the other also being true.
For example, an apple cannot appear as red without that appearance being void by nature. This does not mean, however, that when we cognize or understand one of the facts, we cognize or understand the other. When we cognize or understand that the apple appears to us as red, we do not necessarily cognize or understand the void nature of the appearance.
On the other hand, two sides of a coin may be inseparable, but they are not two facts about the appearance of the coin. They are merely two aspects of that appearance. When we look at a coin from one side or the other, we see two different aspects of the appearance of the coin. Two facts about the appearance of a coin, however, do not derive from looking at the coin from two different physical viewpoints. They derive from considering the appearance of the coin from two different cognitive points of view.
Two inseparable facts about the same attribute of an object may be mutually exclusive (‘gal-ba) or totally pervasive (don-gcig).
Two facts about something are mutually exclusive if they have totally different meanings. The color and the taste of an apple, for instance, are two different facts about the fruit, although not two facts about the same attribute of the fruit Here, it is obvious that the color of the apple does not mean its taste, and vice versa. The two facts are mutually exclusive. Similarly, the two truths about something are different facts about the same attribute of an object that are mutually exclusive. The appearance of an apple as red – as opposed to its appearance as green – does not mean the void nature of that appearance, and vice versa. The two facts do not have the same meaning.
Two facts, on the other hand, are totally pervasive if they have the same meaning. An apple being nonstatic also means that it is an object affected by causes and conditions (‘dus-byas, conditioned phenomenon), and vice versa. The fact that an apple rots means that an apple is affected by the passage of time, and vice versa. Although we may only know one of the two mutually pervasive facts about an apple, our unawareness of one of the facts does not negate the other fact or that the two facts have the same meaning.
Two facts about the same attribute of a phenomenon, even if totally pervasive, must not be identical (gcig); they must always be different (tha-dad) facts. Otherwise, they are the same fact and not two facts.
For example, two facts about the same attribute of a woman may be that she is a mother and that she is a mom. If a woman is a mother, she is necessarily a mom, and vice versa. The two facts have the same meaning and are synonyms (ming-gi rnam-grangs). However, they are different facts or true statements about the person, because the words “mother” and “mom” are different words.
Two facts or true statements are identical only if they are identical in all respects.
Two facts about the same attribute of a phenomenon, such as the two truths about something, share the same essential nature. They are not only two different facts, however; they can be specified as different conceptually isolated items (ldog-pa tha-dad, distinguishers, isolates).
The conceptually isolated item that specifies a validly knowable phenomenon in conceptual cognition is the mental exclusion (blo’i gzhan-sel) of everything that is other than that validly knowable phenomenon. In other words, it is what is left over after conceptually excluding everything that is not a certain item. It is a conceptual device for specifying something as fitting into a specific conceptual category (spyi, universal), such as one of the two truths and not any category other than that.
For example, a medical examination may specify a disease by the symptoms it finds. It may also specify the sickness by logically excluding what it is not, as indicated by the negative results of exhaustive tests. In medicine, knowing that a disease is not X or Y specifies that it must be Z, if Z is the only possibility left over. Here, however, the conceptually specified item does not explicitly indicate that the disease is Z. It merely specifies that it is not non-Z.
The mental exclusion of everything other than X, however, does not require the active process of excluding, one by one, every item that is non-X. A conceptual isolated item is merely a conceptual tag for specifying something as an individual validly knowable phenomenon.
Two items share the same natal source (rdzas-gcig, same natal substance) if they arise from the same source. They may or may not be inseparable.
For example, a clay pot and its belly arise from the same potter’s wheel as their natal source and are inseparable, as is the case with a flame and the heat of the flame arising from the same match.
Two clay pots, however, may come from the same potter’s wheel, but are not inseparable. Likewise, two rebirths may arise from the same karmic legacy (sa-bon, karmic seed, karmic tendency) as their shared natal source, but are not inseparable.
An obtaining cause (nyer-len-gyi rgyu, material cause) is the item from which one obtains the result. It functions as the natal source (rdzas) giving rise to the result as its successor and ceases to exist simultaneously with the arising of its result.
If an item is the natal source of something, it may or may not also be its obtaining cause. For example, a seed is both a natal source and obtaining cause for a sprout. It ceases to exist with the production of the sprout. A potter’s wheel, on the other hand, is a natal source for a clay pot, but not an obtaining cause; whereas the unfired pot is both a natal source and an obtaining cause. The unfired pot ceases to exist with the production of the fired clay pot, the potter’s wheel does not.
An obtaining cause requires simultaneously acting conditions (lhan-cig byed-rkyen, accompanying condition) in order to give rise to its result. For example, a seed requires moisture, heat, and sunlight to give rise to a sprout.
When two items exist simultaneously as the causes for each other – in the sense of each being indispensable for the existence of the other – and each arises from a different natal source, they are simultaneously arising causes (lhan-cig ‘byung-ba’i rgyu).
A common example is a vase and the earth particles of the vase. A vase cannot exist without its earth particles, and its earth particles cannot exist as earth particles of a vase without the vase they comprise existing at the same time. The natal source of the fired vase is the unfired vase; while the natal source of the earth particles of the vase are the earth particles of the clay.
Another example is a moment of primary consciousness (rnam-shes), such as eye consciousness, and its accompanying mental factors, such as feeling a level of happiness. For instance, in a moment of happily seeing our mother, the seeing of our mother and the feeling of happiness that accompanies seeing her simultaneously arise. Both are indispensable for the existence of the moment of happily seeing our mother. The natal source giving rise to the moment of seeing our mother is the karmic legacy of actions in previous lives that have ripened into being born as her child and meeting her now. The natal source giving rise to the feeling of happiness that accompanies that seeing is the karmic legacy of constructive actions we have done in the past.
In short, an item is not made from its natal source and obtaining cause, but is made of its simultaneously arising causes.
When we think of a hand through the conceptual category hand, as an example of an unaffected phenomenon other than voidness, the conceptual cognition arises from a karmic legacy as its natal source. As an unaffected static phenomenon, the conceptual category hand cannot arise from anything. Yet, the conceptual category hand is a component of the cognition.
[For a more advanced discussion, see: Relationships between Objects in Anuttarayoga Tantra]
next in Cognition Theory
Dormant Grasping for True Existence: Gelug Madhyamaka
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MOSHÉ FELDENKRAIS
Moshé Feldenkrais was born in 1904 to a Jewish family living in the Ukraine. Shortly after the end of the First World War, at the age of fourteen, he emigrated to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. He worked there as a laborer on building sites and as a surveyor until he was able to go to Paris to study at the Sorbonne; first engineering, later physics. At the outset of the Second World War, he was working with Nobel Prize-winner Frederic Joliot-Curie. He was also an avid athlete. While he was in Paris he became intensely involved in Judo; he was one of the founders of the Judo Club of France. His sports interests contributed another vital element to his development of his method. Playing soccer as a young man, he damaged one of his knees. This was a manageable irritation until several years later when he tore ligaments in the other knee as well. At that time surgery didn’t offer a very promising solution. This pushed him into the investigation that eventually led him to abandon his career in physics in favor of a much less clear path. Perhaps Feldenkrais was made bolder by his contact, through Judo, with a culturally different sense of what might be possible. He certainly achieved an astonishing synthesis of western physics and eastern martial arts. His ideas were cultivated by studies with other movement pioneers of that time (notably Alexander). Moshé’s wife was a pediatrician, and exposed him to the developmental movement patterns of children and the work of Piaget on the developmental patterns of learning itself.
Returning to Tel Aviv in the 1950’s, Feldenkrais left physics and began teaching what he had learned about movement. He worked with people in all walks of life, and his home was increasingly a point of pilgrimage for people from across Europe who looked to him for help with everything from recovery from stroke or other injury, to management of MS or cerebral palsy. He began training students to be practitioners themselves, first in Israel and then in the United States. Although he died in 1984, such training continues in dozens of countries, on almost every continent; there are currently about four thousand practitioners of the Method that bears Moshé’s name.
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Double duty for Rocco Grimaldi
November 19, 2014 theahl
A second-round pick (No. 33) in 2011 of the Florida Panthers, forward Rocco Grimaldi started his Tuesday morning in a black sweater for the San Antonio Rampage, skating in their Cool School Day game against divisional rival Oklahoma City Barons.
He finished it wearing white and red.
Though the Rampage would go on to defeat the Barons 4-3 in shootout, Grimaldi was long gone before the six-round skills competition had even been a thought in anyone’s minds. He left the ice in the third period, presumably because of either an equipment or injury issue, but instead was hopping on a plane to Los Angeles, joining the Rampage’s parent club in time for their tilt against the Los Angeles Kings.
“It’s special, obviously,” Grimaldi told NHL.com. “This is one of the ones in the calendar that I really wanted to play and I obviously didn’t expect it coming into this morning.”
The AT&T Center, home of the Rampage, is 1,358 miles from the Kings’ ice inside STAPLES Center. The flight is just under three hours.
The 5-foot-6 center grew up in Rossmoor, Calif., just south of Los Angeles. He has yet to notch his first NHL point, though he made his NHL debut with the Panthers on Nov. 1. He has three goals and three assists in 13 games with San Antonio this season.
Previous PostAHL announces suspensionsNext PostRampage’s Movember off to successful start
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Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 250 › Barrett v. Virginian Ry. Co.
Barrett v. Virginian Ry. Co., 250 U.S. 473 (1919)
Barrett v. Virginian Railway Company
Submitted March 21, 1919
The right to take a voluntary nonsuit is substantial, and when and how it may be asserted are questions relating directly to practice and mode of proceeding within the intendment of the Conformity Act. P. 250 U. S. 476.
Under the law of Virginia, in the absence of a demurrer to the evidence and joinder therein, the plaintiff may take a nonsuit at any time before the retirement of the jury. P. 250 U. S. 477.
A motion by defendant for a directed verdict at the conclusion of the testimony, when made in a federal court in Virginia, is not equivalent to a demurrer to the evidence, and the making of such a motion and its impending allowance do not place the plaintiff's right to take a nonsuit at the sound discretion of the court. Id.
244 F. 397 reversed.
The case is stated in the opinion.
CERTIORARI TO TUE CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
MR. JUSTICE McREYNOLDS delivered the opinion of the Court.
Claiming under the Federal Employers' Liability Act (Act April 22, 1908, c. 149, 35 Stat. 65), petitioner sued the Virginian Railway Company in the United States District Court, Western District of Virginia, for damages on account of personal injuries suffered by him July 27, 1915.
At conclusion of the testimony, the railway company moved for a directed verdict; after consideration, the trial judge read to counsel an opinion giving reasons and announced his purpose to grant the motion.
"And thereupon the plaintiff, by counsel, moved the court to be permitted to take a voluntary nonsuit, which motion was opposed by counsel for defendant. And as the court is of opinion that the motion comes too late, it is overruled, and to this action of the court the plaintiff, by counsel, excepted. And thereupon the court directed the jury to find a verdict for the defendant, and to this action of the court the plaintiff, by counsel, excepted. And thereupon the jury rendered and returned the following verdict: 'We, the jury, by direction of the court, find for the defendant.'"
Judgment thereon was affirmed by the circuit court of appeals. 244 F. 397. Petitioner there urged that the trial court erred (1) in directing a verdict for the defendant, and (2) in denying the plaintiff's request to take a voluntary nonsuit. Both claims were denied, and are renewed here.
