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What is the mission of Advancing the Interests of Animals (AIA)?
AIA’s mission is to improve the lives of animals and to encourage increased compassion and respect for all living beings. The organization acts directly with focused campaigns to help animals as well as through a variety of educational activities and informational efforts. Its vision is to be an effective, passionate and nationally respected advocate for all animals.
How did AIA get started?
Drs. Lori Kirshner and Peter Spiegel initially founded Desert Paws in 2001 with a focus on the welfare of dogs and cats in the southern California Coachella Valley community. As the founders learned more about the plight of other animals, such as the abuse of animals in rodeos and circuses, as well as the exploitation of wild animals through such activities as illegal poaching, they expanded their advocacy efforts to be a voice for the humane treatment of all animals.
In 2011, Desert Paws became Advancing the Interests of Animals (AIA) dedicated to the belief that all animals – domesticated and wild – deserve to be treated with compassion and respect.
What does AIA do?
AIA is a national organization that addresses animal welfare issues around the globe through public education and regional projects. Its primary focus is to encourage people of all ages to treat animals with compassion and respect.
In addition, AIA promotes a plant-based diet, which is consistent with its mission and is also the least harmful to the environment. This diet has also been scientifically proven to be the healthiest for humans.
AIA’s founders, Drs. Kirshner and Spiegel, produce and host a weekly, one-hour radio show and podcast, Animals Today. Animals Today features interviews with experts from around the world, commentary and analysis on a wide variety of animals issues, news reporting, pet product reviews, and lighter animal segments.
Guests on the show include celebrities, politicians and government officials, lawyers, naturalists and activists working in the field. They all share a desire to improve the lives of animals around the world.
Where is AIA located?
AIA’s national offices are located in Palm Springs, California.
How do people benefit from the work of AIA?
Although our main focus is the welfare of animals, AIA believes that people who treat animals kindly are generally more respectful in their dealings with other people. By promoting compassion and respect for animals, the work of AIA benefits animals and society as a whole.
In addition, animal abuse by youth can be an early warning sign of potentially violent behavior towards people. The connection between such abuse and the later development of antisocial behavior is well known. AIA educates people about the importance of recognizing and properly addressing animal abuse and neglect in order to interrupt this cycle of violence.
How is AIA funded?
AIA is a tax exempt, 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization and is completely supported by private donations. Drs. Kirshner and Spiegel donate their time and energy and all board members serve as volunteers.
Who supports AIA?
AIA’s supporters come from all walks of life and have a wide range of animal-related interests. These include concerns about the care of companion animals, protecting wild animals and their natural habitats, treatment of farmed animals, and teaching children compassion and respect toward animals. Most of all, AIA supporters share a common desire to help and protect animals.
AIA seeks the support and involvement of individuals and organizations. Financial gifts of any size are appreciated. Tribute gifts can be made in honor or in memory of a loved one. AIA also welcomes volunteers to assist with specific projects.
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Paul Goma - Arhivă Privată
http://courage.btk.mta.hu/courage/individual/n158100?sq
This collection consists primarily of the items confiscated by the Securitate on 1 April 1977, on the occasion of the house search and arrest of the driving force behind an emerging movement in defence of human rights in Romania, Paul Goma, a writer censored in Romania but successful abroad. A particular feature of this collection is that the confiscated items were not destroyed, but were preserved by the Securitate and finally transferred to CNSAS in 2002, from where they were returned to Goma in 2005. Thus, the collection is one of the few which travelled after 1989 from Romania into exile and is now to be found in Paris, where Goma was forced to emigrate a few months after his arrest and the confiscation of the collection.
Paris Rue François Pinton 7, France 75019
Paul Goma Private Archive
This collection constitutes the most important selection of documents relating to the events in 1977 which transformed Paul Goma from a writer, who was censored in Romania but successful abroad, into a dissident and a defender of human rights. At the beginning of February 1977, inspired by Charter 77, Goma effectively made a public appeal – via Radio Free Europe which he had reached with the support of foreign diplomats – with the purpose of protesting against the violation of human rights in Romania. Around 200 people had responded to this appeal and signed a collective open letter by the time of Goma’s arrest on 1 April 1977. The arrest was followed by the confiscation of all items found in his home relating to the emerging protest for human right. Thus, the core of the collection traces only the first phase of this ephemeral movement for human rights, which relates to its rapid development in only two months mostly due to Goma’s personal efforts. After Goma’s arrest, in the second phase, the Securitate quickly manged to disband the movement, which came to be popularly known as the Goma Movement. However, evidence about this second phase is to be found only in the documents created by the secret police, namely in the Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS, defined as such by COURAGE research.
Effectively, the earliest document relating to the Romanian movement for human rights is a personal letter addressed to the playwright Pavel Kohout, one of the signatories of Charter 77, whom Goma had had the chance to read and thus selected as addressee. In other words, what turned later into a collective protest was preceded by an isolated act of defying Ceaușescu’s regime and at the same time expressing solidarity with those who had founded Charter 77. According to Goma, he decided to take this step after several unsuccessful attempts to convince his fellow writers to send a common message. The majority of Goma’s colleagues, according to his recollections, regarded the signatories of Charter 77 as courageous intellectuals, but saw their endeavour as a useless protest which could have no practical result. Goma’s letter to Kohout assured the Czechs and Slovaks who signed Charter 77 of the sympathy they enjoyed among Romanians and made a telling comparison between Romanians and the other national communities included in the Soviet bloc after WWII. According to Goma’s description of the situation in 1977, “We [Romanians] are living in the same camp, in the same Biafra (capital: Moscow). You, Czechs and Slovaks, had a 1968, the Poles had a 1956, a 1971 and an ... always, the East-Germans had Berlin and Biermann. We, Romanians, do not have these landmarks. But suffering is not always proportional with the intensity of the outcry of revolt. You (like the Poles, the East-Germans, the Hungarians and the Bulgarians) are living under Russian occupation; we, Romanians, are under Romanian occupation – ultimately, more painful and more effective than a foreign one. But we live under the same yoke. ... The same lack of elementary rights, the same mockery of the individual, and the same shamelessness of lies everywhere. Everywhere: poverty, chaos in the economy, demagogy, uncertainty and terror.” Against this “programmatic degradation of the human being in our Stalinist ‘socialist’ societies,” Goma called for a fight using as weapon the “word, which is sharper than the blade.” This self-critical and witty letter contrasted Romania to other fraternal countries, but simultaneously pointed out that the communist regimes inflicted everywhere the same abuses upon individuals, for that represented the very essence of the system. It was a moving letter of solidarity with Charter 77, but not a programme of action for a Romanian Charter. However, due to Goma’s amateurish but quite perceptive political analysis in this letter, most historical reconstructions of the Goma Movement mention it as one of the most important documents of the Romanian movement for human rights.
Goma’s personal endeavours continued with a letter to the secretary general of the party himself. In his open letter to Ceauşescu, he invited the leader of the country to follow his initiative of expressing publicly solidarity with the Czechs and Slovaks who signed Charter 77. Through a much-quoted phrase, Goma drew the attention of his addressee to the simple fact that “in Romania, [only] two people are not afraid of the Securitate, your excellency and myself.” Thus, Ceaușescu, just like himself, was practically free to write to the Charter signatories, Goma’s argument continued. If he does this, all Romanians will be able to overcome their inherent fear of the Securitate and follow his and Goma’s example. As far as Ceaușescu is concerned, Goma underlined, the letter will illustrate “consistency with the declarations of 1968” and the secretary general’s genuine desire to “fight for socialism, democracy and humanity.” At the same time, “Romania will be able to participate in the [CSCE Helsinki Follow-Up] Conference in Belgrade with dignity.” The text of this letter is both amusing and mocking; it is illustrative of Goma’s literary talent and it is quoted by most analysists due to the unusual style for an official (though open) letter to Ceaușescu. Together with the letter to Kohout, it is often quoted in historical analyses, given its unique character in terms of content. Thus, this letter is also a featured item of this collection. However, this letter is not part of the collective protest against the violation of human rights in Romania either. Both letters marked Goma’s solitary action of defying the communist regime once they were disseminated among Romanians by Radio Free Europe beginning with 9 February 1977.
The most important document of the collective movement and implicitly of the collection, is the above-mentioned open letter of protest addressed to the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was scheduled to take place in Belgrade in 1977. By the time of his arrest, Goma had collected about 200 supporters for this common letter denouncing human rights abuses in Romania. The list of signatures collected by Goma is another featured item of this collection. This number of supporters was about as many as Charter 77 attracted from among the Czechs and Slovaks in the same year. In comparison to the signatories of the Charter, those who endorsed the Romanian letter of protest were rather a very loose community of isolated individuals who lacked a genuine common purpose. Turning to the letter which was finally signed by these 200 individuals, thus giving birth to a human rights movement in Romania, it is worth underlining its rather haphazard public emergence. It was initially disseminated as an open letter with eight supporters, of whom two were Goma and his wife. The real author of the letter was not Goma himself, as he recalls; although he drafted a version, the signatories preferred another variant, which one of the other initial signatories wrote. This explains why this collective letter contrasts sharply in style and content with the emotional and witty, but general and non-specific denouncement of abuses under the Ceauşescu regime which can be found in Goma’s two letters mentioned above. In contrast to these, the letter to the CSCE Follow-up Meeting in Belgrade uses a neutral tone to enumerate the rights which Romanian legislation theoretically guaranteed, but the authorities did not respect in practice. Besides indicating the precise articles of the Constitution which referred to rights that existed on paper but not in reality, this letter specifically emphasises the right to free circulation, which the Romanian communist regime (like all the others in the Soviet bloc) totally disregarded. According to the document, “the articles of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Romania which refer to civic rights (art. 17); the right to work (art. 18); the right to education (art. 21); the right to free association (art. 27); the freedom of speech, of press, of meetings and public demonstrations (art. 28); the freedom of thought (art. 30); the inviolability of human beings (art. 31); and of private residence (art. 32); the secrecy of correspondence and phone conversations (art. 33); are not respected. At the same time, the right to the free circulation of human beings, ideas, information is not respected, while the right to citizenship is transformed into an obligation.” By contrasting freedom of movement with the enforcement of citizenship, the letter hints at the right to change the citizenship given by birth by emigrating to a country of choice. A copy of this letter, which was dated 8 February 1977, was sent to Radio Free Europe using Goma’s channels of communication. Once information about the existence of the letter was systematically disseminated due to the active involvement of the Romanian desk of Radio Free Europe, it appeared as if the example of the Czechs and Slovaks was spreading fast among Romanians. Only a month after Charter 77, concern for the observance of human rights seemed to have gained momentum in Romania too. Although the two collective protests were apparently similar, in terms of the message expressed and the support received, their proponents proved to be driven by very different motivations.
Due to the way Radio Free Europe disseminated the information about this open letter, Goma turned into the epicentre of an earthquake which shook the Romanian communist authorities and took the secret police by surprise. The novelty of the challenge which Securitate had to confront with Goma’s attempt to establish a Romanian Charter 77 was twofold. It consisted not only in the ideas expressed, which were alien to political traditions in Romania, but also in the unprecedented and unexpected support for an open letter of protest. No other such rapid solidarisation of individuals around a common purpose occurred in communist Romania either before or after. Thus, this emerging movement which implied the defence of a political idea (and not a material benefit) must have been really puzzling for the Securitate officers, who did their best to grasp the situation and to understand the “real” motivations of the individuals involved in protesting over such an “abstract” issue as human rights. With the aim of containing the support for this collective protest, the secret police transformed what appeared to be an aggregate action against the communist regime into a multitude of individual motivations for expressing discontent with the regime. It was to this end that Goma was eventually arrested and brutally interrogated, among others by First Deputy Minister Nicolae Pleșită himself. He was, however, released on 6 May 1977, after a rather short detention, due to massive protests by the Romanian emigration in Paris, which managed to convince many outstanding personalities to sign a petition for his release. As is well known, Goma left Romania never to return just a few months later, in November 1977, thus ending his career as dissident in Romania and opening a new one as a defender of human rights in exile. The documents confiscated at the time of his arrest were preserved by the Securitate and subsequently transferred to CNSAS in 2002. They were included by the secret police in the Confiscated Manuscripts Fonds. All items confiscated during Goma’s house search were returned to him in 2005, so they are now to be found in Paris, where Goma settled after his forced emigration. Many of the documents confiscated from Goma, however, were also preserved in his file of informative surveillance, in particular the open letters and the lists of signatures, and thus they are still preserved in the Archives of CNSAS (ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, File I 2217). It is worth mentioning that copies of the documents that reached Radio Free Europe can also be found in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest (OSA/RFE Archives, Romanian Fond, 300/60/5/Box 6, File Dissidents: Paul Goma). The Paul Goma Private Collection is truly a special case not only because many of its items are preserved in copies in other repositories, but also because it is one of the few which travelled after 1989 from Romania into exile. The post-communist pattern was rather to bring back to Romania collections created in exile.
The core of this collection consists of the 39 notebooks confiscated from Paul Goma’s house on the occasion of his arrest on 1 April 1977, which were preserved in the archives of the Securitate and then transferred to CNSAS in 2002. The confiscated items amount to more than 2,500 pages of manuscripts, correspondence, diary extracts, notes, open letters and address books. Obviously the most interesting items are the open letters, which trace the emergence and development of the ephemeral movement in defence of human rights which Goma established on the model of Charter 77. Among them, the most important item is lists of signatures of the individuals who endorsed the collective letter denouncing the violation of human rights which were guaranteed by the constitution in force in the Socialist Republic of Romania. The content of the confiscated manuscripts is also interesting because it illustrates the lawlessness which characterised the actions of the secret police under the Ceaușescu regime, at a time when it was officially claimed that the communist authorities respected so-called “socialist legality,” which had allegedly been violated only during the time of terror instituted by the Gheorghiu-Dej regime. Because the confiscated items only illustrated Goma’s appeal for the observance of human rights, which the constitution indeed guaranteed, the secret police needed different pieces of evidence to provehis guilt and justify his arrest in accordance with the existing legislation. As Goma recalls in his post-1977 diaries, the Securitate did not hesitate to plant evidence in his apartment in order to achieve the goal of finding evidence of acts contravening the laws in force. The planted documents were then “discovered” by the officers in charge of Goma’s arrest among the many other manuscripts found in his house. These planted materials were intended to prove that Goma was a supporter of the Romanian extreme right, the so-called Legionary movement, which had emerged in the interwar period as a Nazi-fellow-traveller organisation and then, after the communist takeover, survived informally due to its sympathisers in the exile community. Ana Năvodaru, Goma’s wife, fell into the trap of signing the list of confiscated materials on 1 April 1977 without checking their content. In this way, the Securitate managed to obtain their first evidence that the Legionary materials belonged to Goma. Later, during his arrest, the officers in charge of his interrogation attempted to get irrefutable proof of Goma’s entanglements with the Legionary movement by forcing him to touch these materials with his hands or lips, but he managed to resist their strategy of incrimination (Goma 1990, 276–290; Goma 2005, 219–223). As illustrated by the Chart of Paul Goma’s Personal Connections in the Goma Movement Ad-hoc Collection at CNSAS, which the Securitate compiled, the secret police officers were interested above all in proving his relations with former members or supporters of the interwar Legionary movement. Thus, out of the categories of individuals with “political background” identified by the Securitate among those who contacted Goma in order to support the letter of protest against the violation of human rights in Romania Legionaries came first, although they were not the most numerous. This is not surprising considering that in 1977 the secret police were confronted for the first time since the last group of resistance in the mountains was disbanded in the early 1960s with a large-scale movement. Thus, their analyses went along the same line of reasoning as in the late 1940s and the 1950s, when the enemies of the new regime were identified with the remnants of the interwar extreme right movement which had managed to survive the war against Nazi Germany and its allies, which included Romania until August 1944. For instance, an analysis of 1977, published in the top-secret periodical for internal use of secret police cadres, estimated that “in the period 1975–1977, the leaders of the Legionary movement in exile intensified their attempts to create channels of communication with those in the country in order to disseminate Legionary publications” (Securitatea 2/ 1977, 26). The accusation of support for the extreme right was also intended to compromise Goma and implicitly the entire movement for human rights in Romania in the eyes of the West. Fortunately, this strategy of the Securitate did not work, for the Romanian emigration in Paris was still able to catalyse wide support for Goma’s release, so he was eventually released from prison on 6 May 1977 without being formally charged with any offence.
grey literature (regular archival documents such as brochures, bulletins, leaflets, reports, intelligence files, records, working papers, meeting minutes): 1000-
publications (books, newspapers, articles, press clippings): 500-999
Goma, Paul
emigration/exile
literature and literary criticism
Securitate (Department of State Security)
The return of the manuscripts confiscated by the Securitate to Paul Goma
Goma, Paul. Letter to Nicolae Ceaușescu, in Romanian, February 1977
Goma, Paul. List of the signatures in support of the human rights protest, 1977
visits by appointments
Goma, Paul. 1990. Gherla. Bucharest: Humanitas.
Goma, Paul. 1991. Soldatul cîinelui (The dog’s soldier). Bucharest: Humanitas.
Goma, Paul. 1992. Ostinato. Bucharest: Univers.
Goma, Paul. 1992. Amnezia la români (Amnezia among the Romanians). Bucharest: Litera.
Goma, Paul. 1992. Uşa noastră cea de toate zilele (Our daily door). Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1992.
Goma, Paul. 1995. Scrisori întredeschise: Singur împotriva lor (Half-open letters: Alone against them). Oradea: Multiprint.
Goma, Paul. 1997. Jurnal (Diary). 3 vols. Bucharest: Nemira.
Goma, Paul. 2005. Culoarea curcubeului ‘77: Cutremurul oamenilor. Cod “Bărbosul:” Din dosarele Securităţii, 1957-1977 (The colour of the rainbow 1977: The earthquake of people. Code-name “Bearded Man:” From the files of the Securitate, 1957-1977). Iaşi: Polirom.
Petrescu, Cristina
ACNSAS, Informative Fonds, File I 2217.
OSA/RFE Archives, Romanian Fond, 300/60/5/Box 6, File Dissidents: Paul Goma.
Goma, Paul. 2005. Culoarea curcubeului ‘77: Cutremurul oamenilor. Cod “Bărbosul:” Din dosarele Securităţii, 1957–1977 (The colour of the rainbow 1977: The earthquake of people. Codename “Bearded Man:” From the files of the Securitate, 1957–1977). Iaşi: Polirom.
