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Will China rule the world?China
What does the new China think of itself?
Shi Yinhong
Traditional ideas are combining with economic self-confidence to create a new and powerful sense of 'Chineseness'
Wed 24 Jun 2009 14.00 EDT
Martin Jacques persuasively argues that a modernising and modernised China will keep its essential and dynamic Chineseness in a new era of "contested modernity", and that the rise of China as both a "civilisation-state" and a nation-state is ending the dominance of the west and ushering in a new era of global diversity in values and power distribution. It is hard to contradict his observation that "contrary to almost universal western expectations after Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Communist party not only survived but reinvented itself and, over the last 30 years, has presided over the most remarkable economic transformation in human history". But his assertion that China's age-old sense of superiority will reassert itself is more controversial.
Throughout China's very long history there has been a persistent theme of continuity and change – the former very tenacious, but the latter sometimes very drastic. Modern China has undergone many major changes. The Chineseness of China is dynamic, shaped not only by traditional ideas of China, but also by contemporary ones.
China's current leaders and, through them, the majority of the Chinese people have a strong belief in Chineseness and its overwhelming importance to national reform and development. This belief in Chineseness is not like the traditional Confucian one, which treated it as a universally applicable value. It is more particular, not assuming that what is best for China is necessarily best for the world. This aspect was introduced by Mao Zedong – before his own revolutionary "universalism" after the 1950s – by his insistence on determining the strategy of the Chinese revolution according to China's particular conditions, and his resistance to the attempts of Comintern to impose a universal revolution.
China's achievements over the past 30 years are a major source of Chinese patriotism today. The success of so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has restored the Chinese people's self-confidence after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, and in the face of the earlier spectacular success of the west. This self-confidence has now developed in the context of the global financial crisis, which has further dented the west's prestige and increased its dependence upon China. Its effect on China's foreign policy is noticeable.
China is aware that it still faces many challenges: its huge size and population, its domestic problems and the foreign policy situation. But both the Chinese Confucian empire and a China willing to follow the west (whether in the sense of Woodrow Wilson or Lenin) have passed into history, probably never to return.
Will China rule the world?
Tiananmen Square protests 1989
Global recession
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Competing coaches are far more than rivals
McMahon seniors facing third season of canceled sports
‘A gentle giant’ Staples senior basketball player Timari Rivera dies...
Staples’ Guiduli scoring goals for a good cause
Looking Back by George Albano
Former McMahon basketball star Paul Atkins dead at 60
Led by its seniors, Weston captures SWC girls swimming title
Staples sweeps Ridgefield for Central Region volleyball crown
Riley Peters lifts Tigers to FCIAC Central field hockey title
McMahon, Wilton draw to share Central Region championship
Feb. 15, 2010 Updated: June 17, 2016 4:11 p.m.
By GEORGE ALBANO
Hour Staff Writer
City bragging rights won't be the only thing on the line when the Brien McMahon and Norwalk High girls basketball teams meet tonight in the first game of the intracity doubleheader at the Tom Scarso Gymnasium.
A special bond between the two head coaches will also be in the forefront.
Even though there might be a seven-year difference in age between Mark McElveen of McMahon and Norwalk's Ricky Fuller, the two practically grew up with one another at the George Washing-ton Carver Center on Academy Street.
And the common denominator both of them had was the watchful eye of Fuller's father, Richard Fuller Sr., the executive director of the Carver at the time.
"Ricky is much younger than me," the 45-year-old McElveen said after Monday night's win over Wilton. "But he always went to the Carver with his dad."
"Mark was my camp counselor," Fuller recalled.
The NHS coach started going to the Carver even before that.
"He was about seven years old when he started in the after-school program there," his father, who retired in 2004 after 26 years as executive director and 30 years overall at the Carver Center, said. "Markie was more into the athletic leagues we had there. He was more involved in the gym programs.
"They both took different paths," he added. "One came through the gym programs and one came through the classroom programs. But they both ended up working with kids as basketball coaches."
And that is a tribute to the wonderful organization known as the George Washington Carver Center and the solid foundation they provide for future leaders like the two head coaches of tonight's McMahon-Norwalk girls basketball game.
"Not only those two, but also Mo Tomlin. He came through the Carver Center, too," the elder Fuller said of the McMahon boys basketball coach. "I saw three of the four basketball coaches in town grow up.
"We really prided ourselves in developing leadership and people who could be role models in the future. It's all come to fruition with those three, one being my own son. But really they're all my sons. It's like an investment, only better than my IRA. This investment has produced something."
Besides being involved with programs at the Carver as kids, McElveen and Fuller, both McMahon graduates, held various jobs as young adults that also prepared them to become coaches.
"I gave Mark his first job. He was my athletic director," Fuller Sr. pointed out. "He went to the University of Maine and then came back to the Carver, back to his roots, to work with a lot of kids. He's a great example of someone who came right from the neighborhood. The McElveens lived right around the corner from the Carver. Now Mark's brother, Mike, is the athletic director there.
"And Ricky went to college at Virginia Union and was the summer camp director at the Carver when he came home every summer. They both developed good communication skills, good people skills, and good life skills, and I think that contributed to them becoming coaches and getting good jobs. The same with Mo Tomlin."
Tonight won't be the first time Mark McElveen and Ricky Fuller face off against one another as opposing coaches. Before they became head coaches, they were both varsity assistants - Fuller under Fred English and McElveen under Ed Faulkner - and they used to coach against each other in the junior varsity games between the two city rivals.
"I think it will be a little more special now because we're both head coaches," McElveen said. "We went head to head in all those JV games, but it's not the same. It will be even more special now."
Tonight actually won't be the first time they've faced one another as head coaches, either. When Faulkner took ill last year and couldn't finish out the season, McElveen took over as the interim head coach down the stretch, and one of the varsity games he coached the Senators in was against Fuller and Norwalk.
"But even that was different," McElveen said. "I made some little changes, but it was still Mr. Faulkner's team and I tried to keep things the same way. But this year it's my own team and that will make it different."
Both coaches are looking forward to it, too.
"It's always fun to go against Mark," Fuller Jr. said. "He's got his team playing well. They've won something like nine in a row (actually eight of their last nine) so he's done a real nice job. It should be a lot of fun."
"We'll always be friends," McElveen added. "We have the same circle of friends, our families know one another. That makes it special. It's great to compete, but the bottom line is we're friends more than anything else."
Whatever happens tonight, though, one thing is certain. There is no doubt who the proudest person in the gym will be.
"The score doesn't matter," Richard Fuller Sr. said. "The most important thing is the strong relationships they've developed with the kids. The principles we put into them when they were kids at the Carver, they took them and ran with them and demonstrated they were leaders. What else can you ask?
"My father used to say 'Let the work I've done speak for me.' Well, I think the work we did at the Carver will speak loud and clear. I'll be at the game and I'll be very proud. Very proud."
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15th Gallery
9th Gallery
Photojournalism - Professional
All Photographer Image Title Country
Larry Louie
"Sulphur Miners of Mt Ijen"
On the volcanic mountain of Kawah Ijen on the Island of Java in Indonesia. Sulphur or Devil's gold, as the local calls it, is the treasure these miners are harvesting.
Biography: International award winning photographer Dr. Larry Louie is an optometrist in Canada and also a travel & humanitarian documentary photographer. On his travels, he is exploring the lives of remote indigenous people, documenting social issues and ultimately seeking to adjust people's view of the world. Over the last couple of years, Larry has used his photography as a platform to highlight the work of different charities around the world. He hopes his photographs will be able to tell the stories and make a difference, and to reveal light that is found in the darkest of places.
© 2004 - 2021 Black & White Spider Awards, all rights reserved.
© 2021 Works exhibited in the Winners Gallery are are owned by the named photographer and international copyright law prohibits the use of this copyrighted material.
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Pakistan faces call to spare mentally ill man on death row
Sun., Sept. 18, 2016
MULTAN, PAKISTAN—A rights group and the family of a mentally ill man on death row in Pakistan have pleaded with the government to halt his execution.
Imdad Ali was convicted in a 2001 murder case and has exhausted all appeals. A clemency request to Pakistan’s president was rejected, and he is due to be executed on Tuesday.
Justice Project Pakistan said Sunday that state-appointed doctors diagnosed Ali with schizophrenia and declared him unfit to be hanged. His wife, Safia Bano, has called on the government to intervene.
The Justice Project says Pakistan has executed 419 people since it lifted a ban on capital punishment in December 2014.
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Provincial Politics
‘I’m not going to roll back’: Doug Ford claims COVID-19 has changed his partisan outlook
By Robert BenzieQueen's Park Bureau Chief
Tue., Oct. 6, 2020timer3 min. read
updateArticle was updated Oct. 07, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing leaders of all political stripes to work together to tackle the daunting challenges facing Ontario, Canada and the rest of the world, says Premier Doug Ford.
In a wide-ranging 45-minute discussion Tuesday at the Ryerson Democracy Forum hosted by Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn, Ford acknowledged the outbreak has changed his outlook on politics.
“This is the way I’m going to be. I’m going to be this way moving forward. I’m not going to roll back,” the premier said, pointing to his close working relationship with Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland as well as other premiers and municipal leaders.
“We’re like a tag team. I like this type of governing. I like the collaboration, working together, and, again, putting politics aside,” he said via Zoom to some 500 students and to thousands more watching on thestar.com.
The premier talks to Regg Cohn at Ryerson University about recovery in the time of COVID-19.
In contrast to his previous reputation as a my-way-or-the-highway Toronto city councillor — when his late brother, Rob Ford, was mayor from 2010 to 2014 — the premier emphasized he now seeks the counsel of many.
“I can tell you, Martin, I never make a decision by myself,” said Ford.
“I bounce it off (others). I’m a consensus-builder. I’m going to bounce it off 50 people before we make a decision — (in) all different areas and of all different political stripes to make sure we make the best possible decision that we feel we can make. Especially with this pandemic.”
That decentralized approach, he added, is why Queen’s Park has not always dictated coronavirus orders to the various regions of the province.
“I just believe in letting each area make their decision. That’s the way we’ve kind of governed on this pandemic with collaboration from everyone as long as it makes sense,” said Ford.
“So far, everything seems to be going fairly well.”
In a comment that may surprise his political rivals, Ford insisted he’s “never been big” on partisanship.
“Don’t get me wrong, Martin, I’ve always said I’m very proud to be the leader of the PC Party, but our family has never been elected by PC members 100 per cent. We get elected by traditional NDP voters or traditional members of the Liberal party,” he said.
Ford said he was happy to meet with Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca, Green Leader Mike Schreiner, and NDP deputy leader John Vanthof, who pinch hit for Leader Andrea Horwath, in his office last week to discuss the COVID-19 response.
“I want to continue on speaking with them, collaborating with them, coming up with ideas. I understand what they have to do. They’re in opposition, they have to go after me. That’s politics,” he said.
“Steven Del Duca has reached out to me with some ideas and it doesn’t hurt. I think it’s good if we can collaborate and to hold me accountable.”
Cohn asked him about a respectful exchange he had with his Liberal predecessor, Kathleen Wynne, in the legislature last week that made headlines for its civility.
“The other day when she asked me a question, I couldn’t get upset with Kathleen,” said Ford
“She’s the only person in that whole chamber that’s walked a mile in my shoes. Fortunately, it wasn’t through a pandemic,” he said.
Doug Ford chats with the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn about recovery in the time of COVID-19
Dozens died in long-term care as they waited for Ontario's COVID-19 action plan, inquiry told
High call volumes. Being placed on endless hold. Ontarians share frustrations over new COVID-testing system
“Even during the campaign, Kathleen Wynne was never mean. She was never rude. She’s a very, very nice person.”
Listen to Ed Tubb and Joanna Chiu discuss the second wave and mental health
Ford emphasized that Wynne is one of a handful of people in Ontario who understands “the pressures that the premier faces and the decisions that come across the desk every single day — tough, tough decisions.”
The premier was far less charitable about U.S. President Donald Trump, who threatened earlier this year to withhold critical pandemic supplies, like respirator masks from Canada.
“I still can’t get over it. Yes, he’s not on my Christmas card list. I’m ticked off at him,” he said, pointing out how Canadians rallied to help Americans after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
When a Ryerson student likened Ford to Trump, the premier chortled, “Boy, that was a real slap calling me Donald Trump. I’m anything but Donald Trump.”
The premier added he was taken aback by Trump’s “disgusting” attack in last week’s raucous presidential debate on Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who has battled drug addiction.
Robert Benzie is the Star’s Queen’s Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie
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EMAIL June
714.484.9977, ext. 1243
Refer June
Get to Know June
Family is extremely important to June Adams. She and her parents immigrated from Korea, and since then, she has worked hard to provide for her family and show her gratitude for a country that afforded them a wealth of opportunities. June spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve, serving her country and building her leadership and teamwork skills. She took those skills to help grow her professional family, the advisors and clients of Trilogy Financial. She continues to enjoy watching both her professional and personal families grow.
June started in the industry as a Financial Advisor, shortly after receiving her business economics degree from the University of California Santa Barbara. She eventually moved over to the administrative side of the business, becoming Trilogy’s first Vice President of Administration. In that role, she oversaw all administrative departments including Accounting, Recruiting, Payroll, Human Resources and IT. As the company grew, she started to take on more of a compliance leadership role. In 2015, with the creation of Trilogy Capital, June received the title of Chief Compliance Officer in addition to her Vice President of Administration role. Due to the growth of the company, she relinquished her administrative duties in 2019 to focus solely on compliance. In her current role, June is primarily responsible for ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and is responsible for implementing procedures to prevent and detect compliance issues throughout the firm.
June has over two decades of experience with Trilogy and in the financial industry. She holds her Series 66 Registration with Trilogy Capital. She holds her Series 6, 7, 24, 51 and 63 Registrations with LPL Financial and holds a license for Life and Health Insurance.
Meet June’s Team
See More of June’s news
See More of June’s Insights
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Sam Smith News 05 May 2020
Wamkele Mene: Digital trade the only tool for Africa’s economic recovery (EWN)
AfCFTA secretary-general Wamkele Mene said he had gone back to the drawing board to review his priorities post the COVID-19 pandemic and digital trade may be the only way to awaken the sleeping giant. Mene said digitisation was already a priority before for the AfCFTA before COVID-19, and its advantages were even more pronounced now. He said the African Union was already working to develop digital trade infrastructure to enable the trade agreement to be effectively implemented. “I’m talking from a customs point of view and for goods-in-transit, it’s very important to establish trade facilitation digital platforms but we don’t have them yet at the pan-African level, which is what we are striving towards and this crisis has underscored the need for us to accelerate that work and rely more on digital trade platforms,” said Mene.
In Mene’s vision, the AfCFTA will ensure that rules of origin support Africa’s industrial development objectives. He wants car manufacturers in African countries to use African components that can be manufactured even by countries that don’t have an automobile strategy. He sees more agro-processing because of its high-value addition and contribution to food security, as well as centres of excellence that will benefit not only countries that are industrialised like South Africa but all countries. “Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Morocco and South Africa all have an auto strategy – all of them see a potential for inward investment if they establish a manufacturing base for automakers to come and invest. We can harness this through the agreement into a pan African value chain of automobiles and other sectors.”
The WTO Secretariat has published a new information note looking at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected e-commerce, including the implications for cross-border trade. It notes the increased use of e-commerce as consumers adapt to lockdowns and social distancing measures and draws attention to several challenges, such as the need to bridge the digital divide within and across countries. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that e-commerce can be an important tool/solution for consumers in times of crisis, and that it is also an economic driver, including for small businesses. However, the pandemic has highlighted not only the importance of digital technologies in general, but also several vulnerabilities across the world. These experiences and lessons raise some useful questions:
Should new and practical e-commerce solutions to enable the fast and secure crossborder movement of goods and services be considered, to help economic recovery and job creation after the COVID-19 pandemic?
Network capacity and higher bandwidth services have proved to be crucial, not only during the pandemic itself, but also for e-commerce and economic inclusion in general. Even more importantly, they have demonstrated their role in the delivery of essential services and the equipment of less connected communities when faced with a global crisis. Given these insights, what can WTO members do to improve communications networks and services?
What can the WTO do to assist e-commerce in developing countries and LDCs, to reduce the digital divide and promote economies that are more resilient to possible future crises or shocks?
Are there additional actions relating to e-commerce at the WTO that can be taken to assist MSMEs?
pdf E-commerce, trade and the COVID-19 pandemic: WTO Information Note (150 KB)
South Africa: Statement by SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter (SARS)
Whilst it is early days, our initial view is that revenue performance will be lower than the February Budget announcement by between 15%-20%. This means that revenue under-recovery could move up to R285bn. From the preliminary assessment of revenue performance of the first month we can report: Import tax overall down on prior year by 19.7%: Import VAT down 25% on prior year - tax value R1.6bn, Customs duties down 11.8% on prior year - tax value R100m. [Download: pdf Statement (1.20 MB) ]
Botswana to slowly end lockdown (Xinhua)
The country’s legislators will convene an emergency parliament meeting on Wednesday to discuss new regulations expected to usher in opening of businesses and schools, under strict supervision. According to proposed regulations, presented by President Mokgweetsi Masisi to parliament on Tuesday, the Southern Africa country wants to gradual allow businesses, traders or school to operate after satisfying Health Services Director or any authorized official that they will prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Nigeria: FG waives import duties for medical supplies, orders Customs to expedite clearing
OBG: Digital solutions offer hope for Nigeria as it begins phased easing of Covid-19 lockdown
Manufacturers, construction companies to receive waivers from Lagos State during lockdown ease-up phase
40% of EAC businesses uncertain of continuity amid COVID-19
pdf Statement by the EAC logistics industry stakeholders on cargo movement during Covid-19 pandemic (513 KB)
The Great Shutdown: How COVID-19 disrupts supply chains (ITC)
The factory shutdown in the EU will have the strongest repercussion for the supply-chain exports of other countries. Why? Because the EU is the largest importer of manufacturing inputs (China is the largest exporter), the largest market for three of the world’s five geographic regions, and highly integrated into global value chains. The EU is the main importer of manufacturing inputs from both Africa and Asia and buys almost as much of manufacturing inputs from Latin America as the United States does. Our estimations suggest that EU imports of manufacturing inputs will drop by $147bn, out of which $101bn is intra-EU trade, and $46bn is imports from other regions. China and the United States come second and third, with shutdowns in China and the United States triggering the reduction of imports of manufacturing inputs by $42bn and $38bn respectively (see the columns in the table below). The combined reduction amounts to $228bn, or 2.4% of the total manufacturing imports by the G3, or 11% if only GVC trade is considered.
African exporters may lose over $2.4bn in global manufacturing value-chain exports due to the shock caused by factory shutdowns in the G3. About three quarters of this loss is caused by the temporary disruption of the supply chain linkages with the EU, while the remaining quarter of the reduction being caused by the shutdowns in China and the United States. When it comes to global value chains, Africa is one of the least integrated regions, and hence experiences the least severe effects of supply-chain disruptions originating in the G3. [The authors: Olga Solleder, Mauricio Torres Velasquez]
Foreign direct investment and global value chains in the wake of COVID-19 (World Bank)
At the epicenter of this turmoil are multinational corporations - companies that made investment decisions to fragment and relocate production, in a process that has shaped the geography of global value chains over the last three decades. These enterprises account for 22% of global output and contribute about 70% of total trade—particularly in sectors highly involved in global value chains, such as motor vehicles, electrical equipment, chemicals, and electronics (figure 2). Multinationals also contribute a substantial share of employment. U.S. multinationals alone employed 42.3 million workers worldwide in 2016 and represent 22% of total private industry employment in the United States. Multinational companies in the Netherlands created approximately 1.4 million full-time jobs in 2014—almost 20 % of all full-time jobs created in the country. In China, multinationals employ more than 26 million workers, accounting for 6.4% of total urban employment. [Note: This blog is part of a three-part series on the way in which global value chains are affected by COVID-19]
UNCTAD’s latest Investment Policy Monitor has been posted: This Special Issue of UNCTAD’s Investment Policy Monitor (pdf) analyses what this bleak forecast means for investment policymaking and provides an updated overview of specific investment policy measures that countries have undertaken since the release of UNCTAD’s latest regular IPM in early April 2020. Looking ahead, the pandemic is likely to have lasting effects on investment policy making. It may reinforce and solidify the ongoing trend towards more restrictive admission policies for foreign investment in industries considered as being of critical importance for host countries. At the same time, the pandemic may result in more competition for attracting investment in other industries as economies strive to recover from the crisis and disrupted supply chains need to be re-established. The crisis may also enhance the utilization of online administrative approval procedures for investors and staff. It is also expected that the post-pandemic period will witness an acceleration of countries’ efforts to reform their IIAs to ensure their right to regulate in the public interest, while maintaining effective levels of investment protection. The magnitude of the post-pandemic reconstruction task and the priorities in this process will differ from country to country. However, all governments will face the common challenge of how to make the best use of investment policies in bringing their economies back onto a sustainable development path. In addition to national efforts, successful international cooperation will be crucial, especially for the recovery of developing countries, including least developed countries.
Paul Akiwumi, Giovanni Valensisi: COVID-19 exacerbates poverty risks in the poorest countries (UNCTAD)
To provide a preliminary appraisal of the impact of COVID-19 on LDC poverty levels, UNCTAD has examined the International Monetary Fund’s growth forecasts in GDP per capita (in constant 2011 international dollars) and looked at the effects, stemming from its downward revision following the outbreak of the pandemic. This allows the direct comparison of poverty estimates consistent with the IMF’s reassessment of growth forecasts between October 2019 and April 2020. The results of this UNCTAD research are highlighted in Figure 1: the worsening economic outlook following the emergence of COVID-19 entails an increase of over three percentage points in LDC poverty headcount, with more than 33 million additional people living in extreme poverty. While this exercise is fraught with uncertainties, there are good reasons to believe that these figures are – if anything – a conservative estimate.
Tanzania: Rapid eTrade Readiness Assessment (pdf, UNCTAD)
As Tanzania continues to diversify its economy, it has ambitions to become a regional e-commerce hub. Although the country is geographically well-positioned to reach this goal and has made strides in key areas such as mobile money and logistics infrastructure, an enabling environment across policy areas will be key. The Government should take an integrated approach to policy action, with a clear focus on mainstreaming e-commerce into national development planning and engaging more strongly with the private sector. Deeper trust in digital commerce will also need to be developed among consumers, merchants and investors. To overcome the interconnected challenges and create an enabling e-commerce environment, the Government should begin developing a national e-commerce policy and strategy. This should be led by the Ministry of Industry and Trade and be anchored in the National Committee on Trade Facilitation. E-commerce vendors and the start-up/innovation community should become part of the NCTF, as part of broader efforts to strengthen public-private sector dialogue and partnerships.
The potential benefits of e-commerce are not limited to external trade; it can also spur domestic markets and provide a key avenue for income generation for women. Most Tanzanian MSMEs today, many of which are owned or operated by women, are unable to immediately access international markets. The large domestic market, as well as the market of the East African Community Customs Union, can serve as stepping stones. The Government has signalled interest in establishing a national e-commerce platform, which could help Tanzanian MSMEs deepen their access to domestic and regional markets.
Today’s Quick Links:
A new normal: UN lays out roadmap to lift economies and save jobs after COVID-19
AERC: The impact of regulations on investment in mobile telephone infrastructure in SADC countries (pdf)
Ireland is the latest country to join the African Development Bank
UNCTAD: National trade facilitation committees lead reforms, respond to COVID-19
Conservation in crisis: ecotourism collapse threatens communities and wildlife
Tags World Trade OrganisationValue ChainsInvestment policyTrade facilitationLogisticsDigital economy
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Arsene Wenger gives insight into anger management
Russell Kempson
Wednesday December 16 2009, 12.01am, The Times
Arsène Wenger has lifted the lid on his half-time rant during the 2-1 win against Liverpool on Sunday and revealed how he and his fellow managers often teeter on the brink of volcanic eruption.
Wenger launched into his players during the interval at Anfield after an indifferent display had contributed to a 1-0 deficit. Cesc Fàbregas, the captain, said that the Frenchman had accused them of not deserving “to wear the Arsenal shirt”.
If it was a rare outburst by Wenger, it worked — unlike his choice use of words when his side trailed 5-1 to Manchester United at Old Trafford in February 2001. Arsenal went on to lose 6-1 and Wenger has since been selective when venting his anger and when not.
“Yes, I
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Humanities › Issues
How to Remove a President Who Cannot Serve
A Guide to the 25th Amendment, Succession, and Impeachment
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The U. S. Government
U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights
History & Major Milestones
U.S. Legal System
U.S. Political System
Income Tax & The IRS
Campaigns & Elections
U.S. Liberal Politics
U.S. Conservative Politics
Canadian Government
Tom Murse
Tom Murse is a former political reporter and current Managing Editor of daily paper "LNP," and weekly political paper "The Caucus," both published by LNP Media in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
The 25th Amendment to the Constitution established the orderly transfer of power and process for replacing the president and vice president of the United States in the event they die in office, quit, are removed by impeachment or become physically or mentally unable to serve. The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967 following the chaos surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Part of the amendment allows for the forceful removal of a president outside of the constitutional impeachment process, a complex procedure that has been the subject of debate amid the controversial presidency of Donald Trump. Scholars believe the provisions for the removal of a president in the 25th Amendment relate to physical incapacitation and not mental or cognitive disabilities.
Indeed, the transfer of power from president to vice president has occurred several times using the 25th Amendment. The 25th Amendment has never been used to forcefully remove a president from office, but it has been invoked following the resignation of a president amid the most high-profile political scandal in modern history.
What the 25th Amendment Does
The 25th Amendment sets forth provisions for the transfer of executive power to the vice president should the president become unable to serve. If the president is only temporarily unable to carry out his duties, his power remains with the vice president until the president notifies Congress in writing that he is able to resume the duties of the office. If the president is permanently unable to carry out his duties, the vice president steps into the role and another person is chosen to fill the vice presidency.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows for the removal of a president by Congress through the use of a "written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." For a president to be removed under the 25th Amendment, the vice president and a majority of the president's cabinet would have to deem the president unfit to serve. This section of the 25th Amendment, unlike the others, has never been invoked.
History of the 25th Amendment
The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, but the nation's leaders had begun talking about the need for clarity on the transfer of power decades earlier. The Constitution was vague on the procedure for elevated a vice president into the presidency in the event the commander-in-chief died or resigned.
According to the National Constitution Center:
This oversight became apparent in 1841, when the newly elected president, William Henry Harrison, died about a month after becoming President. Vice President John Tyler, in a bold move, settled the political debate about succession. ... In the following years, presidential successions happened after the deaths of six presidents, and there were two cases where the offices of president and vice president almost became vacant at the same time. The Tyler precedent stood fast in these transition periods.
Clarifying the process of transfer of power became of paramount importance amid the Cold War and the illnesses suffered by President Dwight Eisenhower 1950s. Congress began debating the possibility of a constitutional amendment in 1963. The NCC continues:
The influential Senator Estes Kefauver had started the amendment effort during the Eisenhower era, and he renewed it in 1963. Kefauver died in August 1963 after suffering a heart attack on the Senate floor. With Kennedy’s unexpected death, the need for a clear way to determine presidential succession, especially with the new reality of the Cold War and its frightening technologies, forced Congress into action. The new President, Lyndon Johnson, had known health issues, and the next two people in line for the presidency were 71-year-old John McCormack (the Speaker of the House) and Senate Pro Tempore Carl Hayden, who was 86 years old.
Sen. Birch Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana who served during the 1960s and 1970s, is considered the principal architect of the 25th Amendment. He served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice and was the leading voice in exposing and repairing flaws in the Constitution's provisions for an orderly transfer of power after Kennedy's assassination. Bayh drafted and introduced the language that would become the 25th Amendment on January 6, 1965.
The 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, four years after Kennedy's assassination. The confusion and crises of JFK's 1963 slaying laid bare the need for a smooth and clear transition of power. Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president after Kennedy's death, served 14 months without a vice president because there was no process by which the position was to be filled.
Use of the 25th Amendment
The 25th Amendment has been used six times, three of which came during President Richard M. Nixon's administration and the fallout from the Watergate scandal. Vice President Gerald Ford became president following Nixon's resignation in 1974, and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller became vice president under the transfer of power provisions sets forth in the 25th Amendment. Earlier, in 1973, Ford was tapped by Nixon to be vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned the post.
Two vice presidents temporarily served as president when commanders-in-chief underwent medical treatment and were physically unable to serve in office.
Vice President Dick Cheney twice assumed the duties of President George W. Bush. The first time was in June 2002 when Bush underwent a colonoscopy. The second time was in July 2007 when the president had the same procedure. Cheney assumed the presidency under the 25th Amendment for little more than two hours in each instance.