We think refusal to permit the requested nonsuit was error, and for that reason the judgment below must be reversed. This makes it unnecessary to consider the other point.
The Act of June 1, 1872 -- the Conformity Act -- provides:
"The practice, pleadings, and forms and modes of proceeding in civil causes, other than equity and admiralty causes, in the circuit and district courts shall conform, as near as may be, to the practice, pleadings, and forms and modes of proceedings existing at the time in like causes in the courts of record of the state within which such circuit or district courts are held, any rule of court to the contrary notwithstanding."
Construing the statute in Nudd v. Burrows, (1875) 91 U. S. 426, 91 U. S. 441-442 (23 L.ed. 286), this Court said:
"The purpose of the provision is apparent upon its face. No analysis is necessary to reach it. It was to bring about uniformity in the law of procedure in the federal and state courts of the same locality. It had its origin in the code enactments of many of the states. While in the federal tribunals the common law pleadings, forms, and practice were adhered to, in the state courts of the same district, the simpler forms of the local code prevailed. This involved the necessity on the part of the bar of studying two distinct systems of remedial law, and of practicing according to the wholly dissimilar requirements of both. The inconvenience of such a state of things is obvious. The evil was a serious one. It was the aim of the provision in question to remove it. This was done by bringing about the conformity in the courts of the United States which it prescribes. The remedy was complete. The personal administration by the judge of his duties while sitting upon the bench was not complained of. . . . The personal conduct and administration of the judge in the discharge of his separate functions is, in our judgment,
neither practice, pleading, nor a form nor mode of proceeding within the meaning of those terms as found in the context."
See also Indianapolis & St. Louis R. Co. v. Horst, 93 U. S. 291, 93 U. S. 300.
"It is now a settled rule in the courts of the United States that, whenever, in the trial of a civil case, it is clear that the state of the evidence is such as not to warrant a verdict for a party, and that, if such a verdict were rendered the other party would be entitled to a new trial, it is the right and duty of the judge to direct the jury to find according to the views of the court. Such is the constant practice, and it is a convenient one. It saves time and expense. It gives scientific certainty to the law in its application to the facts and promotes the ends of justice."
Bowditch v. Boston, 101 U. S. 16, 101 U. S. 18; Pleasants v. Fant, 22 Wall. 116, 89 U. S. 122; Oscanyan v. Arms Co., 103 U. S. 261, 103 U. S. 265; Randall v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 109 U. S. 478, 109 U. S. 482; District of Columbia v. Moulton, 182 U. S. 576, 182 U. S. 582; Hepner v. United States, 213 U. S. 103, 213 U. S. 113. And this rule is not subject to modification by state statutes or Constitutions. Indianapolis & St. Louis R. Co. v. Horst, supra; St. Louis, Iron Mt. & Southern Ry. v. Vickers, 122 U. S. 360, 122 U. S. 363; Lincoln v. Power, 151 U. S. 436, 151 U. S. 442.
At the common law as generally understood and applied, a nonsuit could be taken freely at any time before verdict, if not indeed before judgment. Confiscation Cases, 7 Wall. 454, 74 U. S. 457; Derick v. Taylor, 171 Mass. 444, 445; Bac.Abr. Nonsuit (D). And see Pleasants v. Fant, supra, 89 U. S. 122. The right is substantial. When and how it may be asserted we think are questions relating directly to practice and mode of proceeding within intendment of the Conformity Act.
Section 3387 Virginia Code (1904) provides: "A party shall not be allowed to suffer a nonsuit, unless he do so before the jury retire from the bar." Prior to this provision, a plaintiff there had the absolute right to take a
voluntary nonsuit at any time before verdict. Harrison v. Clemens, 112 Va. 371, 373. Chapter 27, Va.Acts 1912, directs: "That in no action tried before a jury shall the trial judge give to the jury a peremptory instruction directing what verdict the jury shall render." And c. 42, idem, provides:
"In all suits or motions hereafter, when the evidence is concluded before the court and jury, the party tendering the demurrer to evidence shall state in writing specifically the grounds of demurrer relied on, and the demurree shall not be forced to join in the said demurrer until the specific grounds upon which the demurrant relies are stated in writing; nor shall any grounds of demurrer not thus specifically stated be considered, except that the court may, in its discretion, allow the demurrant to withdraw the demurrer; may allow the joinder in demurrer to be withdrawn by the demurree, and new evidence admitted, or a nonsuit to be taken until the jury retire from the bar."
Citing Parks v. Ross, 11 How. 362, 52 U. S. 373, and Richardson v. Boston, 19 How. 263 (See also Schuchardt v. Allens, 1 Wall. 359, 68 U. S. 370), petitioner maintains that, in the federal courts, the practice of directing verdicts has superseded the demurrer to evidence, and should be controlled by the same general principles. Therefore, it is said, the statutory rule which gives the judge discretion to allow or refuse a nonsuit after joinder in such a demurrer applies when there is a motion for directed verdict.
Obviously the laws of Virginia recognize a marked distinction between demurrer to evidence and direction of a verdict -- the former is permitted; the latter is expressly prohibited. And the different nature and effect of the two things has been pointed out in Oscanyan v. Arms Co., supra, 103 U. S. 264; Central Transportation Co. v. Pullman's Palace Car Co., 139 U. S. 39, and Slocum v. New York Life Insurance Co., 228 U. S. 364, 228 U. S. 388. The conclusion announced in Parks v. Southern Ry. Co., 143
F. 276, 277, that, because federal courts may in proper cases direct verdicts, therefore, in the exercise of sound discretion, they may deny an application for leave to take a nonsuit and direct verdict for defendant, is not well founded.
Under the Virginia statute, in the absence of a demurrer to the evidence and joinder therein, the plaintiff may take a nonsuit at any time before submission of the case to the jury and their retirement. The conformity statute gives the same right in federal courts. This conclusion accords with opinions by the Circuit Courts of Appeals for the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits. Knight v. Illinois Central R. Co., 180 F. 368,; Meyer v. National Biscuit Co., 168 F. 906; Chicago, M. & St. P. Ry. Co. v. Metalstaff, 101 F. 769.
The judgment below must be reversed, and the cause remanded to the district court with direction to set aside the judgment in favor of respondent and sustain motion to enter a nonsuit. Knight v. Illinois Central R. Co., supra, 374; Harrison v. Clemens, supra, 374-375.
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Archive for December 20th, 2006
Video: Cheney to take the stand in Scooter Libby case
Posted in Uncategorized on December 20, 2006| Leave a Comment »
A segment on this morning’s CNN broadcast discussed Vice President Dick Cheney’s planned testimony as a defense witness in the Justice Department’s perjury case against former White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. CNN broadcaster Soledad O’Brien remarked that “it can be kind of confusing” but that “the big take away from this is ‘the VP on the stand.'”
CNN correspondent John King noted that Cheney’s testimony could be “potentially, politically damaging.”
U.S. Not Winning War in Iraq, Bush Says for 1st Time
President Plans to Expand Army, Marine Corps To Cope With Strain of Multiple Deployments
President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the “stressed” U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.
As he searches for a new strategy for Iraq, Bush has now adopted the formula advanced by his top military adviser to describe the situation. “We’re not winning, we’re not losing,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. The assessment was a striking reversal for a president who, days before the November elections, declared, “Absolutely, we’re winning.”
In another turnaround, Bush said he has ordered Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to develop a plan to increase the troop strength of the Army and Marine Corps, heeding warnings from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill that multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan are stretching the armed forces toward the breaking point. “We need to reset our military,” said Bush, whose administration had opposed increasing force levels as recently as this summer.
But in a wide-ranging session in the Oval Office, the president said he interpreted the Democratic election victories six weeks ago not as a mandate to bring the U.S. involvement in Iraq to an end but as a call to find new ways to make the mission there succeed. He confirmed that he is considering a short-term surge in troops in Iraq, an option that top generals have resisted out of concern that it would not help.
A substantial military expansion will take years and would not immediately affect the war in Iraq. But it would begin to address the growing alarm among commanders about the state of the armed forces. Although the president offered no specifics, other U.S. officials said the administration is preparing plans to bolster the nation’s permanent active-duty military with as many as 70,000 additional troops.
A force structure expansion would accelerate the already-rising costs of war. The administration is drafting a supplemental request for more than $100 billion in additional funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the $70 billion already approved for this fiscal year, according to U.S. officials. That would be over 50 percent more than originally projected for fiscal 2007, making it by far the costliest year since the 2003 invasion.
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has approved more than $500 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for terrorism-related operations elsewhere. An additional $100 billion would bring overall expenditures to $600 billion, exceeding those for the Vietnam War, which, adjusted for inflation, cost $549 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
For all the money, commanders have grown increasingly alarmed about the burden of long deployments and the military’s ability to handle a variety of threats around the world simultaneously. Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, warned Congress last week that the active-duty Army “will break” under the strain of today’s war-zone rotations. Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that “the active Army is about broken.”
Democrats have been calling for additional troops for years. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) proposed an increase of 40,000 troops during his 2004 campaign against Bush, only to be dismissed by the administration. As recently as June, the Bush administration opposed adding more troops because restructuring “is enabling our military to get more war-fighting capability from current end strength.”
But Bush yesterday had changed his mind. “I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the Army, the Marines,” he said. “And I talked about this to Secretary Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea.”
In describing his decision, Bush tied it to the broader struggle against Islamic extremists around the world rather than to Iraq specifically. “It is an accurate reflection that this ideological war we’re in is going to last for a while and that we’re going to need a military that’s capable of being able to sustain our efforts and to help us achieve peace,” he said.
Bush chose a different term than Powell. “I haven’t heard the word ‘broken,’ ” he said, “but I’ve heard the word, ‘stressed.’ . . . We need to reset our military. There’s no question the military has been used a lot. And the fundamental question is, ‘Will Republicans and Democrats be able to work with the administration to assure our military and the American people that we will position our military so that it is ready and able to stay engaged in a long war?’ “
Democrats pounced on Bush’s comments. “I am glad he has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces . . . but this is where the Democrats have been for two years,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), the new House Democratic Caucus chairman. Kerry issued a statement calling Bush’s move a “pragmatic step needed to deal with the warnings of a broken military,” but he noted that he opposes increasing troops in Iraq. Even before news of Bush’s interview, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters that the military is “bleeding” and “we have to apply the tourniquet and strengthen the forces.”
The Army has already temporarily increased its force level from 482,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 to 507,000 today and soon to 512,000. But the Army wants to make that 30,000-soldier increase permanent and then add between 20,000 and 40,000 more on top of that, according to military and civilian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Every additional 10,000 soldiers would cost about $1.2 billion a year, according to the Army. Because recruitment and training take time, officials cautioned that any boost would not be felt in a significant way until at least 2008.
Bush, who has always said that the United States is headed for victory in Iraq, conceded yesterday what Gates, Powell and most Americans in polls have already concluded. “An interesting construct that General Pace uses is, ‘We’re not winning, we’re not losing,’ ” Bush said, referring to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs chairman, who was spotted near the Oval Office before the interview. “There’s been some very positive developments. . . . [But] obviously the real problem we face is the sectarian violence that needs to be dealt with.”