Petrescu, Dragoș, interview by Pătrăşconiu, Cristian Valeriu , November 15, 2017. COURAGE Registry Oral History Collection
COURAGE Registry, s.v. "Paul Goma - Arhivă Privată", by Cristina Petrescu, 2019. Accessed: 2021. janar 20., doi: 10.24389/158100
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airBaltic Secures Equity to Overcome Crisis
08.05.2020 16:51 | Latvia
Photo: airbaltic.lv
Author: Alise Briede
Source: A/S Air Baltic Corporation
The Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Latvia, as the majority shareholder of Latvian airline airBaltic, has approved the investment of up to EUR 250 million into the equity of airBaltic in order to mitigate the company to overcome the economic crisis caused by COVID-19.
Martin Gauss, the CEO of airBaltic, said: "With this new equity investment, we can begin to execute our new business plan Destination 2025 CLEAN which focuses on a new start for airBaltic once international flight resume. This will facilitate successful growth for the company once the impact of the COVID-19 crisis begins to ease."
The Latvian government's plan, which remains subject to the approval of the European Commission, is to provide its investment to airBaltic in tranches. Each investment tranche will be provided in line with market rules and will not exceed the losses caused as a result of COVID-19 crisis.
Following such investment, the Latvian state's shareholding in airBaltic will increase from 80.05% to 91%.
On April 23, the Supervisory Board of the Latvian airline airBaltic approved the new business plan of the company presented by the management of airBaltic. The new plan foresees a reduced fleet for the upcoming years, initially resuming operations with 22 Airbus A220-300 aircraft. The new plan takes into account the reduced capacity for the years 2020 and 2021, while at the same time foresees return to growth with up to 50 Airbus A220-300 aircraft by the end of 2023. The additional 30 options of Airbus A220-300 remain for future growth.
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Season nine of ‘AfroPoP’ starts with an ‘American Ascent’
1/6/2017, 6 a.m.
Actress Nikki Beharie hosts the ninth season of the public television documentary series AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange. The season premiere airs on Monday, January 16, 2017 on the WORLD Channel. Courtesy Photo/APT
NEW YORK — New York— The ninth season of the award-winning documentary series “AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange” premieres on WORLD Channel at 8 p.m. on Monday, January 16, 2017 —Martin Luther King Jr. Day— with An American Ascent.
The gripping film captures the first African-American team of climbers attempt to summit Denali (formerly Mount McKinley), North America’s highest peak, and to inspire other Blacks to connect with the outdoors. Hosted by acclaimed actress Nikki Beharie (Sleepy Hollow, Shame, 42), AfroPoP is comprised of documentaries about contemporary life, art and culture across the African Diaspora. The program is produced by National Black Programming Consortium and co-presented by series distributor American Public Television (APT).
New episodes of AfroPoP will air weekly through February 15, 2017. APT will release the series to the nation’s public television stations in February.
The season opens with George Potter and Andy Adkins’ An American Ascent. Winner of Best Documentary and Best Director at the 2015 San Diego Black Film Festival and Best Feature Film at the 2015 Film Festival Flix Mountain and Adventure Film Festival, the film depicts the mountaineers’ backbreaking journey to scale the 20,310-foot mountain. The reward? The satisfaction of overcoming personal limits and societal views of what a mountaineer looks like, not to mention the peaks’ breathtaking views.
Previous hosts of AfroPoP include: Idris Elba, Anika Noni Rose, Wyatt Cenac, Gabourey Sidibe, Anthony Mackie, Yaya DaCosta and Jussie Smollett.
“An American Ascent is more than beautiful mountainous vistas and harrowing, dramatic scenes pitting man against nature. Its purpose is also to convey two important messages— African Americans still have ‘firsts’ to summit, and as citizens of a new majority in 2020, we must become familiar with, care about and become guardians of our national parks to ensure they are preserved for future generations,” said NBPC Director of Programs and Acquisitions and AfroPoP Co-Executive Producer Kay Shaw. “This season of AfroPoP presents six beautifully crafted stories that like An American Ascent will challenge, inspire and touch the heart and mind. It’s a season the public should not miss.”
Other films this season include:
*The moving Intore, by Eric Kabera (January 23), which demonstrates the impact a new generation of artists in Rwanda is having in healing a nation that suffered greatly in the horrific 100-day genocide in 1994.
*Tyler Johnston and Miquel Galofré’s beautiful My Father’s Land (January 30), which follows an illegal immigrant in the Bahamas and the lengths to which he goes to return to his native Haiti to see his ailing 103-year-old father. The film also explores issues of immigration and human rights.
*Eva Weber’s important documentary Black Out (February 6), which shines the spotlight on schoolchildren in Guinea who trek for miles each day during exam season to find places with light so they can study and better themselves and their families. The film airs with Olivia Peace’s narrative short Pangaea, a moving story of a young girl who was trapped on a rooftop after Hurricane Katrina.
*Omo Child: The River and the Bush by John Rowe (February 13), a heartwarming story demonstrating the positive impact one determined individual can have on his community to save lives. Shot over five years, the film follows Lale Labuko, from the Kara tribe in the Omo Valley, Ethiopia, as he works to create a cultural shift in his tribe by ending an ancient practice that will save a generation of children.
For more information about AfroPoP, visit: www.blackpublicmedia.org and for viewing information, check local listings or visit: www.APTonline.org.
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The Tragic Story of Syria: How a Promising Nation Became a War Zone
Posted on October 14, 2013 by Cole Crawford
The people of the Syrian Arab Republic (Syria for short) have seen decades of struggles, tension, and conflict. They have seen a dynastic series of Assads lead their small nation for over 40 years. They have seen peaceful protests against the Assad regime turn into a violent rebellion, and their current president turn from a reserved, quiet doctor to a tyrannical dictator. They have been struck by chemical weapons of their own government, the United States and the United Nations threatening to punish Syria (including the innocents) for their nation’s horrendous actions. These people live in the shadow of politics, the drama of their president’s actions receiving more international news coverage than the families and communities who are affected by their government.
Bashar Al-Assad, once labeled by Diane Sawyer as a “quiet man,” succeeded his father, Hafez Al-Assad, on July 17, 2000. His father was considered legendary by the people he governed and many outside of Syria, having led Syria for 29 years and negotiated with 5 U.S. presidents. Bashar was not Hafez’s first choice of the successor: Bashar’s older brother, Bassel, was groomed his whole life to follow in his father’s footsteps; he was thoroughly educated in military sciences. When Bassel died in 1994, Bashar was hastily primed to take over his father’s presidency.
A man protests the Assad regime in front of the Syrian embassy in Dokki, Egypt.
Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Creative Commons
Even though he was not prepared to take the role of a leader, Bashar did well in the first few years of his presidency. In the beginning of his rule, the new Assad introduced a set of reforms to improve the quality of life in Syria, dubbed the “Damascus Spring.” Some of the objectives of these reforms pertained to granting economic rights to all citizens, establishing a multiparty democracy, and ending the special status of the Baath party, Bashar’s own political faction. The Damascus Spring answered the issues that many Syrians had hoped Hafez Al-Assad would address over the previous three decades, and Assad’s attentiveness towards his people made him a very popular president.
In 2005, Bashar helped organize the Damascus Declaration, an attempt to make peace with the government’s opposition and the regime’s conflict with the United States over Iraq and Palestine, considered a bold, but extremely progressive move in the eyes of his nation and internationally as well.
On the day of his 2007 re-election, Syrians flooded the streets with signs of praise and cheers for the president, and cheered when he won with an astounding 97.62% of the votes. At that time, the Syrians loved their progressive and attentive president, who was leading his nation on an upward spiral, and advancing Syria to a national greatness never previously achieved by any Syrian president.
Unrest over the regime began in 2011 as a part of the ongoing “Arab Spring.” Syrians, sparked by the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries, began themselves to protests for better human rights and socioeconomic equality.
Established in 1963, an emergency rule still active today allows police to detain or arrest citizens without a warrant, censor websites, and impose travel bans. The Syrians, eager to reap the benefits of a republic, desired more freedom from their government, a basic, necessary right for a country that calls itself a democracy.
Additionally, the Syrians called for an improvement in the government’s economic situation. According to the CIA World Factbook, 11.9% of Syrians lived beneath the poverty line, even after the reforms of the Damascus Declaration. Massive economic inequity existed between the elite Syrians and the poor, and many protestors requested more support for those in extreme poverty, as a socialist nation was desired, and this ideal must be followed.
The small fire of peaceful protests grew after a nameless group of teenagers were arrested and tortured by local police for writing anti-regime graffiti on a school. When word of the detainment reached the public, enraged protests grew against their generally popular government. This was the start of the Syrian Civil War.
Syrians in Qatar protest the Assad regime.
Photo by Omar Chatriwala via Creative Commons
As demonstrations turned into violence against police, and police retaliation fueled the riots, tension between the opposition and the regime grew at exponential rates. On March 20, 2011, revolutionaries burned down the Baath Party headquarters. In response, an armored division of soldiers fired live ammunition into a crowd of unarmed protestors. 15 demonstrators died that day, and by now, both parties were completely enraged.
As the war began, a new, powerful force was born. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) formed from a group of defected soldiers from the Syrian Armed Forces (SAF) in July of 2011. The group focuses on disposing possible informants, shabiha [“thugs”], and prominent military officers in the SAF, with the goal of protecting innocent Syrians from the regime. By executing force against Assad’s army, the FSA protects protestors and brings security for the opposition through their organized military force.
The ferocity of the war expanded as the regime developed new methods of fighting the opposition. Local police became violent in support of Al-Assad, but the opposition fought back with equal force. Recognizing the use of social media to organize rallies and protests, the regime also shut down the Internet in parts of Syria, and spread propaganda around towns and cities. During this period of growing conflict, hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled the country under the direction of the United Nations.
The battle between the opposition and the regime lasted for several months, from roughly April of 2011 to today, in October 2013, growing with intensity, and the death toll increasing steadily. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated that by September of 2013, over 110,000 people had been killed in the crisis in Syria.
On August 21, 2013, massive chemical explosions erupted in a heavily populated suburb of the central city Damascus. Over 1,000 men, women and children were killed; they suffered agonizing deaths from the weapons. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) stated that Assad’s administration was responsible for the attack, but the regime immediately rejected the claim. The UN led subsequent investigations, and confirmed that these weapons contained the extremely toxic nerve gas sarin. The few survivors joined the refugee count fleeing their country.
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports that there are nearly two million registered Syrian refugees, currently residing in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Conditions for these refugees are less than ideal; one UNHCR video explains that over a thousand refugees live in an underground garage in Lebanon, without medicine, clean water, reliable electricity, but plenty of sickness. The footage shows children playing on the damp pavement, watchful mothers lounging underneath sodden clothes hanging, as they wait for some, any kind of reassurance or support. In Jordan, over 50% of the refugees are children.
“We have nothing here,” a refugee referred to only as Fatima pleads in a UNHCR production.
Another refugee, Yosra, tells her story to the online community. Seven months ago, an attack shattered her hip and killed her husband.
“I didn’t see the plane before it started shelling us,” Yosra told the UNHCR. “I just heard it coming. Then the sound got a lot louder and the shelling started. The whole ground started shaking. I fell down and I couldn’t feel anything anymore. When I got up, I realized that something was wrong with my leg. And that the whole house had collapsed on top of my husband.”
Today, the revolution and the counter-insurgency efforts surge on.
Tags: assad, bashar, protests, revolution, syria
About Cole Crawford
Cole Crawford is a senior in his third year with The Paper Tiger; he currently serves as the Tiger's Managing Editor and Centerspread Editor. Crawford primarily writes about the Lick community, sports, and politics. He is 6' 4".
View all posts by Cole Crawford →
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Home » Commentary » Arsenal Pulse » Never Alone: Video game brings an Alaska Native story to life
Never Alone: Video game brings an Alaska Native story to life
By Bill Humphrey October 13, 2014 - 9:00 am January 11, 2015 Arsenal Pulse
Note added January 11, 2015: We are hoping to have a review of the game available on this website soon from one of our correspondents. Unfortunately, he has reported that there’s a bug that stops the game about a third of the way through. You might want to wait for it to be patched before buying the game.
NPR recently reported on a very cool video game that brings to life a traditional Iñupiat adventure story from Alaska. It’s called “Never Alone” and is produced by “Upper One Games,” a studio founded in 2013 by Cook Inlet Tribal Council of Alaska to help promote the native cultural heritage to a new generation of its members and to the wider world.
The game, which brought on board a number of respected veterans from the video game industry, was developed with extensive input — on plot, in-game art, and structure — from those who know the story best:
“We didn’t want this to be an outsider’s view of what the Inupiaq culture was. We wanted it to come from the people themselves.”
Never Alone is based on a traditional story known as Kanuk Sayuka and the experiences of Alaska elders, storytellers and youth. The story follows a young Inupiaq girl and an Arctic fox as they go on an adventure to save her village from a blizzard that never ends.
Game developer Sean Vesce has 20 years of experience in the industry working on action titles like Tomb Raider. He recently went to Barrow, in far northern Alaska, to watch the students play a demo of the game. He says that day was his most memorable experience from the project.
The puzzle platformer game will be released for Windows (via Steam), PS4, and Xbox One in November. Here’s the official trailer:
It looks like an incredible game, and it features a female lead playable character, as well as bringing both cultural diversity and an unusual structure (since it was built around the Iñupiat cultural/linguistic worldview and oral traditions, rather than around the industry-dominant Euro-U.S. cultural framework).
Here’s the gameplay description from the official website:
– Play as both Girl and Fox – switch between the two characters at any time. Girl and Fox must work together to overcome challenges and puzzles as each has unique skills and abilities. A second player can join at any time for local co-op play.
– Explore perilous Arctic environments, from tundra to coastal villages, from ice floes to a mysterious forest. Brace yourself against gale-force winds and blizzards; face treacherous mountains.
– Meet fascinating characters from Iñupiaq folklore – Manslayer, the Little People, Helping Spirits, Blizzard Man and more. Never Alone was crafted in partnership with Alaska Native elders and storytellers for true authenticity.
– Hear the story of Kunuuksaayuka as told by a master Iñupiat storyteller in the spoken Iñupiaq language — a first for a commercial video game.
– Unlock special video Insights recorded with the Iñupiaq community to share their wisdom, stories and perspective.
They also worked to appropriately balance the game play with the source material:
One famous Iñupiaq storyteller named Robert Nasruk Cleveland, born in the late 1800s, was renown for his storytelling skill. Many of the great examples of traditional Iñupiaq stories are closely associated with him, including the story of Kunuuksaayuka.
The Never Alone team located Robert Cleveland’s daughter, an Iñupiaq elder named Minnie Gray, to obtain permission to use the story as the inspiration and main narrative spine of the game. The team worked directly with Minnie to ensure that, as the story was adapted to the needs of a video game, it maintained the wisdom and teachings of the original.
Here’s another video on the impact they hope to have with “Never Alone”:
Tagged Alaska, Alaska Natives, American Indians, cultural heritage, Native Americans, political pop culture, video games.
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Poor US-Russia relations still thwart Native reunifications
Why #INeedDiverseGames Is Vital To The Future Of Gaming
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Statement: Rob Guest Endowment announces cancellation of 2020 Scholarship
On 20 August, the Rob Guest Endowment announced the 30 semi-finalists for this year’s scholarship. Due to the lack of racial diversity of the semi-finalists, we received criticism for not doing enough to attract black, Indigenous and people of colour applicants.
We heard this message and agreed that we should have done more to ensure there was a greater BIPOC representation. We unreservedly apologised and vowed to do better. Our initial response in August contained language that we should have known was offensive and we apologise unreservedly for any offence caused.
On 16 September, we announced a wide range of changes to ensure that in the future, the endowment would involve people of colour and of Indigenous and other diverse backgrounds in every area of the competition, and we introduced measures to ensure that semi-finalists in future competitions included a diverse array of entrants including Indigenous Australians and people of colour. Details can be found on our website.
The Rob Guest Endowment is run totally by volunteers passionate about the musical theatre industry. Our goal is to help promising young performers in the name of one of Australia’s greatest musical theatre performers Rob Guest, who guided, mentored and taught young artists and theatre workers, boosting their resilience and determination. For more than a decade, the endowment has been a unifying and positive force in the commercial musical theatre industry.
The endowment team is particularly concerned for the mental health and welfare of the 30 semi-finalists in this year’s competition. They have endured significant challenges which are likely to intensify should the competition enter its second and third rounds.
We are aware that some semi-finalists have been targeted and intimidated from a number of sources and as a result have experienced significant anxiety over recent weeks. Bullying and intimidation have no place in a competition that has only ever sought to bring joy and hope to talented young performers in the commercial musical theatre sector.
The semi-finalists in the Rob Guest Endowment competition are our first priority, and their wellbeing comes before the scholarship. To protect them, it is with great regret that the 2020 Rob Guest Endowment Competition will now be cancelled and this year’s scholarship grant is suspended until 2022.
To emerging young performers in the commercial musical theatre industry in Australia, we will endeavour to continue to support and encourage your talent. We look towards the future and to the next scholarship, which will usher in a new era of change for the endowment. Information about future dates and details will be announced on our website.
The Rob Guest Endowment leadership committee
For more information about the Rob Guest Endowment, visit: www.robguestendowment.com.au for details.
Image: Thor Alvis on Unsplash
Riverside Theatres Digital: Pancha Nadai
Top Picks at the 2020 Queer Screen Film Fest
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News: Hunt for Lost City of Atlantis
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3227295.stm
'Zodiac Killer' cipher solved after 51 years
Atlantis Online > Forum > the Unexplained > Vanishings & Unsolved Murders > 'Zodiac Killer' cipher solved after 51 years
Author Topic: 'Zodiac Killer' cipher solved after 51 years (Read 12 times)
Kristen Kroll
Posted on Saturday, 12 December, 2020 |
Who is the Zodiac Killer and where is he now ? Image Credit: PD
The notorious serial killer, who to this day has never been caught, left several mysterious ciphers.
The unidentified individual, who terrorized parts of northern California back in the 1960s and 1970s, has been linked to at least 5 murders and several attempted murders in the San Francisco Bay area.
At the time, he had contacted several newspapers and even the police themselves with cryptic messages in the form of ciphers which experts have long struggled to solve.
His first cipher, which was solved by a schoolteacher and his wife, read simply - "I like killing."
Another however, which was sent to The Chronicle in November 1969, proved so difficult to figure out that it has taken a staggering 51 years for someone to solve it.
Now according to expert David Oranchak, who has been working on the codes for years, it reads:
"I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. ... I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice (sic) all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me."
Sadly, however, the message does not help authorities identify the killer.
"The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens," said FBI spokeswoman Cameron Polan. "The Zodiac Killer case remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners."
"The Zodiac Killer terrorized multiple communities across Northern California, and even though decades have gone by, we continue to seek justice for the victims of these brutal crimes."
"Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, and out of respect for the victims and their families, we will not be providing further comment at this time."
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Zodiac-340-cypher-cracked-by-code-expert-51-years-15794943.php
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View source for Polaroid Camera
From Dead Media Archive
← Polaroid Camera
=Early Years= [[Image:Film1.jpg|thumb|right|Edwin Land and the First Synthetic Sheet Polarizer (Save Polaroid)]] The story of the Polaroid camera begins with its founder and innovator, physicist Dr. Edwin Land, who came to the forefront of photographic technology in 1929 when he created the first synthetic sheet polarizer; thus solving "one of science’s long-standing 'unsolvable' problems – polarizing light without needing a large crystal of an esoteric mineral" (Save Polaroid). This technology enabled not only the development of the Polaroid camera but sunglasses, 3-D glasses, glare-reducing glass and windows, and many other products as well. In 1937, Dr. Land presented his plastic polarizer as a possible material to reduce headlight glare to a group of Wall Street investors(Blout 40). After an investment from Kuh, Loeb and Co., of $350,000, Land was able to form the Polaroid Corporation that same year, allowing them to begin to manufacture, develop and market these large-area plastic polarizers (40). During the war years, Polaroid turned all its focus on the war effort, manufacturing "optical plastics for military range finders", a "new type of heat homing 'smart bomb'", as well as vectographs, which Elkan Blout, a former Polaroid employee describes as "a system using polarized images to visualize objects three- dimensionally.(40)" In essence, these early years were defined by Land's work. "Polaroid's early years," Blout notes, "were Land's early years; the company exemplified the characteristics of the man -- inventiveness, determination, hard work, ability to communicate (39)." Land was not only the corporate manager, he too was the inventor, innovator and researcher (47). The idea of an instant camera, which would eventually become entirely responsible for the Polaroid Corporation's revenue, wasn’t envisioned by Dr. Land until 1943 in response to his 3-year-old daughter’s confusion as to why a camera could not instantly produce pictures. The story is told that Land's daughter asked her father (who was in the process of taking taking family pictures), “Why can’t I see them now?” (Pace). The question intrigued Dr. Land and set him on the quest to solve the 'problem' of instant photography. [[Image:Example.jpg|thumb|left|Edwin Land, Founder of Polaroid (New York Times)]] In 1947 the concept of instant photography was presented to The Optical Society in New York City and shortly after, in November of 1948 (Blout 43), instant photography became available to the public with the introduction of the Polaroid Model 95 Camera (also referred to as the Polaroid Land Camera) and Type 40 film . The Polaroid Land Camera was welcomed and widely accepted by consumer markets – even with a $95 price-tag (approximately $850 today) the camera flew off shelves and sold out in a matter of weeks. The demand for the new camera was so great that backorders began being taken and consumers started to pay up to $150 (approximately $1350 today) for the new instant photography device (Save Polaroid). A long line of instant photography developments and products proceeded the Polaroid Land Camera’s release and by the 1960’s approximately fifty-percent of American households owned a Polaroid camera (Pace). [http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29594-invention-the-first-polaroid-camera-video.htm VIDEO - Invention: The First Polaroid Camera (Discovery Channel)] =The SX-70= Released in 1972, the SX-70 Land camera represented a completely revolutionary leap for Polaroid in the field of instant film photography. According to N. Trotman of ''Afterimage Magazine'', unlike previous models of Polaroids which printed with peel- apart layers, the SX-70 transformed "the photography into a unitary, sealed packet containing negative, positive and processing chemicals" (Trotman). Additionally, the SX-70 came with a "custom motor battery system to eject the print, which developed in direct sunlight before the user's eyes" (Trotman). The later models that would follow the SX- 70 would build upon the successes of the SX-70, but they also "improved film speed along withe exposure control and added automatic focus systems" (Trotman). These included the Prontol (1976), One Step (1977), 600 Sun (1981), and Spectra (1986). =Noteworthy Dates of Several Polaroid Models= [[Image:Camera1.jpg|thumb|left|130px|Polaroid Model 95 Camera (Save Polaroid)]] 1948: The first Polaroid Land Camera, a Model 95, is sold at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store. ---- 1957: Polaroid camera sales reach over 50 million (Blout 45) ---- 1960: Polaroid camera sales reach almost 100 million/year (46) ---- 1963: Polaroid color film is now widely sold ---- 1964: The five-millionth Polaroid Land Camera, an Automatic 100, is manufactured. ---- 1971: The Big Shot Land Camera, designed to take flash color portraits, debuts. ---- 1972: The SX-70 system is introduced (see section SX-70). The camera is fully automatic, motorized, folding, single-lens reflex which ejects self developing, self-timing color prints. [[Image:OneStep.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Polaroid OneStep Camera (Amazon)]] ---- 1976: Sales of Polaroid cameras exceed six million units. ---- 1977: The OneStep Land Camera is the best-selling camera in the U.S. for more than four years. This year Polaroid sales exceed $1 billion. ---- 1986: The Spectra debuts at Jordan Marsh in Boston. ---- 1998: The OneStep is the world’s best-selling camera. ---- 1999: 9.7 million instant cameras are sold. The iZone Pocket Camera and "sticker" film are introduced. ---- 2004: Polaroid introduces a new line of six instant cameras (Naples Daily News). ---- =What makes the Polaroid Camera special?= ==How a Polaroid Camera Works== [[Image:Works.jpg|thumb|right|"Instant camera film has the entire developing process arranged in chemical layers. When the reagent enters above the light sensitive layers, it gets the process going" (HowStuffWorks).]] The film used in the Polaroid camera is quite similar to the film used in regular cameras (with the exception of a few extra elements). The difference is that the film has "its own built-in developing studio" (HowStuffWorks). Although the Polaroid camera developing process combines colors in the same basic way as slide film, what makes it unique is that the developing chemicals are already present in the film itself (HowStuffWorks). ==How to Take a Picture== '''Step 1''' Purchase the Polaroid film specified for use with your Polaroid camera model. '''Step 2''' Load film into your Polaroid camera (instructions vary depending on the Polaroid camera model. '''Step 3''' Although the Polaroid camera automatically adjusts focus, getting closer than 18 inches from the subject will cause the photograph to blur. '''Step 4''' Choose the exposure control feature you want in order to customize your image quality - a longer exposure time is best for use in areas with low light while a shorter exposure time is best for use in areas with bright light. '''Step 5''' If your Polaroid camera has extra features (i.e., a self-timer) you should adjust these settings to your preference now. '''Step 6''' Take your picture - your photograph will be produced in under 60 seconds (eHow). ==Significance== Ultimately, what makes a Polaroid photograph unique is its combination of its immediate and its material nature. You are not simply producing an instant image, but also an instant ''physical object''. Many theorists have argued, in act, that the emergence of the Polaroid required its own set of phenomenology from that of traditional photography due to these distinctive qualities. In a discussion of using a Polaroid at a party, Trotman argues that <blockquote> “Taking a Polaroid is an event unto itself, contained within the party atmosphere. The partygoer holds the photo-object in his or her hand like a strong drink, taking it in as the image forms. At the moment that the development ceases, the picture does not commemorate the past party, but participates in the party as it occurs. It circulates through the festivity, inspiring others to take their own snapshots, visualizing reality as it takes place, condensing time into a continuous present." (Trotman)</blockquote> The physicality of the Polaroid photo, combined with ability to produce it almost instantly, transforms it from merely a photograph, into a sort of instant source of entertainment, amusement and play. The photo is not solely significant as an artifact, or physical proof of a past moment. The Polaroid photograph is an object to be appreciated in its own materiality, in the present. =Applications= ==Practical uses of a Polaroid camera== The introduction of the Polaroid instant camera created a sensation among regular camera users. The obvious immediate application for “instant pictures” was at family gatherings (i.e., birthdays, holidays, etc.) since it allowed people to see the photos right away and, if necessary, reshoot the picture. But an entire market emerged for other applications as well. For example, many professions and services benefitted from the ability to create near “instant” photographs – DMV’s, Post Offices, and other institutions (business, schools, etc.) used them to quickly snap photos for driver’s licenses, passports, and ID cards. Doctor’s and hospitals began using them to document visible injuries their patients may have had and some even began to use them for “before and after” reference (this was particularly common in dermatology). However, the Polaroid camera was most commonly used in the medical field to take pictures of ultrasounds (in order to provide parents-to-be with their own photograph copy). Law enforcement was another professional that took advantage of the Polaroid camera’s ability to take instant photos – often police officers and crime scene investigators used Polaroid Cameras because of their ability to create immediate, unalterable, photographs (crucial in mug-shots or the documentation of evidence from a homicide). ==Polaroid in Art and Popular Culture== Over its 60 years as a popular form of photography, the Polaroid camera has been a favorite of artists, filmmakers and even songwriters. An exhibition in October 2009 brought together a collection of visual arts pieces which all utilized Polaroid photographs. These ranged from works by Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki to fashion photography Guy Bourdin and filmmaker Wim Wenders. The exhibit also included pieces by major modern artists including David Hockney's ''Joiners'' series, which collages many Polaroid images together to build a "fly-eye compound image", Michael Snow's 1969 piece ''Authorization'', and a variety of pieces by Andy Warhol, a lover of the Polaroid (Barrett). Beyond the visual arts, the Polaroid has been featured in countless films, including the French film hit ''Amelie'' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiU_SYV5W70&feature=related] (YouTube, clip from ''Amelie'', Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)] Polaroids were also brought back into popular lexicon with the hip-hop group Outkast's smash-hit "Hey-Ya" which included the repeated lyric: "Shake it like a Polaroid picture." [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgvGjAhvIw&ob=av2e] (YouTube, music video for "Hey Ya", Outkast). =Decline= ==Kodak Lawsuit== On October 6, 1981, in a court battle over the invention of the instant camera, the Polaroid Corporation accused the Eastman Kodak Company of "violating its patents in a way that 'strikes at the very heart of Polaroid's business'" (The New York Times). Polaroid claimed that Kodak illegally copied their technology and "entered Polaroid's exclusive field" with their 1976 introduction of an "instant color camera" (The New York Times). According to Polaroid's lawyer, William K. Kerr, "Kodak unsuccessfully tried to develop non-infringing methods...[b]ut they bumped against stone walls and eventually were driven to infringe upon Polaroid's patents" (New York Times). This patent infringement, he added, 'strikes at the very heart of Polaroid's business,' whereas instant photography represents 'only a very small part of Kodak's overall business'" (The New York Times). In 1985 Kodak was found guilty of infringing on seven of Polaroid's instant photography patents and was forced to stop producing devices that allowed for instant photography. However, the question of how much economic damage Polaroid had suffered was still unanswered (Holusha). The Polaroid Corporation claimed that Kodak's development and production of instant photography devices and products caused Polaroid to lose $4 billion in profits. And, in a further claim that Kodak "willfully stole its technology," Polaroid asked to receive damages of $12 billion (Holusha). On October 12 1990, "in the largest award ever in a patent-infringement case, a Federal judge ruled...that the Eastman Kodak Company must pay the Polaroid Corporation $909.4 million for infringing Polaroid's patents for instant photography" (Holusha). Unfortunately for Polaroid, "the decision represents something of a victory for Kodak, since it is well below the $12 billion sought by Polaroid and the $1.5 to $2 billion that some financial analysts had expected" (Holusha). ==Marketing== "There was a time when there was nothing to beat a Polaroid camera for instant gratification. But in a world of disposable cameras, one-hour film processing and the camcorder, Polaroid's...sales [suffered]" (Smith). The 1980s and 1990s were not a strong time for Polaroid as their sales and earnings were essentially flat (Blout 52). Some argued, however, that it wasn't due to the emergence of other more progressive photographic technology but rather due to poor marketing on Polaroid's behalf. Many claimed that the company was simply marketing it in the same category as "documentary" or "recording" devices when it should have been marketed as a "social enhancement device." For example, Martin Smith, BBH's deputy chairman, is cited as saying that "Polaroid operate[d] in a different market from 35mm cameras and advanced photography systems. Rather than recording the event, it add[ed] to it, and help[ed] it to become more informal. It [was] less about memories [and] more like alcohol and karaoke" (Smith). As a result, some scholars suggest that if Polaroid had marketed itself as more of a fun-enhancing gadget and less like a traditional camera, sales would have improved. ==Digital Photography== Regardless of poor marketing, there was one force which Polaroid could not ignore: digitization. With the creation of digital photography, and the increasing popularity of photo viewing and sharing via the computer and Internet, most of Polaroid's consumer base has left the Polaroid behind for the even more instant device, the digital camera. Even business applications that so commonly used the Polaroid camera have switched entirely to the digital camera. Almost all Post Offices, DMV's and other institutions are now using digital cameras to take photographs for passports, driver's licenses and ID cards. Even professional photographers who often used the Polaroid camera to preview lighting before taking an expensive photograph are switching to digital cameras- not only because the digital camera provides an instant visual of the photo without more than a moment of waiting time (via a screen on the back of the camera) but also because digital cameras allow almost near instant access to a large, high-def, visual of the image if attached to a computer. Finally, the most obvious benefit of digitization: cost. Digital cameras don't require film, so once you've purchased the device, your costs are almost non-existent. The popularity of viewing images on screens didn't just impact how consumers were previewing and sharing images but also how they were storing and saving images. Over the past several years it has become more and more common (especially among younger generations) to not keep a hard copy of photographs. The days of photo albums and prints are disappearing and being replaced by online photo-sharing websites such as Facebook and Flickr, camera-phones, and iPhoto. Many consumers find that higher definition images, the ability to edit, and the ability to instantly share (either via email, a website, or cellphone) a photograph, with a near infinite number of people, is far superior to a small, unalterable, physical copy. =Bankruptcy and the Petters Group Purchase= On October 12, 2001 the Polaroid Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “The news did not shock Wall Street, where analysts…watched the company's stock sink and debts soar as digital cameras hurt Polaroid's core instant photography business…Its stock, which approached $50 in early 1998, was selling for 28 cents...In its filing, the company listed $1.81 billion in assets and $948.4 million in debts” (Deutsch). The Polaroid instant camera was the basis for founding the Polaroid Corporation and drove the company’s profits for decades. Unfortunately, it was Polaroid’s large reliance on the instant camera – “a vicious cycle of constantly putting all the eggs in one basket” – that ultimately led to the company’s financial failure (Deutsch). In 2005 Polaroid was bought by Petters Group Worldwide (a private investment company) for approximately $426 million (Naples Daily News). In 2007, under the ownership of the Petters Group, The Polaroid Company ceased their production of instant cameras for commercial and consumer use. The following year Polaroid announced that they would cease to produce and manufacture instant film by 2009. ==The Impossible Project== [[File:PROJECTS_FACTORY_tour_p2_b.jpg|thumb|right|320px|Image from The Impossible Project, Factory Tour (Impossible Project)]] In 2009, an organization called the Impossible project took on a 10-year lease of the old Polaroid factory in the Netherlands, with the hope of reproducing film for the slew of Polaroid cameras still in circulation (Barrett). The mission of the Impossible Project, officially launched in October 2008 by Florian Kaps (CMO), Andre Bosman (COO) and Marwan Saba (CFO) is, however, "not to re-build Polaroid film, but to develop a new product with new characteristics as well as to support and promote analog Instant Photography amongst artists and photographers" (The Impossible Project, Press Release). In other words, while they did see themselves as responsible for the future of instant photography, they also hope to enhance the technology in new and interesting ways. The Impossible Project still continues to manufacture film for Polaroid Cameras to this day. ==Polaroid under the Petters Corporation== In the meantime, the new Polaroid corporation (owned and operated by the Petters Group) attempted to find its voice in the digital photography world - this time with photos taken by digital cameras and camera phones. During the third quarter of 2008 the Polaroid Corporation partnered with Zink to create and market the Polaroid PoGo Instant Mobile Printer – a small, portable, battery-powered printer from the company that was built on Edwin Land's Polaroid (Eisenberg). <blockquote> “Polaroid PoGo™ - short for Polaroid-on-the-go - is a pocket-sized, ink-free digital photo printer that produces full-color photos wirelessly from Bluetooth-enabled cell phones and via PictBridge from digital cameras. Weighing only eight ounces, Polaroid PoGo™ provides consumers with a convenient solution for sharing digital images trapped on cell phones and digital cameras. Connecting via Bluetooth or PictBridge, Polaroid PoGo™ uses a revolutionary ZINK Zero Ink Zero Hassles™ Printing Technology to produce borderless, full-color, 2-inch by 3-inch prints in less than 60 seconds” (ZINK).