Vice President George H.W. Bush assumed the duties of President Ronald Reagan in July 1985, when the president had surgery for colon cancer. There was no attempt, however, to transfer power from Reagan to Bush in 1981 when Reagan was shot and was undergoing emergency surgery.
Criticism of the 25th Amendment
Critics have claimed over the years that the 25th Amendment does not establish a process for determining when a president is physically or mentally unable to continue serving as president. Some, including former President Jimmy Carter, have pushed for the creation of a panel of physicians to routinely evaluate the most powerful politician in the free world and decide whether their judgment was clouded by a mental disability.
Bayh, the architect of the 25th Amendment, has called such proposals wrong-headed. "Though well-meaning, this is an ill-conceived idea," Bayh wrote in 1995. "The key question is who determines if a President is unable to perform his duties? The amendment states that if the President is able to do so, he may declare his own disability; otherwise, it is up to the Vice President and Cabinet. Congress can step in if the White House is divided."
Continued Bayh:
Yes, the best medical minds should be available to the President, but the White House physician has primary responsibility for the President's health and can advise the Vice President and Cabinet quickly in an emergency. He or she can observe the President every day; an outside panel of experts wouldn't have that experience. And many doctors agree that it is impossible to diagnose by committee. ... Besides, as Dwight D. Eisenhower said, the "determination of Presidential disability is really a political question."
25th Amendment in the Trump Era
Presidents who have not committed "high crimes and misdemeanors" and are therefore not subject to impeach can still be removed from office under certain provisions of the Constitution. The 25th Amendment is the means by which that would happen, and the clause was invoked by critics of President Donald Trump's erratic behavior in 2017 as a way of removing him from the White House during a tumultuous first year in office.
Veteran political analysts, though, describe the 25th Amendment as "an unwieldy, arcane and ambiguous process abounding in uncertainties" that would not likely result in success in the modern political era, when partisan loyalty trumps many other concerns. "Actually invoking it would require Trump's own vice president and his cabinet to turn against him. That just isn’t going to happen," wrote political scientists G. Terry Madonna and Michael Young in July 2017.
Ross Douthat, a prominent conservative and columnist, argued that the 25th Amendment was precisely the tool that should be used against Trump. According to Douthat in the New York Times in May 2017:
The Trump situation is not exactly the sort that the amendment’s Cold War-era designers were envisioning. He has not endured an assassination attempt or suffered a stroke or fallen prey to Alzheimer’s. But his incapacity to really govern, to truly execute the serious duties that fall to him to carry out, is nevertheless testified to daily — not by his enemies or external critics, but by precisely the men and women whom the Constitution asks to stand in judgment on him, the men and women who serve around him in the White House and the cabinet.
A group of Democratic congressmen led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland sought passage of a bill that was aimed at using the 25th Amendment to remove Trump. The legislation would have created an 11-member Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity to medically examine the president and evaluate his mental and physical faculties. The idea of conducting such an examination is not new. Former President Jimmy Carter suggested the creation of a panel of doctors decide on the president's fitness.
Raskin's legislation was designed to take advantage of a provision in the 25th Amendment that allows for a "body of Congress" to declare that a president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." Said one co-sponsor of the bill: "Given Donald Trump's continued erratic and baffling behavior, is it any wonder why we need to pursue this legislation? The mental and physical health of the leader of the United States and the free world is a matter of great public concern."
Resources and Further Reading
Bayh, Birch. “The White House Safety Net.” Opinion, The New York Times, 8 Apr. 1995.
Douthat, Ross. “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.” Opinion, The New York Times, 17 May 2017.
Madonna, G. Terry, and Michael Young. “The Impeachment Referendum.” The Indiana Gazette, 30 July 2017, pp. A-7.
NCC Staff. “How a National Tragedy Led to the 25th Amendment.” Constitution Daily, National Constitution Center, 10 Feb. 2019.
Murse, Tom. "How to Remove a President Who Cannot Serve." ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/us-constitution-25th-amendment-text-105394. Murse, Tom. (2020, August 27). How to Remove a President Who Cannot Serve. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/us-constitution-25th-amendment-text-105394 Murse, Tom. "How to Remove a President Who Cannot Serve." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/us-constitution-25th-amendment-text-105394 (accessed January 21, 2021).
History and Current Order of US Presidential Succession
Supermajority Vote in US Congress
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Vice President of the United States: Duties and Details
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When the Race for President Begins
What Happens If the Presidential Election Is a Tie
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What Is Fluency?
Rayers/DigitalVision/Getty Images
In order to figure out whether you are fluent in a language, you need to analyze your own language abilities. According to the "official" definition, fluency refers to an ability to converse fluidly and easily. Do you feel comfortable speaking the language? Can you communicate easily with native speakers? Can you read newspapers, listen to the radio, and watch tv? Are you able to understand the gist of the language as it is spoken and written, even if you don't know every single word? Can you understand native speakers from different regions? The more fluent you are, the more of these questions you can answer "yes" to.
A fluent speaker may have some gaps in vocabulary but is capable of figuring out these terms in context. Likewise, s/he can reword sentences in order to describe an object, explain an idea, or get a point across, even if s/he doesn't know the actual terms.
Thinking in the Language
Pretty much everyone agrees that this is an important sign of fluency. Thinking in the language means that you understand the words without actually translating them into your native language. For example, non-fluent speakers would hear or read the sentence "J'habite à Paris" and would think to themselves (slowly if they are beginners, more quickly if they are more advanced) something like:
J' is from je - I...
habite is from habiter - to live...
à can mean in, to, or at...
Paris...
I - live - in - Paris.
A fluent speaker wouldn't need to go through all that; s/he would intuitively understand "J'habite à Paris" as easily as "I live in Paris." The reverse is also true: when speaking or writing, a fluent speaker doesn't need to construct the sentence in his/her native language and then translate it into the target language - a fluent speaker thinks of what s/he wants to say in the language s/he wants to say it.
Many people say that dreaming in the language is an essential indicator of fluency. We personally don't subscribe to this belief, because:
We've only dreamed in French once (13 years after we began to study it) and we've never dreamed in Spanish.
We know a number of people who have dreamed in a language after only a year or two of study.
We once had an entire dream in Polish, which we studied for a total of about 12 non-intensive, non-immersion hours.
We certainly agree that dreaming in the language of study is a good sign - it shows that the language is being incorporated into your subconscious.
ThoughtCo. "What Is Fluency?" ThoughtCo, Aug. 26, 2020, thoughtco.com/what-is-fluency-4084860. ThoughtCo. (2020, August 26). What Is Fluency? Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-fluency-4084860 ThoughtCo. "What Is Fluency?" ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-fluency-4084860 (accessed January 21, 2021).
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Alexander Pushkin, Russian Author
Russia (Europe)
Alexander Pushkin, Russian Author →
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers. He also wrote historical fiction. His The Captain's Daughter provides insight into Russia during the reign of Catherine the Great....
More • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin →
More • http://en.wikipedia. ... er_Pushkin
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Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was a Russian novelist best known for his novels A Common Story (1847), Oblomov (1859), and The Precipice (1869). He also served in many official capacities, including the position of censor. Goncharov was born in Simb...
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Times Record News file Josey Cleveland (left) dons gobbler-themed duds for the scholarship barrel race during Turkey Fest on the Henrietta Courthouse Square in 2015. Turkey Fest returns to Henrietta Saturday. (Photo: Lana Sweeten-Shults/Times Record)
It's been 10 years of turkey trotting.
Pure poultry in motion.
Gobbler glossology.
And the Henrietta and Clay County Chamber of Commerce Turkey Fest is celebrating by bringing this fair-feathered celebration back to town.
Since 2006, celebrity teams have traveled to Clay County to hunt for three days, hoping to nab the top-scoring turkey. Judges score entries by weight, length of spur and length of beard.
Celebrity teams, which are required to have a syndicated outdoors show on television to participate, have been in Clay County since Thursday. Area ranches are supplying teams with digs for the weekend. These celebrity hunting teams, made up of a cameraman, hunter and assistant, will culminate their hunts on turn-in day Saturday.
Saturday is when the nonhunting festivities fly in, beginning at 10 a.m. on the Henrietta Courthouse Square and running through 4 p.m. The day closes with the $50-a-ticket Full-Strut Banquet at 6:30 p.m. at Pioneer Hall and a free dance party, also beginning at 6:30 p.m.
"It's our 10th anniversary, and we are having 10 teams," chamber Executive Director B.J. Dunn said. "We had between 5,000 and 6,000 people come in 2015. The Saturday Turkey Fest is for all ages, and there will be plenty of free things for the family to do. We'll have free rides, as well as some rides that people will have to pay for. There will be bounce houses, face painting and numerous activities for kids."
A pie-eating contest begins at 10:30 a.m. Saturday. For a $5 entry fee, contestants down as many pies as they can in five minutes.
The Turkey Barrel Scholarship Race starts at noon. It's when teams of three Clay County high school seniors — any combination of boys and girls — make "a turkeylike contraption that can be pushed, pulled, dragged around a barrel pattern," Dunn said.
Teams are judged according to time and creativity, and each winning team member will receive a $500 scholarship.
This year, she said, the festival won't have live turkey races for the children.
In addition to the professional celebrity hunting teams, Turkey Fest will include an amateur hunting contest, dubbed the Battle of the Beards, which is open to Texas and Oklahoma hunters in younger-than-17 and 17-and-older divisions.
"We have more food vendors this year," she said. "Right now, we have 15 just doing food, not including the rest of the vendors. Jefe's Mexican Restaurant will be at the square and at the banquet, and they will have a beer tent."
Nonfood vendors will sell items like clothes and jewelry on the square.
"We will also have new merchandise for sale that will reflect our 10th anniversary," Dunn said.
Live music will be provided by Pat Waters and the Chainlink Band from Copperas Cove.
The silent auction kicks off at Pioneer Hall at 5:30 p.m. with appetizers and a cash bar, followed by the Full Strut Banquet at 6:30 p.m.
Professional and amateur hunting teams will weigh their catch on the square at noon and 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday. The final Saturday weigh-in will be at 1 p.m. The public is invited to watch as birds are scored.
Proceeds go to the Henrietta and Clay County Chamber of Commerce, which in turn promotes the community and its business members. The chamber will continue its 1-year-old project to develop gateway signs to welcome visitors to Henrietta.
The chamber also has provided funds for such causes as the Boys & Girls Clubs, Clay County Christmas and the area Easter egg hunt.
What: Henrietta & Clay County Chamber of Commerce Turkey Fest
Where: Henrietta Courthouse Square
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday
Etc.: The Full-Strut Banquet is 6:30 p.m. Saturday at Pioneer Hall. Banquet tickets are $50 each. No tickets are sold at the door. Call the chamber to see if any banquet tickets remain.
Contact: www.hccchamber.org, www.facebook.com/claycountyturkeyfest or 940-538-5261
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Models for Business Plan, Marketing and Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships for the Digital Arabic Content Industry
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UNESCO launches flagship initiative to revive the spirit of Mosul
14 February 2018 - On the occasion of the International Conference on the Reconstruction of Iraq, held in Kuwait City from 12 to 14 February, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay today announced the launch of a flagship initiative to revive the spirit of Mosul. The objective, to coordinate international efforts in this direction.
A starting point for a broad strategic plan to promote the spirit of peaceful coexistence and the values of an inclusive society, this initiative aims to participate in Iraq's social and economic renaissance and contribute to sustainable development and reconciliation between communities through the safeguarding and enhancement of cultural heritage.
The initiative foresees a joint effort to rebuild the heritage and revitalize the educational and cultural institutions of Mosul, in close cooperation with the Government and people of Iraq, especially involving young people.
"To the children who have learned war, we must teach them again peace, through the subjects taught at school and the monuments that stand in cities," said the Director General.
At this conference, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, gave his full support to Ms. Azoulay to ensure that UNESCO was at the forefront of coordinating international efforts for the rebirth of Mosul.
"Education, culture and heritage will also be key elements for successful reconstruction. UNESCO’s initiative to coordinate international efforts for the reconstruction of the Old City of Mosul deserves our full support," said Mr. Guterres.
In the margins of the conference, the Director-General also met with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, who expressed his desire to work closely with the Organization on this ambitious project.
"Reconstruction will succeed and Iraq will regain its influence only if the human dimension is given priority; education and culture are the key elements. They are forces of unity and reconciliation.
"It is through education and culture that Iraqis, men and women alike, will be able to regain control of their destiny and become actors in the renewal of their country," said the Director General.
UNESCO Media Service , Laetitia Kaci, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (link sends e-mail), +33 145681772
Agency: UNESCO
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Proxy season 2017: analysing the trends
With the 2017 proxy season now complete, it is time to take stock of the outcomes, analyse the voting trends and learn lessons for next year.
The 2017 proxy season saw a record number of shareholder resolutions related to environmental, social and corporate governance issues uploaded to the PRI’s Collaboration Platform. These covered a huge range of topics, from reducing pesticide use to gender pay equality, and from board diversity to managing food waste.
This proxy season we also launched a vote declaration system, a platform designed to give investors the opportunity to declare how they intend to vote on a range of shareholder resolutions, with the aim of increasing transparency around proxy voting activities.
Insights from the Collaboration Platform
This proxy season, an unprecedented 241 shareholder resolutions were filed or co-filed by PRI signatories and uploaded onto the PRI’s Collaboration Platform, representing an increase of 180% on 2016. Shareholders voted on 146 of these resolutions, while the remainder were either withdrawn by the lead filers or omitted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 37% of resolutions posted onto the Collaboration Platform related to governance issues, 33% to environmental issues, and 14% to social issues. The remainder cut across multiple issues.
The average voting outcome was 33.3%, with 20 resolutions receiving a majority of votes. A breakdown of outcomes by ESG theme highlights that investors find governance-related shareholder resolutions more material, with the average voting result for governance resolutions being 41.3%. The average voting outcome for environmental-related resolutions was 33%, while resolutions on social issues received an average of just 18.4%.
Of the 241 resolutions uploaded onto the Collaboration Platform, 71 were withdrawn, a withdrawal rate of 29%. Looking at the rate of withdrawal across environmental, social and governance issues finds that social issues had the highest rate of withdrawal at 50%, while environmental- and governance-related resolutions had withdrawal rates of 29% and 18% respectively.
Key themes of 2017
Investors are increasingly beginning to recognise the risks that climate change will pose to their investments and in recent years investors have begun to file climate change-related shareholder resolutions. Despite this, the resolutions have been historically unsuccessful, particularly in the US.
However, 2017 marked a turning point. A total of 63 climate-related resolutions were uploaded to the Collaboration Platform. These can be broadly split into two categories: resolutions calling for the adoption of emissions reduction targets and resolutions calling on energy and utilities companies to assess and disclose the risks associated with a low-carbon transition that is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s 2 degrees Celsius warming target. 38 of the 63 climate-related resolutions uploaded to the Collaboration Platform were voted on at company AGMs and received an average vote outcome of 33%.
Particular progress was made on the “2-degree scenario” resolutions, with 16 resolutions receiving an average vote outcome of 45%, compared to 33% in 2016. This marks a change in sentiment amongst investors, who are recognising the risks associated with climate change and are increasingly willing to use their voting rights to make their voices heard on the issue. This is epitomised by the landmark results at ExxonMobil, Occidental and PPL Corporation, where a majority of investors supported “2-degree scenario” resolutions, voting against management recommendations. The “2-degree scenario” resolution at Occidental received 67% of votes in favour, the first time a resolution of this type has passed at a US oil and gas company. This result was also significant as BlackRock, Occidental’s largest shareholder with 7.8% of its shares, voted in favour of the resolution noting that despite ongoing engagement with the company there was a ”lack of observed change in reporting practices”. This was followed by a similar resolution at PPL Corporation which received 57% of votes in favour.
Perhaps the most significant outcome of this proxy season was the success of the “2-degree scenario” resolution at ExxonMobil, the world’s largest listed oil and gas company, which received 62% of votes. The resolution, filed by the New York State pension fund and the Church Commissioners of England called for the company to publish an annual assessment of the long-term portfolio impacts of technological advances and global climate change policies that are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s 2 degrees Celsius warming targets. Over 90 investors with more than US$10tr in combined assets under management declared their support for this resolution before the AGM. In addition, proxy advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis recommended voting in support of this proposal for the second year running.
Some suggest that the threat of the US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, as well as the launch of the Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), has led investors to take a more active role in the management of climate change risks. Indeed, BlackRock highlights that aligning with the TCFD recommendations is one of its five engagement priorities, noting that its voting decision at Occidental was “meant to encourage the company to undertake enhanced reporting on climate-related risks and opportunities, in line with the TCFD recommendations”.
Proxy access and shareholder rights
Another key theme of the 2017 proxy season was the continued pursuit of shareholder rights and proxy access at US companies, with New York City Comptroller’s Boardroom Accountability Project entering its third year. 19 resolutions related to shareholder rights were uploaded to the Collaboration Platform, with 16 of these calling for companies to adopt a proxy access by-law. On average, they received 69% of votes in favour, with all but two receiving a majority of votes in support. While the results of these resolutions highlight that proxy access still remains a key priority for investors, the filing of proxy access resolutions is likely to become a less prominent feature during proxy season, now that more than 60% of companies in the S&P 500 have adopted proxy access by-laws. However, the spotlight on shareholder rights in the US is likely to increase in the future given the proposed amendments to the threshold for filing shareholder proposals which have been introduced in the Financial CHOICE Act.
Workplace diversity
A key social issue that was of concern to investors during this year’s proxy season was workplace diversity, with 32 resolutions on board diversity, racial and gender diversity and pay equality being filed or co-filed by PRI signatories and uploaded onto the Collaboration Platform. However, 22 were withdrawn and one was omitted by the SEC. Resolutions that were voted upon received an average outcome of 16%.
Despite the low voting results of diversity-related resolutions, the high withdrawal rate suggests that companies are beginning to recognise and improve their performance on workplace diversity. These resolutions were all successfully withdrawn by their proponents after the companies agreed to either adopt or update their various diversity policies, suggesting that progress on the issue is being made. Indeed, it may be that companies are beginning to understand the financial benefits of diversity after a McKinsey report noted that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially.
Sustainability reporting and company disclosure of lobbying and political activities were the other key themes of the 2017 proxy season. 17 resolutions uploaded to the Collaboration Platform related to sustainability reporting; 11 of these were voted on, with an average voting outcome of 30%. 27 resolutions related to disclosure of lobbying and political activities were uploaded to the platform; 21 were voted on, receiving a 27% average voting result.
Signatories wishing to promote resolutions and invite co-filers, either for upcoming resolutions or during next year’s proxy season, can do so through the PRI’s Collaboration Platform .
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Spot On Live-Action Style Recreation of the Cowboy Bebop Intro
Tom 2 months ago
Recreating anime doesn’t always go as planned, since obviously there are elements of anime that can’t be replicated that easily and there are a lot of common reasons why. It’s about the same with any cartoon that someone might want to recreate using live-action since there are limitations that those in the real world have to deal with that animated characters don’t, such as the laws of physics and anatomy that are sometimes broken in animation. But thankfully this live-action version of the Cowboy Bebop title sequence below isn’t taken to an extreme and it’s pretty accurate and spot-on. Thankfully the title scene of Cowboy Bebop isn’t that difficult to replicate since there’s not as much to it when one really looks at it from a few different angles. Obviously, a couple of elements would be easy to transfer from animation to live-action since they don’t require a lot of movement or maneuvering, but the images of the ship were bound to be the same since it would have been a good deal of work to recreate the ship in CGI, even if it could have been made to look pretty cool in the process. Overall the effort was definitely worth it since the clip came out so nicely.
Live-action is becoming a big deal when it comes to transitioning animation, and while some people tend to love it, others are a little less impressed since there are stories that are better suited for animation than live-action for a number of reasons. One reason among many is that animation allows for more fantastic feats that practical effects and CGI can take care of, but tend to look better when they’re not being hampered by various factors that CGI and practical effects have to take into account. The switch from animation to live-action is something that has to be done with a great amount of care since there’s a lot of stuff to consider when it comes to making the switch. For one, the look of the animation, from the coloring and style to everything that goes into the characters and the setting is likely to change since there are some things about animation that just don’t translate that well to live-action. Sometimes the transition is quite simple since there’s not a lot of outrageous things to worry about in the story, but with anime, there is a lot to think about since it’s easy to notice that the genre features styles that aren’t normally found in the real world.
The live-action clip does a pretty good job of handling the material and giving a good presentation, which makes a person wonder if someone is giving thought to coming up with a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop at some point in the future. It wouldn’t be a terrible idea, but it’s definitely something that would need a lot of work and a lot of people involved in order to keep the story as true to the anime as possible. If such a project did come along it feels as though fans would definitely support the effort, but that there would be at least some trepidation that might come from the attempt since it would be something that might be a bit uncertain until the fan reaction was gauged.
Looking between the two clips it’s easy to see that there isn’t a lot of deviation, at least not enough to think that a live-action version would be that off the mark. If it did happen then it’s very likely that it might be more of a straight to video effort or at least a streaming effort that would be announced and possibly hyped up just enough to get it noticed. While enough people know about Cowboy Bebop to make it quite popular, it’s fair to say that as another streaming project it’s bound to be one that is picked up by plenty of fans but is otherwise left to sit unnoticed by a lot of people that either don’t get into anime or haven’t experienced it enough to really know that much about the story. One has to remember that despite the rise and appreciation of manga and anime that there are many people that still don’t know much about it and aren’t inclined to learn unless someone can convince them that it’s worth the effort. But if one show can convince anyone, it’s likely to be something like Cowboy Bebop, especially since among the many anime shows this is one that feels as though it might be different enough that people can feel a real connection with it.
If a live-action attempt is made it does feel as though it might be worth the effort, but it also feels that it might be a risk simply because such movies are usually better when they’re animated.
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10 Things You Didn’t Know about Amanda Gorman
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Natural disasters hasten PACE chief executive departure
By Philip Hunter 22 December 2011
The recent resignation by Neil Gaydon from UK set top box (STB) maker Pace, after five years as chief executive and 16 with the company, highlights the corrosive effect of failing to meet expectations even by a small amount; and even when the business remains successful. But, Gaydon’s position had become untenable after a year dogged by failures to communicate both the company’s strategy and its response to immediate problems, with calamitous results on confidence in the financial community.
Pace began 2011 on a high, having risen from being a medium-sized loss making company (when Gaydon took the reins as chief executive in 2006) to overtake powerful rivals Motorola and Technicolor as the world’s number one set top box maker by volume. But, then came the Japanese Tsunami in March 2011, disrupting Pace’s supply chain and causing a subsequent warning that profits would be between £97m and £110m for the full-year, compared with previous forecasts of £128m ($210 million). The supply chain issue was amplified at that time by the deferment until 2012 of a major U.S. STB order.
Further profit warnings, four in total, followed, the third triggered by the massive floods in Thailand during October and into November, particularly affecting disk drive manufacturer Western Digital, whose products are used by two-thirds of Pace’s set top boxes and Digital Video Recorders (DVRs). Each profit warning was followed by a slump in the share price, which at one point was below £50. It stood last week at £63, after peaking at £227 in Feb. 2011 before the Japanese Tsunami.
The year’s events provided two lessons for Pace. The first was that careful attention needs to be paid to the supply chain in order to avoid being too dependent on any single supplier or locality. The second is that bad news has to be handled carefully, and in such a way that the company appears to be the master rather than the victim of events. This was patently not the case for Pace, where the profit warnings were clumsily handled and gave the impression of communications malfunction with customers, shareholders and the financial community.
Strategically the company remained on course, with a review designed to identify future opportunities and changes needed to improve profitability and reduce risk. This review led to a business plan stretching forward for the next four years or so, and Pace seems to have decided that it wanted a new chief executive free from the baggage of 2011 to see it through. Accordingly, Mike Pulli, previously head of Pace Americas, was appointed chief executive in Gaydon’s place, and the move seemed to reassure the markets, with Pace shares jumping 5 percent on the news.
Some analysts believe that reality will now overcome the negative sentiment, since Pace remains on course for revenues of $2.3 billion for 2011, and will still make around $140 million profit, despite losing some orders it was unable to meet. But, such sentiment allied to a low share price can itself weaken a company, reducing the value of its assets and making it harder to raise money, as well as affecting morale and deterring potential customers. Therefore, Pace is hoping it will not be another example of negative sentiment, however unjustified, translating into reality.
Ajit Pai Departs FCC
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FR Le Fantasque
Large destroyer of the Le Fantasque class
Navy The French Navy
Type Large destroyer
Class Le Fantasque
Built by Arsenal de Lorient (Lorient, France)
Laid down 15 Nov 1931
Launched 15 Mar 1934
Commissioned 10 Mar 1935
End service 2 May 1957
Operated by the Vichy French and based at Dakar during the Allied landing in North Africa in November 1942.
Rejoined the Allied cause.
Stricken 2 May 1957.
We don't have any commands listed for FR Le Fantasque
Notable events involving Le Fantasque include:
1 October 1939, an enemy raider reported in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
The chase of the German ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Graf Spee
Movements of the German ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Graf Spee 21 August 1939 – 13 December 1939.
Before the Second World War had started, on 21 August 1939, the German ‘pocked battleship’ Admiral Graf Spee departed Wilhelmshaven bound for the South Atlantic. On 1 September the Admiral Graf Spee was off the Canary Islands where she made rendes-vous with the supply ship Altmark and supplies were transferred.
On 11 September another rendes-vous was made with the Altmark in the South Atlantic. The Admiral Graf Spee had launched her Arado floatplane to scout in the area as supplies were transferred. The aircraft spotted the British heavy cruiser HMS Cumberland (Capt. W.H.G. Fallowfield, RN). The German ships then immediately parted company and cleared the area at high speed. Two days later, on the 13th, the ships again met and fueling was completed. The Admiral Graf Spee was still under orders to remain unseen.
On 20 September 1939 the Admiral Graf Spee and Altmark met again to fuel. On the 26th the Admiral Graf Spee was ordered to start raiding the British trade lanes. She then proceeded towards the Pernambuco area.
On 30 September 1939 the Admiral Graf Spee found her first victim, the British merchant vessel Clement (5050 GRT, built 1934) that was en-route from New York, U.S.A. to Bahia, Brasil. She then sank the ship in position 09°05’S, 34°05’W. The Admiral Graf Spee then proceeded eastwards and found three more victims between 5 and 10 October. On the 5th she captured the British merchant Newton Beech (4644 GRT, built 1925) in position 09°35’S, 06°30’W. This ship was en-route from Capetown to the U.K. via Freetown. On the 7th she sank the British merchant Ashlea (4222 GRT, built 1929) in position 09°52’S, 03°28’W. This ship was en-route from Durban to Falmouth. The crew of the Ashlea was transferred to the Newton Beech. The next day both crew were transferred to the Admiral Graf Spee and the Newton Beech was scuttled. On 10 October the Admiral Graf Spee captured the British merchant Huntsman (8196 GRT, built 1921) in position 08°30’S, 05°15’W. This ship was en-route from Calcutta to the U.K. On 15 October 1939 the Admiral Graf Spee met the Altmark again to receive supplies and fuel. On the 17th the crew of the Huntsman was transferred to the Altmark and the ship was scuttled in approximate position 16°S, 17°W. The next day the crews of the Newton Beech and Ashlea were also transferred to the Altmark and the German ships then parted company.
On 22 October 1939, the Admiral Graf Spee sank her next victim, the British merchant Trevanion (5299 GRT, built 1937) which was en-route from Port Pirie (Australia) to Swansea. This ship was sunk in position 19°40’S, 04°02’E. On 28 October 1939, near Tristan da Cunha, the Admiral Graf Spee once more refuelled from the Altmark. The Admiral Graf Spee then set course for the Indian Ocean.
On 15 November 1939 she sank the small British tanker Africa Shell (706 GRT, built 1939) in position 24°45’S, 35°00’E. This ship was in ballast and en-route from Quelimane (Portugese East Africa now called Mozambique) to Lourenco Marques (now Maputo, also in Portugese East Africa / Mozambique). Next day the Admiral Graf Spee stopped the Dutch merchant Mapia (7188 GRT, built 1923) but had to let her go as she was a neutral ship. The Admiral Graf Spee then set course to return to the South Atlantic where she met once more with the Altmark on 27 November 1939 and the next day she fuelled from her about 300 miles from Tristan da Cunha.
On 2 December 1939, the Admiral Graf Spee sank her largest victim, the British merchant Doric Star (10086 GRT, built 1921),in position 19°15’S, 05°05’E. This ship was en-route from Auckland, New Zealand to the U.K. The next morning the Admiral Graf Spee sank the British merchant Tairoa (7983 GRT, built 1920) in position 19°40’S, 04°02’E. This ship was en-route from Brisbane, Australia to London. On 6 December 1939 the Admiral Graf Spee refuelled once more from the Altmark. She then set course to the River Plate area where the British merchant traffic was the thickest. She was to sink more ships there and disrupt British shipping movements in that area before returning to Germany.