Asked yesterday about his “absolutely, we’re winning” comment at an Oct. 25 news conference, the president recast it as a prediction rather than an assessment. “Yes, that was an indication of my belief we’re going to win,” he said.
Bush said he has not yet made a decision about a new strategy for Iraq and would wait for Gates to return from a trip there to assess the situation. “I need to talk to him when he gets back,” Bush said. “I’ve got more consultations to do with the national security team, which will be consulting with other folks. And I’m going to take my time to make sure that the policy, when it comes out, the American people will see that we . . . have got a new way forward.”
Among the options under review by the White House is sending 15,000 to 30,000 more troops to Iraq for six to eight months. The idea has the support of important figures such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and has been pushed by some inside the White House, but the Joint Chiefs have balked because they think advocates have not adequately defined the mission, according to U.S. officials.
The chiefs have warned that a short-term surge could lead to more attacks against U.S. troops, according to the officials, who described the review on the condition of anonymity because it is not complete. Bush would not discuss such ideas in detail but said “all options are viable.”
While top commanders question the value of a surge, they have begun taking moves that could prepare for one, should Bush order it. Defense officials said yesterday that the U.S. Central Command has made two separate requests to Gates for additional forces in the Middle East, including an Army brigade of about 3,000 troops to be used as a reserve force in Kuwait and a second Navy carrier strike group to move to the Persian Gulf.
Gates has yet to approve the moves, which could increase U.S. forces in the region by as many as 10,000 troops, officials said. The previous theater reserve force, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, was recently moved to Iraq’s Anbar province to help quell insurgent violence. Gen. George W. Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, has called for the additional brigade — likely the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division — to be positioned to move into Iraq hotspots if needed.
The additional carrier strike group would give Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the Central Command, more flexibility in a volatile region, said one official. While such a move would certainly send a pointed message to Iran, the official said it would also allow additional strike capabilities in Iraq.
Bush Plans to Put More Troops in Iraq
Posted in Uncategorized on December 20, 2006| 2 Comments »
Interview: Bush Plans to Boost Size of Military in Iraq to Fight Long-Term Terrorism War
WASHINGTON – President Bush, working to recraft his strategy in Iraq, said Tuesday that he plans to increase the size of the U.S. military so it can fight a long-term war against terrorism.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Bush said he has asked his new defense chief, Robert Gates, to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces. The president did not say how many troops might be added, but said he agreed with officials in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the current military is being stretched too thin to deal with demands of fighting terrorism.
“I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops the Army, the Marines,” Bush said in the Oval Office session. “And I talked about this to Secretary Gates and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea.”
Top generals have expressed concern that even temporarily shipping thousands of more troops would be largely ineffective in the absence of bold new political and economic steps, and that it would leave the already stretched Army and Marines Corps even thinner once the surge ended.
They also worry that it feeds a perception that the strife and chaos in Iraq is mainly a military problem; in their view it is largely political, fed by economic distress.
Bush said he has not yet made a decision about a new strategy for Iraq, which he is expected to announce next month. He said he was waiting for Gates to return from his expected trip to Iraq to get a firsthand look at the situation.
“I need to talk to him when he gets back,” the president said. “I’ve got more consultations to do with the national security team, which will be consulting with other folks. And I’m going to take my time to make sure that the policy, when it comes out, the American people will see that we … have got a new way forward.”
Bush said his decision to increase the size of the armed forces was in response not just to the war in Iraq, but to the broader struggle against Islamic extremists around the globe.
“It is an accurate reflection that this ideological war we’re in is going to last for a while and that we’re going to need a military that’s capable of being able to sustain our efforts and to help us achieve peace,” he said.
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FUNDING CRITERIA
FUNDING FOR GUEST PERFORMANCES
Documentation 12-2015
> VIDEO: „SHOW YOUR LEGACY.“
Victoria Phillips Geduld and Elisabeth Aldrich about Jane Dudley "Time is money" (1934), dance as historical archive and evidence, how dance history can be rewritten and the importance of open archives.
Victoria Phillips Geduld
is a doctoral candidate in cultural history and foreign policy at Columbia University where she received her B.A., followed by an M.B.A. in Finance. She holds two Master's degrees from New York University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in History. Her articles on dance have appeared in American Communist History, Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Ballet Review, The Routledge History of Modernism, and the anthology, Ethel Winter and her Choreography. The Centre National de la Dance published her book, ‘Dance is a Weapon.’ She curated the exhibit, "Dance is a Weapon," which toured France from 2008 through 2010, as well as Politics and the Dancing Body for the Library of Congress. She was awarded the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award by the Society of Dance History Scholars in 2008. Works on finance have appeared in the New York Times and the American Communist History among others. Ms Geduld lectures both in the United States and internationally on cultural diplomacy and dance. Until 1993, Geduld worked as a fund manager for Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co. Before receiving her B.A., Ms. Geduld worked as a professional dancer and performed in theatres, films and on television.
Elisabeth Aldrich
As Executive Director of the Dance Heritage Coalition from 1999 to 2006, Elizabeth Aldrich initiated the copyright and fair use project that resulted in "Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-Related Materials" (2009). Since 2006, she has served as curator of dance at the Library of Congress. Ms. Aldrich provided the research, narrative text, and dance reconstructions for the Library of Congress’s American Memory Program Internet project, An American Ballroom Companion, c.1490-1920 and has curated exhibitions on Alvin Ailey, Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev and Politics and the Dancing Body which are all three online. Aldrich has provided choreography for nine feature films and has worked with film directors such as Martin Scorsese, James Ivory, Agnieszka Holland and Rob Minkoff. She is the author of numerous books and chapters.
PAX 2013
Leipzig Ballett restaged Uwe Scholz's 1992 choreography Pax Questuosa, which looks at the socio-political situation in the world and in reunified Germany post-Cold War. MORE
The Live Legacy Project
Angela Guerreiro investigated the connections between German contemporary dance and the Judson Dance Theatre in New York. Dancers, choreographers, students, teachers and experts came together for the six-day symposium.MORE
Aldrich|Elisabeth – Archive – Conversation / Interview – Dance history – Dudley|Jane – Heritage – Phillips Geduld|Victoria – Time is money
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With $12M Burning A Hole In Its Pocket, London’s YPlan Wants New York To Be More Socially Spontaneous
Natasha Lomas @riptari / 6 years
Yplan, the London-based startup that’s building a platform for selling last-minute event-booking on mobile, has closed a $12 million (£7.9 million) Series A, led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments also participated in the round, along with a swathe of co-investors, including A-Grade, Kevin Colleran and David Morin’s Slow Ventures, and Shakil Khan, investor and advisor to Spotify and Summly.
YPlan has previously raised $1.7 million (£1.06 million) in seed funding, bringing its total funding to date to $13.7 million. The startup plans to use its new funding to fuel international expansion — with the second city (after London, where it launched in November last year) in its sights being New York. It plans to launch there during the second half of this year, and will then use New York as its North American base, as it looks to expand to other U.S. cities. London will remain as its European base as it looks to expand to other cities in the region, and also for a future push into Asia.
There’s no firm roadmap on which U.S. cities it’ll be tapping after New York but co-founder and CEO, Rytis Vitkauskas, tells TechCrunch that likely candidates include San Francisco, L.A., Boston, Chicago and Austin. “We’ll decide as we go along but the cities that we have in mind are the more densely populated cities with a lot of smartphones,” he says. “And also with a good density of events… That’s the priority list.”
As for why New York specifically, it’s not hard to imagine why a social events app would settle on the Big Apple. Basically it’s got the right blend of time-strapped young smartphone owners who want to go out, coupled with a steady supply of events to go to, says Vitkauskas. “New York is a large city, a lot of people but also a lot of our target audience — our core demographic is people between 20 and late 30s, that are typically starved for time, so they’re very busy. For them time is everything, and you also don’t always have time to plan for the last minute or their plans have changed at the last minute,” he says.
“On the other hand there’s a high density of events happening in New York every single day. Plus surrounding both of those is the fact that New York has a great going out culture. People are out four or five days in a week, just actively engaging with social activities and so YPlan essentially just plugs into all the existing trends.”
YPlan is mobile only, which plays to the serendipitous/spontaneous going out niche it’s targeting. It’s definitely not competing with the big web-based ticketing platforms, says Vitkauskas. The focus is firmly on personalised last-minute recommendations for time-strapped folk — so it’s putting money into what he calls its “secret sauce,” aka its personalisation and recommendation engines.
YPlan users aren’t presented with huge lists of stuff to browse through — a model that doesn’t make sense on mobile — rather they are pushed “a carefully curated list of up to 15 events to go to every night.” YPlan is even writing the snippet-sized descriptions itself, telling its users why such and such an event is a must attend for them. So really YPlan is acting as a personalised filter to flag up cool stuff so its users don’t have to go looking for it. Frankly it’s the sort of feature you could imagine Google adding to Google Now, or Apple to Siri.
Currently YPlan has some 200,000 active users in London, and claims that more than 10 percent of iPhone owners in the city carry the app (I must be one of the 90 percent that don’t then). Since launching in November last year it says it has featured more than 2,500 events on its platform.
The startup works directly with events organisers to get their events on its platform, meaning its headcount is already up to around 30 staff — which it says will probably expand to around 100 over the next year and a half. Its business model is based solely on taking a cut of any events booked through its platform — so it’s already booking revenue — with the aim being to keep the monetisation process simple and free of detracting clutter like ads, says Vitkauskas.
Asked what attracted its VC backers to the YPlan model, he says it’s not so much the idea but the execution, with the company having managed to achieve decent traction in the half year or so its app has been in the market.
“The idea of YPlan is not new necessarily. Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox started Lastminute.com with exactly this vision in mind, and what Brent saw — he’s also an adviser to YPlan — and when he saw our prototypes first he said this is what Lastminute.com was meant to be but we were there 14 years too early. And now the time has come. Now the mobile Internet’s fast enough, smartphones are smart enough and GPS technology is up to speed enough and consumers are ready to transact through the phone and they weren’t ready to transact just a couple of years ago,” says Vitkauskas. “Likewise the event organisers are now ready to embrace the developments in technology.”
YPlan is currently on iPhone only, with plans to launch an Android app “later in the summer.” It’s also going to make a dedicated iPad app, tailoring the experience to fit the different use-case of the tablet device. Vitkauskas adds that it will also look at whether to launch apps in other mobile platforms down the line.
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Why Roman Josi was the right choice for Predators captain
Roman Josi was named the eighth captain in Predators history on Tuesday, and given his value to and experience with the franchise, the decision was a no-brainer.
Roman Josi.|Danny Murphy/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
By Jared Clinton
When Nashville Predators GM David Poile introduced Roman Josi as the franchise’s eighth captain on Tuesday, he said it was the right time for the 27-year-old to take on the responsibility. And not that there has ever been any reason to question Poile, one of the most successful and well-respected GMs in the league, but he couldn’t have been more accurate in his assessment.
After the team’s captaincy was vacated for the second straight summer following the retirement of Mike Fisher, the focus in Nashville turned to his replacement. There were plenty of suggestions, from members of the deep blueline to one of the offensive studs up front, but Josi’s name was always the one that stuck out most.
Even last summer, when the captaincy was up in the air following the trade of Shea Weber to the Montreal Canadiens, it seemed like Josi was one of the clear front-runners. The honor, as we know now, went to Fisher, but even with the ‘C’ heading to the veteran pivot, it seemed like a situation where he was a transitional captain, a leader with an expiration date.