</blockquote> [[Image:Future1111.jpg|thumb|right|320px|Zink Enabeled Polaroid PoGo (Polaroid)]] The 2008 Polaroid PoGo printer connected to cell phones wirelessly via Bluetooth technology and to digital cameras via a cable. The 2008 PoGo was unique in that it didn't use cartridges or toner (because it doesn’t use ink). “Instead, there is a computer chip, a 2-inch-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated” (Eisenberg). “When the image file is beamed from the camera to the printer, a program translates pixel information into heat information. Then, as the paper passes under the printhead, the heat activates the colors within the paper and forms crisp images” (Eisenberg). The unique paper was created by former Polaroid employees and conceptualized at Polaroid. However, after Polaroid filed bankruptcy in 2001 the employees founded the company ZINK Imaging in 2005 where the product was able to be developed and made available to buyers (Eisenberg). As of 2010, the PoGo has been transformed from simply a portable printer into digital camera with a built in printing capacities (Polaroid CZA-05300: Polaroid PoGo Instant Digital Camera). Clearly, the original PoGo; not quite a digital camera, and not quite a traditional Polaroid, failed to find the niche market they hoped it would. ---- = Polaroid in 2010 and into the future = In 2010, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy again, this time due to a multi- billion dollar Ponzi scheme at parent company Petters Group (Burns). Polaroid's name and assets have now been acquired by private equity film Hilco Consumer Capital and liquidator Gordon Brothers Group (Burns) for 67 million US dollars (Kirby). When purchased, the company which had once employed 21,000 workers, employed only 70 people. On June 30, 2010 at the MIT Museum, Polaroid, under it's new ownership, celebrated its history and introduced its plans for the future. This event included an addition to the museum: an image of their new Creative Director, performer Lady Gaga. The appointment of Lady Gaga, Polaroid argues, is simply continuing their tradition of drawing inspiration from "the creative community" ("Polaroid at MIT"). More likely, the addition of Lady Gaga as their Creative Director is part of the new leadership's attempt to relaunch the brand as young, hip, and current- the antithesis of what the brand had come to represent in the past decade. While the company is still interested in cracking the digital market, they are also revisiting analog photography and plan on re-releasing some of their classic cameras. Interestingly, rather than manufacture their own film, Polaroid hopes to help distribute the film currently being produced by The Impossible Project to run with their re-released cameras, a fascinating instance of grassroots-corporate teamwork (Kirby). The new Polaroid seems to believe that the resurgence amongst youth for tangible items, in other terms, "things you can hold and touch," such as vinyl records, will encourage an interest in the Polaroid camera once more (Kirby). The past 5 years have also revealed the popularity of Lomography as an artform, and an interest in film-based cameras as a new means of creative expression. In this age of digitization and the move from the material to the digital, there is hope at Polaroid that there will be some kind of return to physical objects, and to the joy of the instant, material photograph. As one of the founders of the Save Polaroid movement, Dave Bias asserts, "the thing on the paper is a tangible artifact of the moment in time. Good or bad, right or wrong, it's what you created. These tangible things have gained in value" (Kirby). =Works Cited= Amazon. Image: Polaroid OneStep Camera. Amazon. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://www.amazon.com/Polaroid-One-Step-600-Instant-Camera/dp/B00004RFC5>. Barrett, David."Reviews: Exhibitions". Art Monthly. London: Nov 2009. , Iss. 331; pg. 20, 2 pgs Blout, Elkan. "Polaroid: Dreams to Reality". Daedalus, Vol. 125, No. 2, Managing Innovation (Spring, 1996), pp. 39-53 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20013438> Burns, Charlotte. "Polaroid row hots up." Art Newspaper 19 (2010): 65. OmniFile Full Text Mega. Web. 22 Sep. 2010. Deutsch, Claudia H. "Deep in Dept Since 1988, Polaroid Files for Bankruptcy." The New York Times. 13 Oct. 2001. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A00E0D8123FF930A25753C1A9679C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/C/Credit>. Discovery Channel. Video: Invention: The First Polaroid Camera. Discovery Channel. 25 Oct. 2008 <http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29594-invention-the-first-polaroid-camera-video.htm>. eHow. "How to Use a Polaroid Camera." eHow. 26 Oct. 2008. <http://www.ehow.com/how_2075800_use-polaroid-camera.html>. Eisenberg, Anne. Image: Edwin Land, Founder of Polaroid. The New York Times. 13 April 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html?scp=30&sq=polaroid%20camera&st=cse>. Eisenberg, Anne. “Instant Digital Prints (and Polaroid Nostalgia).” The New York Times. 13 April 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html?scp=30&sq=polaroid%20camera&st=cse>. Holusha, John. “Kodak Told It Must Pay $909 Million.” The New York Times. 13 Oct.1990. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6D91F39F930A25753C1A966958260&sec=&spon=&&scp=4&sq=polaroid%20kodak%2suit&st=cse>. HowStuffWorks. "How Instant Film Works" HowStuffWorks. 26 Oct. 2008. <http://science.howstuffworks.com/instant-film.htm>. HowStuffWorks. Image: Instant Camera Film. HowStuffWorks. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://www.howstuffworks.com/question605.htm>. Kirby, J. Polaroid: The revival. Canadian Business v. 83 no. 1 (January 19-February 15 2010) p. 20 Lyons, Patrick J. “Polaroid Abandons Instant Photography.” The New York Times. 8 Feb. 2008. <http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/polaroid-abandons-instant-photography/?hp>. Naples Daily News. "The Polaroid Project: The Timeline." Naples Daily News. 20 April 2008. <http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/Apr/20/polaroid-project-timeline/>. Pace, Eric. “Edwin H. Land Is Dead at 81; Inventor of Polaroid Camera.” The New York Times. March 2 1991. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D8133AF931A35750C0A967958260>. Polaroid. "Polaroid CZA-05300: Polaroid Instant Digital Camera". 22 September 2010. <http://www.polaroid.com/product/0/266909/CZA-05300/_/CZA-05300%3A_Polaroid_PoGo%26%238482%3B_Instant_Digital_Camera> Polaroid. "Polaroid at MIT." 22 Sept. 2010. <http://www.polaroid.com/About/Polaroid+at+MIT/Polaroid+at+MIT/4434> Polaroid. Image: Zink Enabled Polaroid PoGo. 25 Oct. 2008. <http://www.polaroid.com/us/index.jsp?co=usbmLocale=en_US>. Save Polaroid. “A History of Polaroid.” Save Polaroid. 23 Oct. 2008. <http://www.savepolaroid.com/history>. Save Polaroid. Image: Edwin Land and the First Synthetic Sheet Polarizer. Save Polaroid. 23 Oct. 2008. <http://www.savepolaroid.com/history>. Save Polaroid. Image: Polaroid Model 95 Camera. Save Polaroid. 23 Oct. 2008. <http://www.savepolaroid.com/history>. Smith, Allison. “Having a Party with Your Polaroid Camera – Marketing Brand Management.” F.T. Business Enterprises Limited. 26 May 1998. ProQuest. NYU. 20 Oct. 2008. <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=29683432&Fmt=7&clientId=9148&RQT=309&VName=PQD>. The New York Times. “Polaroid Says Kodak’s Entry In to Instant Photos Injured It.” The New York Times. 6 Oct. 1981. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E5DF1239F935A35753C1A967948260&scp=9&sq=instant20camera%20polaroid&st=cse>. Trotman, N. "The Life of the Party". Afterimage v. 29 no. 6 (May/June 2002) p. 10 Youtube. Clip from ''Amelie''. Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 22 September 2010 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiU_SYV5W70&feature=related> Youtube. Music Video for "Hey Ya". Outkast. Dir. Bryan Barber. 22 September 2010 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWgvGjAhvIw&ob=av2e> ZINK (Zero Ink). Image: PoGo and Bluetooth Technology. ZINK. 22 Oct. 2008. <http://www.zink.com/partner-products>. ZINK (Zero Ink). “Partner Products.” ZINK. 22 Oct. 2008. <http://www.zink.com/partner-products>. [[Category:Dossier]]
Return to Polaroid Camera.
Retrieved from "http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/index.php/Polaroid_Camera"
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Whitecliff Bay
Whitecliff Bay is a sandy bay near Foreland which is the easternmost point of the Isle of Wight, England, about two miles south-west of Bembridge and just to the north of Culver Down. The bay has a shoreline of around three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) and has a popular sandy shingle beach which is over half a mile long.[1] It is a tourist site with three holiday parks in the vicinity of the bay; it has two cafes though minimal facilities. Access is limited and only possible down two steeply sloping concrete tracks.
Sandown Bay
Location within the Isle of Wight
Ceremonial county
Sovereign state
List of places
50°40′12″N 1°05′49″W / 50.67000°N 1.09694°W / 50.67000; -1.09694Coordinates: 50°40′12″N 1°05′49″W / 50.67000°N 1.09694°W / 50.67000; -1.09694
The site is of major geological interest, being part of the Whitecliff Bay And Bembridge Ledges SSSI.
GeologyEdit
View of the bay from Culver Down
Whitecliff Bay has nearly identical geology to the lesser known Alum Bay, being a coastal section of the same strata which run east-west across the island. It displays a classic sequence of fossil-bearing Eocene beds of soft sands and clays, separated by an unconformity from the underlying Cretaceous Chalk Formation forming the headland of Culver Down to its south. Due to geological folding of the Alpine orogeny, the strata in the main section of the Bay are vertical, with younger rocks to the north.[2] In the bay, there are around 500 metres (1,600 ft) of well-exposed sands and of late Palaeocene to late Eocene clays which make the site is a good spot for fossil hunting, with an abundance of prehistoric shells, sponges and molluscs.[3] The bay itself is shallow up to around 350 metres (1,150 ft) from shore getting to deep water 1⁄2 nautical mile (0.6 mi; 0.9 km) out.[4]
Whitecliff Bay was one of the landing points for the French invasion of the Isle of Wight (1545) where they planned to go on to attack Sandown.[5] The bay gets its name from the chalky cliff on the headland, Culver Down, which rises over 340 feet (104 m) at the south-eastern point of the bay.[4]
^ Google (5 September 2018). "Sandown Bay" (Map). Google Maps. Google. Retrieved 5 September 2018.
^ West, Ian M. 2007. [1], Geology of the Wessex Coast of England. School of Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, Southampton University. Internet site. Version: 25 July 2007, retrieved 3 August 2008
^ "Whitecliff Bay". UK Fossil Collecting. 8 February 2008.
^ a b "Whitecliff Bay". eoceanic.com. Retrieved 6 September 2018.
^ "Pilot the Isle of Wight: Puckaster Cove to Bembridge". Yachting Monthly. 20 June 2012.
Whitecliff Bay Holiday Park
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Posted on May 24, 2016 by Cindy Moore
Movie Review: Spotlight
This evening I completed this year’s list of Best Picture nominated movies, with Spotlight. Watching the Academy Awards, I was surprised when this film won the final Oscar. The movie Revenant was favored to win. I knew little about Spotlight, other than the premise. I settled in tonight, curious to discover what made this film stand out.
Spotlight stars Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d’Arcy James and Len Cariou. This historical drama was directed by Tom McCarthy and has a run time of 2 hours and 9 minutes. The film is rated R for adult themes and strong language.
Spotlight was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Ruffalo, Best Supporting Actress for McAdams and Best Editing. It won for Best Original Screenplay and the coveted Best Picture Oscar.
Based on actual events, Spotlight is the story of how the Boston Globe uncovered a massive scandal and cover-up of child molestation within the Catholic Church. In 2001, editor Marty Baron (Schreiber) assigns Spotlight, a specialized group of journalists within the Globe, the task of investigating allegations against an unfrocked priest accused of abusing more than 80 boys.
Editor Robby Robinson (Keaton) leads the team, made up of journalists Mike Rezendes (Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (McAdams) and Matt Carroll (d’Arcy James). Because of the sensitive nature of the investigation and the involvement of the Church, Robby secures the help of fellow editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (Slattery). What at first appears to be an isolated case soon grows in its complexity and breadth. As more and more victims are found, the team discovers that the number of Boston priests involved may number closer to 90.
From attorneys who refuse to disclose information, to Cardinal Bernard Law (Cariou), the Archdiocese of Boston, the cover-up is more intentional and more wide spread than the Spotlight team could have imagined. One attorney, Mitchell Garabedian (Tucci), who fights tirelessly on behalf of victims, finally agrees to help in the investigation by securing crucial documents.
The year long investigation threatens to crack open decades of abuse that has been hidden away, while pitting the Church and its supporters against the credibility of the Boston Globe. In breaking the story, they are breaking the silence.
This was a very well done film. The subject was sensitive, and painful. However, the movie never sensationalized the story nor did it pull back from the gravity of the investigation. This was not an attack against Faith, or even so much an attack against the Church in general. It was an uncovering of a deep flaw in the system that allowed a horrific injustice to continue while leaders looked the other way.
I very much appreciated the flow of the film and the journalistic feel, which was a credit to the director. Rather than make a strong emotional appeal, which would have been easy to do, given the circumstances, the story was presented in a factual way. It was vital that the investigation build its case piece by piece, and that the scope was broad enough, so that there could be no defense against the story that broke. I felt like I got to watch that happen.
Marty Baron said, “Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we spend most of our time stumbling around in the dark. Suddenly, a light gets turned on and there’s a fair share of blame to go around. I can’t speak to what happened before I arrived, but all of you have done some very good reporting here. Reporting that I believe is going to have an immediate and considerable impact on our readers. For me, this kind of story is why we do this.”
The impact was huge, and far reaching, and many, many other victims spoke up.
This was a somber movie with an important message. As Marty said, there is enough blame to go around. It takes all of us being vigilant to protect our children. Spotlight made me think and made me aware and in my opinion, deserved the Best Picture win. I was left wondering what changes have been made by the Catholic Church concerning abusive priests, since this story broke in 2002. I’ll find out.
CategoriesUncategorized, Year of Surrender Tags#surrender144, Academy Awards, Best Picture 2016, best picture nominated movies, Movie Review Spotlight, Oscars, Surrender, Year of Surrender
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3 MARCH 1837, Friday
On Saturday last, at Bosvigo Farm near Truro, of brain fever, Elizabeth, wife of Mr. Henry Ellery, aged 32 years.
On Thursday, the 23rd ult, Mrs. James, wife of Mr. Henry James, grocer, Truro, aged 50 years.
At Tywardreath, on the 28th ult, Mr. Samuel Serpell, aged 48 years, leaving seven children to lament their loss.
On Wednesday last, at Tresillian, Mary, third daughter of the late Mr. Mitchell, of that place, aged 23 years.
On the 13th ult., at Well Town, Warleggan, Mr. B. Lean, aged 57 years.
On Wednesday last, at Camelford, Mrs. Soloman, aged 55 years.
At the house of his son-in-law, Carvedras, near Truro, where he had been for the benefit of his health, Mr. Wm. Steppings, of Ilfracombe, Devon, block and pump maker, aged 67 years.� He was for many years a member of the Calvanistic society; his end was peace.
On Wednesday last, at St. Ives, Mr. John Painter, aged 81 years.� On Thursday, Mrs. Goodman aged 67 years,� Mrs. Ann Couch, aged 81 years, and the infant son of Mr. William Veal, aged 6 months.
On the 20th ultimo, at London,� John Grant, Esq. the respected Secretary to the Albion �Mining Association; sincerely regretted by all who knew him.� His urbanity of manners commanded the respect of a large contingent of friends who have sustained a loss long to be remembered.
At the London Inn, St. Austell, last week, Miss Hannah Bastard, aged 86 years.
At Mount Charles, St. Austell, on Thursday last, Mrs. Collings, aged 41 years.
On Friday last, at his residence at Trevena, in the parish of Tintagel, W. Wade Esq. aged 71 years.� The deceased was a highly honourable and benevolent gentleman, and respected by all who knew him.
On Sunday morning, at West Looe, Mrs. Wilcocks, after only two days illness, aged 46 years, daughter of the late Mr. Jeeves, many years Comptroller of H. M. Customs at Looe.� She was generally beloved.
At Penzance, on Friday last, the Rev. Wilkinson Stephenson, Wesleyan Minister, aged 34 years.�His end was peace.
At Penzance, on Tuesday last, Mrs. Rillstone, aged 66 years.
At St. Ives, Mr. Sidney Richards, aged 85 years.
At Falmouth, on Tuesday morning last, the youngest son of Capt. J. Cooper, aged 8 months.
At Lower St. Columb, on the 5th instant, Miss Kezia Nicholls, fifth daughter of the late Mr. James Nicholls, of decline, aged 20 years.
On the 3rd instant, in the Workhouse, Penzance, where she had been an inmate for 10 years, Hope Reseigh, in the 94th year of her age.
At Truro, on Wednesday last, at the age of 90 years, Mr. William Harlow, for upwards of 50 years an inhabitant of this town.� During 70 years, he honourably sustained a Christian profession, having been first a member of the Tabernacle, Moorfields, London, under the ministry of the celebrated Geo. Whitfield; and for many years a deacon of the Independent church of this town.� He was greatly beloved by all who knew him, and distinguished by his zeal in the cause of religion.� He gradually sunk under increasing infirmities, powerfully exemplifying to the latest period of his affectionately disposition to those whom he has left to mourn his loss, and came to his "grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in his season".
Last week, at Truro, Mrs. Bult, relict of the lat Mr. Thomas Bult, late of the Seven Stars Inn, Truro, aged 70 years.
At Launceston, on the 7th instant, the Rev. John Rowe, aged 60 years, perpetual curate of that parish, and also vicar of St. Cleather, near Launceston.
At Liskeard, on Friday last, Mr. Henry Longmaid, copperplate engraver, aged 36 years.
At S... �near Fowey, last week, the infant son of Mr. Richard Hicks.
Last week, at Fowey, Mrs. Line, aged 89 years.� Also, on Wednesday last at Fowey, the infant daughter of Mr. Kingcome of the Crown and Anchor Inn.
At Penzance on Tuesday last, Mrs. Batten, relict of the late John Batten, Esq.
At St. Agnes, on Friday last, Mr. Wm. Matthews, of Mevagissey, aged 19 years.
Lately, at Probus, Mr. Thomas Gerrans, a respectable butcher, aged 76 years; also, Mrs. Ann Searle, aged 35 years.
At Plas Newydd, Bodmin, on Saturday last, William James Esq. civil engineer &c, aged 66 years.
At Bodmin,on Friday last, after a short illness, Mary, the wife of Mr. William Carter, aged 25 years.
On Sunday last, at Penzance, Nanny Ninnis, at the advanced age of 100 years and 5 months.
To the last she was in possession of her mental faculties; and till within the last few weeks, was enabled to walk about; she could also read the smallest print without the aid of spectacles, and was for upwards of 60 years a steady and� consistent member of the Wesleyan Society.
At Helleston, on Sunday evening last, after an illness of long standing, and much occasional suffering, George Simon Borlase, Esq., F.R.S. deputy-lieutenant of his county, in the forty-sixth year of his age.� The early death of this lamented gentleman will be felt, not merely as a private, but as a public loss.� As an active magistrate, ever ready to lend his best exertions to the cause of improvement, as the friend of every useful and benevolent institution, and as the strenuous promoter of every object calculated to advance the best interests of the county, and raise the general standard of intelligence among the people, he will be sincerely regretted by all who shared his labours, or are capable of appreciating their utility.� In his native town, more particularly, and its immediate vicinity, the independence of his character, his public spirit and liberality, will long be remembered in their effects, no less than in the grateful recollections of the inhabitants.� Of the many permanent records by which his practical worth may be estimated, it may be sufficient to notice the schools at Huel Vor, founded, supported, and to a considerable extent endowed, for the children of the miners in that populous district, by his persevering zeal and beneficence; and many similar undertakings directly as well as indirectly conducive to the advancement of religion and piety, either effected, commenced, or only frustrated by his premature decease, bear testimony equally honourable to his character.� He took much interest in the pursuits of science, and numbered among his friends Davies, Gilbert, Dr. Paris, and many other individuals distinguished in the scientific world.
At Helston, on Sunday se'nnight, Mr. P. Best, aged 81 years.
Suddenly, at Trevarth in Gwennap, on Tuesday last, John Paul Esq. surgeon, aged 69 years.
At Tregaswith, St. Columb Major, on Sunday last, universally beloved and esteemed, Philip Drew, Esq. aged 61 years; his loss will be long lamented by a numerous circle of sorrowing relations and friends.
At Penzance, on Tuesday last, Mr. Nicholas Tremewen, aged 79 years.
At Liskeard, on Thursday last, at an advanced age, Mr. R. Hockins, woolstapler.
At Enys, on the 18th instant, aged 71 years, Susanna Sarsons, for more than 19 years the much respected housekeeper in Mrs. Enys's Family.