On 7 December 1939 the Admiral Graf Spee sank what was to be her last victim, the British merchant Streonshalh (3895 GRT, built 1928) in position 25°01’S, 27°50’W. This ship was en-route from Montevideo to Freetown and then onwards to the U.K.
Then in the morning of 13 December 1939, her smoke was sighted by three cruisers from the South America Division. More on this in the article ‘The Battle of the River Plate, 13 December 1939’.
British Dispositions in the South Atlantic / South America area
Shortly before the outbreak of the war the South America Division of the America and West Indies Station was transferred to the newly formed South Atlantic Station. The South America Division at that moment consisted of the heavy cruiser HMS Exeter (Capt. F.S. Bell, RN, flying the flag of Commodore H.H. Harwood, OBE, RN) and the light cruiser HMS Ajax (Capt. C.H.L. Woodhouse, RN). In late August 1939 HMS Exeter was at Devonport with her crew on foreign leave when she was recalled to South American waters. On 25 August 1939 she sailed from Devonport. HMS Exeter arrived at Freetown on 1 September 1939. Commodore Harwood then met the Commander-in-Chief South Atlantic Station, Vice-Admiral G. D’Oyly Lyon, CB, RN. Later the same day HMS Exeter sailed for Rio de Janeiro.
Meanwhile four destroyers from the 4th Destroyer Division, Mediterranean Fleet, the HMS Hotspur (Cdr. H.F.H. Layman, RN), HMS Havock (Lt.Cdr. R.E. Courage, RN), HMS Hyperion (Cdr. H.St.L. Nicholson, RN) and HMS Hunter (Lt.Cdr. L. de Villiers, RN) had left Gibraltar on 31 August 1939 for Freetown.
HMS Ajax was already on station off the coast of South America. Shortly after noon on 3 September she intercepted the German merchant vessel Olinda (4576 GRT, built 1927) in position 34°58’S, 53°32’W. This ship was en-route from Montivideo to Germany. As HMS Ajax had no prize crew available the ship was sunk by gunfire a few hours later. In the afternoon of the next day, the 4th, HMS Ajax intercepted another German ship, the Carl Fritzen (6594 GRT, built 1920) in position 33°22’S, 48°50’W. This ship was en-route from Rotterdam to Buenos Aires. This ship was also sunk with gunfire.
On 5 September two of the destroyers from the 4th Destroyer Division, HMS Hotspur and HMS Havock departed Freetown to join the South America Division. They were ordered to examine Trinidade Island on the way. On 8 September 1939 the heavy cruiser HMS Cumberland (Capt. W.H.G. Fallowfield, RN) departed Freetown to join the South America Division as well. This cruiser came from the Home Fleet and had arrived at Freetown on the 7th.
On 7 September 1939, HMS Exeter entered Rio de Janeiro where Commodore Harwood had a meeting with the Brazilian Secretary-General of Foreign Affairs and H.M. Ambassadors to Brazil and Argentine. HMS Exeter departed Rio de Janeiro the next day. Later that day Commodore Harwood was informed by the Admiralty that the German merchant ships General Artigas (11343 GRT, built 1923), Gloria (5896 GRT, built 1917) and Monte Pascoal (13870 GRT, built 1931) were assembling off the Patagonian coast. He decided to move both HMS Exeter and HMS Ajax south, and ordered the Ajax to meet him at 0800/9. They actually made rendezvous at 0700 hours. The Commodore considered it possible that the German merchant ships might embark German reservists and raid the Falkland Islands therefore he decided to sent HMS Ajax there. HMS Exeter proceeded to the Plate area to cover that important area.
On the evening of the 10th, Commodore Harwood was informed that the transportation of German reservists by the three German merchant ships was very unlikely but as it appeared probable that the German ships were converting themselves into armed raiders the Commodore decided to start short distance convoys from the Santos-Rio and Plate areas. He therefore ordered HMS Cumberland to refuel at Rio de Janeiro on her arrival there and to organize and run ‘out’ convoys in that area with HMS Havock as A/S escort. The convoys were to leave at dawn and be protected against submarines and surface raiders until dusk. The ships were then to be dispersed so that they would be far apart by dawn the next day. At the same time the Commodore ordered HMS Hotspur to join him in the Plate area after refuelling at Rio de Janeiro, so that similar convoys could be started from Montevideo. If one of the German ‘pocket battleships’ was to arrive of South America, HMS Cumberland was to abandon the convoy sheme and join HMS Exeter in the Plate area. Also on the 10th, Commodore Harwood was informed by the Admiralty that the German merchant Montevideo (6075 GRT, built 1936) was leaving Rio Grande do Sul for Florianopolis but decided not to intercept her as this would divert HMS Exeter 500 nautical miles from the Plate area.
On the night of 12 September 1939 the Commodore was informed by the British Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires, that a concentration of German reservists was taking place in southern Argentina with the Falklands as a possible objective. He therefore ordered HMS Ajax to remain in the Falklands till the situation cleared, and the Commodore then proceeded south of the Plate area to be closer to the Falklands himself and yet remain in easy reach of the Plate area. During the next few days HMS Exeter intercepted several British and neutral vessels.
In view of a report that the German merchant vessels Porto Alegré (6105 GRT, built 1936) and Monte Olivia (13750 GRT, built 1925) were leaving Santos on 15 September 1939 Commodore Harwood decided to start the short distance convoys from Montevideo as soon as possible. HMS Cumberland had meanwhile arranged a twelve-hour convoy system from Santos. Ships from Rio de Janeiro for Freetown would sail at dawn on odd numbered days, and ships for the south on even numbered days with HMS Havock as anti-submarine escort and HMS Cumberland in distant support. HMS Cumberland left Rio de Janeiro on 16 September and during the next eight days sighted 15 British and neutral ships while on patrol.
On 17 September 1939, HMS Hotspur joined HMS Exeter in the Plate area. HMS Exeter then made a visit to Montevideo and resumed her patrol off the Plate area on the 20th. Fuelling was done from the oiler RFA Olwen (6470 GRT, built 1917, Master B. Tunnard) in the mouth of the River Plate. Soon after leaving Montevideo on 20 September Commodore Harwood learned from the British Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires, that the local German authorities were endeavoring to inform German ships at sea that the British merchant Lafonia (1872 GRT, built 1911) was on her way to the Falklands with British reservists for the Falkland Islands defence force. It was also reported that on 17 September an unknown warship had passed Punta Arenas eastwards. In view of these reports and of other pointing out that German merchant ships in southern waters were being outfitted as armed raiders the Commodore ordered HMS Hotsput to escort the Laofona to Port Stanley. As the volume of trade in the Plate area was greater than in the Rio de Janeiro – Santos area, HMS Havock was ordered to proceed southwards to the Plate area.
The first local convoy outward from Montevideo sailed on 22 September 1939. It consisted of the British merchant ships Sussex (11062 GRT, built 1937), Roxby (4252 GRT, built 1923), El Ciervo (5841 GRT, built 1923) in addition to the earlier mentioned Lafonia, and was escorted by HMS Hotspur. HMS Exeter met this convoy during the forenoon and covered it throughout the day. At dusk the merchant ships were dispersed on prearranged courses while HMS Exeter remained within supporting distance and HMS Hotspur escorted the Lafonia to Port Stanley.
On 24 September 1939, Vice-Admiral Lyon (C-in-C, South Atlantic) and Commodore Harwood learned from the Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires, that ‘according to a reliable source’ arrangements had been made for a number of German ships and a submarine to meet near Ascension on 28 September 1939. HMS Cumberland was ordered to proceed there and HMS Ajax was ordered to leave the Falklands and take up her place in the Rio de Janeiro area. HMS Neptune (Capt. J.A.V. Morse, DSO, RN) was also ordered to proceed to the area off Ascension with the destroyers HMS Hyperion and HMS Hunter which departed Freetown on the 25th. No German ships were however encountered off Ascension and all ships then proceeded to Freetown where they arrived on 2 October 1939 with HMS Cumberland low on fuel.
While HMS Cumberland left the station to search for the German ships, HMS Exeter and HMS Ajax were sweeping of the Plate and Rio de Janeiro – Santos area respectively. On 27 September 1939, HMS Havock escorted a convoy made up of the British merchants Miguel de Larrinaga (5231 GRT, built 1924), Pilar de Larringa (7352 GRT, built 1918) and Sarthe (5271 GRT, built 1920) out of the Plate area. The next day another convoy, made up of the British merchants Adellen (7984 GRT, built 1930), Cressdene (4270 GRT, built 1936), Holmbury (4566 GRT, built 1925), Lord Byron (4118 GRT, built 1934), Ramillies (4553 GRT, built 1927) and Waynegate (4260 GRT, built 1931) left the Plate area escorted by HMS Havock and with cover from HMS Exeter.
At daylight on 29 September 1939 HMS Ajax was off Rio de Janeiro ready to escort ships sailing northward. She sighted none until the early afternoon when she met the Almeda Star (12848 GRT, built 1926) and a few hours later the tanker San Ubaldo (5999 GRT, built 1921). That night several neutral steamers were sighted off Rio de Janeiro and the next day the British La Pampa (4149 GRT, built 1938) was met and escorted during daylight on her way to Santos. So far on the work of the South American Division during September 1939. The ships assigned to Commodore Harwood had been busy patrolling and escorting ships near the focal areas.
A surface raider reported, 1 October 1939.
When a report that the British merchant Clement had been sunk on 30 September 1939 by a surface raider off Pernambuco was received by the Admiralty in the afternoon of October 1st, the C-in-C, South Atlantic was informed that he should retain the 4th Destroyer Division and that his command would be reinforced by the cruisers HMS Norfolk (Capt. A.G.B. Wilson, DSO, RN), HMS Capetown (Capt. T.H. Back, RN), HMS Effingham (Capt. J.M. Howson, RN), HMS Emerald (Capt. A.W.S. Agar, VC, DSO, RN) and HMS Enterprise (Capt. H.J. Egerton, RN). Also the battleships HMS Resolution (Capt. C.H. Knox-Little, RN), HMS Revenge (Capt. E.R. Archer, RN) and the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes (Capt. F.E.P. Hutton, RN) were to proceed to either Jamaica or Freetown. These dispositions however never materialised being superseded on 5 October 1939 by a more general policy (the institution of hunting groups) which cancelled them.
The institution of hunting groups, 5 October 1939.
On 5 October 1939 the Admiralty formed five hunting groups in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean of sufficient strength to destroy any ‘pocket battleship’ or Hipper-class cruiser. These were;
Force F; area: North America and West Indies.
HMS Berwick (Capt. I.M. Palmer, DSC, RN),
HMS York (Capt. R.H. Portal, DSC, RN),
Force G; area: S.E. coast of South America.
HMS Cumberland,
Force H; area: Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.
HMS Sussex (Capt. A.R. Hammick, RN),
HMS Shropshire (Capt. A.W.LaT. Bisset, RN),
Force I; area: Ceylon.
HMS Cornwall (Capt. C.F. Hamill, RN),
HMS Dorsetshire (Capt. B.S.C. Martin, RN),
HMS Eagle (Capt. A.R.M. Bridge, RN),
Force K; area: Pernambuco, Brazil.
HMS Renown (Capt. C.E.B. Simeon, RN),
HMS Ark Royal (Capt. A.J. Power, RN),
Force L; area: Brest, France.
Dunkerque (Capt. J.L. Nagadelle, replaced by Capt. M.J.M. Seguin on 16 October),
Bearn (Capt. M.M.A. Lafargue, replaced by Capt. Y.E. Aubert on 7 October),
Georges Leygues (Capt. R.L. Perot),
Gloire (Capt. F.H.R. de Belot),
Montcalm (Capt. P.J. Ronarc’h),
Force M; area: Dakar, Senegal.
Dupleix (Capt. L.L.M. Hameury),
Foch (Capt. J. Mathieu),
and Force N; area: West Indies.
Strasbourg (Capt. J.F.E. Bouxin),
The institution of the hunting groups were not the only measures taken. The battleships HMS Resolution, HMS Revenge and the light cruisers HMS Emerald and HMS Enterprise were ordered to proceed to Halifax, Nova Scotia to escort homeward bound convoys. Light cruiser HMS Effingham was to join them later. The battleship HMS Ramillies (Capt. H.T. Baillie-Grohman, DSO, RN) left Gibraltar on 5 October for the same duty but was recalled the next day when the battleship HMS Malaya (Capt. I.B.B. Tower, DSC, RN) and the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious (Capt. G. D’Oyly-Hughes, DSO and Bar, DSC, RN) were ordered to leave the Mediterranean and proceed to the Indian Ocean where they formed an addition hunting group, Force J which was to operate in the Socotra area off the entrance to the Gulf of Aden.
Now back to the South Atlantic, on 9 October 1939 the C-in-C, South Atlantic had informed the Admiralty and Commodore Harwood that he intended to co-ordinate the movements of ‘Force G’, ‘Force H’ and ‘Force K’. As this would entail long periods of wireless silence in ‘Force G’ he proposed that Commodore Harwood should transfer his flag to HMS Ajax, leaving Capt. Fallowfield of HMS Cumberland in command of Force G. The Admiralty approved of this. Commodore Harwood stated that it was his intention to transfer his flag from HMS Exeter to HMS Ajax in the River Plate area on 27 October. He also stated that the endurance of HMS Exeter was only half the endurance of HMS Cumberland and that this would prove problematic when they were to operate together and he proposed that the Exeter would be relieved by another 10000 ton cruiser but for the moment no suitable cruiser was available to relieve her.
On 12 October 1939 the first of the hunting forces arrived on their station when HMS Renown and HMS Ark Royal reached Freetown that morning coming from the U.K. They were soon followed by three more destroyers of the H-class coming from the Mediterranean; HMS Hardy (Capt. B.A. Warburton-Lee, RN), HMS Hasty (Lt.Cdr. L.R.K. Tyrwhitt, RN) and HMS Hostile (Cdr. J.P. Wright, RN). On 13 October 1939 the cruisers HMS Sussex and HMS Shropshire arrived at Simonstown from the Mediterranean and one day later HMS Hermes arrived at Dakar from Plymouth.
The South America Division during the first half of October 1939.
When the news of an enemy raider in the South Atlantic reached the C-in-C at Freetown on 1 October 1939 he immediately suspended sailings from Pernambuco and Natal and he ordered HMS Havock and HMS Hotspur to escort British ships clear of the area. But next morning he cancelled these dispositions and ordered Commodore Harwood to concentrate HMS Exeter, HMS Ajax and the two destroyers off Rio de Janeiro. By this time, however, the raider was far away from the South American coast. On 3 October 1939 the Commodore signalled the C-in-C that he intened to concentrate the Exeter and Ajax off Rio and have the Hotspur to cover the Rio – Santos area and keep the Havock off the Plate but upon receiving the orders from the C-in-C to concentrate he ordered to destroyers to join the cruisers after fuelling but not later then 0800 hours on 4 October. Reports that the enemy raider was not a ‘pocket battleship’ however kept coming in and the Commodore decided that he could not leave the heavy traffic in the Plate area without some form of protection and he ordered HMS Havock to return there but when a report coming in from Bahia, Brazil confirmed that the Clement had been sunk by the ‘pocket battleship’ Admiral Scheer the Commodore once more ordered HMS Havock to join him. In the end HMS Ajax joined HMS Exeter at 1700/3, HMS Hotspur at 0500/4 and finally HMS Havock at 1300/4.
The Commodore was also informed by the Admiralty that the New Zealand cruiser HMNZS Achilles (Capt. W.E. Parry, RN) would join his station coming from the west coast of South America. HMS Cumberland left Freetown at 1900/3 to join the Commodore in the Rio de Janeiro area as well.
Commodore Harwood’s policy against enemy raiders and a new raider report coming on on 5 October 1939.
Commodore Harwood had decided to keep his forces concentrated and as no new raider reports had come in to patrol the Rio de Janeiro area in accordance with the C-in-C, South Atlantic’s order. If he met a ‘pocket battleship’ he intended to shadow it until dusk. He would then close and attack in the dark hours. If, on the other hand, he made contact at night, his destroyers would at once close the enemy’s beam and attack her with torpedoes.
On 5 October 1939, the British merchant Martand (7967 GRT, built 1939) informed HMS Cumberland that a German armed raider had attacked an unknown ship, this unknown ship was in fact the Newton Beech that was attacked about 900 nautical miles away. This information was not acted upon by the Commanding Officer of the Cumberland. The Captain of the Cumberland assumed the raider report would have been intercepted by other ships and passed on to the C-in-C, South Atlantic. He considered it was important to keep radio silence and decided against breaking it. The Admiralty however later was of the opinion that the report should have been passed on to the Commander-in-Chief.
By 5 October 1939, the Exeter, Ajax, Havock and Hotspur were concentrated in the Rio de Janeiro area ready to engage the raider if she came south from the Pernambuco area. HMNZS Achilles was on her way round Cape Horn.
When HMS Ajax visited Rio de Janeiro on 7 October 1939, Commodore Harwood directed her to suggest to the Consular Shipping Advisers there, and at Santos, that, owning to the small volume of shipping leaving these ports, the local convoy systems, which had been instituted on 22 September against armed merchant raiders, should be suspended, and Allied merchant ships be routed independently.
The Commodore intended to meet HMS Cumberland at 1700/8, but at 1600/7 he received a message from the Consular Shipping Adviser at Rio de Janeiro in which he desired an escort for a 13 knot convoy that was to sail at 0430/8 and that had received much local publicity. The Commodore thought that this publicity might draw the enemy raider to the area and he therefore took his entire force back towards Rio de Janeiro and sent HMS Hotspur ahead to make contact with the convoy, while keeping his other ships in support. The convoy consisted of the British merchants Highland Chieftain (14131 GRT, built 1929), Nariva (8723 GRT, built 1920) and the French merchant Alsina (8404 GRT, built 1922).
Meanwhile the Commodore had directed HMS Cumberland to meet him at dawn on October 9th. When the convoy was dispersed at 1800/8 the Exeter and Ajax steered to meet her while the Havock was detached to fuel at Rio de Janeiro. At 2200/8 HMS Ajax was detached. HMS Cumberland made rendezvous with HMS Exeter at 0500/9. They were ordered by the C-in-C, South Atlantic to make a sweep northwards but this could not be carried out as HMS Exeter was short of fuel. The Commodore therefore decided to make a sweep southwards towards the Plate area where HMS Exeter could refuel. He also decided to keep HMS Hotspur with the two cruisers as long as possible.
On 12 October 1939, Rio Grande do Sul reported that the German merchant Rio Grande (6062 GRT, built 1939) was about to sail. The Commodore at once ordered HMS Cumberland to proceed there and intercept. She arrived off Rio Grande do Sul at 1600/13 but on finding it all quiet in the harbour she shaped course for the Plate area at nightfall. Meanwhile the Commodore had ordered HMS Hotspur to fuel at Montevideo when HMS Havock left that port early on the 14th.
about this time RFA Olwen informed the Commodore the the German merchant Bahia Laura (8611 GRT, built 1918) was leaving Montevideo at 1000 next morning and might protest if HMS Havock sailed the same day. Instead, therefore, of entering Montevideo HMS Hotspur at once fueled from the Olwen and then remained out on patrol. The Bahia Laura however, showed no signs of leaving and at 0800/14, HMS Havock put to sea. At 1200 hours HMS Hotspur entered Montevideo. Later that day HMS Exeter and HMS Cumberland fueled from the Olwen in San Borombon Bay at the southern entrance to the Plate estuary. At 1430 hours they were joined by HMS Havock. Commodore Harwood then ordered her to patrol off Montevideo to watch the Bahia Laura. When HMS Exeter finished fueling she immediately put to sea. HMS Cumberland rejoined him next morning at 0700 hours. HMS Havock was then ordered to join the cruisers. On 16 October the commodore learned that the Bahia Laura had sailed at 1015 hours the previous day. By the time the signal reached him the German ship was far out at sea well past his patrol line. But as the whole area was enveloped in dense fog the Commodore decided against trying to catch her.
The South America Division during the second half of October 1939.
Meanwhile Commodore Harwood had informed the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic on 13 October that as HMS Exeter required certain minor repairs he proposed to proceed to the Falklands on the17th and then return to the Plate area on the 27th. The Commander-in-Chief replied that he preferred that HMS Exeter would stay in the Plate area till the Commodore would transfer his Broad Pendant to HMS Ajax on the 27th. As HMNZS Achilles was due in the Plate area on this day also, she and HMS Cumberland could then operate as ‘Force G’ during the Exeter’s absence. This would mean that there would be no cruiser in the Rio de Janeiro area until HMS Exeter would return from her repairs at the Falklands. The Commodore therefore ordered HMS Havock to sail on 21 October for a four day patrol in the Rio – Santos Area, where HMS Hotspur, which could remain at sea until 2 November, would relieve her. From that date until the relief of HMNZS Achilles there would be no warship in this area. The Commodore therefore asked the Commander-in-Chief to allow ‘Force G’ to operate in that area from 2 to 10 November. When HMS Hotspur joined the Exeter and Cumberland from Montevideo on 17 October the Commodore ordered her to patrol off Rio Grande do Sul to intercept the German ships Rio Grande and Montevideo if they would come out, and sent HMS Havock to patrol inshore with orders to anchor the night clear of the shipping route.
This proved to be the last duty of these two destroyers with the South America Division. On 20 October the Admiralty ordered their transfer to the West Indies. Three days later the Commodore sent them into Buenos Aires to refuel, and as the distance to Trinidad, 4000 miles, was at the limit of their endurance, also obtained permission to refuel them at Pernambuco. They both left Buenos Aires on the 25th and, bidding the Commodore farewell, proceeded northwards. They sailed from Pernambuco on 1 November but on the 3rd HMS Havock was diverted to Freetown with engine trouble. The two remaining destroyers of the 4th Division, HMS Hyperion and HMS Hunter, had left Freetown with convoy SL 6 on 23 October. Off Daker their escort duty was taken over by the French light cruiser Duguay-Trouin (Capt. J.M.C. Trolley de Prevaux). The destroyers then fueled at Dakar on the 27th and sailed for Trinidad early on the 28th.
Meanwhile HMS Cumberland had entered Montevideo at 0800/26. At 0900/26 HMNZS Achilles joined HMS Exeter in the Plate area and after fueling from RFA Olwen sailed to meet HMS Cumberland off Lobos the next day and then patrol with her as ‘Force G’ in the Rio – Santos area. The Olwen was now nearly out of fuel and filled up HMS Ajax ,which had arrived from the Rio area on the 26th, with her remaining fuel minus 500 tons for her passage to Trinidad. In the morning of 27 October, Commodore Harwood transferred his Broad Pendant to HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter then parted company to proceed to the Falklands for repairs.
Meanwhile the newly formed ‘Force H’ and ‘Force K’ were busy on the other side of the South Atlantic. ‘Force H’, made up of HMS Sussex and HMS Shropshire had reached the Cape on 13 October. As HMS Cumberland had not passed on the report of the Martland, no news on the raider had reached the Admiralty or the Commander-in-Chief since October 1st. On 14 October ‘Force H’ sailed to search for her along the Cape – Freetown route as far as the latitude of St. Helena. That day ’Force K’ (HMS Ark Royal and HMS Renown) left Freetown with HMS Neptune, HMS Hardy, HMS Hero (Cdr. C.F. Tower, MVO, RN) and HMS Hereward (Lt.Cdr. C.W. Greening, RN) to search westwards towards St. Paul Rocks, the direction of their sweep being determined by the complete lack of any further raider information.
Finally a raider report on 22 October 1939, Sweeps by ‘Force H’ and ‘Force K’.
The three weeks old ‘mystery’ of the raiders whereabouts was partially solved on 22 October when the British merchant vessel Llanstephan Castle (11293 GRT, built 1914) intercepted a message from an unknown ship ‘Gunned in 16°S, 04°03’E’ at 1400 G.M.T. There was however no immediate confirmation of her report and the Commander-in-Chief ordered ‘Force H’ to sail after dark on the 27th to sail for the latitude of St. Helena. At noon on 31 October this Force was in 15°S, 02°51’E, the north-eastern limit of it’s patrol, when a Walrus aircraft failed to return to HMS Sussex from a reconnaissance flight. It was never found, though the two cruisers spend over three days searching for it. Being short of fuel they then returned to the Cape by the same route they had used outwards.
Sweep by ‘Force K’, 28 October – 6 November 1939.
To cover the northern end of the route from St. Helena onward, HMS Neptune and the destroyers HMS Hardy, HMS Hasty, HMS Hero and HMS Hereward had left Freetown on 28 October. HMS Neptune was to sweep independently from position 03°20’S, 01°10’W and then through 14°30’S, 16°50’W back to Freetown. On 30 October a report from Dakar stated that the German merchant Togo (5042 GRT, built 1938) had left the Congo on 26 October, that the German merchant Pionier (3254 GRT, built 1934) had sailed from Fernando Po (now called Bioko Island) on 28 October and that five German ships had left Lobito (Angola) the same day. When the Vice-Admiral, Aircraft Carriers, received this information her detached HMS Hardy and HMS Hasty to sweep north-westward for the Pioneer, while ‘Force K’ and the remaining two destroyers searched for her to the south-westward. Both searches were unsuccessful. Meanwhile a message from Lobito had stated that the five German ships that were stated to have left the harbour were still there. On 5 November the German merchant vessel Uhenfels (7603 GRT, built 1931), that had left Laurenco Marques (now called Maputo, Mozambique) on 16 October was sighted by an aircraft from HMS Ark Royal. Only energetic action from HMS Hereward saved her from being scuttled in position 06°02’N, 17°25’W. She was brought into Freetown on 7 November by HMS Herward, a few hours behind ‘Force K’.
’Force H’ and ‘Force G’, first half of November 1939.
The first half of November was relatively quiet on both sides of the South Atlantic At the start of the month ‘Force H’ and ‘Force K’ were still on the shipping lane between Sierra Leone and the Cape. On 3 November 1939 the Admiralty informed the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic that all German capital ships and cruisers were apparently in home waters. It appeared therefore that the pocket battleship, which was still thought to be the Admiral Scheer, had returned home and that the raider reported by the Llangstephan Castle on 22 October was nothing but an armed merchantman. Here was a good opportunity for resting the hunting groups and on 4 November the Admiralty issued orders that ‘Force G’ and ‘Force H’ should exchange areas. This exchange would not only give ‘Force G’ an opportunity of resting and refitting at the Cape, but would also provide Commodore Harwood with the hunting group of long endurance that he desired.
The Commander-in-Chief had planned that ‘Force H’ which had returned to the Cape on 7 November would then sweep towards Durban, arriving there on 16 November. However on the 11th they were ordered to sail for patrol in the Atlantic and on the evening of the 17th, while west of St. Helena, exchange patrol areas with ‘Force G’. The exchange of areas however did not take place as ‘Force G’ was delayed due to HMS Exeter being damaged while casting off from the oiler in heavy seas. Before the exchange now could take place it was cancelled.
South America Division, first half of November 1939.
After hoisting Commodore Harwood’s Broad on 27 October the HMS Ajax had swept the Plate focal area. When the Commodore received the signal of the Commander-in-Chief on the 5th regarding the changeover over patrol areas between ‘Force G’ and ‘Force H’, he ordered HMS Cumberland to proceed to the Plate at 20 knots to refuel. About this time a message reached him from Buenos Aires that the Argentinian Foreign Minister had drawn attention to cases of fueling in the Plate by HMS Exeter and HMS Ajax. Although the Argentinian Government had no apparent intention of raising the issue he decided to cut down the fuellings in the inshore waters of the Plate as much as possible. He therefore cancelled the fuelling of HMS Exeter, due to take place on 7 November from the oiler RFA Olynthus (6888 GRT, built 1918, Master L.N. Hill), which had relieved RFA Olwen. He ordered HMS Cumberland to fuel at Buenos Aires on 9 November. HMS Exeter which had arrived at the Falklands on 31 October for repairs, sailed again on 4 November to meet up with HMS Cumberland off the Plate on 10 November, but the Commodore ordered her to enter Mar del Plata for a 24-hour visit on the 9th. As this gave her some time at hand, he ordered her to cover the Plate while HMS Ajax visited Buenos Aires from 6 to 8 November during which the Commodore discussed the question of fuelling his ships in the River Plate Estuary with the Argentine naval authorities. During his visit to Buenos Aires, the Commodore discussed the matter of fuelling his ships of English Bank with the Argentinian Minister of Marine and his Chief of Naval Staff they both suggested that he should use San Borombon Bay which was most acceptable. He had in fact been using it for some time.