Reason being is that Josi, especially following the trade of Weber, had moved into the position as the team’s top defenseman, a role he had earned in every sense of the word. Just consider his development: by his sophomore season, he had rocketed up the depth chart to a first-pairing role. He showed his gift for the offensive game by his third season and has excelled in each season since, scoring 205 points in 306 games over the past four campaigns, the fifth-most among all NHL defensemen. And by Year 4, Josi was a serious Norris Trophy candidate, finishing fifth in voting. He has followed it up with fifth- and 11th-place finishes across the past two seasons, respectively, and some would have argued that his well-rounded game made him the Predators’ premier defenseman even before the trade that sent Weber packing.
That said, there would have been cause for concern if the franchise regressed last season under Josi’s watch as the Predators’ undisputed No. 1 rearguard. Quite the opposite happened, however. While Josi had a down year offensively, he took a bigger role on the back end and in the dressing room, helping to guide the league’s best blueline. He averaged more ice time than any other Predators rearguard, a whopping 25 minutes per night, and he helped Nashville weather an early storm to turn things around and land a playoff spot. And we all know what happened next.
Over the next two months in the 2017 NHL playoffs, Josi took his game to another level. He was the Predators’ second-highest post-season scorer, registering six goals and 14 points in 22 games, and his contributions ranged from the power play to the penalty kill and even included a game-winning goal as he skated the biggest minutes of any defender. The Predators went on to sweep the Chicago Blackhawks, defeat the St. Louis Blues and pushed past the Anaheim Ducks. And when all was said and done, Josi had helped guide the Predators to a Western Conference championship and the franchise’s first-ever berth in the Stanley Cup final.
READ ALSO: Five rookie goalies who ruled the playoffs: Can the Blues’ Binnington join the club?
Thus, it seemed to some that even if Fisher would have stuck around for one more year, he was only going to be keeping the ‘C’ warm for when Josi was believed to be ready. And when Fisher hung up his skates this summer, it only made sense that the Predators would shuffle the captaincy down the line to Josi, who is now another year older, more experienced and has a better understanding of what it means to be the captain having watched not only Weber but also Fisher in the role.
Of course, others outside the organization — and possibly some within — had their favorites, but many of those players have been recognized in one way or another. Ryan Ellis, for example, will take on the newly minted associate captain role. Mattias Ekholm, Filip Forsberg and Ryan Johansen, meanwhile, will each serve as alternate captains. But that does leave some outside the official captaincy roles, the most notable of which is P.K. Subban.
While Subban was acknowledged as one of the members of the team’s “leadership group,” that he won’t be wearing a letter on his sweater next season will be a head-scratcher for some. After all, Subban arrived in exchange for Weber as part of last summer’s most highly publicized trade, and the 28-year-old, who is big in skill and personality, has a lot to offer on the ice, in the dressing room, in front of the media and in the community. But to suggest Subban should have been or needed to be a part of the fabric of the leadership group, wearing an ‘A’ or even leaping above Josi and earning the ‘C,’ is a stretch. No doubt, Subban brings an almost intangible excitement to the franchise and his acquisition helped further legitimize the Predators as a playoff threat and Stanley Cup contender, but his tenure with the club has only spanned one season and is exceeded by every player with a letter.
There’s something to be said for tenure with an organization, too, and it’s something Josi most certainly has. No player, not Ellis, Ekholm, Forsberg or Johansen, has been through the highs and lows with the team that Josi has. When he came aboard full-time in 2012-13, the Predators had the first of what ended up being two straight seasons outside of the playoff picture. The second of those years, the 2013-14 season, was an 88-point campaign, the worst the franchise had had since 2008-09.
Now, coming off the best season the team has seen, Josi is the face, both on and off the ice, of the almost complete 180 the Predators have done. And factoring in Josi’s development, value and experience with the franchise, there couldn’t have been a better choice to wear the ‘C’ in Nashville.
Want more in-depth features and expert analysis on the game you love? Subscribe to The Hockey News magazine.
Tags: nashville predators, nhl
Jared Clinton
Jared Clinton is a writer and web editor with The Hockey News. He's been with the team since 2014. He was born, raised and resides in Winnipeg, where he can be found missing the net on outdoor rinks all over town.
Love, loss and the Luxembourg Puckers: ‘The Spirit of the Game’ shows human side of hockey
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Home/All-Posts/World Famous Hip-Hop Family Day Announces Big Daddy Kane as its 2019 Headliner
All-Posts
World Famous Hip-Hop Family Day Announces Big Daddy Kane as its 2019 Headliner
The MinorityEye February 22, 2019
World Famous Hip-Hop Family Day is proud to announce Big Daddy Kane as its headliner for 2019. A Grammy Award-winning artist who began his career in 1986 as a member of the rap collective the Juice Crew, Big Daddy Kane is widely considered one of the most skilled MCs in hip hop and has been ranked on several lists as one of the top 10 MCs of all time.
Kane started out as a Brooklyn battle rapper before joining Juice Crew alongside Marley Marl and Biz Markie. His 1988 debut album, Long Live the Kane, featured the hit “Ain’t No Half Steppin’” and “Raw.” His LP, It’s A Big Daddy Thing, featured “Smooth Operator,” “Warm It Up,” and “I Get The Job Done.”
“Big Daddy Kane is of the most profound lyricists of all time—hard enough for the fellas and smooth enough for the ladies, with second-to-none showmanship,” says Love, Peace & Hip-Hop founder and executive director FatRat Da Czar. “We’d attempted to secure him for the festival two other times, but the third time is the charm. He will undoubtedly set the SODA on fire.”
Big Daddy Kane has collaborated with renowned artists such as Kool G Rap, Masta Ace, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Patti LaBelle, and Quincy Jones. In 2005, Kane was honored during the VH1 Hip-Hop Honors. After a medley of his hits was performed by T.I., Black Thought, and Common, he came out to perform “Warm It Up, Kane” with his old dancers, Scoob and Scrap.
“Kane,” an acronym for King Asiatic Nobody’s Equal Kane, comes from his youthful fascination with martial arts films. “Big Daddy” comes from the name of a character Vincent Price played in the 1963 film Beach Party. The artist is also known as B.D.K., Dark Gable, King Asiatic Nobody’s Equal, Blackanova, and Count Macula.
A four-day celebration capped by a free, family-friendly festival on Saturday, April 13, the 7th annual World Famous Hip-Hop Family Day will bring over 16,000 attendees to Columbia’s Main Street. Presented by Love, Peace & Hip-Hop, the City of Columbia, and WellCare Healthy Connections, Hip-Hop Family Day is an unforgettable day of fun with the best and brightest live performers, DJs, B-Boy dance crews, hip-hop visual artists, and craft and food vendors.
Hip Hop Culture hip-hop
The MinorityEye
The MinorityEye is a news and information aggregator that curates the voices, thoughts and perspectives of minority writers, bloggers, authors, reporters, columnists, pundits, consultants and thought leaders as well as those who write about minorities and issues that impact people and communities of color.
EngenuitySC and Richland One More Than Double Number of “Dress to Impress” Showcases for 2019
DNC Issues Plan for A More Inclusive Delegate Selection Process
Richland County Names New Administrator
SBA Announces Makerspace Training, Collaboration and Hiring (MaTCH) Pilot Competition
Columbia Taiwanese Community Celebrates Taiwanese American Heritage Month with Da-Guan Dance Theater Performance
Pilots Offer Diverse Kids Free Lessons to Promote Aviation Inclusion
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In Russia, downloading 419GB over 3G in one week wins you a $5000 holiday
by Matt Brian — in Mobile
Whilst mobile operators in Europe and North America seem to be doing all they can to restrict the amount of data downloaded by their customers, Russian carrier MegaFon wants its customers to enjoy the true definition of unlimited data by handing out prizes worth up to 1 million rubles ($33,000) to people who downloaded the most data in a week.
Russian news website C News reports that between November 1, 2011 to January 31, 2012, MegaFon customers that bought a 3G modem were asked to download as much data as they physically could, rewarding the person who downloaded the most data during that period with a 150,000 ruble (around $5,000) holiday overseas courtesy of Russian travel agency Neva.
The winner of the contest managed to consume 419GB of 3G data in one week, securing a trip abroad, but also helping MegaFon show its data prowess.
The company used the competition as a chance to show the breadth of its data coverage, announcing that it covers over 80% of north-western Russia with its 3G services.
According to the company’s director of public relations, second and third places were taken by the inhabitants of small Russian towns Novgorod and Yaroslavl, noting MegaFon’s ability to offer 21-megabit per second speeds even in rural areas. The runners-up were apparently very close to the winner in terms of data consumption.
It appears in Russia, unlimited means unlimited. Instead of the 2GB per month plans that masquerade as unlimited in the UK and the US, MegaFon allowed its customers to bombard its networks over a three month period, delivering high-speed and reliable data services across Russia but also providing unmetered access.
Read the latest mobile news every day at TNW Mobile
Read next: Google explains how celebs and politics are driving Google+ growth in Asia
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Pop Project Reviews
We review things and tell you whether it’s worth the money or not
Sounds like Teen Spirit
Posted on May 14, 2013 by Steven Kaufman in Albums, Featured, Music, Old School Reviews, Pop Project Reviews and tagged A-Teens, Amit Paul, Dhani Lennevald, Marie Serneholt, Music, Pop project, Sara Lumholdt, Steven Kaufman, Teen Spirit, The Pop Project: With Steven Kaufman, WRMU, WRMU 91.1 FM.
Day 2 of our review of the A-Teens’ discography has held us to their second album, Teen Spirit. The album is the first to feature their own music (minus one cover of a dreamstreet song but I’ll get to that later) and showed that they are a force to be reckoned. A small force like a gust of wind but still a force.
This album is a far cry from their Europop roots. It sounds like it’s more tailored to the American audience with it sounds that reminds me of *NSYNC’s “No String Attached” and Britney Spears’ “Oops!…I Did it Again” albums. Which would make sense why this album is a pretty forgettable minus a few songs. Most of the songs on the album just fall flat and make you skip over to one of the singles.
What did work for this album?: The single were pretty much the best things on the album. They are the best part of the album and are the only reason why you would buy it. “Firefly” wasn’t a single but it’s one of the better tracks that should have been a single. One of the best singles they released was “Sugar Rush”, a Dreamstreet Cover. This song is probably the best tracks they have released and one of their most successful singles.
Rating: 2 generous doses of Teen Spirit of out 5
Talking about The ᗅᗺᗷᗅ Generation
Posted on May 13, 2013 by Steven Kaufman in Albums, Featured, Music, Old School Reviews, Pop Project Reviews and tagged A*Teens, ABBA, ABBA Museum, Amit Paul, Dhani Lennevald, Marie Serneholt, Pop project, Sara Lumholdt, Steven Kaufman, The ABBA Generation, The Pop Project: With Steven Kaufman, WRMU, WRMU 91.1 FM.
In honor the recent début of the ᗅᗺᗷᗅ museum in Sweden, I thought it would only be fitting if we did a review of music by the 4 sexiest swedish teens of the 90s- ᗅᗺᗷᗅ TEEN, better know as The A*Teens. Today we start with their first album: The ᗅᗺᗷᗅ Generation.