At Hayle, on Saturday last, Mrs. Mary Thomas, aged 77 years.
At Padstow on Saturday last, after a lingering illness, Anna Maria, the wife of Mr. G. Graham, excise officer aged 21 years.
At Ladock, on Friday last, Mrs. Susan Pearse, aged 92 years, she was much lamented; her end was peace.
At Newquay, on Sunday last, Frances, second daughter of Mrs. Thomas, of the Old Inn, aged 20 years.
At Germoe, at an advanced age, Mr. Henbard.
At Callington, on the 11th instant, Mrs. Kinsman, aged 81 years, widow of the late John Kinsman of Manaton.
On Sunday morning last, at Torpoint, Mr. J. Powel.
On Monday last, at Polsue, near Truro, highly respected for his numerous excellencies, Mr. Gatley, aged 77 years.
At Rosewyn, Truro, on Saturday last, John Richards, Esq. aged 65 years.
At St. Blazey, on Monday the 27th instant, Thomas Bond, Esq. late surgeon of Fowey Consols and Lanescot Mines. His abilities and constant attention to the patients under his care, obtained for him considerable esteem and respect. He died from over exertion in his practice whilst labouring under the effects of an attack of the influenza. His loss will be deeply felt by the inhabitants of the thriving town of St. Blazey and its populous neighborhood.
On Tuesday, the 21st instant, at Rosenitheon, St. Kevern, at the advanced age of 92 years, 40 of which were spent in his Majesty's service, Mr. George Boom, beloved and lamented by all who knew him.
At Penzance, on Wednesday last, Mary, eldest daughter of Mr. Pool, Star Hotel, aged 12 years.
At Padstow, on Friday last, Mr. Humphry Sleeman, aged 73 years.
On Tuesday last, after a protracted affliction, borne with Christian patience and resignation to the Divine will, Mr. Oliver Matthrew, bookseller, stationer, &c in the 66th year of his age.
At Helston, on Monday last, Mr. Richard Hawke, aged 40 years. Also, Mrs. Moyle.
At Redruth, on the 29th instant, Elizabeth Ann, eldest daughter of Mr. Haynes, grocer aged 16 years.
Lately, at Mullion, highly respected, at an advanced age, Mr. Fowell, for many years a local preacher in the Methodist connexion.
On Saturday last, at Pengersick in Breage, Mr. T. Harvey, aged 78 years.
On Friday last, at Trew in Breage, Miss Hebbard, a highly respectable shopkeeper.
At Falmouth on Wednesday, the 22nd instant, the infant son of Mr. T. Dash.
At Falmouth, on the 23d instant, after a long illness, which she bore with resignation, Miss M. Frood, aged 30 years.
At Falmouth, on the 17th instant, aged 80, Mr. Richd. Pike, for many years a consistent and highly respected member of the Methodist society.
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The 'Home Alone' Reboot Has Found Its Lead Boy
'Jojo Rabbit' star Archie Yates will star alongside Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney
Archie Yates in 'Jojo Rabbit'
A Home Alone reboot will begin shooting in Montreal early next year. And while we all wish the movie would star Macaulay Culkin, a different boy has been cast as the lead.
Archie Yates, who broke out with scene-stealing turns in Jojo Rabbit, will star in the film alongside Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney. The reboot is being directed by Dirty Grandpa helmer Dan Mazer based on a script from SNL's Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new movie will have nothing to do with the original Home Alone movies. Instead, the film follows "a wife and husband who, in order to save their home from financial ruin, go to war with a kid who has stolen a priceless heirloom."
The new Home Alone will shoot in Montreal from February until mid-April before arriving on Disney+.
More Dan Mazer
More Taika Waititi
More Rob Delaney
More Ellie Kemper
Vancouver's Rio Theatre Is Becoming a Sports Bar
Vancouver's beloved Rio Theatre is making a major move — it's becoming a full-on sports bar. Yes, a sports bar. The Rio made the announce...
'Snowpiercer' Will Return for Season 3
Ahead of the fast-approaching premiere of Snowpiercer's second season, the show has already been renewed for Season 3. TNT has ordered up...
It's nearly February 2021 and, well, we're still inside. Fortunately, Netflix has promised to release at least one original movie every week...
'At Home with Amy Sedaris' Has Just Been Cancelled
Bad news Amy Sedaris fans — her At Home with Amy Sedaris has just been cancelled. Yes, we too see the irony of a show called At Home being c...
'Saved by the Bell' Renewed for Season 2
Whether you love it or hate it, the new Saved by the Bell series is coming back for Season 2. Today NBC's Peacock announced it has ordered u...
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How do I love thee, Robert Rauschenberg? Let me count the ways.
At the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice, France:
Ruby Goose, Robert Rauschenberg, 1979
Ruby Goose, Robert Rauschenberg, 1979 (detail)
At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC:
Reservoir, Robert Rauschenberg, 1961
oil, wood, graphite, fabric, rubber, metal on canvas
At the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC:
Dam, Robert Rauschenberg, 1959
oil paint, photomechanical reproductions, cloth and metal on canvas
"Dam is one of the influential hybrid works known as the Combines that Robert Rauschenberg made between 1954 and 1964. Described by his contemporary Jasper Johns as 'painting playing the game of sculpture,' the Combines incorporate both two- and three-dimensional elements, many of which Rauschenberg collected from the streets of his Lower Manhattan neighbourhood. In an often quoted statement from 1959, the artist wrote: 'Painting relates to both art and life... (I try to act in the gap between the two.)' Reflecting the unexpected contrasts and continuous flux of urban life, Dam invites the viewer's eye to roam among its parts, making unexpected connections between high and low, word and image, art and everyday life."
At the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
Rebus, Robert Rauschenberg, 1955
Bed, Robert Rauschenberg, 1955,
oil and pencil on pillow, quilt and sheet on wood supports
I love the way Rauschenberg combined collage, paint, text and silkscreen printing with found 3-dimensional objects. Though no longer an uncommon practice, it was innovative in its time.
To hear a conversation between Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Stephen Zucker about Bed, and about the place of Rauschenberg in the history of modern art, click on the brief video below:
Labels: inspiration, museum
While in Washington DC this past April, I visited the National Museum of Women in the Arts. What a beautiful venue! Private groups often rent space in the building to hold special events. This museum is the only one in the world devoted exclusively to art made by women.
Here is the text from one of the panels placed near the entrance:
Art and Feminism
Visual art in the 1970s reflected dramatic political and cultural shifts occurring globally. In the U.S., the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights and Women's Movements challenged mainstream values. Feminist artists and activists protested the unequal representation of women in museums, galleries, and publications. Colleges and universities responded by introducing women's studies curricula and feminist art history classes.
Seeking imagery that could form the core of feminist art, some artists created abstracted symbols that reference the female sexual body. Feminist artists worked in traditional fine art media such as painting and sculpture, but they also pioneered experimental art forms such as performance and video. They attained critical recognition for weaving, sewing and assemblage - processes that had previously been classified as handicrafts. Feminist art put strong emphasis on subjective experience. Content often reflects artists' direct experiences within both the domestic and professional spheres as well as critiques of popular culture. Much feminist art is also representational. This sets it apart from the abstract minimalist style prevalent in the 1960s, which was praised by critics and associated almost exclusively with male artists.
I'd like to share here some of my "finds". Of course my photos do not do justice to the experience of seeing these works in their museum setting.
Louise Nevelson, Reflections of a Waterfall II, painted wood, 1982
Louise Nevelson, always one of my favourite sculptors, was 83 years old when she made this work.
"When she was in her sixties, Nevelson became known for her wood sculpture installations comprising columns and walls filled with objects such a newel posts, baseball bats, picture frames, and driftwood. Waterfall is more allusive, with simpler shapes that suggest running water, rocks and bridges. The large scale and dramatic play of light and shadow within Nevelson's sculptures prompted one critic in the 1960s to describe her works as 'appalling and marvelous, utterly shocking in the way they violate our received ideas on the limits of sculpture.'"
Helen Frankenthaler, Spiritualist, acrylic on canvas, 1973
"Rather than apply paint with a brush Frankenthaler poured paint onto unprimed canvas and allowed the pigment to soak directly into the fabric. Her innovative stain technique emphasizes the essential flatness of a painted surface, while the broad swathes of pigment envelop the viewer in an environment of colour. Frankenthaler's work formed a bridge between gestural abstract expressionist painting of the 1950s and colour field painting of the 1960s."
Susan Swartz, Gentle Morning, Acrylic on linen, 2007
There was no explanatory label for the Susan Swartz painting, but I thought it was lovely: atmospheric and painterly.
Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, The Town, oil on canvas, 1955
"Vieira da Silva was a key figure within the field of expressive abstraction in post-war Paris, where she lived and worked for nearly 60 years. Her paintings explore how space can be simultaneously suggested and collapsed or flattened on the two-dimensional surface of a canvas. The grid of black linesand short brushstrokes in this work creates an abstract pattern that seems to shimmer and pulsate like blinking lights and fast-moving traffic."
Here's a short video that will introduce you to the National Museum of Women in the Arts:
Labels: museum, travel
Philadelphia's Magic Gardens
In April I attended the annual SAQA conference, held this year in Philadelphia. It was during a casual conversation with another registrant that I learned about the Magic Gardens. A short walk from our centrally-located hotel, I thought it warranted a visit.
To quote from the facility's brochure:
"Philadelphia's Magic Gardens is a nonprofit visionary art environment and community arts centre located in Isaiah Zagar's largest public artwork.
"Spanning half a block, the museum includes an immersive outdoor art installation and indoor galleries. Zagar created the space using nontraditional materials such as folk art statues, found objects, bicycle wheels, colourful glass bottles, hand-made tiles, and thousands of glittering mirrors.
"The site is enveloped in visual anecdotes and personal narratives that refer to Zagar's life, family, and community, as well as references from the wider world such as influential art history figures and other visionary artists and environments.
"In 1994, Zagar started working on the vacant lots located near his studio. He first constructed a massive fence to protect the area then spent years sculpting multi-layer walls out of found objects.
"In 2002, the Boston-based owner of the lots discovered Zagar's installation and decided to sell the land, calling for the work to be dismantled. Unwilling to witness the destruction of the now-beloved neighbourhood art environment, the community rushed to support the artist.
"After a two-year legal battle, his creation, newly titled Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, became incorporated as a nonprofit organization with the intention of preserving the artwork at the PMG site and throughout the South Street region."
The installation reminded me of a visit to the Hundertwasser museum in Vienna, with its mosaics and bizarre architecture. I felt that I had fallen down the "rabbit hole", separated from the real world and immersed in a strange and fantastic labyrinth.
This kind of art is often labelled as "outsider". But Isaiah Zagar is not a social isolate. He is a community activist. He earned his B.F.A. in Painting and Graphics from the Pratt Institute in New York City, and he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts.
And if you have a chance to visit Philadelphia's Magic Gardens? Prepare to be amazed.
Labels: finds, travel
Papeterie Saint-Armand
We are fortunate to have in Montreal a renowned maker of artisanal papers, Papeterie St-Armand, located at 3700 St-Patrick Street, a few blocks from the Atwater Market. Their unassuming entrance, a yellow door positioned below ground level in a huge, old industrial building, gives no hint of the wonders inside: papers speckled and striped, smooth and rough, in every colour of the rainbow.
Our text'art group was lucky enough to be given a tour by David Carruthers, who founded the paper mill in 1979. He explained that all his paper is made of rags, off-cuts from manufacturers of clothing and bed linens. The cloth remnants are chopped into little bits before being beaten into pulp. The colour of the rags determines the colour of the paper. The black paper, made from black denim, is favoured for photo albums.
Other materials used include jute, linen, sisal, and occasionally leaves. Many of the papers are available for sale in small, postcard-sized bundles, or bound as notebooks and sketchbooks.
textile off-cuts, chopped
While we did see some technicians hand-screening paper, most of the production comes off the assembly line, powered by a machine made in Edinburgh, 1949.
A corner of the plant is sectioned off and filled with drawer after drawer of metal type. Printing can be done to order for posters, wedding invitations, book covers, etc.
Papeterie St-Armand stages special events on the last Saturday of every month, from 10 am to 1 pm. Check the bulletin section of their website to see just what will be presented: monotype printing, hand-screening, or the opportunity to bring your own media and try them out on a variety of papers. Papers of all kinds may be purchased during business hours, 9 am - 5 pm, Monday - Friday.
A 5-minute video made at the Papeterie St-Armand and showing its manufacturing process is available here:
Labels: finds, resource
I recently saw the 2014 film "IRIS", a profile of fashion icon Iris Apfel. The director, then 88-year-old Albert Maysles, since deceased, is best known for his movies "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter".
Iris Apfel is the 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades. A description of the film from the ImDb film review site says,
"More than a fashion film, the documentary is a story about creativity and how, even at Iris' advanced age, a soaring free spirit continues to inspire. IRIS portrays a singular woman whose enthusiasm for fashion, art and people are life's sustenance and reminds us that dressing, and indeed life, is nothing but an experiment. Despite the abundance of glamour in her current life, she continues to embrace the values and work ethic established during a middle-class Queens upbringing during the Great Depression."
The film offers us a glimpse into her very eclectic home, a veritable museum of curiosities. We also witness the loving relationship she has with husband Carl, some seven years her senior.
I would have liked to have had more of a backstory in the film. Apfel credits her mother as having been a big influence in her life, but we don't learn much about her mother, or even about her own career as a designer. What was her interior design work like? What exactly was her contribution to the White House? The movie is more a snapshot of her life now rather than an exploration of her influences.
The film is available as a rental or purchase on Amazon, and also as a free download.
Labels: film
Our little town of Hudson (pop. 5000) has not only an active group of quilters, but a newer group, Hudson Fine Craft. This lively bunch meets regularly to explore new techniques and to organize exhibition opportunities.
Congratulations to Carol Outram, Joanna Olson and Kathryn Lamb, who have worked hard to pull together a collaborative project involving Hudson Fine Craft, the Hudson Historical Society, and the Hudson War Memorial Library.
antique patterns for dolls' clothes, McCall's
Women's Work is on display at the Hudson Historical Society Museum, with many artifacts relating to needlecraft. Antique scissors, thimbles, needles and pincushions have been collected from Hudson's attics and are now showcased along with examples of weaving, quilting, and lacemaking.
Grandmother's Fan quilt, on loan from Inge Lawson
Grandmother's Fan quilt (detail)
I was intrigued by the tiny paper patterns for doll clothes, and by the "Make Do and Mend" wartime government pamphlet. A fine example of an antique Grandmother's Fan is on display, having been rescued for a few dollars from a charity shop. Admittedly, the quilt is a little threadbare, but its decorative embroidery stitches more than make up for that.
Untitled, Phyllis Spriggs
A companion exhibition is currently running at the War Memorial Library. Thirteen works of contemporary textile art, employing a wide variety of techniques and materials, have been hung on the library walls for the pleasure of visitors. Each piece measures 16" square.
Starlight in Silk, Marlise Horst
The artist participants are:
Carol Outram
Joanna Olson
Michele Meredith
Sharon Gallagher
Monique Verdier
Madeleine Leger
Phyllis Spriggs
Marlise Horst
Ann Letellier
and myself.
Artisanes to the Core, Monique Verdier
The Hudson Historical Society Museum is located at 541 Main Road, and is open Wednesday - Sunday, 10 am - 4 pm.
The library is found at 60 Elm Street, and hours are published on its website.
The shows will continue into the summer. More images from the library show are below:
March Hare, Joanna Olson
Untitled, Sharon Gallagher
Still Life with Pillows, Heather Dubreuil
Hudson Artists Spring Show
With fewer artists than usual in the AHA Spring Show, 28 compared to an average of 33 or so, there was still lots of energy at the opening night on Friday. I find that usually I can't take photos at the vernissage, because I am so busy chatting with visitors and other artists.
I went back at a quieter time to get these pix:
My colour studies, acrylic paint on paper, mounted on birch cradleboard, 10" x 10"
and four mini-collages, 6" x 6"
My work was displayed back-to-back with Michele's:
Michele Meredith's compositions in raw silk,
the larger three framed under glass, the smaller on 6" x 6" stretched canvas
The event was well-attended, and Michele and I each sold a piece. A total of 18 works were sold, with net sales approaching $5000.
The group plans to paint the boards a dark grey for the next show, with the hope that the holes in the boards will visually recede, giving more prominence to the works on display. It seems that most community art groups have less than ideal venues to display their work: lighting, floorspace and methods of hanging are often compromised. Still, these local shows help add to a lively community cultural scene.
Berkhamsted #4
Based on a photo I took visiting my cousin's home in England, this 12" x 12" was made as my contribution to the 2016 SAQA benefit auction.
Berkhamsted #4, 12 x 12
hand-dyed cotton, fused appliqué, machine-stitched
It almost didn't get made, and it will no doubt arrive late. I was running out of time as the deadline approached, but then I realized that I could use this as a work in progress for my recent workshop at the Courtepointe Quebec conference, to demonstrate my Cityscapes technique.
I was pleased to be able to share my expertise with a small group of enthusiastic learners at the conference, and I hope that they will send me some photos of their finished projects.
More information about the SAQA auction will be posted in the months to come.
Labels: Cityscape, finished work, workshops
Latest 12 by the dozen challenge: Paul Klee
My 12 by the dozen group has begun a new series of challenges. Our first series was inspired by a particular word (Reflections, Connections, Structure, etc.) and the second series was sparked by a specific colour.
For this new series, we are responding to the work of a particular 20th-century artist. Member Patricia A'Bear chose Paul Klee as the focus for this first quarterly challenge. We were free to concentrate on a single painting, or on his entire oeuvre.
Senecio, Paul Klee, oil paint on gauze, 1922
I chose this painting, Senecio, as my starting point. I always assumed it represented a child, but then I learned that the title can be translated as "Old Man", from the Latin, "senescere", or "to grow old". Still, I find the colours suggest youth and light-heartedness. From this painting, I chose my palette, and I also used some of its simple curves and shapes.
As the final assignment for the Jane Davies course Beyond the Colour Wheel, participants were asked to take the small, 3-colour collages we had made and "tile" them together. In other words, to take those 3" squares or rectangles and put them onto a grid, with no spaces between, just to see what they looked like arranged as a group. So my response to the 12 by the dozen challenge also met the criteria for the last assignment of my on-line course.
Patchwork, made of hand-dyed cotton, 16" x 16"
Many of Klee's paintings suggest a patchwork or a mosaic, with small square-ish shapes "tiled" to form a kind of loose grid, so my use of a grid is also a reference to Klee. I tried to use the colours in more or less the same proportion that Klee used them in Senecio.