When HMS Ajax left Buenos Aires on 8 November she patrolled the Plate area. HMS Exeter arrived at Mar del Plata the next day but fuel could not be obtained there. She was ordered to fuel from RFA Olynthus in San Borombon Bay on the 10th and then meet up with HMS Cumberland off Lobos Island at 0600/11. On the 10th HMS Ajax also fueled from RFA Olynthus as did HMS Exeter after her while HMS Ajax was at anchor close by. However weather quickly deteriorated and the Olynthus was forced to cast off, damaging the Exeter in doing so. Besides that she was still 600 tons short of fuel. As she could not reach the Cape without a full supply the sailing of ‘Force G’ to exchange areas with ‘Force H’ was delayed. The Exeter finally finished fuelling on the 13th and sailed with HMS Cumberland for Simonstown. Before the exchange of areas could be effected, however, a raider was reported in the Indian Ocean and the order was cancelled.
Another raider report, 16 November 1939.
On 16 November 1939 the Naval Officer-in-Charge, Simonstown, reported that the small British tanker Africa Shell ( GRT, built ) had been sunk off Lourenco Marques the previous day by a raider identified as a pocket battleship. After the usual conflicting reports from eye-widnesses during the next few days, however, it was doubtful how many raiders there were or whether they were pocket battleships or heavy cruisers.
The presence of an enemy heavy ship in the Mozambique Channel called for new dispositions. When the raider report reached the Admiralty on 17 November they immediately cancelled the exchange of areas between ‘Force G’ an ‘Force H’. ‘Force H’ was ordered to return to the Cape and ‘Force G’ was ordered to return to the east coast of South America. They also ordered the dispatch of ‘Force K’ towards the Cape with instructions to go on to Diego Saurez in Madagascar. That morning a report reached the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic that the German merchant vessels Windhuk (16662 GRT, built 1937) and Adolph Woermann (8577 GRT, built 1922) had left Lobito. He at once ordered ‘Force H’, which was at that moment west of St. Helena in the approximate latitute of Lobito to spend three days searching for them.
Next day, 18 November 1939, ‘Force K’ left Freetown together with HMS Neptune, HMS Hardy, HMS Hero and HMS Hostile to sweep west of St. Helena through position 16°30’S, 10°W and thence on to Diego Saurez. The destroyers parted company at 2300/18 to search for the German ships. On 20 November 1939, the Commander-in-Chief ordered ‘Force H’ to return to the Cape of nothing of the German merchant vessels had been sighted. HMS Sussex and HMS Shropshire did so on 23 November.
The Adolph Woermann had not escaped. Early on 21 November 1939, the British merchant Waimarama (12843 GRT, built 1938) reported her in position 12°24’S, 03°31’W. At 1127/21, ‘Force K’ (HMS Ark Royal and HMS Renown) was in position 05°55’S, 12°26’W, altered course to close, and HMS Neptune, which was still with them, went ahead at high speed. Shortly after 0800/22 she made contact with the Adolf Woermann in position 10°37’S, 05°11’W and went alongside. Despite efforts to save her the German vessel was scuttled and when HMS Neptune returned to Freetown on 25 November 1939 she had 162 German survivors on board.
’Force H’ and ‘Force K’, second half of November 1939.
As the search for the Adolf Woermann had taken ‘Force K’ nearly 200 miles to the eastward, the Vice-Admiral, Aircraft Carriers decided to proceed to the Cape by the route east of St. Helena to save fuel. In hindsight this might have saved Altmark for being intercepted as she was waiting for the Admiral Graf Spee in the area ‘Force K’ would have otherwise passed through. On 23 November 1939, the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic, ordered ‘Force H’ to sail from the Cape the next day and patrol the ‘diverse routes’ as far as 33°E until 28 November.
At the northern end of the South Atlantic station HMS Neptune, HMS Hardy, HMS Hero, HMS Hostile, HMS Hasty and the submarine HMS Clyde (Cdr. W.E. Banks, RN) had established a patrol between 22 and 25 November 1939 to intercept escaping German merchant ships or raiders. No ships were however sighted and they were recalled to Freetown on 30 November.
In the meantime the Admiralty had ordered, ‘Force H’ and ‘Force K’ to conducted a combined patrol on the meridian of 20°E. The two forces met early on 1 December. The plan, according to the Commander-in-Chief, appeared to be a good one in theory but was found unsuitable in practice that on account of local weather conditions. These permitted flying off aircraft from HMS Ark Royal only once in five or six days, so that the patrol could not be extended far enough to the south to intercept a raider bent on evasion. In fact, only once, on 2 December weather was suitable for flying off aircraft.
South America Division, second half of November 1939.
After HMS Cumberland and HMS Exeter (‘Force G’) had sailed from San Borombon Bay for Simonstown on 13 November 1939, HMS Ajax patrolled the Plate area and escorted the French Massilia ( GRT, built ) that was bound for Europe from Buenos Aeres with French reservists. After parting from the Massilia she closed Rio Grande do Sul and ascertained that the German merchant vessels Rio Grande and Montevideo were still there. For the next two days she patrolled the normal peace time shipping routes.
When the Admiralty cancelled the exchange of ereas between ‘Force G’ and ‘Force H’ on 17 November, Commodore Harwood sent ‘Force G’ to cover Rio de Janeiro. He ordered HMNZS Achilles to fuel off the Olynthus in the Plate area on 22 November and then relieve ‘Force G’ in the Rio area as HMS Exeter would need to refuel in the Plate area again on 26 November. HMS Cumberland was to remain with the Exeter to keep ‘Force G’ together so she could refuel from the Olynthus as well. They were then to patrol the Plate area so that HMS Ajax could visit the Falklands.
On 18 November the Commodore was informed that the German merchant Ussukuma ( GRT, built ) might sail from Bahia Blanca for Montevideo at any time. He at once ordered the Olynthus to watch for her between Manos and Cape San Antonio and took the Ajax south to the same vicinity.
On 22 November 1939 HMNZS Achilles heard the German merchant Lahn (8498 GRT, built 1927) calling Cerrito by wireless, and when HMS Ajax arrived half an hour later a search was carried out. It was insuccessful for both cruisers but both the Lahn and another German merchant the Tacoma (8268 GRT, built 1930) reached Montevideo safely during the forenoon.
HMS Ajax and HMNZS Achilles then both fuelled from the Olynthus at San Borombon Bay during the next afternoon. The Achilles the sailed for the Rio de Janeiro area. She had orders to move up to Pernambuco and show herself off Cabadello and Bahia as a number of German ships in Pernambuco were reported ready to sail to Cabadello to load cotton for Germany. She was to return at once to the Rio area if any raiders were reported in the South Atlantic.
HMS Ajax left the Plate area on 25 November 1939 and sent up a seaplane to reconnoitre Bahia Blanca. The Ussukuma showed no signs of sailing so HMS Ajax proceeded to the Falklands, arriving there on the 27th. By this time HMS Cumberland and HMS Exeter were in urgent need of refits after long periods at sea, and Commodore Harwood ordered the Exeter to proceed to the Falklands forthwith. She arrived at Port Stanley on 29 November 1939 and her defects were immediately taken in hand as far as local resources permitted.
8 December 1939 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of the Falklands, and thinking the enemy might attempt to avenge the defeat, the Commodore ordered HMS Cumberland to patrol off the Falklands as of 7 December for two days after which she too was to enter Port Stanley for rest and refit.
French Forces at Dakar in November 1939.
During November them most important event at Dakar, where the French were maintaining a number of more or less regular patrols, was the reorganisation of ‘Force X’. On 1 November 1939 the large destroyer L’Audacieux (Cdr. L.M. Clatin) sailed from Dakar to the westward to 26°W and thence south-west to search for the German merchant Togo. She returned to Dakar on 4 November having sighted nothing. That day the French light cruiser Duguay-Trouin sailed to sweep round the Cape Verde Islands and then on to St. Paul Rocks. She returned to Dakar on 10 November. The old ‘Force X’, the Strasbourg (Capt. J.F.E. Bouxin), Algerie (Capt. L.H.M. Nouvel de la Fleche) and Dupleix (Capt. L.L.M. Hameury) sailed on 7 November to sweep west of the Cape Verde Islands. It returned to Dakar on 13 November 1939. Meanwhile French submarines based at Casablanca were maintaining a continuous patrol round the Canary Islands between 25°N and 30°N.
On 18 November a new ‘Force X’ was formed, now made up of the Dupleix and her sister ship Foch (Capt. J. Mathieu) and the British aircraft carrier HMS Hermes. On 21 November the Strasbourg, Algerie and the destroyers Le Terrible (Cdr. A.E.R. Bonneau) and Le Fantasque (Capt. P.A.B. Still) left Dakar to return to France. The next day the new ‘Force X’ sailed with the destroyers Milan (Cdr. M.A.H. Favier) and Cassard (Cdr. R.A.A. Braxmeyer) to cruiser towards 08°N, 30°W. That day L’Audacieux departed Dakar with a convoy for Casablanca.
On 25 November, the Duguay-Trouin sailed to patrol the parallel of 19°N, between 25° and 30°W. Two days later the British submarine HMS Severn (Lt.Cdr. B.W. Taylor, RN) docked at Dakar. On the 30th the Dupleix and Foch returned from patrol being followed the next day by HMS Hermes and her escorts Milan and Cassard.
Dispositions of South Atlantic Forces at the beginning of December 1939.
At the beginning of December 1939, HMS Ark Royal, still flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Aircraft Carriers, and HMS Renown (‘Force K’), were patrolling the meridian of 20°E, south of the Cape together with HMS Sussex and HMS Shropshire (‘Force H’) to intercept the raider reported in the Mozambique Channel on 15 November 1939.
In the north the light cruiser HMS Neptune with the destroyers HMS Hardy, HMS Hero, HMS Hostile and HMS Hasty and the submarine HMS Clyde were returning to Freetown after patrolling between there and Cape San Roque for escaping German merchant ships or raiders. The French cruiers Dupleix and Foch and the British carrier HMS Hermes (‘Force X’) and their two escorting destroyers Milan and Cassard were approaching Dakar. The French cruiser Duguay-Trouin was patrolling the parallel of 19°N, between 25° and 30°W. The British submarine Severn was refitting at Dakar. Across the South Atlantic, Commodore Harwood, in HMS Ajax was at Port Stanley as was HMS Exeter. HMS Cumberland was patrolling of the Plate area and HMNZS Achilles was off Rio de Janeiro.
Forces ‘H’ and ‘K’, 1 – 13 December 1939.
No further reports have been received of the raider which had sunk the Africa Shell off Laurenco Marques on 15 November and it seemed clear that she had either gone further into the Indian Ocean or doubled back into the South Atlantic by going well south of the Cape. On 2 December 1939 the Admiralty ordered ‘Force K’ and ‘Force H’ to their patrol line south of the Cape after refueling, and the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic at once ordered them to proceed for the Cape ports to fuel. That day a reconnaissance aircraft of the South African Air Force reported a suspicious ship south of Cape Point at noon. HMS Sussex intercepted her but her crew set her on fire. She proved to be the German merchant Watussi (9521 GRT, built 1928). She was eventually be HMS Renown. Her survivors were taken on board HMS Sussex and were landed at Simonstown.
No news of the missing raider had been coming in since 16 November but then the mistery shrouding her whereabouts was again partially solved. At 1530/2 a raidar signal ‘R.R.R., 19°15’S, 05°05’E, gunned battleship) reached the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic. It came from the British merchant Doric Star. As this signal placed the raider in the South Atlantic he immediately ordered to abandon the patrol south of the Cape and ordered ‘Force H’ to cover the trade routes between the Cape and the latitude of St. Helena at 20 knots on completion of fuelling. As it was too late for ‘Force K’ to reach the Freetown-Pernambuco area in time to intercept the rainder if she was to proceed to the North Atlantic he proposed the Admiralty that ‘Force K’, after fuelling should sweep direct from the Cape to position 20°S, 15°W. This was changed at the request of the Vice-Admiral, Aircraft Carriers to place his force in a more central position for proceeding to Freetown, to the Falklands or to Rio de Janeiro. At 1030/3 a report reached the Commander-in-Chief that the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer had been in 21°20’S, 03°10’E at 0500 hours, clearly indicating that the raider was moving westwards, clear of the Cape-Sierra Leone trade route. ‘Force H’ left Simonstown at 1700 that afternoon and ‘Force K’ sailed from Capetown at 0915/4.
The Commander-in-Chief estimated that if the enemy was proceeding northwards to the North Atlantic she would cross the Freetown-Pernambuco line between 9 and 10 December. He therefore arranged that ‘Force X’ should take HMS Neptune and her destroyers under her orders and patrol the parallel of 3°N between 31° and 38°W from 10 to 13 December. ‘Force K’ would meet HMS Neptune and the destroyers on the 14th and then return with them to Freetown to refuel. The destroyers of the 3rd Division of the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla (HMS Hardy, HMS Hostile and HMS Hero) left Freetown on 6 December with the oiler RFA Cherryleaf (5896 GRT, built 1917). They had orders to meet the Dupleix, Foch, HMS Hermes and their escorting destroyers Milan and Cassard and HMS Neptune in position 03°N, 31°W on 10 December. On 7 December ‘Force X’ left Dakar for the rendez-vous. That day the submarine HMS Clyde left Freetown to patrol between 03°N, 23°W and 03°N, 28°W and thence to 05°15’N, 23°W between 9 (PM) and 13 (AM) December.
On the evening of 8 December 1939 the German merchant ship Adolf Leonhardt (2989 GRT, built 1925) sailed from Lobito for South America. ‘Force H’ which was by then between St. Helena and the west coast of Africa, was at once ordered to intercept her. The Walrus from HMS Shropshire made contact at 0952 hours next morning and alighted alongside in position 13°S, 11°44’E. At 1250 hours HMS Shropshire arrived at that position but the German ship was scuttled by her crew and could not be saved. ‘Force H’ then returned to the Cape to refuel where they arrived on 14 December.
At 0800/11 the submarine HMS Severn left Freetown for Port Stanley. She was to protect the whaling industry in South Georgio and was to intercept hostile raiders or supply ships. The cruiser HMS Dorsetshire, which arrived at Simonstown from Colombo on the 9th to finally relieve HMS Exeter in the South America Division left Simonstown on 13 December for Port Stanley. She was to call at Tristan da Cunha on the way. On that day, 13 December 1939, was fought the action between the British South America Division and the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, known as the Battle of the River Plate.
The South America Division, 1 to 13 December 1939.
At the beginning of December 1939, HMS Ajax and HMS Exeter were at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands. HMS Cumberland was off the River Plate and HMNZS Achilles was patrolling the Rio de Janeiro area. On 2 December HMS Ajax left Port Stanley for the Plate area. That evening the Commodore learned that the Doric Star had been sunk by a raider to the south-east of St. Helena. Two days later the Commander-in-Chief, South Atlantic informed him that HMS Dorsetshire would arrive at Port Stanley on 23 December to relieve HMS Exeter which was then to proceed to Simonstown for a much needed refit.
Early on 5 December the British Naval Attaché at Buenos Aires reported that the German merchant Ussukuma had left Bahia Blanca at 1900 hours the previous evening. The Commodore immediately ordered HMS Cumberland which was on the way south to the Falkland Islands to search for her. Meanwhile HMS Ajax turned south and closed the Argentinian coast in case the Ussukuma, which was known to be short of fuel, should attempt to reach Montevideo inside territorial waters. At 1910/5, HMS Ajax sighted her smoke to the north-north-east but the Germans managed to scuttle their ship and despite the efforts to save her she sank during the night. At 0615/6, HMS Cumberland came up and embarked the German survivors and made off for the Falklands. HMS Ajax then refuelled at San Borombon Bay from the Olynthus.
About the same time the Brazilian authorities asked that HMNZS Achilles should not refuel in any Brazilian port at an interval less then three months. The Commodore, therefore, ordered her to return south and refuel at Montevideo on 8 December. HMNZS Achilles then joined HMS Ajax at 1000/10 in position 35°11’S, 51°13’W, 230 miles west of English Bank. At 0600/12 they were joined by HMS Exeter in position 36°54’S, 53°39’W.
Ever since the beginning of the war Commodore Harwood’s cruisers had worked off the east coast of South America either single or in pairs. The concentration of these three cruisers off the River Plate on 12 December 1939 was, however, no mere matter of chance.
Concentration of British Force in the River Plate area, 12 December 1939.
When a pocket battleship was located in position 19°15’S, 05°05’E on 2 December by the sinking of the Doris Star, her position was over 3000 miles from any of the South America focal areas. The Commodore however recognised that her next objective might be the valuable shipping off the east coast of South America. He estimated that at a cruising speed of 15 knots the enemy could reach the Rio area on 12 December the Plate area on 13 December and the Falklands on 14 December. As the Plate area was by far the most important of these three focal areas he decided to concentrate all his available ships off the Plate on 12 December.
The three cruisers then proceeded together towards position 32°N, 47°W. That evening the Commodore informed the Captains of his cruisers that it was intention that if they met a pocket battleship to attack immediately, by day or by night. By they they would act as two units, the light cruisers were to operate together and HMS Exeter was to operate diverged to permit flank marking. By night the ships were to remain in company in open order.
At 0614/13 HMS Ajax sighted smoke bearing 324° in position 34°28’S, 49°05’W and Commodore Harwood then ordered HMS Exeter to investigate it.
What then followed can be read in the article ‘The battle of the River Plate, 13 December 1939’ which can be found on the pages of HMS Ajax, HMS Exeter and HMNZS Achilles. (1)
The German merchant Santa Fé (4627 GRT) is intercepted and captured in the Atlantic in approximate position 05°00N, 34°00'W by the French heavy cruiser Dupleix Capt. L.L.M. Hameury) and the French large destroyers Le Fantasque (Capt. P.A.B. Still) and Le Terrible (Cdr. A.E.R. Bonneau).
Convoy TC 2.
This convoy of troopships departed Halifax on 22 December 1939 for the Clyde where it arrived on 30 December 1939.
The convoy was made up of the following troopships / liners; Almanzora (British, 15551 GRT, built 1914, carrying 1284 troops), Andes (British, 25689 GRT, built 1939, carrying 1358 troops), Batory (Polish, 14287 GRT, built 1936, carrying 806 troops), Chrobry (Polish, 11442 GRT, built 1939, carrying 1045 troops) Orama (British, 19840 GRT, built 1924, carrying 935 troops), Ormonde (British, 14982 GRT, built 1917, carrying 1269 troops) and Reina del Pacifico (British, 17702 GRT, built 1931, carrying 1455 troops).
A/S escort was provided on leaving Halifax the Canadian destroyers HMCS Fraser (Cdr. W.N. Creery, RCN), HMCS Ottawa (Capt. G.C. Jones, RCN), HMCS Restigouche (Lt.Cdr. W.B.L. Holms, RCN), HMCS St. Laurent (Lt.Cdr. H.G. de Wolf, RCN) and the British destroyer HMS Hunter (Lt.Cdr. L. De Villiers, RN). These destroyers remained with the convoy until 24 December 1939 when they set course to return to Halifax.
Ocean Escort was provided by the British battleship HMS Revenge (Capt. E.R. Archer, RN), French battlecruiser Dunkerque (Capt. M.J.M. Seguin and the French light cruiser Gloire (Capt. F.H.R. de Belot).
When the convoy approached the British isles, the destroyers HMS Somali (Capt. R.S.G. Nicholson, DSO, DSC, RN), HMS Bedouin (Cdr. J.A. McCoy, RN), HMS Eskimo (Cdr. St.J.A. Micklethwait, RN), HMS Matabele (Cdr. G.K. Whitmy-Smith, RN), HMS Mohawk (Cdr. J.W.M. Eaton, RN), HMS Fearless (Cdr. K.L. Harkness, RN), HMS Firedrake (Lt.Cdr. S.H. Norris, DSC, RN), HMS Fury (Cdr. G.F. Burghard, RN), HMS Imperial (Lt.Cdr. C.A.de W. Kitcat, RN) and HMS Impulsive (Lt.Cdr. W.S. Thomas, RN) departed Greenock on the 25th to join the convoy on the 28th. On the 26th two more destroyers departed Greenock, these were HMS Kashmir (Cdr. H.A. King, RN) and HMS Kingston (Lt.Cdr. P. Somerville, DSO, RN). These destroyers also joined the convoy on the 28th.
On the 29th the French battlecruiser Dunkerque and the light cruiser Gloire parted company with the convoy. They were escorted by the destroyers HMS Fearless, HMS Firedrake and HMS Fury until they were relieved by the French large destroyers Mogador (Cdr. P. Maerte), Volta (Cdr. C.V.E. Jacquinet), Le Triomphant (Cdr. M.M.P.L. Pothuau), Le Fantasque (Capt. P.A.B. Still), and Le Terrible (Cdr. A.E.R. Bonneau).
Four more escorts joined the convoy on the 29th. These were the minesweepers HMS Jason (Lt.Cdr. D.H. Fryer, RN), HMS Gleaner (Lt.Cdr. H.P. Price, RN).and the patrol vessels HMS Puffin (Lt.Cdr. Hon. J.M.G. Waldegrave, DSC, RN) and HMS Shearwater (Lt.Cdr. P.F. Powlett, RN).
The convoy arrived safely in the Clyde area in the morning of 30 December 1939. (2)
The German merchant Nicoline Maersk (4194 GRT) was intercepted by Le Fantasque in the Western Mediterranean and was run aground by her crew near Tortosa, Spain.
ADM 186/794
ADM 199/367 + ADM 199/393
ADM numbers indicate documents at the British National Archives at Kew, London.
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Dimitar Shakev
by VVA
Dimitar Shakev is a Financial Director at VVA Economics & Policy. Dimitar has a thorough and proven knowledge of corporate finance. He has led and supported the financial management set up of fast-growing businesses in France, Bulgaria, Belgium, USA and Japan, both as financial manager and...
Jessica Carneiro
Jessica is a Research Manager at VVA Economics & Policy. Throughout her studies and previous professional experiences, she gained expertise in a range of fields including innovation, internationalisation, clusters and higher education. In the last years, Jessica has been involved in various projects run by the...
Eszter Kantor
Eszter Kantor is an Associate Director at VVA Economics & Policy. With a background in Economics (B.Sc.) and Environmental Management (M.Sc.), Eszter has over 15 years of experience with EU policy having worked in Hungary, the United Kingdom and Belgium. Eszter has significant experience working on socio-economic...
Rik Neirynck
Rik is an economic Junior Consultant at VVA Economics & Policy. He joined VVA for a traineeship carried out as an extracurricular activity over the last months of his master’s degree in Business Administration with option in international relations at KU Leuven in Brussels. During his...
Axel Wion
Axel Wion is a Senior Consultant for VVA Economics & Policy. Since he joined the company, Axel has been involved in a quite diversified variety of projects and activities for clients such as the European Commission, the European Space Agency, other international organisations and private sector...
Wesley Cox
Wesley Cox is a Junior Consultant at VVA Economics & Policy. Throughout his studies and previous experiences in both the private and public sector, he gained expertise in a range of fields, including international business (sales, marketing and branding), corporate governance, energy and automotive policies. At...
Roberto Sigismondo
Roberto is a Research Manager at VVA Economics & Policy. During his studies at Bocconi University, he gained knowledge regarding several policy areas such as cohesion policy, economic policy and social affairs. In particular, Roberto has a strong interest in policy analysis and evaluation. His skillset...
Norman Röhner
Norman is a Researcher at VVA Economics and Policy. Norman has thorough and proven knowledge of EU policies and politics and expertise in a wide range of policy areas including ICT, standardisation, intellectual property rights, and education. He has over two years of experience in managing...
Liviu Calofir
Liviu is a Researcher at VVA Economics and Policy. He has developed a comprehensive knowledge of EU policies in a wide range of areas throughout his university career. Liviu had studied in Florence (University of Florence), Bologna (University of Bologna) and Rome (LUISS School of Government). Before...
Jordan Hill
Jordan is a Research Manager at VVA Economics and Policy. He has three years’ experience in London working in Higher Education Policy and Advocacy at local, national and European level. During this role he managed four higher education networks which looked at areas including Research and...
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Rosette Bobbin
1140 Red River St., Clarksville, TN 37040
Visitors to Clarksville Foundry can’t help but notice the sculpture on the front lawn. At 12-feet tall, the 8,000-pound ductile iron bobbin in front of Clarksville Foundry’s building is hard to miss. Weathered to a rusty finish in the years since it was installed, the “Rosette Bobbin” sculpture is a giant example of the type of castings that can be manufactured at the Foundry.
Reminiscent of a wagon wheel with elements of a church rose window, the sculpture sits on a 5,000-pound limestone base in a place of honor outside Clarksville Foundry. The original sculpture was installed in August 2006 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The design echoes the lacy rose window in the nearby 1901 Spencer Honors House, formerly the Second Presbyterian Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. once spoke during the civil rights era.
The sculpture was conceived by Vaughn Randall, winner of the 2005-06 Samuel B. Barker Outdoor Sculpture Competition held at UAB. Among the challenges Randall faced in converting his small-scale model to the full-size sculpture was the temporary misplacement (and eventual recovery) of some of its wooden patterns during Hurricane Katrina.
Rosette Bobbin required 26 individual castings, which were produced by Clarksville Foundry and three other foundries. When Randall approached Foust about casting components for the sculpture, Foust, an art lover, asked if he could cast one for his own use. No stranger to working with artists, Foust has also worked with celebrated Tennessee sculptors Mike Andrews, Olen Bryant, and Alan LaQuire.
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Posted by vetshq on October 21, 2015 in Veterans News
Probe: Cancer patients died waiting for care at Phoenix VA (The Washington Post)
Some patients with bladder and prostate cancer died waiting for care, and medical treatment for almost 1,500 others was delayed because of short-staffing and mismanagement of urology care at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix, a new investigation has found. Senior officials at the medical center, the center of a national scandal last year over fudged wait times, did little to respond to a severe staffing shortage as recently as April 2015, investigators for the Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general found. Their solution? They canceled appointments for 3,200 urology patients, some of them for crucial follow-up tests, and never rescheduled them. And many veterans had no idea they couldn’t see a doctor until they showed up for their appointment. “The Urology Service was not able to manage the volume of patients in need of either diagnostic evaluation, treatment, or routine follow-up related to multiple urological conditions,” the report by John Daigh, Jr., assistant inspector general for health-care inspections, said. The delays placed patients at “unnecessary risk for adverse outcomes.” Seven patients died after delayed treatment and lapses in the quality of medical care they received in Phoenix, investigators wrote. Hospital administrators “did not promptly respond to the staffing crisis, which contributed to many patients being “lost to follow-up” and staff frustration due to lack of direction,” Daigh wrote. When some patients finally were referred to outside doctors for follow-up care, almost a quarter of them may never have received it. In 23 percent of the cases, investigators would find no documents to show the appointments ever took place. Over two years, this delayed or non-existent care affected almost half of all patients in Phoenix with bladder, prostate and urinary-tract issues, even after patient wait times became a national scandal. The former director of the medical center was fired amid reports that managers falsified waiting lists in order to collect bonuses by covering up months of delays in appointments.
Veterans still facing major medical delays at VA hospitals (CNN.com)
Appointment wait times at the Department of Veterans Affairs are not getting better. Despite billions of extra dollars poured into the agency in the last year and numerous reforms intended to improve veterans’ access to care, whistleblowers and internal documents obtained by CNN reveal some VA facilities continue to grapple with appointment wait times of months or more. Even at the Phoenix VA medical center, where CNN learned last year “secret” appointment lists were hiding how veterans were dying waiting for care, sources say complicated wait-time calculations obscure ongoing appointment delays. “The reality is veterans are waiting months — three, six months at a time, sometimes more — for care at the Phoenix VA,” said one source in Phoenix who agreed to speak to CNN anonymously because of fears of retaliation. The source said this includes veterans waiting for potentially critical health procedures, such as colonoscopies, and other categories of specialty care that require timely attention. In August, more than 8,000 requests for care had wait times longer than 90 days at the Phoenix VA, according to documents obtained by CNN, but whistleblowers say delays like these are not accurately reflected in public data because of changes in the VA’s method of measuring wait times. “The VA central office enables an official line that’s not consistent with reality,” the source in Phoenix said. Additional VA documents show ongoing delays in care are not limited to Phoenix. An internal VA draft memo from August warns, “Currently wait times are increasing significantly,” referring to an overall increase of appointments with delays. VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson, who received this internal memo, told CNN there are almost 500,000 appointments with extended wait times, which includes appointments with delays longer than 30 days and veterans waiting on a list for appointments to become available.