This album was pretty much not your average run of the mill tribute album. They took a normal tribute album and pretty much gave it a dose of ecstasy. They reworked all the ᗅᗺᗷᗅ hits and made them more toward the genre that was taking the world by storm- Europpop. Europop was more trance and club oriented. A*Teens helped fuel what was becoming more and more a Europop music scene in America (thanks to Eiffel 65 and Aqua). This album delivered high amounts Europop with every songs creating that you were going to become a slave to music and force to dance (sidenote: I wonder if this was what Britney was taking about).This album was perfect for just driving in your car and dancing.
What didn’t work?: The Ballads. Slow songs like “One of Us” and “Our Last Summer” just didn’t sound and just felt awkward because of the beat. It fit but it still just felt like awkward. I do give them a props for reintroducing the world to the music of ABBA but they should have spent more time on the ballads.
Demi Lovato new CD send fans into a glitter attack
Posted on May 8, 2013 by Bailey Miller in Albums, Bailey's Review, Celebrity News, Featured, Music, Pop Project Reviews and tagged Bailey Miller, Demi, Demi Lovato, Disney, Disney Channel, Pop project, The Pop Project: With Steven Kaufman, WRMU, WRMU 91.1 FM.
The clock is still ticking for Lovatics everywhere. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 3 months, you know that Demi Lovato’s fourth studio album, self titled as “DEMI” drops on May 14th. Eager and ruthless Lovatics however have recently tweeted their little hearts out, myself included, to unlock each song on the upcoming album a WEEK EARLY. Yes, each song from DEMI is now able to be streamed via her official Vevo page, DemiLovatoVevo. So as a self proclaimed and quite extreme Lovatic (I have a tattoo dedicated to the girl for God’s sake), who was recently blessed with this opportunity to listen to each song from the album IN THEIR ENTIRETY a week early…I feel it is my duty to present you with a track by track review of each song on DEMI, and give my overall thoughts on the album. So, here goes nothing…
Heart Attack:
The first single that was released in March starts the album off with a familiar bang. You know the song, you love the song and it sets the tone for the rest of the album.
Favorite parts: That crazy run of high notes in the bridge…Damn girl.
Made in the USA:
This track was recently announced as the next single and music video from the album, which Demi directed herself. The track is lighthearted and poppy, and sounds like a radio station’s dream. Perfectly mainstream with just the right amount of uniqueness that is quintessentially Demi.
Favorite parts: The banjo picking near the end of the song, and the catchy chorus. “Our love was made in the USA…”
Without the Love:
Upbeat track with a slightly depressing theme, once again perfectly and totally Demi. The melody to this is hella catchy and seriously makes me wonder who this song is exactly about, as do the majority of the songs on the album…where are the T-Swift type hidden games in the liner notes when you need them?
Favorite parts: The bridge, and the chorus are so powerful. “What good is a love song without the love?…”
Neon Lights:
THIS SONG! Oh my god…SO different from anything Demi has ever done on an album. Mainstream sounding? Yes. But in this case it works perfectly. The chorus is crazy catchy and was stuck in my head long after I first heard it. The little breakdown after the chorus makes me want to fist pump…and I don’t fist pump. Ever. It’s safe to say you actually see neon lights in your head as you listen to this song, and long after it ends.
Favorite parts: That frickin’ chorus is LIFE. “Baby when they look up at the sky. We’ll be shooting stars just passing by. You’ll be comin’ home with me tonight. And we’ll be burning up like neon lights…” And not to mention those notes are CRAZY.
Demi tweeted lyrics to this song last week, sending myself and all Lovatics into a tizzy. This song is beautiful. The melody is so unique and different in the pre-chorus, then that drum that comes in when the chorus hits is perfect. Simply put, it is too good. Perfect, and very reminiscent of something that could have been on “Here We Go Again”.
Favorite parts: The lyrics. “There’s a boy lost his way looking for someone to play. There’s a girl in the window, tears rolling down her face…” So youthful and just plain pretty. Loving it.
Probably the most hyped up song on the album. Demi had tweeted about this song in early 2013 when work first began on the album, and Lovatics have been awaiting this song in particular the most. The melody is beautiful, and her voice is spot on. Not a speck of autotune here. Crossing my fingers I will get to hear this song live because I feel like she will just kill it. So good.
Favorite parts: “Can you be my nightingale? Sing to me, I know you’re there…”…and those notes she hits. Woah.
In Case
Not gonna lie. I heard the demo version of this a week before it was released, and I wasn’t thrilled. However after hearing Demi’s version of the track, the song has grown on me. A depressing song? Yes. But beautiful nonetheless. Not my favorite track on the album, but still very good.
Favorite parts: Some pretty damn powerful lyrics here…”Strong enough to leave you, but weak enough to need you. Cared enough to let you walk away…”
Really Don’t Care” (feat. Cher Lloyd)
LOVE this song. So catchy. Definitely one of those taunting kind of songs to say “Guess what…I hate you.” Also one of those that makes me die wanting to know who it’s about. “I can’t believe I ever stayed up writing songs about you…” WHAT?! Who is this about Demi?! I need to know. The only confusing part of this track is the Cher Lloyd collaboration. The girl is in the song for a total of 15 seconds, if that, and is rapping a little diddy that Demi herself could have done way better. I mean it’s a cute little rap but…still…
Favorite parts: Has to be this line, “Now if we meet out on the street I won’t be runnin’ scared. I’ll walk right up to you and put one finger in the air…” Hmm…I wonder what finger that would be? 😉
MY JAM RIGHT NOW. Seriously this song is amazing. I could also see this being a single, and doing very well on radio if given the chance. So catchy and very upbeat. Also one of many songs that have a “fire” theme to them. This album is the epitome of Demi Lovato being represented as a phoenix. Rising from the ashes stronger than ever before…
Favorite parts: “I’m a badass jumping off a moving train. I’m a Jane Bond puttin’ all them guys to shame…I’m a firestarter. I’m a sweet disaster. I melt hearts like water.” LOVE…
Something That We’re Not
Very much like “Really Don’t Care” in that it’s one of those “eff you” kind of songs. Demi apparently has some dude that just needs to get a damn clue and leave her alone. Very catchy song. Love the beginning too.
Favorite part: The point in the song when everything stops, and Demi just says straight up: “Not gonna happen dude.”…OOOOH! Do you need some ice for that BURN?
Never Been Hurt
Pretty good song. But very similar to the track “Unbroken” from her last album. The lyrics are also quite similar. “I will love you, like I’ve never been hurt…” Still very catchy and good beat though. It has one of those breakdown moments at the end of the chorus that seems very T-Swift in “I Knew You Were Trouble”. One of those songs that probably should have been a bonus track, but still sits contently on the album anyways…
Favorite part: The little breakdown post-chorus, and the bridge.
Shouldn’t Come Back
Slower song. Bit of a sad song…But the vocals on this are unbelievable. The falsetto on the chorus is a refreshing change of pace, since the majority of the tracks on the album are Demi full on belting. For some reason I feel like this song could be about her estranged biological father…but that’s just my opinion. These lyrics are also some of the most powerful and deep on the entire album. You can just tell that Demi was in tears as she recorded the track. Powerful and perfect. Rounds out the second half of the album nicely.
Favorite part: The lyrics are crazy deep and too long to list…and the hauntingly heartbroken melody is beautiful.
If ever there were a Demi song to describe my life, this is it. This is basically the “Skyscraper” of this album. This is without a doubt the most powerful song on the album. Not gonna lie…I cried when I first heard it. Demi lays everything out on the line in this song. Basically saying she’s been through hell, and has made it through stronger than ever. Once again the fire and ashes references run all through this track for an even more present phoenix theme. Although this song will most likely never be a single, I feel like it would have the same radio appeal as Christina Aguliera’s “Beautiful” once did. Beautifully composed and arranged, with deep and powerful lyrics. If you don’t feel Demi’s struggle and triumph, or your own for that matter in this song, then you obviously have no soul. Sorry about that….
Favorite parts: The entire thing. Listen to these lyrics. They represent not only my life and most likely many other girls, but more importantly Demi’s life, struggles, and rebirth as a stronger person…”I am a warrior.”
***BONUS TRACK***
I Hate You Don’t Leave Me
This track is the bonus track included with the Target edition of DEMI. The ONLY bonus track at that…I mean…Why can Taylor Swift have an entire special “Red” edition of her album sold at Target with TONS of bonus goodies, and DEMI get’s one song….Anyways, I digress. This track is perfect. A bit of a mellow, more downer of a song, so I can see why they left it off the album to balance out the feel, but in my opinion it should have taken the place of “Never Been Hurt”. This is another one of those way personal songs. The lyrics are almost whispered in places, and you really hear the desperation in Demi’s voice, pleading her love to stay. The song also addresses abandonment issues and lyrics allude to the root of the problem being once again her jerk of a biological father. The song is beautiful though regardless of the subject matter. Do I think it is work going to Target just to buy this edition? No….But do I think you should download it online like I did? Hell yeah.
So there you have it….A track by track review of DEMI. Don’t forget (hey look, a first album pun right there!) to pick up your copy of the album May 14th, or to preorder on iTunes right now….Thanks Hollywood Records for giving this Lovatic something to keep me satisfied until I can get my hands on a physical copy of DEMI. You’re a peach. 😉
Rating: 4.5 Bows out of 5
1 … 97 98 99 100 101 … 103
The Pop Project: with Steven Kaufman
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Cougar Pride is Running High as Golf Teams Score a Rare Double Win
February 28, 2018 Like 0 Tom Cunneff
It’s not every day that our athletic teams set records, but the men’s and women’s golf teams hit a number of remarkable milestones this week.
The College of Charleston men’s golf team claimed its first tournament win of the season at the Loyola (Md.) Intercollegiate.
For the first time both teams won tournaments in the same week – the women on Tuesday at the Edwin Watts/Kiawah Island Spring Classic and the men on Monday at the Loyola (Md.) Intercollegiate at Palm Valley Golf Club in Goodyear, Arizona. The men set a tournament-record and school-record low 54-hole total of 816 (-48), while the women tied a school-record low round of 279 (-9) in the second round. Sophomore Hunter Dunagan (Augusta, Ga.) shot a school-record low round of 62 in the first round for the men’s team. And in just her second tournament as a Cougar, junior newcomer Isi Nilsson (Santiago, Chile) shot a record-low 66 for the women’s team in the second round.
The women’s team led wire to wire in the three-day event – the largest collegiate golf tournament in the country with 43 teams. Sophomore Victoria Huskey (Greenville, S.C.) lead the way at the two-day event at -2 and turning in a career-best finish with a T4.
“It was a great win for the team because they worked extremely hard over the (winter) break to improve on our fall season,” says women’s Head Coach Jamie Futrell, who picked up his 24th career win at the College. “It’s great to see them rewarded for the work they put in and see them play with a lot of confidence.”
Sophomore Logan Sowell (Kershaw, S.C.) led the men with career-low rounds of 66, 67 and 67 to finish 16-under and runner-up to individual medalist Ambrose Abbracciamento of Hartford (-17).
“What a great tournament for our program,” says men’s Head Coach Mark McEntire, who picked up his ninth win. “We broke the team lowest 54-and 36-hole records, the lowest individual round and got a W. I could not be happier for the guys.”