In summary, I'd say that I like the original painting, I like the colours, I like the shapes, and I like the idea of a grid. But somehow, in my interpretation, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. I think that without the organizational structure of a recognizable face, the piece has no unity. It's a hot mess: it looks like it went through the blender. Klee's painting has a variety of small, medium and large shapes. My patchwork has only small and smaller. It's one thing to fulfill the requirements of a class assignment or a group challenge, but it's another thing to make good work.
To see the other responses to our latest challenge, some of them spectacular, please visit the 12 by the dozen website or blog.
Labels: finished work, membership
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Emrah Yildiz
)Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies
Norhwestern University
Emrah Yıldız is 2016-17 College Fellow of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Middle East & North African Studies at Northwestern University. His work is a historical anthropology of routes of mobility between Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; ritual practice, saints and visitation in Islam; as well as paper currency and contraband commerce in trans-regional political economy.
His current book project, The Ways of Zaynab via Turkey: Genealogical Geographies and Arrested Mobilities across Iran and Syria, brings these areas of scholarship into conversation as it follows the pathways of a ziyarat (visitation) route, often referred to as Hajj-e Fuqara’ (pilgrimage of the poor) from bus stations in Iran, through informal bazaars in Turkey, to the Sayyida Zaynab shrine in Syria. He is also interested in studies of gender and sexuality in the Middle East and is currently at work on a second project on LGBT and queer Iranian asylum-seekers at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Turkey.
Yıldız holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. A former DAAD Research Fellow at Institut für Europäische Ethnologie—Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, he received his BA in Anthropology & German Studies, and his MA in Cultural Anthropology from Wesleyan University. He has also been a visiting researcher at Boğaziçi and New York Universities. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, Die Zeit Stiftung Bucerius Fellowship in Migration Studies, Cora Du Bois Charitable Trust, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, as well as Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Studies have supported his research and writing. Yıldız is co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Turkey Page, and co-editor (with Anthony Alessandrini and Nazan Üstündag) of the collection “Resistance Everywhere:” The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey (2014).
Sites of Religious Memory in an Age of Exodus - Eastern Mediterranean
Faculty Bio
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East Side Highway
Environmental Assessment (EA) Study
Study Process
Origin Destination Survey
Context Sensitive Solutions
Public Information Meetings
Community Working Group
Focus Working Group
Land Use and Access Management Focus Working Group
Sustainability Focus Working Group (FWG)
Alternative Modes Focus Working Group (FWG)
Final Environmental Assessment
2009 Corridor Report
Stakeholder Involvement Plan
Purpose and Need
O-D Survey Memorandum
Alternative Evaluation Process
Joint Council Meeting
The Bloomington-Normal metropolitan area has been experiencing an unprecedented amount of new growth over the last several decades. It is predicted that the future urban expansion will stress the existing infrastructure networks: transportation, water, and sewer. A new transportation facility is being considered to meet the transportation needs of the new and continued development on the east side.
The East Side Highway EA is the next stage of analysis that follows the East Side Highway Feasibility Study and Corridor Study. The 2002 Feasibility Study examined the ability to connect I-55 to I-74 east of Bloomington-Normal. It predicted that the future urban expansion of the region will stress the existing roadway networks, and explored the impacts of providing a new major roadway facility that would relieve traffic congestion.
The East Side Highway Corridor Study began in March 2007 and was completed in March 2009. The Context Sensitive Solution (CSS) approach to public involvement was used throughout the Corridor Study and will continue through the EA. The East Side Highway Corridor Study identified a single feasible 500’ wide corridor that would serve the needs of anticipated growth on the east side of the Bloomington-Normal community. This study did not determine the location of a specific alignment.
The EA is not a refinement of the Corridor Study’s recommended alternative. The EA will assess a full range of transportation improvement alternatives. Some of the corridors previously studied, in addition to new corridors, will be examined for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA requires federal agencies to integrate socio-economic and environmental values into the decision making process. Transportation Demand Strategies, compatibility with transit, support of alternate modes of transportation, location of a specific alignment, roadway geometry, and interchange type will be refined during the EA study. The Corridor Study considered these values on a preliminary level only. Upon completion of the EA, a specific alignment with centerline and preliminary Right Of Way needs will be identified. The final Corridor Report and associated appendices can be downloaded here.
...McLean County was one of very few counties in Illinois where jobs continued to grow during the recent economic downturn. In 2010, it also had the lowest unemployment rate among metro regions in the State. (Illinois Department of Employment Security).
A Public Hearing will be held on October 19th, 2016 at the Central Catholic High School at 1201 Airport Road in Bloomington, Illinois. The meeting will be held from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM. For more information, click here.
The final East Side Highway Environmental Assessment document may be downloaded here. It is also available for viewing at the McLean County Highway Department building at 102 S. Towanda Barnes Road, Bloomington, IL.
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* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *
This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.
This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or redistribute this file.
Title: The Uncommon Prayer-book
Author: James, Montague Rhodes (1862-1936)
Date of first publication: 1921 (Atlantic Monthly); included in "A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories" (1925)
Edition used as base for this ebook: "The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James" (New York: Longmans, Green; London: Edward Arnold, 1931) [first edition]
Date first posted: 28 February 2010
Date last updated: 28 February 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #493
This ebook was produced by: David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net
THE UNCOMMON PRAYER-BOOK
Mr. Davidson was spending the first week in January alone in a country town. A combination of circumstances had driven him to that drastic course: his nearest relations were enjoying winter sports abroad, and the friends who had been kindly anxious to replace them had an infectious complaint in the house. Doubtless he might have found someone else to take pity on him. "But," he reflected, "most of them have made up their parties, and, after all, it is only for three or four days at most that I have to fend for myself, and it will be just as well if I can get a move on with my introduction to the Leventhorp Papers. I might use the time by going down as near as I can to Gaulsford and making acquaintance with the neighbourhood. I ought to see the remains of Leventhorp House, and the tombs in the church."
The first day after his arrival at the Swan Hotel at Longbridge was so stormy that he got no farther than the tobacconist's. The next, comparatively bright, he used for his visit to Gaulsford, which interested him more than a little, but had no ulterior consequences. [491]The third, which was really a pearl of a day for early January, was too fine to be spent indoors. He gathered from the landlord that a favourite practice of visitors in the summer was to take a morning train to a couple of stations westward, and walk back down the valley of the Tent, through Stanford St. Thomas and Stanford Magdalene, both of which were accounted highly picturesque villages. He closed with this plan, and we now find him seated in a third-class carriage at 9.45 a.m., on his way to Kingsbourne Junction, and studying the map of the district.
One old man was his only fellow-traveller, a piping old man, who seemed inclined for conversation. So Mr. Davidson, after going through the necessary versicles and responses about the weather, inquired whether he was going far.
"No, sir, not far, not this morning, sir," said the old man. "I ain't only goin' so far as what they call Kingsbourne Junction. There isn't but two stations betwixt here and there. Yes, they calls it Kingsbourne Junction."
"I'm going there, too," said Mr. Davidson.
"Oh, indeed, sir; do you know that part?"
"No, I'm only going for the sake of taking a walk back to Longbridge, and seeing a bit of the country."
"Oh, indeed, sir! Well, 'tis a beautiful day for a gentleman as enjoys a bit of a walk."
"Yes, to be sure. Have you got far to go when you get to Kingsbourne?"
"No, sir, I ain't got far to go, once I get to Kingsbourne [492]Junction. I'm agoin' to see my daughter, sir. She live at Brockstone. That's about two mile across the fields from what they call Kingsbourne Junction, that is. You've got that marked down on your map, I expect, sir."
"I expect I have. Let me see, Brockstone, did you say? Here's Kingsbourne, yes; and which way is Brockstone—toward the Stanfords? Ah, I see it: Brockstone Court, in a park. I don't see the village, though."
"No, sir, you wouldn't see no village of Brockstone. There ain't only the Court and the Chapel at Brockstone."
"Chapel? Oh, yes, that's marked here, too. The Chapel; close by the Court, it seems to be. Does it belong to the Court?"
"Yes, sir, that's close up to the Court, only a step. Yes, that belong to the Court. My daughter, you see, sir, she's the keeper's wife now, and she live at the Court and look after things now the family's away."
"No one living there now, then?"
"No, sir, not for a number of years. The old gentleman, he lived there when I was a lad; and the lady, she lived on after him to very near upon ninety years of age. And then she died, and them that have it now, they've got this other place, in Warwickshire I believe it is, and they don't do nothin' about lettin' the Court out; but Colonel Wildman, he have the shooting, and young Mr. Clark, he's the agent, he come over once in so many weeks to see to things, and my daughter's husband, he's the keeper."[493]
"And who uses the Chapel? just the people round about, I suppose."
"Oh, no, no one don't use the Chapel. Why, there ain't no one to go. All the people about, they go to Stanford St. Thomas Church; but my son-in-law, he go to Kingsbourne Church now, because the gentleman at Stanford, he have this Gregory singin', and my son-in-law, he don't like that; he say he can hear the old donkey brayin' any day of the week, and he like something a little cheerful on the Sunday." The old man drew his hand across his mouth and laughed. "That's what my son-in-law say; he say he can hear the old donkey," etc., da capo.
Mr. Davidson also laughed as honestly as he could, thinking meanwhile that Brockstone Court and Chapel would probably be worth including in his walk; for the map showed that from Brockstone he could strike the Tent Valley quite as easily as by following the main Kingsbourne-Longbridge road. So, when the mirth excited by the remembrance of the son-in-law's bon mot had died down, he returned to the charge, and ascertained that both the Court and the Chapel were of the class known as "old-fashioned places," and that the old man would be very willing to take him thither, and his daughter would be happy to show him whatever she could.
"But that ain't a lot, sir, not as if the family was livin' there; all the lookin'-glasses is covered up, and the paintin's, and the curtains and carpets folded away; not but what I dare say she could show you a pair[494] just to look at, because she go over them to see as the morth shouldn't get into 'em."
"I shan't mind about that, thank you; if she can show me the inside of the Chapel, that's what I'd like best to see."
"Oh, she can show you that right enough, sir. She have the key of the door, you see, and most weeks she go in and dust about. That's a nice Chapel, that is. My son-in-law, he say he'll be bound they didn't have none of this Gregory singin' there. Dear! I can't help but smile when I think of him sayin' that about th' old donkey. 'I can hear him bray,' he say, 'any day of the week'; and so he can, sir; that's true, anyway."
The walk across the fields from Kingsbourne to Brockstone was very pleasant. It lay for the most part on the top of the country, and commanded wide views over a succession of ridges, plough and pasture, or covered with dark-blue woods—all ending, more or less abruptly, on the right, in headlands that overlooked the wide valley of a great western river. The last field they crossed was bounded by a close copse, and no sooner were they in it than the path turned downward very sharply, and it became evident that Brockstone was neatly fitted into a sudden and very narrow valley. It was not long before they had glimpses of groups of smokeless stone chimneys, and stone-tiled roofs, close beneath their feet; and, not many minutes after that, they were wiping their shoes at the back-door of Brockstone Court, while the[495] keeper's dogs barked very loudly in unseen places, and Mrs. Porter, in quick succession, screamed at them to be quiet, greeted her father, and begged both her visitors to step in.
It was not to be expected that Mr. Davidson should escape being taken through the principal rooms of the Court, in spite of the fact that the house was entirely out of commission. Pictures, carpets, curtains, furniture, were all covered up or put away, as old Mr. Avery had said; and the admiration which our friend was very ready to bestow had to be lavished on the proportions of the rooms, and on the one painted ceiling, upon which an artist who had fled from London in the plague-year had depicted the Triumph of Loyalty and Defeat of Sedition. In this Mr. Davidson could show an unfeigned interest. The portraits of Cromwell, Ireton, Bradshaw, Peters, and the rest, writhing in carefully-devised torments, were evidently the part of the design to which most pains had been devoted.
"That were the old Lady Sadleir had that paintin' done, same as the one what put up the Chapel. They say she were the first that went up to London to dance on Oliver Cromwell's grave." So said Mr. Avery, and continued musingly, "Well, I suppose she got some satisfaction to her mind, but I don't know as I should want to pay the fare to London and back just for that; and my son-in-law, he say the same; he say[496] he don't know as he should have cared to pay all that money only for that. I was tellin' the gentleman as we come along in the train, Mary, what your 'Arry says about this Gregory singin' down at Stanford here. We 'ad a bit of a laugh over that, sir, didn't us?"
"Yes, to be sure we did; ha! ha!" Once again Mr. Davidson strove to do justice to the pleasantry of the keeper. "But," he said, "if Mrs. Porter can show me the Chapel, I think it should be now, for the days aren't long, and I want to get back to Longbridge before it falls quite dark."
Even if Brockstone Court has not been illustrated in Rural Life (and I think it has not), I do not propose to point out its excellences here; but of the Chapel a word must be said. It stands about a hundred yards from the house, and has its own little graveyard and trees about it. It is a stone building about seventy feet long, and in the Gothic style, as that style was understood in the middle of the seventeenth century. On the whole it resembles some of the Oxford college chapels as much as anything, save that it has a distinct chancel, like a parish church, and a fanciful domed bell-turret at the south-west angle.
When the west door was thrown open, Mr. Davidson could not repress an exclamation of pleased surprise at the completeness and richness of the interior. Screen-work, pulpit, seating, and glass—all were of the same period; and as he advanced into the nave and sighted the organ-case with its gold embossed[497] pipes in the western gallery, his cup of satisfaction was filled. The glass in the nave windows was chiefly armorial; and in the chancel were figure-subjects, of the kind that may be seen at Abbey Dore, of Lord Scudamore's work.
But this is not an archæological review.
While Mr. Davidson was still busy examining the remains of the organ (attributed to one of the Dallams, I believe), old Mr. Avery had stumped up into the chancel and was lifting the dust-cloths from the blue-velvet cushions of the stall-desks. Evidently it was here that the family sat.
Mr. Davidson heard him say in a rather hushed tone of surprise, "Why, Mary, here's all the books open agin!"
The reply was in a voice that sounded peevish rather than surprised. "Tt-tt-tt, well, there, I never!"
Mrs. Porter went over to where her father was standing, and they continued talking in a lower key. Mr. Davidson saw plainly that something not quite in the common run was under discussion; so he came down the gallery stairs and joined them. There was no sign of disorder in the chancel any more than in the rest of the Chapel, which was beautifully clean; but the eight folio Prayer-Books on the cushions of the stall-desks were indubitably open.
Mrs. Porter was inclined to be fretful over it. "Whoever can it be as does it?" she said: "for there's no key but mine, nor yet door but the one[498] we come in by, and the winders is barred, every one of 'em; I don't like it, father, that I don't."
"What is it, Mrs. Porter? Anything wrong?" said Mr. Davidson.
"No, sir, nothing reely wrong, only these books. Every time, pretty near, that I come in to do up the place, I shuts 'em and spreads the cloths over 'em to keep off the dust, ever since Mr. Clark spoke about it, when I first come; and yet there they are again, and always the same page—and as I says, whoever it can be as does it with the door and winders shut; and as I says, it makes anyone feel queer comin' in here alone, as I 'ave to do, not as I'm given that way myself, not to be frightened easy, I mean to say; and there's not a rat in the place—not as no rat wouldn't trouble to do a thing like that, do you think, sir?"
"Hardly, I should say; but it sounds very queer. Are they always open at the same place, did you say?"
"Always the same place, sir, one of the psalms it is, and I didn't particular notice it the first time or two, till I see a little red line of printing, and it's always caught my eye since."
Mr. Davidson walked along the stalls and looked at the open books. Sure enough, they all stood at the same page: Psalm cix., and at the head of it, just between the number and the Deus laudum, was a rubric, "For the 25th day of April." Without pretending to minute knowledge of the history of the Book of Common Prayer, he knew enough to be sure[499] that this was a very odd and wholly unauthorized addition to its text; and though he remembered that April 25 is St. Mark's Day, he could not imagine what appropriateness this very savage psalm could have to that festival. With slight misgivings he ventured to turn over the leaves to examine the title-page, and knowing the need for particular accuracy in these matters, he devoted some ten minutes to making a line-for-line transcript of it. The date was 1653; the printer called himself Anthony Cadman. He turned to the list of proper psalms for certain days; yes, added to it was that same inexplicable entry: For the 25th day of April: the 109th Psalm. An expert would no doubt have thought of many other points to inquire into, but this antiquary, as I have said, was no expert. He took stock, however, of the binding—a handsome one of tooled blue leather, bearing the arms that figured in several of the nave windows in various combinations.
"How often," he said at last to Mrs. Porter, "have you found these books lying open like this?"
"Reely I couldn't say, sir, but it's a great many times now. Do you recollect, father, me telling you about it the first time I noticed it?"
"That I do, my dear; you was in a rare taking, and I don't so much wonder at it; that was five year ago I was paying you a visit at Michaelmas time, and you come in at tea-time, and says you, 'Father, there's the books laying open under the cloths agin'; and I didn't know what my daughter was speakin' about,[500] you see, sir, and I says, 'Books?' just like that, I says; and then it all came out. But as Harry says,—that's my son-in-law, sir,—'whoever it can be,' he says, 'as does it, because there ain't only the one door, and we keeps the key locked up,' he says, 'and the winders is barred, every one on 'em. Well,' he says, 'I lay once I could catch 'em at it, they wouldn't do it a second time,' he says. And no more they wouldn't, I don't believe, sir. Well, that was five year ago, and it's been happenin' constant ever since by your account, my dear. Young Mr. Clark, he don't seem to think much to it; but then he don't live here, you see, and 'tisn't his business to come and clean up here of a dark afternoon, is it?"
"I suppose you never notice anything else odd when you are at work here, Mrs. Porter?" said Mr. Davidson.
"No, sir, I do not," said Mrs. Porter, "and it's a funny thing to me I don't, with the feeling I have as there's someone settin' here—no, it's the other side, just within the screen—and lookin' at me all the time I'm dustin' in the gallery and pews. But I never yet see nothin' worse than myself, as the sayin' goes, and I kindly hope I never may."
In the conversation that followed (there was not much of it), nothing was added to the statement of the case. Having parted on good terms with Mr. Avery and his daughter, Mr. Davidson addressed[501] himself to his eight-mile walk. The little valley of Brockstone soon led him down into the broader one of the Tent, and on to Stanford St. Thomas, where he found refreshment.
We need not accompany him all the way to Longbridge. But as he was changing his socks before dinner, he suddenly paused and said half-aloud, "By Jove, that is a rum thing!" It had not occurred to him before how strange it was that any edition of the Prayer-Book should have been issued in 1653, seven years before the Restoration, five years before Cromwell's death, and when the use of the book, let alone the printing of it, was penal. He must have been a bold man who put his name and a date on that title-page. Only, Mr. Davidson reflected, it probably was not his name at all, for the ways of printers in difficult times were devious.