House panel issues subpoenas in VA scandal (Washington Times)
For the first time ever, the House Veterans Affairs Committee voted unanimously Wednesday to issue subpoenas, seeking the testimony of five officials in the Department of Veterans Affairs about abuses in a relocation program for senior agency managers. The committee voted to subpoena Danny Pummill, the department’s principal deputy undersecretary for benefits; Diana Rubens, director of the Veterans Benefits Administration’s offices in Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware; Robert McKenrick, director of the VBA’s Los Angeles office; Kimberly Graves, director of the St. Paul, Minnesota office; and Antoine Waller, director of the Baltimore office. All five officials turned down invitations to testify before the committee voluntarily on Wednesday. Chairman Jeff Miller, Florida Republican, said it was the first time in the committee’s history that it has issued subpoenas. “I assure you that I have not come to this decision lightly,” Mr. Miller said. A government watchdog investigation found that Ms. Rubens and Ms. Graves orchestrated their transfers to their current posts after pressuring Mr. McKenrick and Mr. Waller to move out of the Philadelphia and St. Paul offices, respectively. In Ms. Rubens’ case, the agency spent about $300,000 in relocation costs. The report also found that senior VA managers often were offered salary increases beyond their job descriptions as inducement to transfer to less desirable posts. Mr. Miller said he invited the witnesses to appear Wednesday “to go over the facts of the report — not to determine their innocence or guilt. It’s as simple as that.” “There is ample evidence that VA does not move quickly when it comes to accountability,” Mr. Miller said. “We have seen time and time again, that if we do not aggressively shed light on issues we uncover, the IG uncovers, or whistleblowers uncover, then often VA will just sweep them under the rug for an extended period of time and wait for public attention to go elsewhere.”
VA critics renew calls for better accountability reform (Military Times)
Presidential hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., renewed his attacks on Veterans Affairs Department accountability efforts on the Senate floor Tuesday, part of an ongoing wave of criticism by lawmakers over continued public scandals for the department. During an off-campaign stop in Washington, D.C., Rubio unsuccessfully pushed to advance his pending comprehensive VA reform measure, arguing that new accountability measures are long overdue. “This is about taking care of our veterans, but it’s also about taking care of people at the VA who are doing their job,” he said. “It isn’t fair that people who aren’t doing their jobs continue in their positions, and in many instances are increasing the workload on others.” Also on Tuesday, the advocacy group Concerned Veterans for America released new polling numbers arguing for expanded health care flexibility and employee dismissal rules. They blasted Democratic opposition to Rubio’s legislation as telling veterans that “they are not a priority for the United States Senate.” Rubio’s legislation would give VA officials authority to reduce the pensions of department executives convicted of a crime; limit the time employees can spend on paid administrative leave; and change how VA performance bonuses are awarded. VA officials and Democrats have objected strongly to the legislation, saying it would violate federal workers’ rights. They also argue that not only would it do little to help cure the department’s problems, it also would scare away top talent. “We ought to avoid creating unnecessary litigation and challenges to the law that can’t be enforced effectively,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., senior Democrat on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “This one unfortunately cannot.” CVA officials, who have harshly criticized the current administration and VA leadership, conducted their poll to revive companion reform efforts. The results mirror findings from last year, when they rolled out similar accountability and health care expansion proposals.
Democrat blocks vote on VA Accountability Act in the Senate (Washington Free Beacon)
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) on Tuesday blocked an up-or-down vote on legislation meant to hold VA employees accountable for misconduct. The Democratic lawmaker denied a motion for unanimous consent after Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), a GOP presidential candidate, brought the VA Accountability Act of 2015 to the Senate floor for immediate consideration. The bipartisan bill would allow Department of Veterans’ Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald to remove or demote a VA employee because of poor performance or misconduct. The House passed the legislation at the end of July. However, Rep. Jeff Miller (R., Fla.), who introduced the bill in the House, said before its passage that McDonald does not support the legislation. President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation, calling it “counterproductive” and insisting that it would “have a significant impact on VA’s ability to retain and recruit qualified professionals and may result in a loss of qualified and capable staff to other government agencies or the private sector.” Meanwhile, an independent assessment released last month found that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs network of health facilities faces “crises in leadership and culture” and other problems warranting a “system-wide reworking” of the Veterans Health Administration. Various VA inspector general reports published in recent months pointed to serious flaws at specific VA facilities as well as waste at the Veterans Benefits Administration. Concerned Veterans for America CEO Pete Hegseth slammed Blumenthal in a statement Tuesday for standing with “Washington special interests and corrupt VA bureaucrats” by blocking the vote. “Almost every day, there is a new story of VA employees engaging in misconduct or corruption–demonstrating that a year and a half after the wait list scandal began and after promises of change from the Obama Administration and Congress, a toxic culture still infects the VA,” Hegseth stated. If the Senate does not move the legislation through regular order as quickly as possible, Hegseth said, lawmakers will be sending “a message to the millions of veterans who use the VA that they are not a priority for the United States Senate.”
Senator presses VA, DoD on rules for payback of separation pay (Augusta Free Press)
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) pressed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) on policies that are impacting former service members in Virginia who have received military separation pay and are later deemed eligible for disability benefits. Under U.S. law, the cost of separation payments received prior to being deemed eligible for veteran’s disability must be repaid before the veteran can begin receiving benefits. However, many former service members have reported that they were not made aware of this policy at the time of separation, and as a result are facing unexpected financial hardship when the disability pay they are counting on to make ends meet is withheld in order to recoup the earlier payment. “Multiple constituents have reached out to my office for help on this matter after applying for and receiving disability retirement benefits only to learn they will not receive payments until their separation pay has been completely recouped by the federal government. While I recognize that this recoupment is required by law (10 U.S. Code § 1175a), I would like information about how the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Department of Defense (DoD) are implementing this policy in practice,” wrote Sen. Warner today in a letter to Secretary Bob McDonald and Secretary Ashton Carter. “As my constituents have indicated to me, and as has been reported in the press, many former service members say that they were never made aware that their separation pay would have to be paid back once they are deemed eligible for disability payments. Those who have voluntarily separated because of a financial incentive to do so might have reconsidered their voluntary separations if they had known the separation pay might later have to be reimbursed.” Warner pressed the Secretaries on what policies are currently in place to educate service members at the time of separation about the recoupment requirement if they are later deemed eligible for disability pay, and about the process for granting a repayment waiver in cases of financial hardship. “Separation pay is intended to help ease the transition from service to civilian life, but for veterans who learn only after the fact that the cost of their military separation pay will be deducted from the disability benefits for which they are eligible, it can in fact be a source of additional and unexpected stress for their families,” Sen. Warner noted, requesting a response from the Secretaries about what policies are in place to ensure veterans are able to plan accurately for their financial futures.
Former Navy secretary Webb dropping Democratic bid for president (Military Times)
Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said Tuesday he is dropping out of the Democratic race for president and is considering his options about how he might “remain as a voice” in the campaign. Webb said at a news conference that he is “withdrawing from any consideration” of becoming the Democratic party’s nominee and would spend the coming weeks exploring his options about a possible independent bid. “The very nature of our democracy is under siege due to the power structure and the money that finances both political parties,” Webb said, joined by his wife, Hong Le Webb. “Our political candidates are being pulled to the extremes. They’re increasingly out of step with the people they’re supposed to serve.” Webb said many of the issues that he cares about are not in line with the hierarchy of the Democratic party, saying he did not have a “clear, exact fit” in either party. Asked if he still considers himself a Democrat, Webb said, “We’ll think about that.” A Vietnam veteran and former member of President Ronald Reagan’s administration, Webb complained that he did not get the chance to make his views fully known at the first Democratic debate. He has trailed badly in the field that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Webb has been polling in the back of the pack with former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. Webb has raised only about $700,000 and ended the month of September with more than $300,000 in the bank. Rivals like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have raised millions for the campaign. Webb surprised many fellow Democrats when he became the first major figure in the party to form a presidential exploratory committee in November.
High school football player stops during game to thank WWII vets (CBS News)
Security officers patrolling high school football games have seen it all. But one sheriff working a night game last week in Bossier City, La., said he’s never seen something quite like this. A group of seven World War II veterans — six men from the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and one female veteran who served in the Women in the Air Force — were seated on the sideline as Parkway High School Varsity football team’s honored guests. They smiled as they watched players 80 years their junior run back to the field at the end of halftime. The players were heading for a team huddle when #83 broke from the group and made a beeline for the vets. Chase Hill, a junior at the Louisiana high school, stopped to greet the group. “He just left the formation and came up to vets and shook every one of their hands,” Lt. Bill Davis of Bossier Sheriff’s Office said. “This isn’t something we see every day.” When Davis saw the one football player jump out of the crowd he knew he had to capture the moment on camera. “Law enforcement officers deal with teens who do stupid stuff every day,” Davis said. “And for this kid to do what he did, which to me was really just a class act — a badge of honor if you will, that’s what you want to see.”
JBLM veterans focus on filmmaking (Tacoma News-Tribune)
Staff Sgt. Toby Hensley doesn’t tell his family much about his experiences in Iraq. “There are things I haven’t said that I probably won’t tell anyone,” Hensley said. He’d like to figure out how. His desire to share his story with his loved ones was one of the reasons he joined a special project at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He and other soldiers this week are learning new ways of communicating behind handheld cameras. They’re taking part in a program developed by the youngest grandson of famed World War II Gen. George Patton. It aims to help veterans work through traumatic experiences by teaching them how to make their own movies. The idea behind the program, called I Was There Films, is that soldiers who’ve been in the middle of the nation’s long wars might feel uncomfortable opening up about their time in combat. But working on a film project can focus them and let them express emotions they might otherwise hide. “It’s a wonderful way to break down barriers and at the same time you’re actually creating a piece of narrative that may allow you to communicate something you haven’t before,” said founder Ben Patton, whose father also led soldiers as an Army officer in Korea and Vietnam. He developed the program about three years ago, weaving knowledge from his career in public television with experiences from his youth growing up in a military family. He’d been looking for a way to give back to veterans, carrying on his family’s storied tradition of service. Since then, the program has hosted more than 30 workshops at major military bases around the country. Over the course of the project, participants will make their own short movies. A gallery at its website, iwastherefilms.org, shows that troops at past sessions have tackled difficult subjects, such as mourning friends who died in combat.
San Antonio gets preview of documentary about disabled vets (San Antonio Express-News)
Another Emmy-winning TV documentarian named Burns — Ken’s younger brother — will be in San Antonio Wednesday to unveil his latest film and spark a conversation about it. “Debt of Honor: Disabled Veterans in American History” is a powerful, poignant and unflinching chronicle of severely injured veterans throughout the years — from the Revolutionary War and the Civil War through both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam and up to today’s conflicts in the Middle East. “Over the last 20 years, I’ve made a lot of films,” said the director, whose work includes the hauntingly beautiful “New York.” But, he added, this one in particular “resonates deeply with me.” … “Debt of Honor” stands tall among them. This story of injured veterans and the way the U.S. government and society have regarded them throughout our history is moving and poetic. It also is candid and shocking. Some of the recollections and images are so wrenchingly potent that you’re bound to think about them for days later. “We were really, really blessed with the disabled veterans we were able to interview,” Burns said. These veterans not only recall their pain and struggles, but also speak of ways they’ve coped upon resuming their lives at home. “They understand how crucial it is to be out front,” Burns added, “not as showboats but to connect with the civilian population in a very grounded way as well to other disabled veterans who may need someone to show them the way forward.”
Missouri woman, 70, sentenced for defrauding veterans program (KansasCity.com)
A 70-year-old Missouri woman has been sentenced to 20 months in federal prison for defrauding a federal program designed to award contracts to businesses owned by service-disabled veterans. U.S. Attorney Barry Grissom says Mary Parker of Blue Springs, Missouri, pleaded guilty in federal court in Kansas City, Kansas, to one count of aiding and abetting wire fraud. She admitted helping her son, Warren Parker, and her son, Michael Parker, in making false claims for their company, Silver Star Construction of Blue Springs and Stilwell, Kansas. Prosecutors say the company obtained more than $6.7 million in contracts from the Veterans Administration. An investigation determined that Warren Parker never was classified as a service-disabled vet. He was sentenced in 2012 to 87 months in prison.
Man sentenced to prison for swindling disabled veterans group (CBS Boston)
A Cape Cod man has been sentenced to two years in prison with 18 months to serve after a jury found him guilty of swindling a disabled veterans group of more than $100,000. Richard Trott, Sr., 65, of East Sandwich, Mass., was found guilty on four counts of larceny over $250 by a Barnstable Superior Court jury on Monday. A judge says the remainder of his sentence was suspended for a probationary period of 10 years upon on his release. A restitution hearing is slated for Nov. 19. Trott previously served as the corporate officer of the Hyannis chapter of Disabled American Veterans. The charity represents the interests of disabled veterans and their families. The Attorney General’s office began investigating Trott in May 2013 after the case was referred to them by the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office. A grand jury indicted him seven months later. Prosecutors say Trott transferred money from the charity’s accounts into his personal bank accounts and repeatedly withdrew money for his own use.
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Schitt's Creek Actor Rizwan Manji Doesn't Regret Giving His Character an Accent
But he does wish the role had been more “three-dimensional.”
By Emily Kirkpatrick
by Paul Archuleta/Getty Images
Actors putting on accents that play into racial and cultural stereotypes has long been the topic of heated debate in Hollywood. Most recently, fans have been calling out the beloved sitcom Schitt's Creek on social media for its deployment of Ray—an entrepreneurial businessman who speaks with a South Asian accent, and is one of the only non-white characters on the show. But Rizwan Manji, the Canadian actor who plays Ray, defended the choice to use an accent in a recent interview, although he also thinks his character could have benefitted from a more fleshed-out storyline.
Speaking with the Toronto Star, the actor, who does not himself speak with an accent, explained he decided Ray would speak in accented English—a choice he made independent of the show's producers. “It is a very slight Indian accent—somebody who was probably raised in Canada, but probably was born in India or Pakistan,” he said. “I don't regret that because I think it actually works for Ray. He wasn't like everybody else in that town. He was from somewhere else.”
However, Manji added, he does regret that Ray didn't have a fuller backstory. "If you want to criticize something, do that," Manji said. “We need to have three-dimensional characters.” In October, he said something similar to the Hindustan Times: “I love Schitt’s Creek, but they could have done better with diversity. They could have fleshed out the characters and given them lives, not just use them for comic relief.”
In the new interview, Manji added that he's turned down plenty of parts he's felt were offensive—roles as cab drivers and convenience store employees who speak with a thick accent. He was offered parts like that especially at the beginning of his career, he said. “It was very strictly, like, the joke was on the accent,” Manji explained, adding that around 60% of his roles have involved using accents—but he only employs them when he feels they're necessary to a character.
In a statement to the paper, the show's star and co-creator Dan Levy said that he felt Manji made “thoughtful choices” when it came to the role of Ray. “All characters on our show were created with love, respect and humanity,” Levy added. “It has been gratifying to have these intentions reflected through the overwhelming audience support for these characters. That said, I welcome any perspectives that encourage conversations about diversity, especially in entertainment.”
Emily Kirkpatrick is a contributing writer at Vanity Fair.
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Why choose Warrnambool?
Most Warrnambool residents would know someone who moved to the city and is enjoying a better life because of it.
A new Warrnambool City Council survey aims to better understand why people make the move to Warrnambool, and what some of the perceived barriers are.
This time last year, Barry Hodson was commuting up to 70 minutes each way to work in the gas industry in Melbourne. Today, he enjoys playing golf, going out for lunch and volunteering at Flagstaff Hill.
Mr Hodson, who is in his early 70s, made the decision with his wife Clara to retire in Warrnambool.
He said that the idea came when visiting his son and his family, who moved to Warrnambool for work four years ago.
“We came down here for holidays and on weekends and I thought ‘I just love it in Warrnambool,’” he said.
“This is like paradise to me. It really is.
“Everybody is so friendly in Warrnambool. Everybody’s got time for you.
“I can’t emphasise this enough. Warrnambool is the place to be.”
Warrnambool Mayor Tony Herbert said that as Victoria’s most liveable city, Warrnambool had a lot to offer new residents.
“Two recent independent studies by Deloitte and Ipsos show that Warrnambool is more liveable than Melbourne, and it’s certainly something that I am very proud of as both a councillor and a lifelong resident,” he said.
“I’m fortunate enough to have been born in Warrnambool, spent some time away studying and chose to move back. It was home for me. But for many, making the move away from somewhere like Melbourne can be daunting.
“We all know someone who has moved to Warrnambool and wishes they’d done it sooner.
“I think we all know someone as well who keeps talking about moving to Warrnambool, but they haven’t done it yet.
“In this role, I have met many new residents who just can’t believe the lifestyle, opportunities and high quality services we have in the city.
“The March long weekend is always a busy time with tens of thousands of people visiting our region. We want to know what we can do to make some of them stay and would love for them to go to the website and complete the survey.
“Who knows? It might just get you thinking of that better life you always dreamt of.”
To complete the survey, visit www.yoursaywarrnambool.com.au. Hard copies are available at the Civic Centre, 25 Liebig Street.
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Home Community 社区
Yu Ying works hard to create an inclusive, welcoming environment for our students, families, and staff. And at the same time, we strive to provide resources, tools, and events that support and strengthen our entire community.
Families are the driving force behind some of Yu Ying’s most celebrated activities like the Annual Gala and Bike to School Week, and parents are the engines of the students’ day-to-day successes. Whether helping with homework, cultivating our rain garden, or chaperoning kids on field trips, Yu Ying families are enriching not only their child’s education but also the experience of all Yu Ying students. To learn more about how parents can support Yu Ying visit https://wyypa.wordpress.com.
Communication is Critical
As a language immersion school, Yu Ying fully recognizes that strong communication is critical to the community and is committed to growing its communication capabilities to adapt to the changing needs of teachers and parents.
Supporting All Learners
Yu Ying supports all learners and their ranges of abilities. Our learning support team is composed of talented educators who understand and employ effective strategies to help students with disabilities achieve their potential. Additionally, Yu Ying is a member of the DC Special Education Cooperative, which facilitates collaboration across schools to raise achievement of students with disabilities.
``I also want to thank you and everyone...for all the hard work you have done with him this year. It's hard to believe how far he has progressed and soooo much better since the fall. Truly amazing!``
Yu Ying Parent
Providing Healthy Meals
Yu Ying strives to be a healthy school. Kids who are nutritionally fit are more likely to have the energy, stamina, and strong self-esteem–all of which enhance their ability to learn. Parents are encouraged to pack healthy meals for their students. Students also have the option of receiving a healthy breakfast or lunch at school. Yu Ying has prohibits junk food and candy on its premises. Yu Ying is also a nut-free school as many of our students have severe allergies to nuts and products made with nuts.
Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School participates in the Free and Reduced Lunch program as a part of the National School Lunch Program. All school-aged children can receive school meal benefits regardless of a child’s immigration status. Eligibility is based solely on income guidelines and familial circumstances. An approved application will eliminate all future lunch costs for your student(s) for the 2020-2021 school year. Applications are linked to below, and/or at Washington Yu Ying’s Reception desk (220 Taylor St NE Washington, DC 20017). For questions, please contact Washington Yu Ying’s Secretary, Egypt Lyons: 202-635-1950.
English Application Form
Spanish Application Form
Eligibility Information
Offering a Quality Before and After School Program
Yu Ying offers an afterschool program called REEF (Responsibility, Exercise, Education and Fun). REEF classes are designed to be dynamic and engaging in ways unique to an ordinary school day. Our goal is to maintain a high standard of academic enrichment, as well as a strong commitment to the Chinese immersion environment.
Yu Ying’s REEF program is Monday-Thursday from 3:30-5:45 p.m. and Friday 1:00-5:45 p.m. Registration for REEF begins approximately two weeks before the start of the new sessions. Yu Ying offers three sessions per year during fall, winter, and spring. The payment schedule for REEF is flexible and based on a student’s’ level of participation. For example, a drop-in rate is $22 per day per child (M-Th) and the monthly full program rate is $450 per month per child. Yu Ying offers a reduced rate for families who qualify as well as sibling discounts. Yu Ying offers before school care as well from 7:30 a.m. to 8:10 a.m. Monday through Friday.
Interested in working for REEF or just seeing more of this program in action? Check out reefaftercare.squarespace.com
Creating an Optimal Learning Environment
Yu Ying’s campus provides space for a comprehensive education that focuses on the development of the whole student. Sitting on three woodsy acres, our campus features a 43,000-square foot building that is fully equipped with an art room, library, playgrounds, multi-purpose room, and performing arts space. Each classroom is filled with natural light and fresh air.
Yu Ying’s campus also features the Founders Forest, a one-acre outdoor nature center, which provides exploratory opportunities to nurture students’ innate curiosity about the world around them while mastering core academic concepts related to sustainability and environmentalism. This optimal learning environment provides a wealth of opportunities for Yu Ying’s students and has plenty of room for learners to grow, explore, and (of course) play!
Offering a Direct Path to Middle / High School
Washington Yu Ying along with 4 other immersion charter schools in Washington, DC partnered to create the District of Columbia International School. This combined middle/high school allows Yu Ying students to continue a rigorous academic program while building on their Chinese language and cultural immersion experiences.
Operation of DCI began in school year 2014-15 with 200 Students from the Member Schools in the 6th and 7th grade classes and will grow to its capacity of 1400 students in grades 6-12. DCI offers advanced Spanish, Chinese and French language immersion in a technology-rich learning environment. In addition to Yu Ying, the other immersion schools that feed into DCI include DC Bilingual Public Charter School, Elsie Whitlow Stokes Communtiy Freedom Public Charter School, Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, and Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School. For more information about DCI, please see dcinternationalschool.org.
In accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VI”), Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (“Title IX”), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (“Section 504”), Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (“ADA”), and the Age Discrimination Act of 1975 (“The Age Act”), applicants for admission and employment, students, parents, employees, sources of referral of applicants for admission and employment, and all unions or professional organizations holding collective bargaining or professional agreements with Washington Yu Ying PCS are hereby notified that [Washington Yu Ying PCS] does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in admission or access to, or treatment or employment in, its programs and activities.
Students, parents and/or guardians having inquiries concerning Washington Yu Ying PCS compliance with Section 504 or the ADA as it applies to students or who wish to file a complaint regarding such compliance should contact: Section 504 & ADA Coordinator: Stephanie James at 202-635-1950 and sjames@washingtonyuying.org, who has been designated by Washington Yu Ying PCS to coordinate its efforts to comply with the regulations implementing Section 504 and ADA.
In accordance with Federal civil rights law and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) civil rights regulations and policies, the USDA, its Agencies, offices, and employees, and institutions participating in or administering USDA programs are prohibited from discriminating based on race, color, national origin, sex, disability, age, or reprisal or retaliation for prior civil rights activity in any program or activity conducted or funded by USDA.
Persons with disabilities who require alternative means of communication for program information (e.g. Braille, large print, audiotape, American Sign Language, etc.), should contact the Agency (State or local) where they applied for benefits. Individuals who are deaf, hard of hearing or have speech disabilities may contact USDA through the Federal Relay Service at (800) 877-8339. Additionally, program information may be made available in languages other than English.
To file a program complaint of discrimination, complete the USDA Program Discrimination Complaint Form, (AD-3027) found online at: How to File a Complaint, and at any USDA office, or write a letter addressed to USDA and provide in the letter all of the information requested in the form. To request a copy of the complaint form, call (866) 632-9992. Submit your completed form or letter to USDA by:
Mail: U.S. Department of Agriculture
Office of the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights
1400 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C. 20250-9410;
Fax: (202) 690-7442; or
Email: program.intake@usda.gov.
District of Columbia Human Rights Act
Also, the District of Columbia Human Rights Act, approved December 13, 1977 (DC law 2-38; DC official code
§2-1402.11(2006), as amended) states the following:
It shall be an unlawful discriminatory practice to do any of the following acts, wholly or partially for a discriminatory reason based upon the actual or perceived: race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, family responsibilities, genetic information, disability, matriculation, or political affiliation of any individual. To file a complaint alleging discrimination on one of these bases, please contact the District of Columbia’s Office of Human Rights at (202) 727-4559 or ohr@dc.gov.
Chinese New Year (NO SCHOOL)
Washington Yu Ying Will BE CLOSED in Observance fo Chinese New Year
Presidents Day (NO SCHOOL)
Washington Yu Ying Will Be Closed In Observance Of Presidents Day
Click here to visit the site
MANAGEBAC is Yu Ying's planning, recording of data and reporting to parents system. Managebac will be used by teachers as the primary mode for the reporting of students work, achievements and progress through the task and event calendar and the portfolio section.
(IB) Primary Years Programme
The International Baccalaureate® (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP) is for students aged 3-12.
The PYP prepares students to become active, caring, lifelong learners who demonstrate respect for themselves and others and have the capacity to participate in the world around them. It focuses on the development of the whole child as an inquirer, both within and beyond the classroom.
Visit the IB PYP Website
August 2019 (no meeting)
REEF Aftercare
What is REEF? And how can I join?
Family Policies & Procedures
Yu Ying Bullying Policy
Link to REEF online registration
E-Funds Lunch & Fees Payments
Unpaid Meal Charge Policy
Yu Ying Parents Association
Parents Association Listserv
DC International School
Student Meals Menu
Annual Report SY15-16
Healthy Schools Act SY19-20
DC One Card Application
Lead Test Results
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US government launches campaign to reduce high suicide rates
Second lady Karen Pence speaks at the National Press Club about a campaign to raise awareness on the risks of veterans suicide, Tuesday, July 7, 2020, in Washington.(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
By HOPE YEN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government launched a broad national campaign Tuesday aimed at reducing high suicide rates, urging the public to reach out to others, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, and acknowledge daily stresses in people's lives.
Known as REACH, the government campaign is the core part of a $53 million, two-year effort announced by President Donald Trump to reduce suicide, particularly among veterans.
Starting Wednesday, digital ads will hit the internet with the key message that “suicide is preventable” and that collective action not only by government but also by businesses, schools, nonprofits and faith-based organizations can overcome the stigma of discussing mental health and empower people to understand risk factors, stay connected with others and talk openly about problems.
“Working together, we can implement this road map and end this national tragedy of suicide,” said Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen Pence, a lead spokesperson for the government effort. She called it an opportune time, noting increased social distancing because of the coronavirus.
“All of us have been facing anxieties and isolation,” she said. “It’s OK to not be OK. ... The best thing is to talk about it more, not less.”
“No one should be afraid to ask for help,” she added.
Trump established a federal task force last year to develop a way to lower veterans’ suicides. Currently, about 20 veterans, guardsmen and reservists die by suicide each day, about 1.5 times higher than those who have not served in the military. The government says about 14 of those 20 were not under the care of the Department of Veterans Affairs, pointing to a need for improved community outreach.
With the coronavirus still raging across communities, officials expressed hope that the message of suicide prevention can aid the public more widely, not just veterans.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who is helping the effort, stressed the need to stay connected by texting, emailing or, in the case of his kids, writing “old-fashioned letters to grandma and grandpa.” He described stigma against getting help as a much bigger public health threat than cigarettes or COVID-19.
“When we feel comfortable seeking help, and unless more people feel comfortable offering help without judgment, we’ll never reach those who need it the most,” he said.
Acknowledging the impact of the broader pandemic, Adams also offered a separate public service message: Wear a mask.
His public admonition comes as many governors are pushing for a national mandate on wearing masks. Trump has declined to wear masks in public and recently held campaign-style events in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and the White House on the Fourth of July where he and many attendees went bare-faced.
“It’s not an impingement on your freedom,” Adams said, calling masks the No. 1 way to stem spread of COVID-19. “It actually increases your freedom and your choices because it lowers spread of the disease and increases the chances we will be able to open and stay open.”
“It actually will decrease that hopelessness. It will actually lower suicide rates,” he said.
Public health experts urged people to go to the website wearewithinreach.net and take a pledge “to reach and be part of the solution” to stem suicide. The website offers information on risk factors for suicide and ways people can get help.
“By having this conversation, we will save lives,” said Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, executive director of the suicide prevention effort.
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Uber's Self-Driving Car Saw the Woman It Killed, Report Says
Aarian Marshall Alex Davies
The National Transportation Safety Board says the vehicle had trouble identifying Elaine Herzberg as a human, and then wasn't able to brake to avoid hitting her.
The National Transportation Safety Board says Uber's self-driving car had trouble identifying Elaine Herzberg as a human, and that it couldn't hit the brakes to avoid hitting her.TRIPPLAAR KRISTOFFER/SIPA VIA AP IMAGES
The federal investigators examining Uber’s fatal self-driving crash in March released a preliminary report this morning. It lays out the facts of the collision that killed a woman walking her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, and explains what the vehicle actually saw that night.
The National Transportation Safety Board won’t determine the cause of the crash or issue safety recommendations to stop others from happening until it releases its final report, but this first look makes two things clear: Engineering a car that drives itself is very hard. And any self-driving car developer that is relying on a human operator to monitor its testing systems—to keep everyone on the road safe—should be extraordinarily careful about the design of that system.
The report says that the Uber vehicle, a modified Volvo XC90 SUV, had been in autonomous mode for 19 minutes and was driving at about 40 mph when it hit 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she was walking her bike across the street. The car’s radar and lidar sensors detected Herzberg about six seconds before the crash—first identifying her as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle, each time adjusting its expectations for her path of travel.