Both teams have a few weeks off now to savor the victories, which is nice since there’s a lot to savor.
Featured image: The College of Charleston women’s golf team won its first tournament of the season at the Edwin Watts/Kiawah Island Spring Classic. Photos courtesy of College of Charleston Athletics.
Tags: athleticsmen's golftoday-featuredwomen's golf
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Discusses Emanuel A.M.E. Church
Meet 6 Alums Creating Unique Culinary Experiences
Tom Cunneff
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CofC to Recognize Birthplace of Civil Rights Activist, Educator Septima Clark
May 1, 2018 4 0 Darcie Goodwin
South Carolina Teaching Fellows Ridgeland Welch and Aly Lain were deep in a discussion about education in the civil rights era during their Foundation of Education class when professor Jon Hale mentioned that Septima Poinsette Clark, a nationally known civil rights leader, education advocate and freedom fighter, was born at a location now embedded within the College of Charleston campus.
The two students immediately wondered why there was no historic marker in front of her birthplace at 105 Wentworth St. Charleston has the Septima Clark Parkway (U.S. Highway 17) that people drive over daily, and her burial spot is well-marked at Old Bethel United Methodist Church Cemetery. Why wouldn’t there be a marker to celebrate her birthplace?
Septima Clark
With the support of Hale and Mary Ann Hartshorn, visiting assistant professor and director of the College’s Teaching Fellows & Teacher Cadet Program, Welch and Lain got the ball rolling. Two years later with the collaboration of more than 100 teaching fellows, School of Education, Health, and Human Performance Dean Fran Welch, faculty and politicians, along with many fundraisers, the historic marker and a portrait of Clark will be unveiled this Thursday, May 3, 2018.
The event, says Lain, will commemorate the life and legacy of a woman who made a positive impact on so many lives.
“We feel strongly about this marker for Clark because we believe in the power of telling stories; the stories we encounter have a great power to inspire us. And that’s what Clark’s story has done for us,” says Lain. “Clark was a woman from Charleston who did not have to do anything, but she chose to do everything. She chose to speak out and demand equal treatment, she chose to educate others to stand up for their rights, she chose again and again to advocate for equity in every way. Her story is one of exceptional power, and we believe she is a figure who can motivate us all to search for our own ways to support equality in all things.”
Clark contributed in a variety of ways to the civil rights movement. She created and led the Citizenship School program, which educated nearly 10,000 African-Americans to pass discriminatory voting tests. As a teacher, she also saw education as a means to freedom and worked with all people to become students of freedom and active change agents, says Hale. She also mentored Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Recognizing Clark’s birthplace is important, says Hale, because it “actively addresses the oversight of African- American and civil rights history in Charleston.”
Hale, whose speciality is the history of American education during the civil rights movement, adds, “The marker makes visible a contribution and a rich history that is often ignored by sanitized versions of history put forth in Charleston’s tourist economy. It also reminds students and educators that our city has a proud history of education activism and people like Ms. Clark have successfully challenged the city to better meet its responsibilities in providing a quality education.”
May 3 marks the 120th anniversary of Clark’s birthdate, so it’s only fitting that it serves as the date of the historic marker dedication. At the unveiling, Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg will issue a proclamation in Clark’s honor, and Charleston’s poet laureate Marcus Amaker will read a poem written especially for the occasion. The dedication will take place at 105 Wentworth St. at 10 a.m. and is free and open to the public.
Thursday afternoon at the College of Charleston’s Hill Gallery on the first floor of the Cato Center at 161 Calhoun St., a portrait of Clark by famed Charleston artist Jonathan Green will be unveiled. The portrait will ultimately be housed at the Avery Research Center where Clark studied when it was the Avery Normal Institute. Gretchen Morgan, Gamma Xi Omega chapter president of the CofC Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., will also speak about Clark, who was a sorority sister. The portrait reception, which is free and open to the public, begins at 4 p.m.
Language on the Historic Marker:
Septima Poinsette Clark, who Martin Luther King Jr. called “the Mother of the Movement,” was a nationally influential Civil Rights activist. She was born at 105 Wentworth St. on May 3, 1898, to Peter Poinsette, former slave, and Victoria Anderson, who was of Haitian descent. Clark earned her teacher’s certificate from Charleston’s Avery Normal Institute and her master’s from Hampton Institute. She taught for nearly 40 years.
In 1953, Clark visited the Highlander Folk School in TN, which was dedicated to training community organizers and pursuing equality for all. Here she developed the “citizenship school” model, which promoted literacy and political education. By 1965 Clark had helped to organize nearly 900 citizenship schools, including the first one on nearby Johns Island, and had helped register more than 50,000 Black voters.
Featured image: Septima Clark’s birthplace at 105 Wentworth St. across from the College of Charleston campus.
Tags: educationschool of education health and human performancetoday-featured
CofC in the News: Week of April 30, 2018
Microfinancing App Wins ImpactX Demo Day
Darcie Goodwin
View all posts by Darcie Goodwin →
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CofC Says Farewell to Interim President Osborne
May 14, 2019 1 0 Amanda Kerr
College of Charleston faculty and staff gathered at the President’s House on Monday, May 13, 2019, to bid farewell to Interim President Stephen C. Osborne ’73, who will retire later this week.
Board of Trustees Chair David M. Hay ’81 wished Osborne and his wife Mary a “joyous, restful and fun retirement.”
Osborne has served as interim president since July 2018. Prior to that he served as the College’s executive vice president and chief financial officer from 2006 to 2017 before serving as a senior advisor to former President Glenn F. McConnell ’69.
“Throughout my time on the Board of Trustees and in my current role as chair of the board, I’ve watched Steve showcase great passion for our academic mission and our student experience,” Hay said during the reception. “He’s always wanted the best for our alma mater, our students, our faculty and our staff. For Steve, being interim president of the College of Charleston has never been about him. It’s always been about our campus community, particularly our students. On behalf of the Board of Trustees, I’d like to simply say thank you.”
Osborne called his departure “bittersweet,” noting, “it’s really been an incredible journey for me,” starting as a student on the campus in 1970 to becoming interim president more than four decades later.
“I leave here today joyous that I’ve had these years here as a part of the College staff, as part of the administration, and truly, truly honored and grateful for this past year as your interim president,” he said.
President-elect Andrew T. Hsu will become the College’s 23rd president on Thursday, May 16, 2019.
Photos by Heather Moran.
Tags: faculty and staffpresident osbornetoday-featured
Move-Out at CofC: A More Sustainable Approach
Researchers Sound Off on Ancient Dolphin Hearing
Grounds Tech Takes Pride in Keeping Campus Streets Clean
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Trump talks to Saudi crown prince on Iran, oil
U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are seen during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina November 30, 2018. REUTERS/Marcos Brindicci
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump spoke on Friday to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about Middle East stability and the oil market, the White House said, after tensions with Iran prompted a rise in oil prices.
“The two leaders discussed Saudi Arabia’s critical role in ensuring stability in the Middle East and in the global oil market. They also discussed the threat posed by the Iranian regime’s escalatory behavior,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
The phone call took place in the wake of Iran’s shooting down of an unmanned U.S. drone in the Gulf region, which prompted Trump to prepare but ultimately hold back from launching a retaliatory attack.
There was no word from the White House statement on whether Trump raised with the crown prince the death last October of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
A 100-page report by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnes Callamard, earlier this week accused Saudi Arabia of a “deliberate, premeditated execution” and said the crown prince should be investigated for it.
Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by David Alexander and James Dalgleish
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Factbox - Panama v Tunisia
SARANSK, Russia (Reuters) - Panama play Tunisia in their final World Cup Group G match in Saransk on Thursday, with both teams already unable to reach the knockout phase.
Where: Mordovia Arena
Capacity: Capacity: 41,685
When: Thursday, June 28, 2100 local (1800 GMT/1400 ET)
Referee: To be announced
* Panama and Tunisia both lost their first two matches in Group G and are contesting third place before they head home.
* Panama have conceded nine goals in Russia and Tunisia seven. Panama’s 6-1 defeat by England and Tunisia’s 5-2 to loss to Belgium were the highest-scoring games of the tournament.
* This is Panama’s first appearance in the World Cup finals.
* Felipe Baloy’s 78th minute goal for Panama against England was their first World Cup goal ever.
* The 37-year-old Baloy was also the fourth-oldest player to score in the World Cup after Cameroon’s Roger Milla aged 42 in 1994, Sweden’s Gunnar Gren aged 37 and 236 days in 1958, and Mexico’s Cuauhtemoc Blanco aged 37 and 151 days in 2010.
* Tunisia are making their fifth appearance in the World Cup. They have failed to make it out of the group stage each time.
* Tunisia were the first African country to win a World Cup finals game, beating Mexico in Argentina in 1978. Since then they have drawn seven and lost six.
* Panama’s coach Hernan Dario is nicknamed El Bolillo (The Truncheon). He has previous experience at the finals, having coached his native Colombia in 1998 and Ecuador in 2002.
* Tunisia coach Nabil Maaloul won 74 international caps for Tunisia as a midfielder between 1985 and 1995, scoring 11 goals.
* Panama, nicknamed the “Los Canaleros” (The Canalmen) after the ocean-linking Panama Canal, are ranked 55th in FIFA’s world ratings. Tunisia, known as “the Eagles of Carthage” are ranked 21st.
Previous meetings: This will be the first time the two sides have played each other.
GROUP G STANDINGS
MP W D L GF GA +/- PTS
ENGLAND 2 2 0 0 8 2 +6 6
BELGIUM 2 2 0 0 8 2 +6 6
TUNISIA 2 0 0 2 3 7 -4 0
PANAMA 2 0 0 2 1 9 -8 0
Reporting by Angus MacSwan; Editing by Hugh Lawson
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February 11, 2019 / 12:25 PM / 5 months ago
Goldman Sachs, Point72 and others invest $44 million in business credit startup Nav
Anna Irrera, Elizabeth Dilts
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nav, a startup that gives small businesses free access to their credit reports, said on Monday that it had raised $44 million from investors including Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N), Point72 Ventures and Experian Ventures (EXPN.L).
The ticker symbol and logo for Goldman Sachs is displayed on a screen on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund and Aries also participated in the round which was led by Goldman Sachs, the companies said.
Salt Lake City-based Nav plans to use the funding to continue to build out its technology and market its platform to more small businesses, Levi King, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview.
Founded in 2012, Nav aims to make it easier for small business to access financing by showing them their credit reports from major consumer and commercial credit bureaus for free. Nav’s platform also contains a marketplace of more than 100 financing products such as loans and credit cards that small and medium businesses can apply to based on their financial health.
“One of the pain points for small businesses is that the process of getting financing is a pain,” King said. “We are in a position to make that dramatically easier for the business owner.”
Similar to well-known consumer credit score startup Credit Karma, Nav makes money through partnerships with the credit providers whose products are displayed on its platform.
Nav is among the growing batch of young companies using technology to offer more user-friendly financial services to small businesses and consumers.
Established financial firms have been investing millions of dollars into these companies as they seek to keep up with new technology and to offer better services to clients.
Tripp Shriner, a partner at Point72 Ventures, the venture capital arm of Steve Cohen’s investment firm Point 72, said Nav had a compelling business model because it also helps credit providers by placing their products in front of the right potential customers.
“It provides value to banks and other financial service providers,” Shriner said.