As he was in the front hall of the Swan that evening, making some investigations about trains, a small motor stopped in front of the door, and out of it came a small man in a fur coat, who stood on the steps and gave directions in a rather yapping foreign accent to his chauffeur. When he came into the hotel, he was seen to be black-haired and pale-faced, with a little pointed beard, and gold pince-nez; altogether, very neatly turned out.
He went to his room, and Mr. Davidson saw no more of him till dinner-time. As they were the only two dining that night, it was not difficult for the newcomer to find an excuse for falling into talk; he was[502] evidently wishing to make out what brought Mr. Davidson into that neighbourhood at that season.
"Can you tell me how far it is from here to Arlingworth?" was one of his early questions; and it was one which threw some light on his own plans; for Mr. Davidson recollected having seen at the station an advertisement of a sale at Arlingworth Hall, comprising old furniture, pictures, and books. This, then, was a London dealer.
"No," he said, "I've never been there. I believe it lies out by Kingsbourne—it can't be less than twelve miles. I see there's a sale there shortly."
The other looked at him inquisitively, and he laughed. "No," he said, as if answering a question, "you needn't be afraid of my competing; I'm leaving this place to-morrow."
This cleared the air, and the dealer, whose name was Homberger, admitted that he was interested in books, and thought there might be in these old country-house libraries something to repay a journey. "For," said he, "we English have always this marvellous talent for accumulating rarities in the most unexpected places, ain't it?"
And in the course of the evening he was most interesting on the subject of finds made by himself and others. "I shall take the occasion after this sale to look round the district a bit; perhaps you could inform me of some likely spots, Mr. Davidson?"
But Mr. Davidson, though he had seen some very tempting locked-up book-cases at Brockstone Court,[503] kept his counsel. He did not really like Mr. Homberger.
Next day, as he sat in the train, a little ray of light came to illuminate one of yesterday's puzzles. He happened to take out an almanac-diary that he had bought for the new year, and it occurred to him to look at the remarkable events for April 25. There it was: "St. Mark. Oliver Cromwell born, 1599."
That, coupled with the painted ceiling, seemed to explain a good deal. The figure of old Lady Sadleir became more substantial to his imagination, as of one in whom love for Church and King had gradually given place to intense hate of the power that had silenced the one and slaughtered the other. What curious evil service was that which she and a few like her had been wont to celebrate year by year in that remote valley? and how in the world had she managed to elude authority? And again, did not this persistent opening of the books agree oddly with the other traits of her portrait known to him? It would be interesting for anyone who chanced to be near Brockstone on the twenty-fifth of April to look in at the Chapel and see if anything exceptional happened. When he came to think of it, there seemed to be no reason why he should not be that person himself; he, and if possible, some congenial friend. He resolved that so it should be.
Knowing that he knew really nothing about the printing of Prayer-Books, he realized that he must make it his business to get the best light on the matter[504] without divulging his reasons. I may say at once that his search was entirely fruitless. One writer of the early part of the nineteenth century, a writer of rather windy and rhapsodical chat about books, professed to have heard of a special anti-Cromwellian issue of the Prayer-Book in the very midst of the Commonwealth period. But he did not claim to have seen a copy, and no one had believed him. Looking into this matter, Mr. Davidson found that the statement was based on letters from a correspondent who had lived near Longbridge; so he was inclined to think that the Brockstone Prayer-Books were at the bottom of it, and had excited a momentary interest.
Months went on, and St. Mark's Day came near. Nothing interfered with Mr. Davidson's plans of visiting Brockstone, or with those of the friend whom he had persuaded to go with him, and to whom alone he had confided the puzzle. The same 9.45 train which had taken him in January took them now to Kingsbourne; the same field-path led them to Brockstone. But to-day they stopped more than once to pick a cowslip; the distant woods and ploughed uplands were of another colour, and in the copse there was, as Mrs. Porter said, "a regular charm of birds; why you couldn't hardly collect your mind sometimes with it."
She recognized Mr. Davidson at once, and was very ready to do the honours of the Chapel. The new visitor, Mr. Witham, was as much struck by the completeness of it as Mr. Davidson had been.[505] "There can't be such another in England," he said.
"Books open again, Mrs. Porter?" said Davidson, as they walked up to the chancel.
"Dear, yes, I expect so, sir," said Mrs. Porter, as she drew off the cloths. "Well, there!" she exclaimed the next moment, "if they ain't shut! That's the first time ever I've found 'em so. But it's not for want of care on my part, I do assure you, gentlemen, if they wasn't, for I felt the cloths the last thing before I shut up last week, when the gentleman had done photografting the heast winder, and every one was shut, and where there was ribbons left, I tied 'em. Now I think of it, I don't remember ever to 'ave done that before, and per'aps, whoever it is, it just made the difference to 'em. Well, it only shows, don't it? if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again."
Meanwhile the two men had been examining the books, and now Davidson spoke.
"I'm sorry to say I'm afraid there's something wrong here, Mrs. Porter. These are not the same books."
It would make too long a business to detail all Mrs. Porter's outcries, and the questionings that followed. The upshot was this. Early in January the gentleman had come to see over the Chapel, and thought a great deal of it, and said he must come back in the spring weather and take some photografts. And only a week ago he had drove up in his motoring car, and a very 'eavy box with the slides in it, and she[506] had locked him in because he said something about a long explosion, and she was afraid of some damage happening; and he says, no, not explosion, but it appeared the lantern what they take the slides with worked very slow; and so he was in there the best part of an hour and she come and let him out, and he drove off with his box and all and gave her his visiting-card, and oh, dear, dear, to think of such a thing! he must have changed the books and took the old ones away with him in his box.
"What sort of man was he?"
"Oh, dear, he was a small-made gentleman, if you can call him so after the way he've behaved, with black hair, that is if it was hair, and gold eye-glasses, if they was gold; reely, one don't know what to believe. Sometimes I doubt he weren't a reel Englishman at all, and yet he seemed to know the language, and had the name on his visiting-card like anybody else might."
"Just so; might we see the card? Yes; T. W. Henderson, and an address somewhere near Bristol. Well, Mrs. Porter, it's quite plain this Mr. Henderson, as he calls himself, has walked off with your eight Prayer-Books and put eight others about the same size in place of them. Now listen to me. I suppose you must tell your husband about this, but neither you nor he must say one word about it to anyone else. If you'll give me the address of the agent,—Mr. Clark, isn't it?—I will write to him and tell him exactly what has happened, and that it really is no fault of yours. But, you understand, we must keep it very[507] quiet; and why? Because this man who has stolen the books will of course try to sell them one at a time—for I may tell you they are worth a good deal of money—and the only way we can bring it home to him is by keeping a sharp look out and saying nothing."
By dint of repeating the same advice in various forms, they succeeded in impressing Mrs. Porter with the real need for silence, and were forced to make a concession only in the case of Mr. Avery, who was expected on a visit shortly. "But you may be safe with father, sir," said Mrs. Porter. "Father ain't a talkin' man."
It was not quite Mr. Davidson's experience of him; still, there were no neighbours at Brockstone, and even Mr. Avery must be aware that gossip with anybody on such a subject would be likely to end in the Porters having to look out for another situation.
A last question was whether Mr. Henderson, so-called, had anyone with him.
"No, sir, not when he come he hadn't; he was working his own motoring car himself, and what luggage he had, let me see: there was his lantern and this box of slides inside the carriage, which I helped him into the Chapel and out of it myself with it, if only I'd knowed! And as he drove away under the big yew tree by the monument, I see the long white bundle laying on the top of the coach, what I didn't notice when he drove up. But he set in front, sir, and only the boxes inside behind him. And do you[508] reely think, sir, as his name weren't Henderson at all? Oh, dear me, what a dreadful thing! Why, fancy what trouble it might bring to a innocent person that might never have set foot in the place but for that!"
They left Mrs. Porter in tears. On the way home there was much discussion as to the best means of keeping watch upon possible sales. What Henderson-Homberger (for there could be no real doubt of the identity) had done was, obviously, to bring down the requisite number of folio Prayer-Books—disused copies from college chapels and the like, bought ostensibly for the sake of the bindings, which were superficially like enough to the old ones—and to substitute them at his leisure for the genuine articles. A week had now passed without any public notice being taken of the theft. He would take a little time himself to find out about the rarity of the books, and would ultimately, no doubt, "place" them cautiously. Between them, Davidson and Witham were in a position to know a good deal of what was passing in the book-world, and they could map out the ground pretty completely. A weak point with them at the moment was that neither of them knew under what other name or names Henderson-Homberger carried on business. But there are ways of solving these problems.
And yet all this planning proved unnecessary.
We are transported to a London office on this same 25th of April. We find there, within closed doors,[509] late in the day, two police inspectors, a commissionaire, and a youthful clerk. The two latter, both rather pale and agitated in appearance, are sitting on chairs and being questioned.
"How long do you say you've been in this Mr. Poschwitz's employment? Six months? And what was his business? Attended sales in various parts and brought home parcels of books. Did he keep a shop anywhere? No? Disposed of 'em here and there, and sometimes to private collectors. Right. Now then, when did he go out last? Rather better than a week ago? Tell you where he was going? No? Said he was going to start next day from his private residence, and shouldn't be at the office—that's here, eh?—before two days; you was to attend as usual. Where is his private residence? Oh, that's the address, Norwood way; I see. Any family? Not in this country? Now, then, what account do you give of what's happened since he came back? Came back on the Tuesday, did he? and this is the Saturday. Bring any books? One package; where is it? In the safe? You got the key? No, to be sure, it's open, of course. How did he seem when he got back—cheerful? Well, but how do you mean—curious? Thought he might be in for an illness: he said that, did he? Odd smell got in his nose, couldn't get rid of it; told you to let him know who wanted to see him before you let 'em in? That wasn't usual with him? Much the same all Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Out a good deal; said he[510] was going to the British Museum. Often went there to make inquiries in the way of his business. Walked up and down a lot in the office when he was in. Anyone call in on those days? Mostly when he was out. Anyone find him in? Oh, Mr. Collinson? Who's Mr. Collinson? An old customer; know his address? All right, give it us afterwards. Well, now, what about this morning? You left Mr. Poschwitz's here at twelve and went home. Anybody see you? Commissionaire, you did? Remained at home till summoned here. Very well.
"Now, commissionaire; we have your name—Watkins, eh? Very well, make your statement; don't go too quick, so as we can get it down."
"I was on duty 'ere later than usual, Mr. Potwitch 'aving asked me to remain on, and ordered his lunching to be sent in, which came as ordered. I was in the lobby from eleven-thirty on, and see Mr. Bligh [the clerk] leave at about twelve. After that no one come in at all except Mr. Potwitch's lunching come at one o'clock and the man left in five minutes' time. Towards the afternoon I became tired of waitin' and I come upstairs to this first floor. The outer door what lead to the orfice stood open, and I come up to the plate-glass door here. Mr. Potwitch he was standing behind the table smoking a cigar, and he laid it down on the mantelpiece and felt in his trouser pockets and took out a key and went across to the safe. And I knocked on the glass, thinkin' to see if he wanted me to come and take away his tray;[511] but he didn't take no notice, bein' engaged with the safe door. Then he got it open and stooped down and seemed to be lifting up a package off of the floor of the safe. And then, sir, I see what looked to be like a great roll of old shabby white flannel, about four to five feet high, fall for'ards out of the inside of the safe right against Mr. Potwitch's shoulder as he was stooping over; and Mr. Potwitch, he raised himself up as it were, resting his hands on the package, and gave a exclamation. And I can't hardly expect you should take what I says, but as true as I stand here I see this roll had a kind of a face in the upper end of it, sir. You can't be more surprised than what I was, I can assure you, and I've seen a lot in me time. Yes, I can describe it if you wish it, sir; it was very much the same as this wall here in colour [the wall had an earth-coloured distemper] and it had a bit of a band tied round underneath. And the eyes, well they was dry-like, and much as if there was two big spiders' bodies in the holes. Hair? no, I don't know as there was much hair to be seen; the flannel-stuff was over the top of the 'ead. I'm very sure it warn't what it should have been. No, I only see it in a flash, but I took it in like a photograft—wish I hadn't. Yes, sir, it fell right over on to Mr. Potwitch's shoulder, and this face hid in his neck,—yes, sir, about where the injury was,—more like a ferret going for a rabbit than anythink else; and he rolled over, and of course I tried to get in at the door; but as you know, sir, it were locked on[512] the inside, and all I could do, I rung up everyone, and the surgeon come, and the police and you gentlemen, and you know as much as what I do. If you won't be requirin' me any more to-day I'd be glad to be getting off home; it's shook me up more than I thought for."
"Well," said one of the inspectors, when they were left alone; and "Well?" said the other inspector; and, after a pause, "What's the surgeon's report again? You've got it there. Yes. Effect on the blood like the worst kind of snake-bite; death almost instantaneous. I'm glad of that, for his sake; he was a nasty sight. No case for detaining this man Watkins, anyway; we know all about him. And what about this safe, now? We'd better go over it again; and, by the way, we haven't opened that package he was busy with when he died."
"Well, handle it careful," said the other; "there might be this snake in it, for what you know. Get a light into the corners of the place, too. Well, there's room for a shortish person to stand up in; but what about ventilation?"
"Perhaps," said the other slowly, as he explored the safe with an electric torch, "perhaps they didn't require much of that. My word! it strikes warm coming out of that place! like a vault, it is. But here, what's this bank-like of dust all spread out into the room? That must have come there since the door was opened; it would sweep it all away if you moved it—see? Now what do you make of that?"[513]
"Make of it? About as much as I make of anything else in this case. One of London's mysteries this is going to be, by what I can see. And I don't believe a photographer's box full of large-size old-fashioned Prayer-Books is going to take us much further. For that's just what your package is."
It was a natural but hasty utterance. The preceding narrative shows that there was, in fact, plenty of material for constructing a case; and when once Messrs. Davidson and Witham had brought their end to Scotland Yard, the join-up was soon made, and the circle completed.
To the relief of Mrs. Porter, the owners of Brockstone decided not to replace the books in the Chapel; they repose, I believe, in a safe-deposit in town. The police have their own methods of keeping certain matters out of the newspapers; otherwise, it can hardly be supposed that Watkins's evidence about Mr. Poschwitz's death could have failed to furnish a good many head-lines of a startling character to the press.
[End of The Uncommon Prayer-book by M. R. James]
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An emotional journey of identity change and transformation: The impact of study-abroad experience on the lives and careers of Chinese students and returnees
Gu, Qing (2015) An emotional journey of identity change and transformation: The impact of study-abroad experience on the lives and careers of Chinese students and returnees. Learning and Teaching, 8 (3). pp. 60-81. ISSN 1755-2281
Official URL: http://berghahn.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/berghahn/latiss/2015/00000008/00000003/art00004
This article discusses the nature of Chinese students' transnational experiences and its impact on their identities within and beyond national and cultural boundaries. The discussion is located in the theoretical framework of transnationalism and explores in detail the ways in which students adapt, change and develop, both in the host country of their study and also on their return to work in their home countries. Empirical evidence in the article is drawn from the findings of three studies, led by the author, which have investigated the pedagogical, sociocultural and emotional challenges that Chinese students have encountered when studying at British universities, and the perceived impact of their overseas studies on their lives and careers in their home countries. The research findings suggest that there are distinctive patterns of challenges, struggles, adjustments, change and achievement over time – all of which are embedded in the processes of socialisation, enculturation and professionalisation. Such experiences are both transitional and transformational and, most profoundly, they necessitate identity change at and across different layers of boundaries. At the heart of this identity change is a constant, emotional search for a reflexive sense of self as an embodied individual, a member of a professional group and a member of an organisation.
Chinese students; culture; identity; returnees; study abroad; transnationalism
https://doi.org/10.3167/latiss.2015.080304
Collier, Elanor
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Blogs > Liberty and Power > Historical Revision and the alleged “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve
Historical Revision and the alleged “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve
by Liberty and Power tags: economics,Phillip W. Magness,Phillips Curve,Paul A. Samuelson
Dr. Phil Magness is a policy historian and Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He is the co-author of the critically acclaimed book Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (University of Missouri Press).
The history of thought is an inherently tricky evidentiary exercise, as it typically involves a need to discern intention from written words left by the subjects in question. Its better practitioners attempt to understand the parameters of a particular decision or argument by weighing the available evidence around it and interpreting it in light of the context in which it was made. Typically implicit is a willingness to follow that evidence where it leads, even when the implication is unexpected or, in cases involving thinkers of prominence, an unwelcome mark on their reputation.
This contrasts with a more problematic approach wherein the historian begins his or her investigation with an explicit case to “prove” and thus begins the evidentiary process by casting about for bits and pieces of material to support the predisposed thesis. Or in the case of written matter, begins with a search for narrow and esoteric renderings of the subject’s work, so as to extract from it a contingent and favorable rendering toward the predisposed position. As no investigator is ever truly impartial, the tendency to slip into this latter approach is a persistent danger, though one that may also be mitigated with an empiricist’s grounding. But when the historical enterprise itself begins with an act of simply casting about for bullet points to get around a past figure’s shortcomings, the whole enterprise quickly devolves into counter-historical territory – into exercises in exonerative history that attempt to parse a past figure away from something embarrassing, or something that simply “went wrong” in ways that defied his intentions or expectations.
Such seems to be the case with a relatively new and unusual approach to the contributions of economist Paul A. Samuelson as they pertain to the Phillips Curve. Samuelson’s work on this subject in the 1960s has long been linked to an embarrassing episode in prescriptive Keynesian policy-making wherein an exploitable inverse relationship was posited between unemployment and the price level. Drawing upon a famous 1960 article in the American Economic Review by Samuelson and Robert Solow in which its authors investigated and adapted a perceived empirical relationship between employment and wage levels in the work of A.W. Phillips, policy-makers in that decade and for some time beyond consciously used the Phillips Curve as a structural relationship on the basis of which to conduct macroeconomic policy in the United States. As one of the article’s more notorious passages suggests,
“In order to achieve the nonperfectionist’s goal of high enough output to give us no more than 3 percent unemployment, the price index might have to rise by as much as 4 to 5 percent per year. That much price rise would seem to be the necessary cost of high employment and production in the years immediately ahead.”
In its most problematic iteration, the Samuelson-Solow derived Phillips Curve fostered a belief that monetary inflation could function as an acceptable trade-off, along side which low unemployment could be obtained in the United States. While this did not necessarily commend an intentional inflationary policy to combat unemployment, it did foster an increased tolerance for inflationary circumstances on account of the presumed tradeoff…that is, until the whole thing came crashing down with the stagflation episode – simultaneous high inflation and unemployment – in the 1970s.