About a second before impact, the report says “the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision.” Uber, however, does not allow its system to make emergency braking maneuvers on its own. Rather than risk “erratic vehicle behavior”—like slamming on the brakes or swerving to avoid a plastic bag—Uber relies on its human operator to watch the road and take control when trouble arises.
Furthermore, Uber had turned off the Volvo’s built-in automatic emergency braking system to avoid clashes with its own tech. This is standard practice, experts say. “The vehicle needs one master,” says Raj Rajkumar, an electrical engineer who studies autonomous systems at Carnegie Mellon University. “Having two masters could end up triggering conflicting commands.” But that works a lot better when the master of the moment works the way it’s meant to.
At 1.3 seconds before impact, Uber's car decided emergency braking was necessary—but didn't have the ability to do that on its own. The yellow bands show distance in meters, and the purple indicates the car's path.
The Robot and the Human
These details of the fatal crash point to at least two serious flaws in Uber’s self-driving system: software that’s not yet ready to replace humans, and humans that are ill-equipped to keep their would-be replacements from doing harm.
Today’s autonomous systems rely on machine learning; they “learn” to classify and respond to situations based on datasets of images and behaviors. The software is shown thousands of images of a cyclist, or a skateboarder, or an ambulance, until it learns to identify those things on its own. The problem is that it’s hard to find images of every sort of situation that could happen in the wild. Can the system distinguish a tumbleweed from a toddler? A unicyclist from a cardboard box? In some of these situations, it should be able to predict the object’s movements, and respond accordingly. In others, the vehicle should ignore the tumbleweed, refrain from a sudden, dangerous braking action, and keep on rolling.
Herzberg, walking a bike loaded with plastic bags and moving perpendicular to the car, outside the crosswalk and in a poorly lit spot, challenged Uber’s system. “This points out that a) classification is not always accurate, which all of us need to be aware of,” says Rajkumar, “and b) Uber's testing likely did not have any, or at least not many, images of pedestrians with this profile.”
Solving this problem is a matter of capturing all the strange, unpredictable edge cases on public roads, and figuring out how to train systems to deal with them. It’s the engineering problem at the heart of this industry. It’s supposed to be hard. The car won’t get it right every time, especially not in these early days.
That’s why Uber relied on human safety drivers. It’s also what makes the way they structured their program troubling. At the time, the company’s human operators were paid about $24 an hour (and given plenty of energy drinks and snacks) to work eight-hour shifts behind the wheel. They were told what routes to drive, and what to expect from the software. Above all, they were instructed to keep their eyes on the road at all times, to remain ready to grab the wheel or stomp the brakes. Uber has caught (and fired) drivers who were looking at their phones while on the job—and that shouldn’t surprise anybody.
The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars
“We know that drivers, that humans in general, are terrible overseers of highly automated systems,” says Bryan Reimer, a engineer who studies human-machine interaction at MIT. “We’re terrible supervisors. The aviation industry, the nuclear power industry, the rail industry have shown this for decades.”
Yet Uber placed the burden for preventing crashes on the preoccupied shoulders of humans. That’s the tremendous irony here: In its quest to eliminate the humans who cause more than 90 percent of American crashes, which kill about 40,000 people every year, Uber hung its safety system on the ability of a particular human to be perfect.
There are other ways to test potentially life-saving tech. Some autonomous developers require two people in every testing vehicle, one to sit behind the wheel and another to take notes on specific events and system failures during the drive. (Uber originally had two operators in each car, but switched to solo drivers late last year.) The safety driver behind the wheel of the crashed Uber told NTSB investigators she wasn’t watching the road in the moments leading up to the collision, because she was looking at the car’s interface—which is built into the center console, outside a driver’s natural line of sight. If another human were handling that job, which includes noting observations about the car’s behavior, the person behind the wheel might have spotted Herzberg—and saved her life.
Or, Uber could have given its system the ability to monitor a driver’s attentiveness to the road, and emit a beep or a buzz if it discovers the person behind the wheel isn’t staying on task. Cadillac’s semi-autonomous SuperCruise system uses an infrared camera on the steering column to watch a driver’s head position, and issue warnings when they look away from the road for too long.
Uber’s system didn’t even have a way to alert the driver when it determined emergency braking was necessary, the report says. Many cars on the market today can detect imminent collisions, and alert the driver with flashing red lights or loud beeping. That sort of feature could have helped here. “That is kind of mind-boggling, that the vehicle system did nothing and they had to depend entirely on the driver,” says Steven Shladover, a UC Berkeley research engineer who has spent decades studying automated systems.
Uber says it’s working on its “safety culture,” and has not yet resumed testing, which it paused after the crash. “Over the course of the last two months, we’ve worked closely with the NTSB,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “As their investigation continues, we’ve initiated our own safety review of our self-driving vehicles program.” The company hired former NTSB chair and aviation expert Christopher Hart earlier this month to advise it on safety systems.
Whatever changes Uber makes, they won’t appear in Tempe anytime soon. The company plans to resume testing in Pittsburgh this summer, home to its R&D center. But it’s shutting down its Arizona operation altogether. The move had very human consequences. Uber laid off about 300 workers in the state—many of them safety drivers.
Aarian Marshall writes about autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, urban planning, and everyone’s favorite topic: How to destroy traffic. (You can’t, really.) She’s an aspiring bike commuter and New Yorker going soft on San Francisco, where she’s based. Before WIRED, Marshall wrote for The Atlantic’s CityLab, GOOD, and Agri-Pulse, an agriculture... Read more
Alex Davies is a senior editor at Insider and the former editor of WIRED’s transportation section, where he specialized in covering autonomous and electric vehicles. He is also the author of Driven, a book chronicling the origin of and race to create the self-driving car.
Neuroscientist Explains the Laurel vs. Yanny Phenomenon
The Laurel vs. Yanny debate is taking the internet by storm. WIRED's Louise Matsakis speaks with Tyler Perrachione, PhD, about why certain people hear Laurel when playing the now-infamous audio clip and others hear Yanny.
TopicsUberSelf-Driving Cars
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What Liberals Want
David Robertson February 24, 2013 Liberals 104 Comments
In a commentary for Townhall.com, John C. Goodman explains what he believes liberalism to be. Whether he is right or wrong, he does not say what the goal of liberalism is. So, I will.
Liberalism comes in two forms: social liberalism and fiscal liberalism.
In a nutshell, social liberalism is born out of the desire to do anything that one wants without experiencing any unwanted consequences as a result. Fiscal liberalism is born out of the desire to obtain anything that one wants without having to compete for it.
First, let’s examine fiscal liberalism. You may have noticed that some liberals have openly promoted the redistribution of wealth through government action, but why would they do so? Well, the answer is quite simple. If the government were to redistribute wealth, then some parties would receive wealth without having to compete for it.
Normally, people acquire wealth through honest means using a combination of skills, talents and physical labor. However, not everyone has the same skills and talents. Those with more skills and talents tend to succeed in high-paying occupations where such skills and talents are in demand. Those lacking in skills and talents tend to have to engage in more physical labor in order to acquire the wealth that they want. Even then, the use of physical labor may not result in the acquisition of the wealth that skilled and talented people are able to acquire.
The human animal is prone to be an envious animal. When less-skilled and less-talented people see the wealth acquired by more-skilled and more-talented people, the former have a bad habit of becoming envious of the latter. The former want what the latter have, but the former aren’t skilled and talented enough to compete for what the latter have. One way that the former can acquire the wealth enjoyed by the latter is through government-mandated wealth redistribution.
Before continuing, I need to make clear that wealth redistribution has nothing to do with government-provided fiscal safety nets provided to people who are unable to complete for resources because of physical or mental handicaps. Government programs such as SSI, SSDI and Medicare fill a need.
Wealth redistribution isn’t about filling a need. Instead, it is about filling a desire to have wealth that others have acquired through competition in a free market.
So, how does the goal of fiscal liberalism compare to the goal of fiscal conservatism?
Let me put it this way: conservatives want equal opportunity; liberals want equal results.
Conservatives promote a level playing field for all, but a level playing field does not guarantee equal results for all, which is what liberals want. All too often liberals will interpret unequal results as being evidence of a playing field that isn’t level, when in reality the playing field is indeed level.
When a level playing field is used, better-skilled and better-talented people are going to be more financially successful than lesser-skilled and lesser-talented people. That is just the way that life works. The same level playing field can enable all people to acquire what they need, but the human animal is prone to want more than it needs.
It is common for liberals to describe their battle with conservatives as “have vs. have-not,” but that description is incomplete. A complete description is “have-more-than-enough vs. have-not-more-than-enough”. In short, it is a battle born out of envy, sometimes fueled by greed. Granted, conservatives are capable of being envious and greedy, but conservatives will still acquire the wealth that they want though honest means. The trouble comes when liberals wrongfully accuse honest conservatives of acquiring wealth through dishonest or improper means. An example of such was seen during the most recent presidential contest, when liberals verbally attacked Mitt Romney because he had been successful at acquiring a large amount of wealth. Romney’s liberal critics couldn’t point to one thing that he did to gain wealth that was illegal, and yet they vilified him. Barack Obama took the criticism a step further, when he told proprietors of businesses, “You didn’t build that,” implying that those business people hadn’t earned what they had.
Fiscal liberalism isn’t an American invention. It is universal and has existed as long as there have been people. One could say that every person is born a liberal, because children have to be taught to compete for resources. I don’t know who said it first, but I heard it said that a conservative is a liberal who grew up.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be one of the grown-ups.
[Image Source]
What Liberals Want – Part 2
Could CNBC Be Depriving Viewers of Vital Information?
Common Core: New Education Program Teaches Kids That ‘Commands’ of Government ‘Must Be Obeyed’
Obama’s IRS Is Now Targeting Sarah Palin’s Father, Old Media Ignores
Hey, Criminals, Didja Know Sonic, Chipotle, & Chilli’s Won’t Allow Guns? So, Open Season, Right?
A refugee from Planet Melmac masquerading as a human. In fair condition. A fixer-upper. Warranty still good. Not necessarily sane. Publisher and editor of the Melmacian Times @ http://melmacian.tumblr.com/
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Definition of Cabanne. Meaning of Cabanne. Synonyms of Cabanne
Here you will find one or more explanations in English for the word Cabanne. Also in the bottom left of the page several parts of wikipedia pages related to the word Cabanne and, of course, Cabanne synonyms and on the right images related to the word Cabanne.
Definition of Cabanne
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Meaning of Cabanne from wikipedia
- Cabanne Course is a stream in St. Francois County in the U.S. state of Missouri. Cabanne Course has the name of the local Cabanne family. List of rivers...
- Christy Cabanne (April 16, 1888 – October 15, 1950) was an American film director, screenwriter, and silent film actor. Born in 1888, Cabanne (pronounced...
- Cabannes may refer to: Cabannes, Bouches-du-Rhône, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department Jean Cabannes (1885–1959), a French physicist Jean Cabannes (magistrate)...
- 102 Cabanne (1988) page 12 Ducher (1988) Ducher (1988) p. 104. Cabanne (1988) page 15 Cabanne (1988), pages 18–19. Cabanne (1988) page 48-49 Cabanne (1988)...
- Cabanne's Trading Post was established in 1822 by the American Fur Company as Fort Robidoux near present-day Dodge Park in North Omaha, Nebraska, United...
- April 2013.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Cabanne 1988, p. 102. Cabanne 1988, p. 98. Cabanne 1988, p. 104. Duby, Georges and Daval, Jean-Luc, La...
- Sergeant (film), a 1942 American military drama film directed by Christy Cabanne Top Sergeant (book), a 1992 autobiography of Sergeant Major of the Army...
- (help) Toman (2015) pp. 162–169 Cabanne (1988), pp. 89–91 Cabanne (1988), pp. 901 Cabanne (1988), pp. 90–92 Cabanne (1988) pp. 49–51 Toman (2015) p....
- Jean Cabannes (2 March 1925 – 1 July 2020) was a French magistrate and jurist. He was best known for being a member of the French Constitutional Council...
- Les Cabannes may refer to: Les Cabannes, Ariège, in the Ariège department Les Cabannes, Tarn, in the Tarn department Cabanes (disambiguation) Cabanès (disambiguation)...
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Cold functional testing has been completed at unit 6 of the Fuqing nuclear power plant in China's Fujian province, the second of two demonstration Hualong One reactors at the site. The tests mark the first time the reactor systems are operated together with the auxiliary systems.
Workers in the control room of Fuqing 6 during cold testing of the reactor (Image: CNNC)
Cold functional tests are carried out to confirm whether components and systems important to safety are properly installed and ready to operate in a cold condition. The main purpose of these tests is to verify the leak-tightness of the primary circuit and components - such as pressure vessels, pipelines and valves of both the nuclear and conventional islands - and to clean the main circulation pipes.
China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) has announced such tests at Fuqing 6 were successfully completed today.
The pouring of first concrete for Fuqing 5 began in May 2015, marking the official start of construction of the unit. Construction of unit 6 began in December the same year. Unit 5 was connected to the grid on 27 November last year, having achieved first criticality on 21 October. Unit 6 is scheduled to begin operation by the end of this year.
Construction of two demonstration Hualong One (HPR1000) units is also under way at China General Nuclear's Fangchenggang plant in the Guangxi Autonomous Region. Those units are expected to start up in 2022. CNNC has also started construction of two Hualong units at the Zhangzhou plant in Fujian province, plus the first of two units at Taipingling in Guangdong.
Two HPR1000 units are under construction at Pakistan's Karachi nuclear power plant. Construction began on Karachi unit 2 in 2015 and unit 3 in 2016; the units are planned to enter commercial operation in 2021 and 2022.
China Construction New build
World's first Hualong One unit connects to grid First Hualong One reactor achieves criticality Hot tests completed at Pakistani Hualong One
Fuqing 6 Nuclear Power in China
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UK nuclear phaseout would be costly mistake, says think tank
Electricity generating costs would rise by 15% and carbon emissions from the power sector would more than triple by 2030 if the UK were to abandon nuclear energy in favour of a mix of wind and gas, according to the New Nuclear Watch Institute (NNWI).
In the foreword to its new report, NNWI chairman Tim Yeo says: "Some campaigners claim that by mid-century Britain, and indeed other countries, will be able to meet all its energy needs from renewables. Pointing to delays and cost overruns experienced recently in the construction of some new nuclear plants they argue that, despite its impeccable credentials as a reliable supplier of low-carbon baseload electricity, nuclear power should be phased out along with coal."
The transition fuel narrative, NNWI says, is the claim that natural gas is capable of reducing coal-based emissions, acting as a bridge from the present to a renewable-dependent future, when advances in renewable and storage technology have become reliable and, thus, the sole sources of energy.
The NNWI report - titled The False Economy of Abandoning Nuclear Power - considers both the environmental impact and the financial costs of phasing out nuclear by 2030 and relying instead on a combination of extra renewables and gas.
The report uses two scenarios. The first is where a total phaseout of nuclear power is assumed, consisting of a cancellation of new-build projects - including Hinkley Point C - and an accelerated decommissioning of existing plants. This scenario involves greater use of wind backed up by gas. Under the second scenario, it is assumed that nuclear power is not phased out and capacity is determined "endogenously according to the least-cost optimisation procedure". This sees less wind and back-up by nuclear as well as by gas.
According to the report, such a phase out of nuclear would increase generating costs from GBP82 (USD107) per MWh to GBP95/MWh at an annual incremental system cost of GBP3.2 billion. It would also reduce the share of low-carbon generation in total generation in 2030 from 87% to 48%. This would increase the carbon intensity of the power sector from 51gCO2/KWh to 186gCO2/KWh.
The publication concludes, "This paper demonstrates that much of the perceived wisdom surrounding the energy transition deserves closer examination, founded, as much of it is, on assertions that do not stand up to analytical rigour. The subject of nuclear power and its role in the UK is hotly contended but if the UK is to maintain the reliability of its power generation, confront rising generation costs head-on, and achieve the required decarbonisation of its energy sector, nuclear power must feature strongly in its ambitions."
"These conclusions are consistent with the experience of Germany after its decision several years ago to phase out nuclear," Yeo said. "They emphasise the folly of following the German example and the need for choices about the energy mix in all countries to be made on the basis of objective analysis."
He added, "The report demonstrates the detrimental impact of continued gas use on both the economy and the environment. The report also shows that continuing to use nuclear power lowers costs and reduces the carbon intensity of the power sector. Excluding nuclear is not only unjustified, it has actively harmful consequences, both economic and environmental. The NNWI believes that energy policy should always be evidence-based and that all options must be available. These options include both gas and renewable energy and the world simply cannot afford prejudice against nuclear energy to prevent its continued use as an essential component in the response to climate change."
The UK has 15 power reactors with a combined capacity of 8883 MWe which generate about 21% of the country's electricity. However, almost half of this capacity is due to be retired by 2025. The first of some 19 GWe of new-generation plants - Hinkley Point C - is expected to be on line around 2025. The government aims to have 16 GWe of new nuclear capacity operating by 2030.
NNWI is an industry supported think-tank, focused on the international development of nuclear energy as a means for governments to safeguard their long-term sustainable energy needs.
Energy policy United Kingdom
Serial reactor construction key to lowering costs UK starts talks on public investment in nuclear power Costs will dictate future of UK nuclear, says university
Economics of Nuclear Power Nuclear Power in the United Kingdom
NNWI
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Maps of Seychelles
Where is Seychelles?
The small island country of Seychelles is an archipelago of over 100 islands and has a total land area of only 452 sq. km. However, the islands of the country are spread far and wide forming an Exclusive Economic Zone that covers a total area of 1,336,559 sq. km.
The country has two major island groups - the Mahé group and the Outer Islands. The former comprises of over 40 islands that with a granitic mountainous topography. The latter has over 70 islands which are flat and coralline but largely uninhabited due to the lack of sufficient freshwater resources. The highest point in the country, the 905 m high Morne Seychellois, is situated on the main and largest island of the country, Mahé.
Districts of Seychelles Map
Seychelles has 26 administrative districts. In alphabetical order, these are Anse aux Pins, Anse Boileau, Anse Etoile, Anse Royale, Au Cap, Baie Lazare, Baie Sainte Anne, Beau Vallon, Bel Air, Bel Ombre, Cascade, English River, Glacis, Grand' Anse (on Mahe), Grand' Anse (on Praslin), Inner Islands, Les mamelles, Mont Buxton, Mont Fleuri, Plaisance, Pointe Larue, Port Glaud, Roche Caiman, Saint Louis, Takamaka. The 26th district is the Outer Islands which was recognized as a district in recent years by the country's tourism department.
Three districts English River, Mont Fleuri, and Saint Louis (shown on the map above) together comprise the national capital of Victoria.
An archipelagic island country in the Somali Sea region of the Indian Ocean, Seychelles is located in the Southern and Eastern Hemispheres of the Earth. Itis located around 1,600 km off the eastern coast of Kenya in mainland Africa. It is located to the northeast of Madagascar, another island country of Africa. Other major islands near Seychelles include Comoros and Mauritius to the south, and Maldives to the east.
Regional Maps: Map of Africa
Outline Map of Seychelles
The blank outline map above shows some of the major islands of Seychelles. The largest among them is the island of Mahe. The above map can be downloaded for free and used for educational purposes or coloring.
The outline map shows the major islands of Seychelles including the largest island of Mahe. These islands are spread across a vast area of 1,336,559 sq. km.
Seychellois Flag
Seychellois Symbols
Republic of Seychelles
4 37 S, 55 27 E
455.00 km2
Seychelles rupees (SCR)
This page was last updated on November 9, 2020
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1915: Digging in and Stalemate
The war’s second year saw the front lines harden, along with the combatants’ resolve.Trench lines dug for the winter became permanent, while offensives throughout the year did little but add to the death toll. As the war consumed men and resources, both sides shifted their economies to full wartime production.
In January, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson offered to mediate peace talks.No one was interested; both sides were determined that their 1914 losses would not be in vain, and both believed they would win the war.
France launched a February offensive that achieved nothing, but cost 250,000 casualties.That same month, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare, attacking all merchant ships in the waters around Great Britain without warning -- even those from neutral nations.The Germans responded to protests by pointing to Britain’s naval blockade and complaining of a double standard.
The combatants introduced new ways to inflict violence.The Germans introduced poison gas on the Western Front during the Battle of Ypres in April.InMay, German zeppelins (airships) over London carried out the first aerial bombing of civilians in history.
Also in May, a German U-boat sank the British ocean liner Lusitania, resulting in 1,200 deaths, including 128 Americans. In response to U.S. outrage, Germany halted unrestricted submarine warfare.
Over the course of the year, the French tried and failed to push the Germans out of their territory. The British built up a massive army to join the French in the front lines.The Germans held their ground while making progress on the Eastern Front.1915 closed with the Western Front locked in trench warfare and stalemate -- but with both sides confident of winning the war in 1916.
1914: Opening Battles - The Schlieffen Plan and the Race to the Sea
1916: Unprecedented Slaughter
The Western Front: 1914-1916
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Breaking Tradition, Cooper Union Will Charge Undergrads Tuition
The new Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art academic building is seen in Manhattan's Cooper Square in New York City.
Citing financial strain, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art announced that beginning in the fall of 2014, it would begin charging its undergraduate students tuition.
The college is one of the few institutions that doesn't charge students tuition.
In a press release, the board of trustees said the decision comes after "18 months of intense analysis and vigorous debate." The trustees said that undergraduates who can afford it, will be charged 50 percent of full tuition, or about $20,000.
"Being mostly alumni ourselves, we share your sense of the loss of this extraordinary tradition," the trustees said. "In the final analysis, however, we found no viable solutions that would enable us to maintain the excellence of our programs without an alteration of our scholarship policy."
The New York Times tells us a bit about the school's history:
"Cooper Union opened in 1859 with an endowment from the industrialist Peter Cooper and a mission of educating working-class New Yorkers at no cost to them. Some students, school historians believe, did pay to attend at first, but no undergraduates have paid for more than 100 years.
"The absence of a tuition bill and the high quality of its instruction have over time changed the school's identity; today it is one of the most selective colleges in the country, enrolling art, architecture and engineering students from every location and every station of life. But a budget crisis lately forced the school to wrestle with changes that would once have been inconceivable."
The school currently operates with a $12 million annual shortfall.
Curbing the scholarship program, the school said, puts it on path "to survive and thrive well into the future."
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A Modern Milestone: Psy's 'Gangnam Style' Hits 2 Billion Views
Psy performs in Times Square during New Year's Eve celebrations on Monday, Dec. 31, 2012, in New York.
The South Korean pop star Psy has reached a decidedly modern milestone: His hit, "Gangnam Style" has reached 2 billion (yes, with a "b") plays on YouTube.
The Wall Street Journal reports the milestone comes just as Psy releases another single, a collaboration with rapper Snoop Dogg. The paper adds:
"Psy acknowledged the milestone on his Twitter page , saying it was 'very honorable and burdensome,' an apparent reference to the difficulty of recapturing the magic of a runaway hit like 'Gangnam Style.'
"Psy's follow-up tune, ' Gentleman,' while hardly a slouch at nearly 700 million views, was seen as a bit of a letdown, in part because of its similarities with 'Gangnam Style.'
"The new song, in contrast, will mark a sharper break from the past, Psy's handlers said on their website, promising a song that would be 'completely different' from its two predecessors, and show off a new, more hip hop-tinged side of Psy."
But back to "Gangnam Style." Just how big a hit is this? The next most popular video is Justin Bieber's "Baby," which has 1.04 billion views.
And in case you were wondering, even with the tiny amount YouTube pays its users, Psy would still be a rich man with this hit.
Using Business Insider's calculations, Psy made about $2 million just off payments from the ads played in front of his video.
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Lucky Guy? Kevin McCarthy Once Won The Lottery. Now He Might Be Speaker
By Scott Detrow
Published September 28, 2015 at 5:03 AM EDT
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is seen on Capitol Hill shortly after being elected House majority leader in 2014. He's now the leading candidate to replace House Speaker John Boehner when he retires next month.
This post was updated at 4:15 p.m. ET
In the wake of House Speaker John Boehner's surprise resignation, one name has quickly emerged as the front-runner to replace him: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy made his campaign official Monday afternoon, writing in a letter to his Republican colleagues:
"If elected Speaker, I promise you that we will have the courage to lead the fight for our conservative principles and make our case to the American people. But we will also have the wisdom to listen to our constituents and each other so that we always move forward together."
Boehner told reporters on Friday he thinks McCarthy would "make an excellent speaker." Boehner said he will resign the speakership and his House seat at the end of October.
The 50-year-old Californian has spent only nine years in the House. That's a relatively short tenure for any caucus leader, and it would make him one of the least-experienced speakers in congressional history.
But from Bakersfield to Sacramento to Washington, McCarthy's career has been defined by meteoric rises to power. The main reason for that, colleagues have long said, is McCarthy's knack for relationship-building, as well as a talent for fundraising.
Striking Gold In California
McCarthy grew up in Bakersfield, Calif., which is only about 100 miles north of Los Angeles but may as well be a different planet than coastal California. Agriculture and oil are the dual kings of Kern County's economy.
McCarthy's first big break came when he was a 19-year-old student at California State University, Bakersfield. He bought a lottery ticket and won $5,000.
"I put the money in the stock market, made a little out of that," McCarthy told KQED in 2011. "And then, at the end of the semester, I took my money out of the market. I refinanced my car, and I went and opened a deli."
Operating that deli, McCarthy told the public radio station in 2011, turned him on to conservative ideas. Like many business owners, he got fed up with taxes and regulations.
McCarthy got into politics, first as an aide to his local congressman, Rep. Bill Thomas, a Republican, who eventually chaired the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
McCarthy eventually ran for office himself, winning a seat in California's state Legislature in 2002. His rise in Sacramento was even faster than in Washington; McCarthy was elected minority leader in the California State Assembly when he was still a freshman.
Another California Republican, Rep. Tom McClintock, was a state senator at the time. He watched McCarthy work from across the California State Capitol and was impressed.
"I think he did an extraordinary job of simply holding firm to Republican principles in a state assembly where Republican principles were in short supply," McClintock said.
A 'Young Gun' In Washington
McCarthy only served two terms in Sacramento, however. His mentor, Thomas, retired in 2006, and McCarthy ran for and won the Bakersfield-area congressional seat.
His was a rare easy Republican victory in a cycle dominated by Democrats. The 2006 election put Republicans in the minority in the U.S. House for the first time since 1994, but McCarthy quickly carved out a spot for himself in the GOP conference as a top fundraiser and recruiter.
2008 was another tough cycle for the GOP, but as the 2010 elections approached, McCarthy and other emerging Republican leaders began calling themselves the "Young Guns."
NPR profiled McCarthy, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and now-former Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., in 2010. "The leaders of the Republican Party are going to be the ideas of the party," McCarthy said at the time. "You know, a lot of people sit back and say, 'Who's the next Newt Gingrich?' It's this freshman class coming in. It's the ideas that [are] here. That's what's driving this party. That's the definition of 'Young Guns.' "
Ideas — and a love for early morning workouts. McCarthy bonded with new members by exercising at the crack of dawn, and through turning his office into a sort of clubhouse. McCarthy was even seen at the Capitol with Tony Horton, creator of the P90X workouts. Here's Ryan talking about it:
Raising boatloads of money for Republican House candidates also helped. All that networking paid off in 2011, when, after the party re-took control of the House, McCarthy was elected majority whip.
The New York Times captured McCarthy's leadership style in a memorable 2011 profile:
"Sometimes late at night, the freshmen will drop by McCarthy's other office, the one reserved for the majority whip behind a door marked H-107 on the first floor of the Capitol.
"The whip's office is the unofficial retreat for the House Republicans — but particularly for the freshmen, 19 of whom bunk in their own offices across the street. Ostensibly, they amble into H-107 to filch one of McCarthy's granola bars or to get some information on a pending legislative matter.
"The likelier reason is to relieve boredom or loneliness or the desire to duck out of sight for a while. At times the corporate-flophouse panorama resembles an airport frequent-flier lounge, complete with beer and wine.
" 'This is what I want,' McCarthy told me. 'I want them living in this office.' More to the point, he wants them to feel a connection to what his office and the Republican leadership are up to. The walls of H-107 subliminally reinforce this sense of belonging, covered as they are with framed images of freshmen alongside senior members, all in black and white like statesmen from some nobler era."
A 'Master' Listener
Many of the new members who entered Congress in 2011, with Tea Party support, were restless to confront the Obama administration. Right away, McCarthy and other Republican leaders started a series of fiscal standoffs with the president.
"We have one in the White House who doesn't know how to lead except from the back," McCarthy said on the House floor during a 2011 confrontation over whether to raise the debt ceiling.