Goldman, Point72 and CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, had made a first investment in Nav in 2017.
As part of Goldman’s investment Rana Yared, managing director in the bank’s strategic investment group, has become a voting director on Nav’s board, the companies said.
Reporting by Anna Irrera and Elizabeth Dilts; Editing by David Gregorio
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Elephant in Myanmar society (1752-1885)
The Dissertation titled, Elephant in Myanmar Society (1752-1885) is presented by dividing into four chapters, in which Chapter I deals with "Elephant in Myanmar mythology", and Chapter II describes "the Elephant in Myanmar Art and Literature" and Chapter III explains “Elephant in warfare”, while the last chapter expounds about the "Elephanteers in Society". It explains the elephant cult and how elephants are related with it. As Myanmar kings accepted the white elephant as the Buddha-to-be, the cult of white elephant was related with the lives of the Buddha. By the acceptance of textual conception that the white elephant brings peace and prosperity, the dissertation goes on mention that, how kings and people of Myanmar firmly believed in the white elephant cult,how they adopted the title of the White Elephant. But Chapter I describes the irony of how the possessor Kings of white elephant faced the imperialist wars. The kings manipulated the literature by incorporating the cult of white elephant into it, in order to expand the aura and the influence of the reigning king, by which made the ruling of the country easy. As the white elephant possessing kings encouraged, art, literature and sculpture that related with the white elephant, came to emerge and piled into a heap. Most literatures, that related with the elephant, eulogized how much the king was glorified. All these are described in Chapter II. In the days of Myanmar Kings, elephants occupied a central role as war fighters. The possession of many elephants, directly related with the power and glory of a king. The dissertation also explains how much the elephant was important in the relation between the king and his vassals and in the relations of the kingdom and other countries. The believed that they could win the wars if there were white elephants in their troops. The Kaleidoscope of the change of the usefulness of the elephant, as war fighters during Bagan Period, down to early Konbaung Period, the as goods producing animal in later Konbaung Period is mentioned in Chapter III. As the elephant has played a major role in feudal Myanmar, the officials and attendants to these elephants also played a crucial role in monarchical Myanmar. Society, socially, these peoples were enjoying many privileges. But their ups and downs was dependent on the attitude of the King and his mood,and how much he valued and regarded the elephant. These are described in Chapter IV. The dissertation ends by examining how the once important and reliable elephant in wars and the elephanteers, declined in when western imperialism predominated the country.
t.dpale.pdf (2.197Mb)
Pale' Aung
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Technology and culture
January 5, 2009 By Daniel Little in CAT_history Tags: assemblages, history, technology Leave a comment
Photo: Charles Sheeler, “Power, wheels”, 1939; MFA, Boston
Technology is sometimes thought of as a domain with a logic of its own — an inevitable trend towards the development of the most efficient artifacts, given the potential represented by a novel scientific or technical insight. The most important shift that has occurred in the ways in which historians conceptualize the history of technology in the past thirty years is the clear recognition that technology is a social product, all the way down. And, as a corollary, historians of technology have increasingly come to recognize the deep contingency that characterizes the development of specific instances or families of technologies.
Thomas Hughes is one of the most important and prolific historians of technology of his generation. His most recent book, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture , is well worth reading. It looks at “technology” from a very broad perspective and asks how this dimension of civilization has affected our cultures in the past two centuries. The twentieth-century city, for example, could not have existed without the inventions of electricity, steel buildings, elevators, railroads, and modern waste-treatment technologies. So technology “created” the modern city. But it is also clear that life in the twentieth-century city was transformative for the several generations of rural people who migrated to them. And the literature, art, values, and social consciousness of people in the twentieth century have surely been affected by these new technology systems.
This level of analysis stands at the most generic perspective: how does technology influence culture? (And perhaps, how does culture influence technology?) What Hughes has demonstrated in so much of his work, though, is the fact that the most interesting questions about the “technology-society” interface can be framed at a much more disaggregated level. Consider some of the connections he suggests in his earlier book on the history of electric power (Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 ):
Invention (by individuals with a very specific educational and cultural background)
Concrete development of the artifacts within a laboratory (involving specific social relationships among various experts and workers)
“Selling” the innovation to municipal authorities (for lighting and traction) and to industrial capitalists (for power)
Finding investors and sources of finance for large capital investments in electricity
Building out the infrastructure for delivery of electric power
Government regulation of industry practices
Development of an extended research capability addressing technology problems
Each part of this complex story involves processes that are highly contingent and highly intertwined with social, economic, and political relationships. And the ultimate shape of the technology is the result of decisions and pressures exerted throughout the web of relationships through which the technology took shape. But here is an important point: there is no moment in this story where it is possible to put “technology” on one side and “social context” on the other. Instead, the technology and the society develop together.
Hughes also explores some of the ways in which the culture of the machine has influenced architecture, art, and literature. He discusses photography by Charles Sheeler (whose famous series on the Rouge plant defined an industrial aesthetic), artists Carl Grossberg and Marcel Duchamp, and architects such as Peter Behren. The central theme here is the idea that industrial-technological developments caused significant cultural change in Europe and America. Hughes’s examples are mostly drawn from “high” culture; but historians of popular culture too have focused on the impact of technologies such as the railroad, the automobile, or the cigarette on American popular culture. See Deborah Clarke’s Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America for a discussion of the effect of automotive culture. And Pam Pennock’s examination of the effects of alcohol and tobacco advertising on American culture in Advertising Sin And Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol And Tobacco Marketing, 1950-1990 is also relevant.
Hughes doesn’t consider here the other line of influence that is possible between culture and technology: how prevailing aesthetic and cultural preferences influence the development of a technology. This has been an important theme in the line of interpretation referred to as the “social construction of technology” (SCOT). Wiebe Bijker makes the case for the social construction of mundane technologies such as bicycles in Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change . And automobile historian Gijs Moms argues in The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age that the choice between electric and internal combustion vehicles in the early twentieth century turned on aesthetic and lifestyle preferences rather than technical or economic efficiency. (Here is a nice short discussion of SCOT.) This too is a more disaggregated approach to the question. It proceeds on the idea that we can learn a great deal by examining the “micro” processes in culture and society that influence the development of a technology.
It seems to me that the conceptual framework of “assemblages theory” would be useful in discussing the history of technology. (See Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity for a review of the theory, and Nick Srnicek’s blog at accursedshare, which makes frequent use of the framework.) The framework is useful here because technology is a social phenomenon that extends from one’s own kitchen and household to the cities of Chicago or Berlin, to the global internet and the international system of manufacturing and design. And similar processes of shaping and conditioning occur at the micro, meso, and macro levels. In other words — perhaps we can understand “technology” at the molar level, as a complex composition of activities and processes at many levels closer to the socially constructed individual. And the value-added provided by the sociology and history of technology is precisely this: to shed light on the mechanisms at work at all levels that have an influence on the aggregate direction and shape of the resulting technology.
Since we’re thinking about “technology and culture” — it’s worth noting that Technology and Culture is the world’s leading journal for the history of technology, emanating from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT, established in 1958). The journal has played a significant role in the definition of the discipline over the past thirty years or so and is an outstanding source for anyone interested in the questions posed here.
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The Super Snorkel face mask is super comfortable and allows you to breathe as easily as if you were on land. The soft silicone edging that conforms to your face and the 4-point head straps create a watertight seal that keeps water out and your face dry. In addition, a drain at the bottom of the masks gets rid of any extra water, and a separate breathing chamber keeps airflow away from the lens, which makes our mask completely fog-resistent.
Located just off the coast of Western Sahara in Africa, the Canary Islands are actually a Spanish archipelago and therefore owned by Spain. There are 7 main islands in the Canaries, with each offering something different for the intrepid traveler looking to kick back and enjoy island life. Tenerife is the largest of the islands and has a bit of everything, including one of the largest Carnival festivals in the world each February.
No personal information on users of the site www.snorkeling-report.com is published without the knowledge of the user, nor exchanged, transferred, transmitted or sold on any media to a third party. In the event of Snorkeling Report Int. and its rights being sold, the said information would be transmitted to the buyer, who would in turn have the same obligations of preserving and modifying data relating to the site’s users.
Ocean Beach City Beach is the main beach in the San Diego neighborhood of Ocean Beach. This is a wide sandy beach that has formed at the south side of the San Diego River mouth. Looking north you can see the neighborhood of Mission Beach on the other side of the rock jetties that protect the Mission Bay Entrance Channel. The southern view from City Beach is dominated by the Ocean Beach Pier which extends about a half-mile out into the Pacific Ocean. If you are visiting here for the first time you should walk out to the end of the pier to take in the view of the city. Below the pier and south of it you’ll find extensive tide pools that are exposed at low tide.
Sipadan is located in the Celebes Sea off the coast of Sabah (Malaysia's easternmost state on the island of Borneo—Google-map it!). Best known for world-class diving, and described as an “Untouched Piece of Art” by Jacques Cousteau himself, the snorkeling here is equally stunning with easy viewing of otherworldy coral formations, sea turtles, and Bumphead Parrotfish.
This is not a wow beach but not a bad beach. It's a beach and a big one. Found my way here in a Sunday after a morning run. It was a nice enough beach to take the time to enjoy. A lot of surfers enjoying the sets rolling in which made it relaxing. It is a nice long stretch and people let their dogs off leash to enjoy it as well. So if you don't like dogs I suggest not going here.
From the 1950s to mid-1970s, men's contest formats were often supplemented with women's beauty contests or bikini shows. The winners earned titles like Miss Body Beautiful, Miss Physical Fitness and Miss Americana, and also presented trophies to the winners of the men's contest.[194] In the 1980s, the Ms Olympia competition started in the US and in the UK the NABBA (National Amateur Body Building Association) renamed Miss Bikini International to Ms Universe. In 1986, the Ms Universe competition was divided into two sections – "physique" (for a more muscular physique) and "figure" (traditional feminine presentation in high heels).[195] In November 2010 the IFBBF (International Federation of BodyBuilding & Fitness) introduced a women's bikini contest for women who do not wish to build their muscles to figure competition levels.[196]
The bikini finally caught on, and by 1963, the movie Beach Party, starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, led a wave of films that made the bikini a pop-culture symbol, though Funicello was barred from wearing Réard's bikini unlike the other young females in the films. In 1965, a woman told Time that it was "almost square" not to wear a bikini; the magazine wrote two years later that "65% of the young set had already gone over".[89]
The Great Astrolabe Reef is, at more than 60 miles long, one of the largest and most magnificent barrier reefs on the planet. It surrounds several of Fiji’s islands, including Ono Island, and the warmth and clarity of the water brings out the vivid colors of the majestic underwater world. In fact, on calm days, visibility can be as great as 100 feet or more, allowing both snorkelers and scuba divers the chance to see vast displays of ocean life in every direction.
As popularity of bikinis grew, the acceptability of pubic hair diminished.[245] But, with certain styles of women's swimwear, pubic hair may become visible around the crotch area of a swimsuit.[244] With the reduction in the size of swimsuits, especially since the advent of the bikini after 1945, the practice of bikini waxing has also become popular.[244] The Brazilian style which became popular with the rise of thong bottoms.[246]
Turtles swim past languidly. A ray is camouflaged against the soft sandy bottom. Reef sharks whizz by, not far from your flippers. The Galapagos Islands are one of the world’s greatest snorkeling destinations, where legends of the ocean can be spotted close to the surface. And you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy snorkeling, either. Warm and shallow waters make the Galapagos an ideal destination for both beginner and experienced snorkelers.