Followers of the economic literature of the time will also probably be aware that the attempted operationalization of the Phillips Curve in the early 1960s underwent a series of damning critiques in the theoretical literature as well by Milton Friedman, Edmund Phelps, and Robert Lucas in particular, the gist of which (1) left the Curve practically impotent as a basis for prescriptive policy, as had been theorized and attempted in the wake of Samuelson-Solow, and (2) highlighted the dangers of the very same in showing it to be the genesis of prolonged stagflation. While a number of modified “Phillips Curve” relationships – usually tied to short run phenomena – have persisted in the macro world ever since, they bear little resemblance to the original Samuelson-Solow articulation of the concept and offer little in the way of policy advice, which had been a central feature of the Samuelsonian version.
All said, the Phillips Curve episode proved quite embarrassing for the type of prescriptive macroeconomics that first brought it to prominence and remains a warning against the perils posed by a macroeconomic outlook that approaches policy as a matter of simple lever-pulling to manipulate overall output patterns in a seemingly desired direction.
The Revisionist Case Considered:
While the Phillips Curve experience of the 1960s is well known (and indeed the basis for multiple subsequent Nobel Prize citations), a recent attempt has been made at the rehabilitation of Samuelson’s reputation as a prime instigator of the episode. The gist of its argument is that Samuelson and Solow never really intended the Phillips Curve to be a “stable and exploitable” relationship, and that the subsequent attribution of this charge to them starting with Friedman (1968) onward is a “myth.” In some iterations, the Samuelson-Solow (1960) is either assumed to have been misinterpreted by the field and/or public as offering a prescriptive policy relationship, or its subsequent influence to that effect is also deemed a further part of the “myth.”
The most detailed examples of the revisionist case are laid out in this 2010 article by James Forder, critiquing Friedman’s self-accounting of the deficiencies in the Phillips Curve, and a followup working paper on Samuelson himself, which has gained a fair amount of subsequent currency in some quarters of the economics blogosphere. Forder’s argument also finds currency, to some extent, in another recent working paper by Kevin Hoover and appears to be the basis of a forthcoming book, due out this October.
As the two Forder papers are the most developed examples of the revisionist literature, I’ll focus primarily on their contributions. Both pieces are worth reading as both a history of how the economics profession grappled with the Phillips Curve, and for consideration of the arguments made therein. Briefly summarized, Forder mounts an extended challenge to whether Samuelson and Solow actually intended for the Phillips Curve to be interpreted as an exploitable trade-off for policymaking. He approaches this issue on many fronts, both internal to the Samuelson-Solow (1960) paper and its developing external reception and reputation ever since.
In doing so, Forder relies heavily upon finding textual qualifiers, nuance, and a number of hedged predictions – typical of academic writing – to effectively leave its authors an “out” to their oft-noted association with the policy errors of the 60s and 70s. Some instances are more successful than others, including his drawing attention to Samuelson & Solow’s postulating that the theorized curve for the U.S. had “shifted somewhat” in prior decades. This, he supposes, is an answer of sorts to the presumed stability of the curve that would make it an exploitable relationship, at least in the critique offered of it by Friedman.
It might be noted in response that Samuelson and Solow’s apparent cognizance of the Phillips Curve’s “shiftiness” actually appears to have extended its manipulable characteristics in their minds, thus its closing paragraph suggests not only a belief in the exploitable nature of movements along the curve but also the possibility of further controlling the external parameters of those movements by shifting the curve itself in a more conducive direction. To frame the reception of Samuelson and Solow as a dispute over “stability,” in the sense that it portended a permanently fixed and non-shifting relationship, might thus be a simple confusion of terms. Samuelson and Solow seem to have believed they were dealing with a relationship that they could (1) internally base policy upon where the Phillips Curve presently stood – an implied stability of sorts when operating along that curve, but hardly an immovable one – and (2) if needed, externally manipulate the curve to a better plane through certain external prescriptive measures. Any “shiftiness” was something they believed - quite literally – that they could control and even induce with the “right” types of policies:
“These could of course involve such wide-ranging issues as direct price and wage controls, antiunion and antitrust legislation, and a host of other measures hopefully designed to move the American Phillips curves downward and to the left.”
So yes, in a very narrow sense Forder is correct that Samuelson-Solow (1960) recognized a shifting Phillips Curve. It is not at all apparent though that they saw this as a destabilizing feature of the relationship. To the contrary as the line above indicates, they interpreted the Phillips Curve’s “shiftiness” as another another lever to manipulate through a suite of complimentary policies. And they did so from the very outset of their work.
As a brief aside I cannot stress the importance of that final paragraph in Samuelson-Solow (1960) enough. We will return to it shortly, as it set up precisely where Samuelson was going with his Phillips Curve analysis: a model that could be exploited via movement along the curve itself and by externally inducing a favorable shift in the curve to create a more idealized set of conditions for the aforementioned movements.
But what of Samuelson and Solow’s policy objectives in the 1960 article? They do indeed pose additional problems for Forder and the revisionist account. One of the better known instances comes from Solow himself, who in later years strongly suggested that he and Samuelson saw the Phillips Curve as an exploitable tool for macroeconomic policy purposes at the very outset of their inquiry. In an interview given to the MIT alumni magazine in 1978, Solow recounted a conversation in the late 1950s after his reading of the original Phillips paper:
“I remember that Paul Samuelson asked me when we were looking at those diagrams for the first time, ‘Does that look like a reversible relation to you?’ What he meant was ‘Do you really think the economy can move back and forth along a curve like that?’ And I answered ‘Yeah, I’m inclined to believe it’ and Paul said ‘Me too.’ And thereby hangs a tale.”
Forder’s handling of this reminiscence is unconvincing. He attempts to work around it by narrowing the contextual applications of the quote to an endorsement of an inflationary prescription out of the trade-off. Yet the issue of Samuelson-Solow (1960) was always the existence and use of an exploitable trade-off itself, not necessarily its consequential disposition toward inflationary policies which is a product of its political economy. But needless to say, there is much in both the article and Solow’s recounting of its genesis to suggest that its authors had a direct interest in applying it to prescriptive policymaking.
Samuelson as a Prescriptive Phillips Curve Economist:
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that Samuelson actively pressed policymakers to employ his Phillips Curve trade-off prescriptively in the immediate wake of the 1960 article. It is this political context that is largely missing from the textual analysis of the revisionist account, and it tends to show that an accompanying depiction of the dissemination of Samuelson-Solow (1960) in the academic literature is very incomplete – and perhaps even partial to presenting an exonerative interpretation.
Even Samuelson-Solow (1960) was an academic revamping of an earlier and more prescriptive paper they drafted in 1959 and presented at the American Economic Association in the context of its policy implications. To this end, Samuelson and Solow went on to publish an extended passage from the 1959 original as a chapter in Arthur M. Okun’s 1965 book The Battle Against Unemployment. Its title reveals a directly prescriptive intent, “Our menu of policy choices,” and the excerpted passages center around the prescriptive characterization quoted above wherein a price level rise is described as a “necessary cost of high employment and production.”
But of perhaps more direct significance to the 1960 academic article’s influence, Samuelson himself actively went to work in pressing it upon congressional legislators and suggesting it could be used as a basis for crafting unemployment policy!
An early occasion came in December 1961 when Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI) invited Samuelson to address a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee on the problem of unemployment. Note that at this time the Phillips Curve’s implied connection between employment and the price level was still a very new concept. The hearing thus had no particular charge to investigate inflation or any related aspect of monetary policy. That is until Samuelson introduced it by way of the Phillips Curve, which he presented to the committee as something of a cutting edge concept to emerge from the economics discipline. A relevant passage from the hearing transcript may be seen below in which Samuelson introduces the Phillips Curve to the committee and suggests that it operates as both a constraining and prescriptive mechanism for them to consider. The relationship, he suggested, implied the existence of “a tendency for wages and prices to rise for cost-push or seller-inflation reasons, even before we got to the desirable social goal of full employment.”
This tendency, Samuelson continued, was “an institutional situation in which there seems to be cost-push or seller’s mechanisms at work,” that institution being the referenced Phillips Curve. The implication of the curve as he then explained was “a relationship of an empirical and sometimes theoretical type between the unemployment rate and the percentage increase in money wages or the percentage increase in prices.” He then provided Proxmire with a copy of his 1960 paper for the committee’s consideration.
As his testimony resumed, Samuelson asserted quite plainly that the “general policy implications of the above analysis are quite clear.” Though limited by time to expand upon them, he urged the committee to adopt “expansionary fiscal and monetary measures and the more direct programs for retaining manpower” in reference to a suite of government jobs training initiatives – two approaches he described as “supplementary, in my view, rather than competitive. This is a case where the whole will add up to much more than the sum of the separate parts.”
Keeping in mind the closing paragraph from Samuelson-Solow (1960) as quoted above, it might be reasonably inferred that by late 1961 he was pressing the more encompassing suite of programs hinted at therein. A written memo accompanying Samuelson’s testimony further expands upon his prescriptive points as well, making note that, though warranting further study, “the preponderance of the existing evidence and analysis suggests to me that something like two-thirds or more of the described increase in unemployment has been due to the inadequacy of overall dollar demand.” This observation though was further “complicated by the fact that even if there were zero “structural unemployment” there might be a tendency for wages and prices to rise for cost push reasons even before the percentage of unemployment had been reduced down to a tolerable and desirable low percentage.” He then goes on to recommend a suite of federal jobs training programs, federally managed employment information exchanges, and aggressive anti-trust enforcement. In other words, he was informing them of a theorized policy implication of Phillips Curve and imparting them with policies that he thought would advantageously manipulate the parameters of that curve – just as he suggested in the final sentence of the 1960 article.
If the 1961 hearing is suggestive, Samuelson’s other actions in this period should remove any doubt of his prescriptive intentions in attempting to enlist the Phillips Curve to macroeconomic policymaking. Brian Domitrovic, who has written extensively about the Phillips Curve fiasco of the 1960s and 70s, alerts me to several such instances from Samuelson’s own capacity as an economic adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The first comes from an early 1961 memo that Samuelson wrote to the Kennedy transition team:
“A careful survey of the behavior of prices and costs shows that our recent stability in the wholesale price index has come in a period of admittedly high unemployment and slackness in our economy. For this reason it is premature to believe that the restoration of high employment will no longer involve problems concerning the stability of prices. Postwar experience, here and abroad, suggests that a mixed economy like ours may tend to generate an upward creep of prices before it arrives at high employment. Such a price creep, which has to be distinguished from the ancient inflations brought about by the upward pull on prices and wages that comes from excessive dollars of demand spending, has been given many names: “cost-push” inflation, “sellers” (rather than demanders) inflation, “market power” inflation, – these are all variants of the same stubborn phenomenon.”
While Samuelson contextualized this comment amidst a broader ongoing dialogue in the economics discipline about the nature of inflation, it is evident he was mapping out an underlying Phillips Curve-based mechanism. He goes on to acknowledge a divergence of expert opinion on the problem of inflation but then proceeds to a lengthy prescriptive warning:
“[I]t should be manifest that the goal of high employment and effective real growth cannot be abandoned because of the problematical fear that reattaining of prosperity in America may bring with it some difficulties; if recovery means a reopening of the cost-push problem, then we have no choice but to move closer to the day when that problem has to be successfully grappled with. Economic statesmanship does involve difficult compromises, but not capitulation to any one of the pluralistic goals of modern society.” (emphasis original)
If Samuelson did not intend to convey an exploitable unemployment-inflation trade-off in the policy sphere, he certainly chose a poor way of expressing himself. The next example comes from a 1964 memo prepared by an advisory committee to LBJ under Samuelson’s direction. By this point Samuelson appears to have been operating under a full-fledged embrace of the operationalized implications of his work on the Phillips Curve.
“An economy which is always near full employment faces a more persistent threat of inflation than a stagnant economy. The remarkable price stability which the U.S. has maintained over the past 6 years has in part been due to the high level of unemployment. One way of assuring a continuation of this price stability would be to tolerate continuing high unemployment. Like most Americans, we reject this “solution” to the problem of inflation. Yet the reconciliation of price stability with full employment is a thorny problem – one to which there are no tried and tested solutions.”
The memo then proceeds to suggest a variety of policy solutions that might mitigate inflation, including “vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws,” increased spending on federal jobs programs, freer trade, and federal intervention against market “barriers” to price competition such as monopoly. It is important to realize that Samuelson actually eschews inflation as a tolerable policy onto itself, though two things may be noted here:
(1) His further prescriptive observations reflect the extension of his own search for other manipulable characteristics that could favorably alter the parameters of the Phillips Curve, as suggested in the closing lines of the 1960 article. Note that this directly chafes with the revisionist account, which questions the presence of an exploitable Phillips Curve. Samuelson quite plainly thinks “yes, it can be exploited” but far from recognizing a problem of “instability” of an order that limits the curve, he has at this point identified its anticipated shiftiness as an additional exploitable characteristic.
(2) A key point of Friedman’s critique is important here as well, as he called into question not just the naive trade-off that Samuelson was assuming from the Phillips Curve but also the constraining implications of his expectations critique upon the curve: that attempts to exploit it in the manner being discussed in policy circles would invariably initiate an inflationary course with stagflationary risk, the various under-developed and concurrent attempts Samuelson was undertaking to further exploit or control a shift of the curve itself notwithstanding.
When turning to his continued forays into policy, the staying power of a prescriptive and exploitable Phillips Curve in Samuelson’s work becomes similarly difficult to escape. He famously incorporated it into his widely used economics textbook in the mid 1960s, and regularly extolled its prescriptive uses in a column for Newsweek magazine. By the time that his original 1959 paper with Solow was excerpted and republished as a “menu of policy choices” in 1965, there was absolutely no doubt in the public arena that he intended such implications to be drawn from the more notorious prescriptive passages I have excerpted at the outset of this post.
Similarly revealing are Samuelson’s comments in a 1967 debate sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the text of which may be found here. It shows a Samuelson who was quite enamored with the policy implications of the Phillips Curve. As he informed the audience,
“[O]ne must not exaggerate the exactitude of the Phillips curve but nevertheless it is one of the most important concepts of our times. Any criticism of the guideposts which does not explicitly take into account the Phillips curve concept I have to treat as having missed the fundamental point of all economic policy discussions.”
So where then did this concept stand with Samuelson in 1967? As his remarks at AEI reveal, he was aggressively toying around with the final point of his 1960 article with Solow: how to externally manipulate the location of the Phillips Curve through other policies for the purpose of making it further exploitable as a relationship for movements along the curve. He proceeded to identify a “good” and a “bad” Phillips Curve based upon their respective optimality for this persisting goal of operation along the curve. As he put it at the time, “Macroeconomic policy can determine where you are on the Phillips curve. But if you have a bad short- or long-run curve, macroeconomic policy cannot give you a good Phillips curve.” This, he suggested, had to come externally through a suite of policies to induce a more “ideal” Phillips Curve. His hand-drawn example from the lecture may be seen below:
Note that in the explanatory paragraph, Samuelson further specifies the two concurrent policy questions underlying his attempted use of the Phillips Curve. First is the problem of whether the curve itself is at an “ideal” location or not, implying not instability in the curve but an ability to manipulate it externally. And the second issue is the location of an economy along the curve itself, which “is the problem of proper macroeconomic fiscal and monetary policy” – again fully endorsing the original notion of an unemployment/price level trade-off, which would indeed still be a “stable” operating and exploitable target within the idealized parameters of an already-attained “good” Phillips Curve for the country. As Samuelson had asserted all along and was now arguing with increasing sophistication, the policy question about the Phillips Curve was really a two-component proposition, and both components – he plainly believed – were manipulable.
Except that it simply wasn’t so, and a growing number of academic critics posited reasons why it wasn’t so: expectations traps that led to a vertical long run curve, behavior adjustments taken in anticipation of policy premised on the curve, difficulties in identifying the operating point of an economy along the curve, and even the overall empirical weakness of the purported relationship. Far from salvaging the Phillips Curve from its deficiencies, the ensuing literature thoroughly undermined its Samuelsonian iteration and incapacitated it as a functional policy-making mechanism.
Samuelson himself resisted the incoming repudiation of his attempts to operationalize the concept. As late as 1971 and well after Friedman’s formal critique appeared in the economic literature (1968), Samuelson was still pushing a hardline prescriptive orthodoxy around the Phillips Curve. In a letter to the New York Times (12/29/1971) reflecting on leadership changes in Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, he noted the following:
“But how can any economist throw a stone at him for not having predicted the unpredictable – the fact that the cost-push (or Phillips curve) pathology of hte American mixed economy has turned out to be so much worse than past patterns of experience had suggested? By this I mean: All the regression equations to predict how much deceleration of price and wage inflation the Nixon-engineered stagnation would induce, proved to be systematically overoptimistic. For a little unemployment, we got only a derisory reduction in the rate of inflation.”
This is not the language of an inquisitive scientist as he encounters the first cracks in a prior supposition; it is a rigid clinging to a prior orthodoxy around an exploitable Phillips Curve whose performance was increasingly at odds with empirical evidence. And with it came a bitter lashing out at those he had influenced, not for want of their own attempts to continue a failed exploitation of the curve but for their less rigid adherence to the prescriptive course he himself had laid out.
In turning to these policy examples, it is not difficult to observe what is missed in the revisionist Phillips Curve narrative of Forder and others. The “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve is no myth at all where Samuelson is concerned, and indeed he likely viewed it as another manipulable component of his growing macro system that could be subjected to policy ends both within its framework – i.e. a movement along the curve – and externally through a consciously induced shift of that curve.
Where ambiguities in the text of the 1960 article and a few sparing selections from the subsequent academic discussion seem to provide an air of plausible deniability around his connection to the notion of an exploitable Phillips Curve, it is actually Samuelson’s concurrent actions in the public policy sphere that belie the “myth” revision. His advice to policymakers in Congress and the White House shows that he viewed the curve as an exploitable extension of prescriptive macroeconomic policymaking. And where such policy implications are only hypothesized in the 1960 article, they are connected in tangible and specific instances to the legislators and presidents he was urging them upon throughout the 1960s. The revisionist account reminds us of nuance in academic writing and even inadvertently teases out a more complicated element of prescriptive manipulation in Samuelson’s consideration of a “shifting” curve. But it is at best an exercise in selective evidence assemblage to exonerate Samuelson from an episode that his own policy work directly reveals to the contrary.
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Tomorrowland 2011 AfterMovie vol.2 | Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike ( Official )
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