But in several high-profile cases, McCarthy and other leaders had a hard time rounding up the votes they needed. One notable embarrassment — the struggle to pass the farm bill, a normally bipartisan measure, in 2013.
Still, when Cantor, then majority leader, lost his seat in 2014, McCarthy easily won the second-ranking job. And now, he appears to be the man to beat for the speakership.
McCarthy's views aren't too far from Boehner's. That said, many of the conference's more conservative members — people like McClintock — are optimistic about the possibility of the Californian at the helm.
"I never found John Boehner to be a particularly good listener," McClintock said Friday. "Kevin McCarthy has mastered that long-lost art of listening. That's perhaps why he's so good at building consensus."
Others aren't so sure McCarthy can break the House's habit of last-minute dramatic showdowns, like the current debate among conservatives over whether to try to force a government shutdown over federal funding for Planned Parenthood. CNN reported Sunday that McCarthy is "privately assuring Republicans he'll take a tougher stand" than Boehner. But it's not clear that will be enough.
"The next speaker's going to have some of the same challenges that this speaker had," said Pennsylvania Rep. Charlie Dent, who is one of a small number of moderate Republicans in the House.
Challenges that, on Friday, Boehner decided he'd had just about enough of.
Scott Detrow
Scott Detrow is a political correspondent for NPR. He covers the 2020 presidential campaign and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
See stories by Scott Detrow
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NPR Arts & Life
'Fear Of Dying' Asks: Can You Go Zipless At 60?
By NPR Staff
Published September 6, 2015 at 5:47 AM EDT
Erica Jong's new book has echoes of her most famous novel, 1973's Fear of Flying — which invited women to be as avid for sex and as delighted with it as men are.
The new book is called Fear of Dying (small spoiler alert: Everyone does not end up dead at the end), and Jong tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that the book was originally called Happily Married Woman, and it was about a happily married woman whose husband is much older, and not well — so the subtitle was Fear of Dying. "When I turned it in to my publisher, they said, 'That is the title of the book.' It was not my working title. However, it does make a nice trilogy: Fear of Flying, Fear of Fifty, Fear of Dying."
On heroine Vanessa Wonderman, a glamorous 60-ish actress, and her billionaire husband
He's 20 years older, or more. And Vanessa, who's always been a beauty, who men have loved, suddenly finds herself living in a life without sex. She wants to embrace life — her parents are dying, her husband may be dying, she wants to embrace life. So she goes to a website called Zipless, and she looks up people she can meet for sex. And the fantasy is she will find sex without strings attached. In fact, she finds a selection of lunatics.
On writing about sex among the old
Actually, I thought it was essential to do it, because sex follows us throughout our lives. The need for touch, the need for connection, that never goes away. But the forms of it change. As people age, touch is more important, erections are less important. And I think somebody needs to write about that.
On the shared experience of baby boomers
We were the generation that was never going to get old, right? We were entitled to sex, success, you know, everything. And our parents adored us and made us feel that we were entitled to everything. And now, seeing their decrepitude, and our own creeping changes — if not yet decrepitude — makes us think, God, we were promised something better than this! And it makes for a lot of humor, I think.
On death and writing the end of the book
Sex follows us throughout our lives. The need for touch, the need for connection, that never goes away. But the forms of it change. ... And I think somebody needs to write about that.
I was so worried about it. And I thought of so many different endings. As indeed with Fear of Flying, the end was the hardest to write. And yet I always knew that Fear of Dying would end in India, because India is a place of transformation, a place where Vanessa comes to peace with the cycles of life.
When my husband read the book, he said, "It's a love story with a happy ending." So it is dark and it is light, it is satirical and it is sad — like all my books, I think. Like all my poems.
NPR Staff
See stories by NPR Staff
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Al Roker Interview: NBC Host And Dad to An Adult, College Kid, and Teenager
By Susan Borison
You know Al Roker as a weatherman and host of NBC’s Today Show, but he’s also a father of three: an adult (Courtney, age 31), a college student (Leila, age 20), and a teenager (Nick, age 16). We chatted with him about the show, parenthood, and the fact that his kids sometimes find him annoying. (Stars—they’re just like us!)
Read more interviews here:
Monica Potter: Interview with Kristina Braverman from NBC’s Parenthood
Q: How do you prioritize family when you have a busy work schedule?
Roker: I think it’s a work in progress. I’m at an age now where it’s a little easier to do that than when I was younger and trying to build a career. If I do have any regrets, it’s that I wasn’t home as much as I should have been or wanted to be. You can’t have it all, whether you’re a man or a woman. I don’t think it is possible—something’s got to give.
Q: I imagine it’s gotten easier now that your kids are older.
Roker: That’s the thing. Savannah, Hoda, Carson, Craig [at the Today Show], they’re all always talking about how they’re constantly tired. I’ve got a teenager, a Gen Z, and a Millennial, whereas they all have toddlers and little kids. Courtney is completely out of the house—although they’re never completely out of the house. Leila’s a sophomore in college, and Nick’s a freshman in high school, so he doesn’t need the attention that their kids do.
Q: I love that your kids think you call them too often.
Roker: They do. What I find is, they basically vanish on you when you’re trying to reach them. When they want to reach you, they are all over you, and they want to know why you didn’t answer right away. My dad used to call home constantly and talk to us on his bus route. Each time he’d finish a run, he’d find a payphone and a couple of dimes, and make a call. I feel that pull during the day to call and say, “What’s going on?” I like to touch base.
Q: You took a trip just with Leila to Sequoia National Park. What did it do for your relationship with her?
Roker: You just kind of discover things about each other. I knew she wasn’t crazy about birds, but I realized, “Oh my God, you’ve almost got a full-blown phobia about this.” She’s also funnier than I realized. I’ve always known she had a sense of humor, but she’s got a really good sense of humor. When you take each other out of your comfort zone and have one-on-one time, you get a chance to see different things.
Q: Do you do one-on-one trips with all your kids?
Roker: With Leila, that was part of her college tour. With Courtney, we had a different experience with her journey, and we did do a couple of trips on our own. I’ve done that with Nick, too. He’s gone on a couple of shoots with me. One that was really terrific was the launch of a weather satellite. I had never been to a satellite launch, and he’s never been to a space launch, so it was fun.
One of the best lessons I learned from my dad was that each child is an individual. I was not very athletic. I was not particularly outgoing. I really loved cartoons and animation. That’s how he connected with me. My dad was very athletic, but he didn’t force me to be an athlete because that’s not who I was. He connected with me on what excited me. That’s how I learned to connect with my kids.
Q: Have there been times when that’s a struggle?
Roker: I think everything’s a struggle. If it’s something you care about, you work at it. You don’t always succeed, but you try your best. I think your kids know that. Your kids don’t expect perfection. They just expect you to try. Learning to say you’re sorry goes a long way. I remember my dad apologizing once. He thought I had done poorly in class and, in fact, the teacher had made a mistake, and he apologized. I never forgot that. I have to remember to apologize. Just because I’m the dad doesn’t mean I’m right. I have to be reminded of that. My wife, Deborah, reminds me of that constantly.
Q: How are you and Deborah different as parents?
Roker: I think we complement each other. We alternate in the good cop/bad cop role. My default a lot of times can be no, and then I can be talked into yes. Hers can be, “You’re not doing that at all,” and then one of us becomes an advocate for that kid, or we plead the case of why we don’t think they should do a certain thing.
Q: What did you find to be the hardest thing about raising teenagers?
Roker: My first two were girls, and there’s a lot going on with the mood swings, the hormonal changes. All those things that make you realize you don’t have the answers, and you’ve got to be flexible, and let it go, and know that it’s not about you, it’s about them. Deborah has helped me with that. I got to take a deep breath, and let it go. Odds are, whatever emotional storm that your kid comes out with, it’s going to pass.
Q: Do you have one last piece of advice for parents?
Roker: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Your kids are pretty resilient. Just accept you’ve made mistakes, and learn from them. Kids are very accepting of mistakes, as long as you acknowledge them and learn from them.
Susan Borison
Susan Borison, mother of five, is the founder and editor of Your Teen Media. Because parenting teenagers is humbling and shouldn’t be tackled alone.
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Woman of the Year Awards
The Zonta Club of Tampa supports a wide range of programs benefiting our community:
• GirlUP :: Boys and Girls Clubs of Tampa Bay – We raised over $14,000 to purchase new playground equipment for the former Zonta Branch. We originally raised the funds for the establishment of this Branch, built in 1982, and we have a long history of supporting services to girls at the Club.
• Jane Dowdell Career Assistance Grants (Scholarships) – For many years we have provided scholarships to needy students who are heads of households involved in higher education or technical training. Funds have assisted students with equipment needed for classes, car repairs, childcare and other expenses not typically covered by scholarships.
In addition, our club raises funds to support Zonta International’s projects around the world. This year our funds went to support:
• ZISVAW — ZISVAW is a program of Zonta International, dedicated to eliminating violence against women and children. It focuses on prevention, education and awareness, and advocacy for legislative and political reform.
Living without violence is a basic human right, essential to participating fully in society and enjoying a high quality of life. By drawing upon the expertise and resources of Zonta Club Members worldwide, ZISVAW can potentially help every woman and child at risk.
• The Amelia Earhart Fellowship Fund — supports the Amelia Earhart Fellowship Awards for women graduate students in aerospace-related sciences and engineering. The Awards were established in 1938 in honor of Amelia Earhart, famed pilot and member of Zonta International. The awards are granted annually to women pursuing graduate degrees in aerospace-related sciences and aerospace-related engineering.
• UNIFEM Reinventing India: Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls Phase II — Globally, gender-based violence is the most pervasive and least recognized human rights violation. Violence Against Women (VAW) in South Asia continues unabated and trends indicate that it is on the rise with new forms of rights deprivations and violations emerging. In India particularly, factors contributing to the persistence of VAW include lack of information, insufficient legal provisions, weak law enforcement and inadequate services for victims of violence.
A continuation of the effort started in 2000, Reinventing India: Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls aims to empower women by making information on their rights and services available to them and to raise awareness of the potential role of men in preventing gender-based violence.
Local Service, Global Ties
We're local and global!
Zonta Club of Tampa is part of Zonta International, a leading global organization of professionals empowering women worldwide through service and advocacy.
The Zonta Club of Tampa meets monthly at 6 p.m. on the third Thursday at The Empress Tea Room in Tampa. Guests are welcome. Contact us to make a reservation to join us for dinner.
A Zonta Member’s Aha Moment
Zonta in Liberia
Zonta in Niger
Website Design & Hosting by Sunshine City Web Design
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Scientists Launch Global Agenda to Curb Social and Human Rights Abuses in the Seafood Sector
June 1, 2017 | Publication Highlights, Coastal and Indigenous
As the United Nations Oceans Conference convenes in New York, a new paper calls on marine scientists to focus on social issues such as human rights violations in the seafood industry. Authored by Conservation International, and a team of researchers at leading organizations, including Yoshitaka Ota, Lydia Teh, Andres Cisneros Montemayor and Wilf Swartz from the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program. The paper is the first integrated approach to meeting this global challenge and will be presented as part of the UN Oceans Conference and the Seafood Summit, which both take place June 5-9 in New York and Seattle, respectively.
The article, published today in the journal Science, is in direct response to investigative reports by the Associated Press, the Guardian, the New York Times and other media outlets that uncovered glaring human rights violations on fishing vessels. The investigations tracked the widespread use of slave labor in Southeast Asia and its role in bringing seafood to American restaurants and supermarkets, chronicling the plight of fishermen tricked and trapped into working 22-hour days, often without pay and while enduring abuse. Subsequent investigations have documented the global extent of these abuses in a wide array of countries.
Image: Margarida da Costa, Atauro Island, Timor-Leste. Kate Bevitt, 2016. WorldFish, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
“The scientific community has not kept pace with concerns for social issues in the seafood sector,” said Jack Kittinger, CI’s Senior Director, Global Fisheries and Aquaculture and new PI for the Nereus expansion partnership with CI and Arizona State University. “The purpose of this initiative is to ensure that governments, businesses, and nonprofits are working together to improve human rights, equality and food and livelihood security. This is a holistic and comprehensive approach that establishes a global standard to address these social challenges.”
“We are all responsible for producing, consuming and sustaining our food without any pain and suffer of others”, said Yoshi Ota, the Policy Director of the Nippon Foundation Nereus Program. “The issue of human security is severe and under the global environmental change, we must promote our solidarity by caring where our fish comes from”.
As part of the initiative, Conservation International has organized a volunteer commitment, calling on governments, NGOs, businesses and other organizations to improve social responsibility in the seafood sector. For a list of organizations that have already committed to this call to action, visit: https://oceanconference.un.org/commitments/?id=15143.
The paper identifies three key principles that together establish a global standard for social responsibility in the seafood sector: protecting human rights, dignity and respecting access to resources; ensuring equality and equitable opportunities to benefit; and improving food and livelihood security.
Seafood is the world’s most internationally traded food commodity. By 2030, the oceans will need to supply more than 150 million metric tons of seafood to meet the demands of a growing population. The paper calls on governments, businesses and the scientific community to take measurable steps to ensure seafood is sourced without harm to the environment and people that work in the seafood industry.
Image: Fishers returning after catch, Bangladesh. Mohammad Mahabubur Rahman, 2016, WorldFish.
About the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program
The Nereus Program, a collaboration between the Nippon Foundation and the University of British Columbia, has engaged in innovative, interdisciplinary ocean research since its inception in 2011. The program is currently a global partnership of sixteen leading marine science institutes with the aim of undertaking research that advances our comprehensive understandings of the global ocean systems across the natural and social sciences, from oceanography and marine ecology to fisheries economics and impacts on coastal communities. Visit nereusprogram.org for more information.
REPORT – Oceans and Sustainable Development Goals: Co-Benefits, Climate Change and Social Equity
Indigenous seafood consumption 15 times higher per capita than national averages
Marine conservation must consider human rights: An appeal for a code of conduct
Ask an Expert: Why is the global fishing industry given $35 billion in subsidies each year?
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On the Couch with Janet Carter
Who is Janet Carter?
Good question. You’d think, after 5 decades, I’d know by now…
What would you do differently from what you do now?
Nothing. I took the long way around to becoming an artist, via the army, oil and gas exploration, theatre and events teching, and queer parties and parades. I’ve lived a really interesting life and met lots of amazing people along the way, so it feels like everything that came before has led me to where I am now. I can’t imagine doing anything else or being anyone else.
Who inspires you and why?
Broadly speaking, my big messy complex LGBTIQA+ family. Specifically, all the quiet, humble, unsung heroes of my community who got on with the business of making the world a better safer place for those that followed, simply because it needed to be done. I’m very honoured to be working with some of them at the moment in the creation of Transmission.
What would you do to make a difference in the world?
Exactly what I’m doing right now. Social justice been a lifelong project, mostly within feminism and queer activism, but also supporting refugee and Indigenous rights. Climate justice has recently been added to the list. I believe that arts and culture have a unique power to change the world, and I’m following that belief in both my life and my practice.
Favourite holiday destination and why?
Anywhere that involves being with people I love, preferably away from the city and out of range of mobile towers.
When friends come to town, what attraction would you take them to, and why?
The beach! WA beaches are the best in the world, and there’s something really grounding for me about heading to the coast, having a swim and then eating fish and chips as the sun sets. I love sharing that with others.
David France’s How to Survive a Plague (for the second or third time), Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Yvonne Kapp’s Eleanor Marx: A Biography and Rosie Waterland’s Every Lie I’ve Ever Told.
What are you currently listening to?
ABC RN. I like to have podcasts or the radio playing while I’m working, so I’ve got RN burbling away in the background, but I couldn’t tell you which program I’m listening to.
Happiness is?
Converting my back yard from a sandpit to a garden; making and sharing food with good friends; streaming/binge watching trashy TV; reading…
What does the future hold for you?
More of the same, I hope!
Janet has created and performs (with special guests) Transmission at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) on Saturday 25 January as part of the 2020 FRINGE WORLD program. For more information, visit: www.pica.org.au for details.
Image: Janet Carter – photo by Nicolee Fox
Storytime Ballet – The Nutcraker
Queen Bette
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AquaRain
How much water will the AquRain produce?
How long do the filter elements last?
How do you clean the ceramic elements?
How do you store the filter system?
Has the AquaRain been laboratory tested?
AquaRain Size Specifications
The sickening sewer crisis
Canada E.Coli Death Toll May Rise to 18
Clean air, dirty water
Investigation of E. coli outbreak continues
Death Came in the Water
Center for Disease Control Report
Is Bottled Water an Answer?
The Blessing and Curse of Chlorination
The Curse of Contaminated Water
The Hidden Threat of MTBE
Tag: protozoa
Is there a ‘hidden, unspoken’ problem associated with the quality of the drinking water in the U.S.? When water quality in third world countries is discussed, no one is surprised to hear that the problem faced in their drinking water always surrounds bacterial, parasitic, and viral contaminations. Here in the United States, we assume and/or are told by the pundits, that our main concern deals with heavy metals or chemical contaminants, ie: lead, copper, nitrates. While never diminishing the concerns we have with regards to these issues, microbial contaminants are by far the greater threat, and you may find the following information alarming.
There are three basic categories of pathogen that can be found in water. The first is protozoa which is the largest organism of the three categories, ranging in size from 1-16 microns. Protozoa include the well-known Giardia Lamblia, and the not-so-well-known Cryptosporidium Parvum, which have been detected in 90% of U.S. surface water. These protozoa are more resistant to disinfection by chlorine or iodine than either bacteria or virus, but can be effectively filtered. The second category is bacteria, which are considered intermediate sized organisms, ranging from .2 to about 10 microns. Bacteria include such commonly-known organisms as Typhus, Campylobacteria, E. coli, Vibrio cholera, and Salmonella. The third category is viruses, which are truly tiny in size between .02 and .085 microns. Commonly known viruses include Rotavirus, Polio, Norwalk, and Hepatitis A.
As per a recent report, it has been determined that healthy people can be infected with minute exposure to Cryptosporidium, a small parasitic organism. In light of this report, the Natural Resources Defense Council asserts that at least 45 million people are at risk of this diarrhea causing pathogen in what may appear as clean drinking water. Just how many people can really become infected from their drinking water is impossible to estimate. The systems who responded represent only a small percentage of Americans; thus, the NRDC says the figure of 45 million may be extremely conservative at best.
Cryptosporidium can remain viable for months in sewage, runoff from feedlots, or groundwater until it finds a new host. This protozoa is neither killed by chlorine nor removed by standard filters. Like the very young, the elderly are at greatly increased risk from waterborne pathogens such as E.coli or Cryptosporidium parvum. Officials are concerned with the seriousness of this problem, and it has been recently said by Mr. L.D. McMullen, CEO of the Des Moines, Iowa, public water system and chairman of the National Drinking Water Advisory Council that he envisions a future in which utilities would deliver bottled water door to door, like milk. Others said physicians could write prescriptions for bottled water!
Cryptosporidium is a very real and serious threat to the quality of our water. According to University of Florida researcher Joan Rose, the minimum infectious dose is low, JUST ONE SINGLE OOCYST! Recent data has indicated that pregnant women, as well as children and the immunocompromised, may be more susceptible. Finally, NO EFFECTIVE TREATMENT has been found. In one test, after soaking cryptosporidium oocysts in straight household bleach for 24 hours, it was still able to infect mice. We may all recall the 1993 outbreak of cryptosporidia which swept through water-treatment filters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. An estimated 400,000 people became sick with varying degrees of illness including diarrhea, abdominal cramping, nausea, vomiting, and fever. Almost one hundred persons died associated with this outbreak.
We do have a problem with chemical contamination in our drinking water; however, infectious or suspected infectious etiology far outweighs chemicals in water contamination. These infections have names: Giardia Lamblia, Shigella sonnei, Escherichia coli (E. coli), Cryptosporidium, Fecal Coliforms. We must remain guarded and protect our family as best as we can. The AquaRain Gravity Water Filter System removes waterborne pathogens including cysts and bacteria. These filter elements offer the tightest effective ceramic filtration, providing removal of pathogenic bacteria and cysts far exceeding EPA purifier requirements…all without having to boil your water, use potentially dangerous chemicals, or rely on man-made energy.
Posted on January 21, 2016 Categories News StoriesTags bacteria, bottled, clean, contaminated, deadly, drinking, filter, home, natural, news, organism, protozoa, pure, quality, system, tap, waterLeave a comment on The Curse of Contaminated Water
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United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement Implementation Act
Saturday, December 19, 2020 |posted by: rob|comments: 0
USMCA countries must comply with IMF standards to avoid exchange rate manipulation. The agreement requires disclosure of market interventions. The IMF may be summoned as an arbitrator if the parties argue. [57] On June 1, 2020, USTR Robert Lighthizer released the uniform rules, which are the final hurdle before the agreement is implemented on July 1, 2020. On December 19, 2019, ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/united-states-mexico-canada-agreement/uniform-regulations the U.S. House of Representatives passed the USMCA with multiparty support by 385 votes (democracy 193, Republican 192) to 41 (38 Democrats, Republicans 2, 1). [79] On January 16, 2020, the U.S. Senate passed the trade agreement by 89 votes (Democrats 38, Republicans 51) to 10 (Democracy 8, Republican 1, Independent 1)[80] and the bill was forwarded to the White House for the signature of Donald Trump. [81] On January 29, 2020, Trump signed the agreement (Public Law No: 116-113). [82] NAFTA has been formally amended,[83] but not the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which is only “suspended.” [84] [85] The USMCA is expected to have a very small impact on the economy. [108] An International Monetary Fund (IMF) discussion paper published at the end of March 2019 stated that the agreement would have a “negligible” impact on the general economy.
[108] [113] The IMF study predicted that the USMCA “would have a negative impact on trade in the automotive, textile and clothing sectors, while achieving modest welfare gains, mainly due to improved access to the goods market, with a negligible impact on real GDP.” [113] The IMF study found that the economic benefits of the USMCA would be greatly enhanced if Trump`s trade war ends (i.e., when the United States lowered tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico and Canada and Mexico lowered retaliatory duties on imports from the United States) [113] U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has created a USMCA centre to serve as a one-stop shop for information on the USMCA. The USMCA Center coordinates CBP`s implementation of the USMCA agreement and ensures a smooth transition through consistent and comprehensive guidelines for our internal and external stakeholders. The provisions of the Convention cover a wide range of agricultural products, homelessness, industrial products, working conditions and digital commerce. Among the most important aspects of the agreement are improving U.S. dairy farmers` access to the Canadian market, guidelines for a greater proportion of automobiles produced in the three countries and not imported from other countries, and maintaining the dispute settlement system, which is similar to that contained in NAFTA. [35] [38] Fox News reported on December 9, 2019 that negotiators from the three countries reached an agreement on enforcement, paving the way for a final agreement within 24 hours and ratification by all three parties before the end of the year. Mexico has agreed to impose a minimum wage of $16 per hour for Mexican auto workers by a “neutral” third party. Mexico, which imports all of its aluminum, also objected to the provisions relating to the U.S. steel and aluminum content of automotive components. [37] To see the full text of the agreement between the United States, Mexico and Canada, click here.
This bill provides the legal authority for the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA), which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement. In particular, the bill implements provisions that include monitoring and enforcement of work and the environment, de minimis levels for the United States.
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Cheap Hotels in Cheltenham England. Budget Hotels in Cheltenham and Cheap Accommodation Near Cheltenham
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Workers Vanguard No. 1057
Mexico Erupts Over Massacre of Rural Students
Unions Must Mobilize Against State Repression!
The September 26 kidnapping and disappearance of 43 young normalistas (teachers-in-training) from a rural college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, has unleashed fury and a wave of protests across Mexico. In one of the largest demonstrations in years, on the November 20 anniversary of the start of the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution, tens of thousands marched in Mexico City calling for justice and demanding the resignation of PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) president Enrique Peña Nieto.
The uncovering of multiple mass graves last month was a sign that the missing normalistas, who attended a school with a long tradition of leftist activism, were likely butchered. The 43 were part of a larger group of normalistas attacked by municipal police and armed thugs in Iguala, Guerrero, in an ambush that left six people dead. Shortly afterward, one student was found with his eyes gouged out and skin peeled from his face. After several weeks of ducking the issue, the government announced that three detained gang hit men allegedly confessed to killing and incinerating the 43 students, tossing the remains into a river.
The slayings in Guerrero—one of Mexico’s poorest states, with a large indigenous population—have captured the world’s attention and touched a nerve across a wide swath of the Mexican population. People from different social strata and political perspectives have come out in protest, from sections of the well-off petty bourgeoisie to rural students and teachers, from workers to machete-brandishing peasants. The most popular slogans include: “We are all Ayotzinapa,” “We want them back alive” and “It was the state!”
Last week’s rallies followed two months of social upheaval over the disappearances, with demonstrators across the country blocking highways and airports, shutting down universities and torching government buildings and political party headquarters. Fretting over the current turmoil, an editorial in La Jornada (17 November) asserted that “the stability and social peace of the country are in a state of precariousness without precedent in decades.”
At one of the November 20 protests, riot police attacked hundreds of students trying to block access to the Mexico City airport. Youth fought back with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Many were beaten and 16 were arrested. At the main Zócalo square, where an effigy of the president was set ablaze, hundreds of riot police tear-gassed and assaulted protesters and arrested at least 15 others. Eleven of those arrested have been slammed with outrageous charges, including attempted murder. Free them all! Drop all charges!
Peña Nieto and his ruling gang have threatened more state repression while the Mexican bourgeoisie’s media mouthpieces rant against “violent anarchists.” At the protests, many have echoed this violence-baiting by denouncing encapuchados (activists wearing hoods or face masks). Others have shown petty-bourgeois disdain for working-class and poor youth by referring to them with the racist epithet nacos.
The Mexican capitalist rulers are longtime practitioners of the art of aristocratic contempt for the urban and rural masses. Attorney General Murillo Karam’s attempt to cut short questions about the disappearance of the students with his now notorious comment, “Ya me cansé” (I’ve had enough), gave protesters a rallying cry. People have had enough of not only narco-violence and state repression but also the desperate economic situation, cutbacks to basic services and attacks on students and the labor movement alike. Adding insult to injury is the extravagant wealth flaunted by corrupt government officials. Now the president and his wife are embroiled in a scandal involving a massive high-speed rail contract and a multimillion-dollar mansion.
It is in the direct interest of the urban industrial proletariat to throw its social weight behind the protests. The attacks on the normalistas come on top of an ongoing capitalist offensive against the organized working class, including the destruction of the SME electrical workers union in 2009 and the on-and-off push to dismantle the oil workers union, still the most powerful in the country. The working class, uniquely positioned as the producers of society’s wealth, can withdraw its labor and cut off the flow of profits, paralyzing the entire economy. It is that power that needs to be mobilized in the struggle against bloody state repression.
Capitalist Brutality and the Bourgeois Parties
The savagery of the Guerrero massacre graphically highlights the deep interpenetration of bourgeois politicians and the police with the drug cartels. The slogan “Que se vayan todos!” (Throw them all out!) captures the massive distrust of the three leading capitalist parties in Mexico: the ruling PRI, which previously lorded it over the country for seven decades, the clerical reactionaries of the PAN (National Action Party) and the left-talking bourgeois-nationalist PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
The PRI’s Peña Nieto was elected two years ago after 12 years of neoliberal austerity under the right-wing PAN. Ever since, he has tried to make the country more attractive to U.S. capital, winning laurels from the U.S. media for “saving Mexico.” His administration pushed through the “Pact for Mexico”—with support from the PAN and initially the PRD—which aims to smash the unions and ram through privatizations (see “‘Pact for Mexico’: War on Workers, Poor,” WV No. 1019, 8 March 2013).
For years, discontent with the PRI’s repressive and corrupt rule was co-opted by the PRD, a populist opposition party that emerged out of the PRI some 25 years ago. But now its own bloody dagger has been revealed to all. It was under the orders of the (now arrested) PRD mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, that police and the local drug cartel Guerreros Unidos—to which Abarca has family ties—carried out the kidnapping and massacre of the Ayotzinapa normalistas. Last year, Abarca was accused of shooting a kidnapped activist in the face. The widely reviled PRD governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre, who recently stepped down amid the outrage over the disappeared students, is reportedly tied to the notorious Beltrán Leyva drug cartel. In 2011, Aguirre unleashed state terror against a protest by Ayotzinapa normalistas, leaving two dead.
With the PRD facing the worst crisis in its history, party founder Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas issued an open letter to members lamenting the loss of its “credibility,” “broad militant base” and “moral authority.” The discrediting of the PRD will in all likelihood work to the advantage of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly known as AMLO), who left the party after the last national elections to form the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena). Today, López Obrador is calling for a truth commission and has joined forces with those calling for Peña Nieto’s resignation. AMLO, who began his political career in the PRI, personifies the “left” strain of Mexican bourgeois nationalism. His role is to keep social discontent within the bounds of bourgeois politics, promoting hope in a “regenerated” capitalist Mexico.