Whether you’re hoping to hit the sand and surf in style or relax comfortably by the pool on a sunny day, PacSun’s got you covered. With our collection of swimsuits for women, you can mix and match to create your own unique look. Take your pick from a variety of different patterns, colors, and textures, all with the latest trends of the season in mind.
If you are a reggae/island music enthusiast, and looking for a snorkel adventure in Key West, then look no further than Rum and Reggae snorkeling tour. This top rated snorkeling tour even throws in a sunset sail at the end of the day, which also includes unlimited soda, beer, water, or the famous rum punch. This relaxed tour leaves later than most, so you can enjoy your cup of coffee in the morning, and leave in the afternoon.
here’s a spot that might be interesting to some people. I’ve spent a month two years ago in Cozumel, Mexico (right across from Cancun) and found it to be really cool. I worked on cruise ships and it is one of the major cruise ship stops so there are tourists but mostly during the day while the ships are in port. Other than that it’s a cool and cheap place to stay. Using the app HomeAway (similar to AirBnB) I’ve found a place (it was a studio in a 7 apartment bulding, with a gate and a small pool in the back) that I paid $350 for a month for. The internet was very good and there were a few big supermarkets close by. Cozumel, for example is one of the top spots for scuba diving in the Caribbean and the side of the island that’s opposite to downtown where the cruise ships dock is full of beaches that rarely anyone goes to but it’s a great spot for windsurfing for example.
One of the most diverse islands in the South Pacific, Tanna’s main attraction is Mount Yasur – known as ‘the world’s most accessible active volcano’. Every afternoon, motorcades of 4X4 jeeps make the long and challenging journey across the island’s unsealed roads and ash covered plains to visit the mighty volcano. Making it to the volcano’s rim just in time for sunset, Yasur’s awe striking display of spewing lava and loud explosions fails to disappoint. Beyond the volcano, Tanna’s rainforests are home to ancient tribes that retain their traditional kustom way of life, and mysterious cargo cults still waiting for John Frum to return. Its volcanic reefs are perforated with natural blue holes, and its friendly teach you that you don’t need much in life to be happy!
I am in love with this crochet bikini set. It is so incredible cute. For reference, I am 5'4", weigh 110lbs and normally wear a size 0 bottom and a 32B top. It fits perfectly. However, since it's crochet it could easily expand to accommodate larger sizes. I honestly bought this thinking I could wear it as a legit bikini to the beach, but I was extremely mistaken. It is 100% crochet. So, you can somewhat see through it all. I am going to instead wear it around the pool or boardwalk, but with a strapless bra and underwear on underneath. This is more of clothing than a swimwear bikini. The bottoms fit like booty-shorts and the top is just a typical bandeau. I think it would need an layer underneath of swimsuit material in order for it to be a true swimsuit. Either way, I still love the design/pattern, and the quality of the crochet is great. Can't wait to show this off this summer!
As the swimsuit was evolving, the underwear started to change. Between 1900 and 1940, swimsuit lengths followed the changes in underwear designs.[225] In the 1920s women started discarding the corset, while the Cadole company of Paris started developing something they called the "breast girdle".[226] During the Great Depression, panties and bras became softly constructed and were made of various elasticized yarns making underwear fit like a second skin. By 1930s underwear styles for both women and men were influenced by the new brief models of swimwear from Europe. Although the waistband was still above the navel, the leg openings of the panty brief were cut in an arc to rise from the crotch to the hip joint. The brief served as a template for most all variations of panties for the rest of the century.[227] Warner standardized the concept of Cup size in 1935. The first underwire bra was developed in 1938.[226] Beginning in the late thirties skants, a type of skanty men's briefs, were introduced, featuring very high-cut leg openings and a lower rise to the waistband.[227] Howard Hughes designed a push-up bra to be worn by Jane Russell in The Outlaw in 1943, although Russell stated in interviews that she never wore the 'contraption'. In 1950 Maidenform introduced the first official bust enhancing bra.[226]
In Europe, 17-year-old Brigitte Bardot wore scanty bikinis (by contemporary standards) in the French film Manina, la fille sans voiles ("Manina, the girl unveiled"). The promotion for the film, released in France in March 1953, drew more attention to Bardot's bikinis than to the film itself. By the time the film was released in the United States in 1958 it was re-titled Manina, the Girl in the Bikini. Bardot was also photographed wearing a bikini on the beach during the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. Working with her husband and agent Roger Vadim she garnered significant attention with photographs of her wearing a bikini on every beach in the south of France.[92]
Continental islands are bodies of land that lie on the continental shelf of a continent.[10] Examples are Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Sakhalin, Taiwan and Hainan off Asia; New Guinea, Tasmania, and Kangaroo Island off Australia; Great Britain, Ireland, and Sicily off Europe; Greenland, Newfoundland, Long Island, and Sable Island off North America; and Barbados, the Falkland Islands, and Trinidad off South America.
Sitting at 1,562 m (5,125 ft) high in the highlands of western Guatemala, Lago de Atitlan is a little piece of paradise. Despite not being a tropical island or an oceanside beach town, this place is worth mentioning because it’s uniquely amazing. Surrounded by 3 massive volcanos, traditional Mayan villages, yoga retreats and coffee plantations means there is a lot to explore and discover.
Im here in Vermont and love it here but want more and Im antsy to move in the future. I dont know where to start, but I do know I want a tropical place warm year round. I guess I need a break from this cold weather. I own and operate an herbal shop for I am a Holistic Practitioner , Master Herbalist, Nutritional consultant and much more. Iam looking to relocate my business and myself with my 2 boys!!! Anyone have any locations that I may visit that might be a new future location with a high call for my type of work please oh please let me know. Namaste! Cold here in Vermont!!!!
Free Standard Shipping with your minimum purchase of $50.00 or more. Eligible customers must have a minimum cart value of $50.00 and select Standard Shipping during checkout in order to receive free standard shipping. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Not valid on gift card purchases. No adjustments on previous purchases. Valid on standard U.S. ground shipping in the 48 continental U.S. states only. Not valid on international shipments or to Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. territories, P.O. Boxes, and APO/FPO addresses. If you choose another shipping option, additional charges will apply. Offer is nontransferable and subject to change without notice.
Spend a bit more and rent a dry snorkel, or at the least, a snorkel with a splash guard. One of the least pleasant experiences is having a flood of water come down your snorkel. A dry snorkel has a special valve on top that seals shut when your snorkel goes underwater (like with a wave, or when you tilt your head to the side). It will also have a special purge valve at the bottom of the snorkel so that it is easy to blow water out of the tube. For a first time snorkeler we find this piece of equipment essential (we use them ourselves). It is worth whatever additional rental costs. Learn more about different types of snorkels here.
One of the great things about bikinis is that they come in two pieces, so you can feel free to mix things up to get just the right look--and fit. With bikini separates you can score the perfect sizes on top and bottom, and if you-re feeling creative, consider looking at them as a way to express your personality! We've got tons of cute bikinis for sale in all sorts of styles, including halter tops, spaghetti strap tops, bandeaus, and cheeky bottoms, from the best bikini brands. Creating the perfect beach look for your unique style is easy with our affordable prices and wide selection!
Contact us at webmaster@theswimweartags.com | Sitemap xml | Sitemap txt | Sitemap
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I am not pointing my finger at any one person or body. I am not blaming anybody. I am just expressing my thoughts on how Malta could be and should appear in the eyes of those whose opinion should matter to us.
Malta at the moment is going through a general boom. Why not? Why shouldn’t it? It is centrally situated slam bang in the middle of the Mediterranean and an integral part of the European Union.
No matter which government is running Malta, it has all the assets to be very successful.
Malta should stand out as an example of good leadership, great business acumen, environment conservation and a bastion of Christian ethics and morality.
Our country is beautiful, really beautiful, with an amazing coastline, an abundance of historical buildings and an intelligent population that could set an example to the rest of the world.
But why doesn’t it?
Well, perfection is extremely difficult to achieve.
We should aim for perfection. We could be. But something stops this happening. What is it? Greed? Corruption? Lust for power? Selfishness?
It is all these vices in different proportions. But why?
Take three types of people. Those, who enter political life or some other organisation in order to help the people in the country, those who are prepared to take a risk and go into business, and those who are prepared to work for others.
All are an important ingredient for a flourishing country and a successful economy. Unfortunately, when things go well, corruption rears its ugly head in all directions and in all segments of the population, in small ways and sometimes big ways.
When things go well, power also seems to become more and more important.
We have seen this in many countries throughout the years, and when Malta’s fortunes have gone up and down, we have seen it happening here too.
Why do people go into politics? It can’t be for the money. Or shouldn’t be. It must be either for the power, or else the desire to want to be of service to the country.
Everybody’s needs and ideas are different, so it is not an easy thing to be a politician. In fact, it is a pretty thankless task, but those members of society, who choose that path should do the job as diligently, honestly and as transparently as possible.
Why is it so difficult to do this?
When a country like ours is split down the middle with regard to political views, no matter what the governing party does, the party in opposition always tends to give its own spin on the situation to suit its purpose. It must be a nightmare.
We are an educated, and reasonably honest people. We are quite capable of being fair andjust to everybody
For 50 per cent of the electorate you can do no right, and for the other 50 per cent you can do no wrong. Bearing in mind this scenario you have to run a country and try and be fair to everyone.
At the moment, it surely must be the ideal moment to try and be fair to everyone. The country is making money.
We can plan our country properly. We can be leaders in morals and ethics.
We can be transparent in all our dealings because all the dealings should be for the benefit of all the population, irrespective of which political party the citizen supports.
We are quite close to near perfection that attaining perfection is not beyond us, so long as we make a concentrated effort to stick to the right path and avoid anything that could tarnish our reputation.
Taking the best decisions for the good of the country as opposed to benefitting a few is just one example. We can and should lead the world in being an honest, safe, successful and pleasant place in which to reside and visit, with an active and caring government that is fair and just to all.
The majority of the world is in a mess. We can lead the way to common sense.
What should happen is this.
Every politician, whether in government or in opposition, should only act for the good of the Maltese people in general. He or she should be transparent in their actions and never even speak or listen to anyone who would wish them to do otherwise.
This is of course what every politician in every country should do. But here in Malta we can do this. Our politicians can be easily seen to be acting in the interest of all of their countrymen, no matter which political affiliation they practise.
Our business community can act honestly and still be very successful. Our police can act diligently, efficiently and fairly towards everyone.
If the rest of the world wants to lead their countries into a path of injustice to their population in general, let them. But it doesn’t have to happen in Malta. We are better than that. We are an educated, and reasonably honest people. We are quite capable of being fair and just to everybody.
Our leaders, even though from a small country, can meet their counterparts abroad, with heads held high. Leading the way in how real democracy should be practised, giving true prosperity, health and happiness to the whole population, without exception.
It can be done.
Why am I even writing this?
I will tell you. Because I want Malta to be seen as upright and honest, among our foreign counterparts. I want our leaders to be respected all over the world because of their correct decisions and wise and honest governance.
I want Malta to be recognised for the Christian values it upholds. I want these things because they are attainable. And I want these things because that is how it should be.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece
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