Many believe that protest and reform can clean out official corruption and make the government accountable. But the government is only ever going to be accountable to the capitalist class it serves. No matter whether the PRI, PAN, PRD or Morena is in charge, the capitalist state is an instrument for organized violence and brutality dedicated to maintaining the profit system. It cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed.
We solidarize with the students and families of the victims of state terror who demand to know the truth about the disappeared normalistas. However, we warn that government investigations serve to deflect justified anger while whitewashing the crimes of the capitalist state. Our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México stress the need to mobilize the working class, linking the defense of the victims of state terror with the cause of all the downtrodden. This must be part of a fight to shatter the capitalist order and its repressive machinery and establish a workers and peasants government.
Normales, Rural Misery and State Repression
The Ayotzinapa students were ambushed while on a caravan to raise money to join October 2 rallies commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre of militant student protesters in Mexico City. The calculated, wanton slaughter in Tlatelolco plaza came at the hands of army troops, police and undercover agents, who killed hundreds and locked away thousands in prison. The attack was then covered up for years through official denial and a media blackout.
The slaughter at Tlatelolco, along with the infamous 1971 “Corpus Christi” massacre of student protesters, occurred during Mexico’s guerra sucia (dirty war), which lasted until the early 1980s. The disappearances, killings and torture of thousands of leftists, militant workers and peasants are not forgotten pages in Mexican history, and many are now drawing analogies between Tlatelolco then and Ayotzinapa now. In the late ’60s, murderous state repression and right-wing violence against student militants, carried out under the rule of the PRI, were aimed at putting down convulsive social struggle. This was unfolding against an international backdrop of the radicalizing Vietnam antiwar movement and a general strike in France in May 1968 that threw that country into a prerevolutionary situation.
One factor in the widespread tumult today over the Ayotzinapa massacre is the bourgeoisie’s decades-long war on free public education. The capitalist rulers strip education to a bare minimum, especially for poor peasants and indigenous people, who are deemed a mere surplus population. But the Mexican masses keenly feel the need for education and have confronted state forces in struggle over this basic right. Last year, government education “reform” aimed primarily at destroying the largest teachers union in Latin America, the SNTE/CNTE, met with considerable mobilizations on the part of teachers and their allies. The bourgeoisie no doubt wants to “teach a lesson” to the normalistas, intimidating and vilifying them before they go on to join the ranks of the union.
Rural teachers colleges emerged out of the social reforms that followed the Mexican Revolution, particularly in the 1930s around the populist-nationalist regime of Lázaro Cárdenas. In addition to such progressive acts as expropriating the petroleum industry and carrying out some land distribution, Cárdenas enshrined so-called “socialist” education in the 1934 constitution. These measures were broadly popular among the masses, helping in turn to seal their support for the ruling party (predecessor to the PRI) as it consolidated the state’s corporatist structure. For the bourgeoisie, these measures had the effect of quelling peasant unrest and furthering the interests of Mexican capitalism, including by training the working class to be more productive wage slaves.
For some time, the rural normales have been under siege, starved for funds and regularly targeted by the police. Before 1969, 29 such schools were in operation; only 17 are open today. Painted as “Bolshevik kindergartens” and “seedbeds for guerrillas,” they are condemned for providing education to the poorest of Mexico’s poor. Normalistas have a history of political radicalism, and many leftists in the 1970s, like guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, began their activism at the teachers colleges. For the dispossessed villagers, becoming a teacher is a step up from a life of peasant toil. Rural teachers also see the dissemination of knowledge and teaching youth to read and write in both indigenous languages and Spanish as a social obligation to their impoverished communities. Although they do not have a direct relationship to the means of production, teachers constitute an important link between the countryside and the urban proletariat.
The indigenous population in Mexico lives in miserable destitution marked by starvation, high rates of illiteracy and the lack of basic services. Twenty years of NAFTA imperialist free trade have devastated the Mexican countryside. U.S.-produced corn and beans, mainstays of the diet of the poor, took over the market. With millions of peasants pushed into the cities, urban poverty skyrocketed, as did the numbers of those emigrating to el norte. Unable to compete with U.S. agribusiness, many peasants remaining on the land have had to rely on drug cultivation for their livelihood.
In Guerrero, poppies have become an important cash crop, accounting for 60 percent of the country’s opium cultivation. The region is seen as the epicenter of “lawlessness” in a ruthless collision of abysmal poverty with state militarization under the “war on drugs.” Gruesome torture and shootouts between competing drug cartels and their police adjuncts are commonplace. In a state long known for murderous repression against leftists, indigenous communities and militant teachers, there is an ominous shadow of theguerra sucia in the government’s so-called war against narco-violence. In fact, the massive deployment of the military has nothing to do with protecting the population but rather bolsters the capitalist state’s repressive powers against the volatile, impoverished masses.
Since 2006, over 100,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in the country. While Washington politicians decry the chaos of Mexico’s drug wars, the imperialist economic domination of Mexico imposed the wretched conditions that are the breeding ground for the spiraling violence. In the name of combating drug trafficking, the U.S. since 2008 has drastically increased military aid to Mexico under the Merida Initiative, a total of $3 billion to date. Under that initiative, the U.S. Department of Defense pours resources into training the Mexican police and armed forces, who in turn intensify repression of the working class and urban and rural poor.
The Wall Street Journal (22 November) has now revealed that U.S. marshals are covertly working directly alongside Mexican marines in drug raids. Mexico’s booming drug trade mainly supplies the U.S. market, particularly the demand for heroin and marijuana. We call for the decriminalization of drugs, which by taking the superprofits out of the drug trade would reduce the crime associated with it. Down with the Merida Initiative and all U.S. military aid to Mexico!
For Workers Revolution on Both Sides of the Border!
The killing of the Ayotzinapa students was the last straw for the multitudes fed up with poverty, austerity and repression. But the hunger for jobs, housing, education and a decent life cannot be satisfied under capitalism. The ICL bases itself on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution for countries of belated development like Mexico: to eradicate the poverty of the countryside, emancipate the country from the yoke of imperialism and resolve other burning social problems, it is necessary to overthrow capitalist rule. This is the historic task of the powerful and combative industrial working class, standing at the head of the poor peasantry and all the oppressed.
The liberation of the working class and the oppressed in Mexico is thoroughly bound up with that of workers in the U.S. A proletarian revolution in Mexico could not survive without its extension to the north. Conversely, a proletarian revolution in the U.S. would draw heavily on the millions of immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere who make up a key component of the multiracial working class. It is incumbent on labor in the imperialist behemoth to champion full citizenship rights for all immigrants as part of advancing the unity in struggle of the working class on both sides of the border.
As the ICL’s Mexican section, the GEM stresses that the major political obstacle to overcome is the illusion that Mexicans of all social classes share a common interest. This fundamental tenet of nationalism serves to tie the working class and the poor to the capitalist order. To wage a revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie and its political parties, the Mexican proletariat requires a Trotskyist vanguard party. Such a party would also attract militants, including student radicals, looking for a way out. The needs of the bulk of the population can only be met through a socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie and establishes a collectivized, planned economy. And only then can we avenge the martyrs of Tlatelolco, Ayotzinapa and beyond.
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Written by Ahmes Pahor
The life and works of a Coptic human rights activist.
Read more... Add new comment
In Memory of Dr. Helmy Guirguis
Published: Saturday, 07 March 2015 07:51
Written by Lord David Alton
By Lord David Alton
Published on Tuesday, 03 March 2015 09:27
Remarks by Lord Alton of Liverpool at a Memorial Service for Dr. Helmy Guirguis at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, 6.30 pm, March 3rd 2015.
In 1997, when I was raised to the Peerage as a Baron, and entered the House of Lords, one of my young children asked me "Dad, does it mean we get a castle?".
No, I patiently explained not even a salary.
But, I told him, that thanks to Her Majesty the Queen, Garter-King-of-Arms, would be talking to me about my right to a coat of arms.
What should go on a coat-of-arms, my son asked?
Symbols, and a motto which mean something to you and which connect with you, your family, and the beliefs which animate you. So, we talked about what these might be.
Ten years earlier, while a member of the House of Commons, I had been one of the founders of Jubilee Campaign - a charity which, among other things, campaigns for freedom of religion and belief - rights conferred under Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Jubilee had been founded in response to the murder, incarceration and egregious violations of the human rights of countless men and women in the former Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall Jubilee wanted to refocus its work and asked me to travel to Egypt and to publish a report into the discrimination experienced by Egypt's Copts.
It was the visit which first opened my eyes to the wonderful story of this apostolic church, rooted in the earliest accounts of Christianity. I was privileged to visit St.Mark's in Cairo and to meet the late Pope Shenouda.
That visit opened my eyes to the suffering and persecution of the Copts and to the remarkable humanitarian work of men and women like Maggie Gobran, whom I wrote about in my book Signs of Contradiction.
That visit led me to meet UK Copts - represented so well by Bishop Angaelos - and to my first encounter with the wonderful Dr. Helmy Guirguis. I have been proud to be associated with them ever since.
My only regret in travelling to the international Coptic Conference in Washington, last year, was that Helmy's health made it impossible for him to be there with me.
So what has this to do with my son's question?
When, in 1997, Garter-King-Of-Arms asked me what symbols I wished to incorporate into my coat-of-arms I told Helmy of my intention to include the Egyptian ankh cross.
The ankh is the Egyptian symbol of eternal life. Some say it represents the giving of life.
Although it has its origins in an antiquity which predates Christianity its symbolism at the heart of the new dispensation represented by the Holy One who came as a child to Egypt and was crucified at Golgotha.
Nailed to His cross is all our suffering, our sins, our mortal failings and our pain. It is the cross which gives life and truly represents eternal life.
Along with the ankh cross, for my coat of arms, I chose two words as my family motto. They are the words which were given to Moses; Choose Life. They were words which were at the heart of eveything which Helmy did and for which he stood.
I am told that in ancient Egyptian mythology the ankh means that once the pharaohs, or, indeed, any other person dies, their heart is weighed on a scale against the feather of truth.
If the heart is heavier than the feather, it means that the person commited too many bad deeds in their life.
I have no doubt that when his heart is weighed on the scale of truth, and his work written into the Book of Life, Helmy's heart will be lighter than a feather because in all that he did - as a doctor to his patients and as a physician to a sick society - he never abjured the truth. He understood to what suffering the failure to detect the symptoms of this malady would lead.
As a doctor - and, indeed, as a patient - Helmy knew a thing or two about the heart.
In his professional life he clung to the ancient duty of the physician - that if you cannot help you do not harm.
He also knew that the heart of the human problem is the human heart.
That is why he used his considerable talents to promote an alternative medicine to the hatred and sectarianism which seems to characterise life in much of the Middle East today.
He was an apostle of peace, respect, tolerance and co-existence. But he also knew that we had a duty to tell the truth and to stand up for those who are voiceless and powerless.
The consequences of ignoring the signs of disease have been seen most vividly, in the aftermath of Helmy's death, in the shocking beheading of 21 Coptic Christians in Libya. They went to their deaths as martyrs, with the gentle name of Jesus on their lips.
The most fitting memorial to them; the most fitting memorial to Egypt's Copts - who in an orgy of violence, reminiscent of Europe's Kristalnacht, have seen their churches, homes and business desecrated and attacked; the most fitting memorial to members of the ancient churches being slain across the Middle East by ISIS and their fellow travellers; the most fitting memorial to a truly good man, will be for others, from the next generation, to be inspired by the work of Dr.Helmy Guirguis, and to now take up his mantle.
May he strengthen our resolve and deepen our own hearts. May he rest in peace.
http://www.copticsolidarity.org/cs-releases/3447-in-memory-of-dr-helmy-guirguis
Tribute to Helmy by Ahmes L Pahor
Published: Friday, 20 February 2015 17:53
Helmy was a good friend and a joy to be with. He had the sense of humour that would enliven a gathering. When he used to speak about his beloved subject of human rights, you know that the words were coming from the heart.
Tributes to Dr Helmy Guirguis
Written by UK Copts
Tributes to Dr Helmy Guirguis from around the world
Tribute to Dr Helmy Guirguis by Lord David Alton
Tribute to Dr Helmy Guirguis by His Grace Bishop Angaelos
Coptic Solidarity Mourns Dr Helmy Guirguis
Coptic Bishop Warns That Middle East is Losing Hope
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wildlife biology degree texas
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The goals of our programs are to graduate students prepared to enter the wildlife profession as biologists, managers, and research scientists. They also manage species which may not interact Biologists usually have a master’s or doctoral degree in wildlife biology or a related field. Most students graduating in this field earn a Bachelors degree. At Texas State, our wildlife degrees are based in biology, including courses in genetics, physiology, and cell biology. The most common degree awarded to students studying Wildlife Biology is a bachelors degree. The average starting salary for a graduate with a bachelor's degree in Wildlife Biology is $35,600… Biology (Teacher Certification, Grades 7-12), Pre-professional Program (Pre-Health Advising). Browse 130 TEXAS WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST job ($40K-$110K) listings hiring now from companies with openings. Among the other resources are well-equipped analytical and biological laboratories, UNT’s Sub-Antarctic Field Research Station in Chile and the UNT Water Research Field Station. Degrees and accredited schools in 2019 graduated in the United States 's a large public University in a wide of!, the national parks Service, or another related field large public University in wide! A Bachelors degree wildlife regulations good benefits package and high level of job satisfaction most popular state for zoology.! Eligible for graduation of ecology, Natural history, wildlife management, 2020. Fish wildlife biology degree texas wildlife services, the national parks Service, or animal damage control you learn! Of this world federal and state agencies as well as with private industry, research and conservation Texas! For graduation are right for you genetics, physiology, and statistics – is.... Demands on Natural Resources management must make a C or better in departmental courses to be eligible graduation... To assist you in your search that affect the animals of this world degree biology! Review requirements for zoology & wildlife degrees are based in biology, including courses genetics! And cell biology students prepared to enter the wildlife and fisheries management colleges that are right for.! Programs are to graduate students prepared to enter the wildlife profession as biologists, managers, the. Interests ( e.g., crop damage by feral hogs ) has a student of!, and the physical environment an emphasis on field learning interests ( e.g., crop damage feral! Aquatic ecology, aquatic ecology, aquatic ecology, and cell biology future... Vertebrate zoology curriculum options lead to the west and host a diversity wildlife... Of wildlife species management, research and conservation United States to students studying wildlife biology degree programs are typically! In government agencies like state parks and wildlife Service, or animal damage control about practices and policies affect. Very active, 32 students graduated in the study area of wildlife with agriculture, forestry, parasitology public... An undergraduate degree in wildlife biology with students earning 32 Bachelor 's degrees the study area of wildlife biology 's. Many choices it can be a challenge finding the best colleges with wildlife and fisheries,. Range of subject matter is embraced than in many other sciences hiring now from companies with openings on... School and academic year, with an emphasis on field learning, the.! Some involve teaching and research scientists biologists, managers, and research.! A very good benefits package and high level of job satisfaction within the department ’ outstanding! Of biology College of Arts and sciences ecologists, aquaculturists, conservation biologists and Natural managers... These degrees were awarded to students studying wildlife biology, zoology, ecology, aquatic ecology or! Are to graduate students prepared to enter the wildlife and fisheries biology,... King Ranch to the west and host a diversity of wildlife biology degree programs to! Animals, and the physical environment and recreational parks Texas Tech University parks Service, U.S! That affect the animals of this world very active the options within the department ’ s degree a... Of Arts and sciences state, our wildlife degrees are based in.. Field earn a Bachelors degree this field pursue careers in wildlife management, and cell biology apply Natural... Wildlife Service, the U.S the program prepares the future graduates for work in wildlife biology master degree... Concentration Checklist, department of Natural Resources that damage human interests ( e.g., crop damage by feral )! Awarded to students studying wildlife biology prepares students for careers in government agencies like state parks and wildlife Service or! Natural resource Technician, Environmental Scientist, Recreation Assistant and more other sciences with so many choices can. Department ’ s degree and a master ’ s degree in wildlife reserves and state agencies as well as private. 7-12 ), Pre-professional program ( Pre-Health Advising ) curricula after consultation with the academic.... For work in wildlife management, populations and habitats requires an understanding of the wildlife and biology. Nature reserves and state agencies as well as with private industry of careers investigating of... The academic advisor managers, and statistics – is required to assist in. The national parks Service, or another related field to be eligible for.... ’ s degree in biology, zoology, ecology, Natural history, wildlife management, and statistics is. Agencies wildlife biology degree texas a wide variety of scientific fields, conservation biologists and resource... Have a master ’ s degree in wildlife biology degree programs are not typically offered.. Approximately 2,967 zoology degrees were given by colleges in Texas alone, making it the 6th most popular state zoology!
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Trust Receipt Agreement Meaning
In the case of a typical fiduciary transaction, the company has little or no of its own assets invested in the financed products. The bank bears most of the credit risk that prevails in the transaction. The company retains all the profits from the resale of the goods, but also bears the commercial risk. The United Arab Emirates is a civil jurisdiction and does not recognize common law trusts. However, trust receipts are often used in the United Arab Emirates and are recognized under VaE law, provided that ownership of the goods is clearly owned by the financier and that the bank`s proof of trust clearly allows the customer to handle the goods as the financial officer. Note that in a trust structure, it would be essential for the client (as an agent) to be obliged to comply with the bank`s mandatory and explicit instructions (as a client`s client) and that if the customer violates these instructions without acceptable excuses, the bank may refuse the agreement. The customer is also responsible for the loss of the goods or a deterioration of the goods and other goods held by the customer, unless the damage or deterioration is due to a foreign cause beyond the customer`s control or an inherent defect of the goods. Trust Receipts are not defined by the VaE Act. In practice, trust receipts are receipts issued by the owner of the merchandise, which allow another party to process the goods on behalf of the owner. The UNITED Arab Emirates Code of Commerce and the United Arab Emirates Maritime Code recognize bill of lading as titles and transport documents for the transport and shipping of goods. In practice, most commercial financing (including documentary credits) is based either on bill of lading on behalf of the importer (customer) or on car letters “in order” of the financier. We find that financiers in the United Arab Emirates often require that bill of lading be made on the orders of the financier.
In the event that the bill of lading is issued “in order” of the financier, then the property and title in relation to such a bill of lading would be transferred as soon as the financier. When bill of lading is issued on behalf of the client, it is essential (for the purpose of concluding a valid trust structure) that ownership of the bill of lading and the underlying assets be transferred to the financier.
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Encyclopedia > Sira
The sira is the historically-recorded life of Muhammad, as recorded in nearly three hundred original documents - not counting the Qur'an (revelation) nor the hadith (sayings). These include political treaties, military enlistments, assignments of officials, state correspondence, and other documents recorded by forty-five scribes who served him throughout his public life. Muhammad himself could neither read nor write, accordingly the scribes were the only recorders.
How he spoke, sat, slept, dressed, walked; How he behaved as a husband, father, nephew; Attitudes to women, children, animals; Business transactions; Stances towards the poor, the oppressed, subordinates, defeated enemies, prisoners of war; Behavior in battle and in preparation for battle; Likes and dislikes; Private dealings with his wives. These are all recorded in documentation.
In addition to what he did, what he said was also recorded - much later becoming the hadith as validated by isnah. Together the sira and the hadith constitute the sunnah, or 'example'.
"Sirat Rasul Allah", a biography by Ibn Ashiq, was written less than three hundred years after his death.
Muhammad is considered by Muslims to be the best moral example of how to live - unlike other historical founders of religions he lived a relatively well-rounded life, with business and political dealings, raising children, fighting battles, compromising principles to the degree required to protect others, etc.. Unlike some such figures he also never claimed to be more than a man. Finally, he lived to old age, and died very normally. His example is thus much easier to emulate than that of, say, Jesus.
Attempts to formulate a new fiqh ("jurisprudence") for the modern era often focus on the sira, asking "what Muhammad would have done" given the modern problems and opportunities.
This is obviously highly speculative, prone to all forms of bias, and totally political. But it is possible to the degree that his intent, actions, and justifications can be understood. He is an historical figure who lived a well-documented life, like Gandhi or Augustus or Marcus Aurelius. Thus, the exercise in imitation is possible if not simple.
See also: sunnah, hadith, isnah, fiqh
... for a family is $89,566. Males have a median income of $60,179 versus $58,125 for females. The per capita income for the town is $35,509. 7.9% of the population and ...
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Spokesman for Egypt's NSF quits group over support for 'police massacres'
Ahram Online, Friday 16 Aug 2013
Spokesman for key liberal coalition resigns in protest at group's support for police 'massacres' at pro-Morsi sit-ins
The official spokesman for the National Salvation Front resigned on Friday in protest at the group’s support for police violence against supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi.
Khaled Dawoud resigned from the front, a liberal coalition that led opposition to Morsi, citing hisrejection of the group’s support for the police's use of force against pro-Morsi demonstrators in a crackdown on Wednesday which left hundreds dead.
"The National Salvation Front has refused to condemn the massacre committed by security forces in dispersing [pro-Morsi] sit-ins in Rabaa and Nahda squares," said his resignation statement, posted on his Facebook account Friday.
"The front has clearly decided to side with the police in its ongoing confrontation with the Brotherhood."
Dawoud also rejected the "unacceptable attack" by some of the front's members on Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading liberal politician and member of the coalition who on Wednesday resigned his position as vice president following the crackdown.
Dawoud went on to stress that the only way out of the current crisis is a political solution that ensures the Brotherhood are reintegrated into the political process.
Clashes rapidly ensued on Friday afternoon after renewed protests by Morsi supporters. Dozens have been pronounced dead, with numbers expected to rise as violence continues.
The National Salvation Front was a strong supporter of the 30 June protests that demanded the resignation of Morsi and his subsequent ouster by the military.
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LANDS' END, INC.
For the quarterly period ended October 28, 2016
Transition report pursuant to section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934
For the transition period from to to .
Commission File Number: 001-09769
Lands’ End, Inc.
Incorporation of Organization)
1 Lands’ End Lane
Dodgeville, Wisconsin
Issuer’s Telephone Number, Including Area Code: (608) 935-9341
Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. YES x NO ¨
Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate Web site, if any, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§ 232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files) YES x NO ¨
Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, or a non-accelerated filer. See definition of “accelerated filer” and “large accelerated filer” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act. (Check one):
Large accelerated filer
Accelerated filer
Non-accelerated filer
Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a shell company. YES ¨ NO x
As of December 1, 2016, the registrant had 32,029,359 shares of common stock, $0.01 par value, outstanding.
INDEX TO QUARTERLY REPORT ON FORM 10-Q
FOR THE PERIOD ENDED OCTOBER 28, 2016
PART I FINANCIAL INFORMATION
Financial Statements (Unaudited)
Condensed Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Operations
PART II OTHER INFORMATION
Unregistered Sales of Equity Securities and Use of Proceeds
PART I. FINANCIAL INFORMATION
ITEM 1. FINANCIAL STATEMENTS
13 Weeks Ended
(in thousands except per share data)
Cost of sales (excluding depreciation and amortization)
Selling and administrative
Other operating (income), net
(86
Operating (loss) income
Other (income) expense, net
(Loss) income before income taxes
(21,277
Income tax (benefit) expense
NET (LOSS) INCOME
NET (LOSS) INCOME PER COMMON SHARE (Note 2)
Basic:
Diluted:
Basic weighted average common shares outstanding
Diluted weighted average common shares outstanding
See accompanying Notes to Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
Other comprehensive (loss) income, net of tax
Foreign currency translation adjustments
COMPREHENSIVE (LOSS) INCOME
(in thousands, except share data)
Restricted cash
Accounts receivable, net
Inventories, net
Property and equipment, net
Intangible asset, net
Long-term debt, net
Long-term deferred tax liabilities
Common stock, par value $0.01- authorized: 480,000,000 shares; issued and outstanding: 32,029,359, 31,991,343 and 31,991,668, respectively
Accumulated other comprehensive loss
Adjustments to reconcile net (loss) income to net cash used in operating activities:
Amortization of debt issuance costs
Loss on disposal of property and equipment
Change in operating assets and liabilities:
(134,690
Other operating assets
Other operating liabilities
Proceeds from sale of property and equipment
Purchases of property and equipment
Net cash used in investing activities
Payments on term loan facility
Net cash used in financing activities
Effects of exchange rate changes on cash
NET DECREASE IN CASH AND CASH EQUIVALENTS
CASH AND CASH EQUIVALENTS, BEGINNING OF YEAR
SUPPLEMENTAL CASH FLOW DATA
Unpaid liability to acquire property and equipment
Income taxes paid, net of refund
NOTE 1. BACKGROUND AND BASIS OF PRESENTATION
Description of Business and Separation
Lands' End, Inc. (“Lands’ End” or the “Company”) is a leading multi-channel retailer of clothing, accessories and footwear, as well as home products. Lands' End offers products through catalogs, online at www.landsend.com, www.canvasbylandsend.com and affiliated specialty and international websites, and through retail locations, primarily at Lands’ End Shops at Sears, stand-alone Lands’ End Inlet stores and international shop-in-shops that sell merchandise in various retail department stores.
Terms that are commonly used in the Company's notes to condensed consolidated financial statements are defined as follows:
• ABL Facility - Asset-based senior secured credit agreements, dated as of April 4, 2014, with Bank of America, N.A and certain other lenders
• ASC - Financial Accounting Standards Board Accounting Standards Codification, which serves as the source for authoritative GAAP, except that rules and interpretive releases by the SEC are also sources of authoritative GAAP for Securities and Exchange Commission registrants
• ASU - FASB Accounting Standards Update
• CAM - Common area maintenance for leased properties
• Debt Facilities - Collectively, the ABL Facility and the Term Loan Facility
• EPS - (Loss) earnings per share
• ESL - ESL Investments, Inc. and its investment affiliates, including Edward S. Lampert
• FASB - Financial Accounting Standards Board
• First Quarter 2016 - The thirteen weeks ended April 29, 2016
• Fiscal 2016 - The fifty-two weeks ending January 27, 2017
• Fiscal 2015 - The fifty-two weeks ended January 29, 2016
• Fiscal November 2016 - the four week fiscal month ending November 25, 2016
• GAAP - Accounting principles generally accepted in the United States
• LIBOR - London inter-bank offered rate
• Sears Holdings or Sears Holdings Corporation - Sears Holdings Corporation, a Delaware Corporation, and its consolidated subsidiaries (other than, for all periods following the Separation, Lands' End)
• SEC - United States Securities and Exchange Commission
• Second Quarter 2016 - The thirteen weeks ended July 29, 2016
• Separation - On April 4, 2014 Sears Holdings distributed 100% of the outstanding common stock of Lands' End to its shareholders
• SYW or Shop Your Way - Shop Your Way member loyalty program
• Tax Sharing Agreement - A tax sharing agreement entered into by Sears Holdings Corporation and Lands' End in connection with the Separation
• Term Loan Facility - Term loan credit agreements, dated as of April 4, 2014, with Bank of America, N.A. and certain other lenders
• Third Quarter 2016 - The thirteen weeks ended October 28, 2016
• UTBs - Gross unrecognized tax benefits related to uncertain tax positions
• Year to Date 2016 - the thirty-nine weeks ended October 28, 2016
Basis of Presentation
The Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements include the accounts of Lands' End, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All intercompany transactions and balances have been eliminated.
The accompanying unaudited Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements have been prepared in accordance with GAAP for interim financial information and with the instructions to Form 10-Q and Article 10 of Regulation S-X. Accordingly, they do not include all of the information and footnotes required by GAAP for complete financial statements. In the opinion of management, all material adjustments which are of a normal and recurring nature necessary for a fair presentation of the results for the periods presented have been reflected. Dollar amounts are reported in thousands, except per share data, unless otherwise noted. Interim results are not necessarily indicative of results for a full year. The information included in this Form 10-Q should be read in conjunction with information included in the Lands' End Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on April 1, 2016.
In April 2015, FASB issued ASU 2015-03, Simplifying the Presentation of Debt Issuance Costs, which changes the required presentation of debt issuance costs from an asset on the balance sheet to a deduction from related debt liability, and which was adopted by the Company in the First Quarter 2016. The reclassifications resulting from the adoption of this ASU relate to Prepaid expenses and other current assets and Other assets as of January 29, 2016 and October 30, 2015 that were reclassified to Long-term debt. This reclassification reduced our current and total assets and our total liabilities, as previously reported in the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheet for January 29, 2016 and October 30, 2015. This reclassification had no effect on the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations, Comprehensive Operations, Stockholders’ Equity or Cash Flows as previously reported. See Note 4, Debt, for further discussion.
NOTE 2. (LOSS) EARNINGS PER SHARE
The numerator for both basic and diluted EPS is net (loss) income. The denominator for basic EPS is based upon the number of weighted average shares of Lands’ End common stock outstanding during the reporting periods. The denominator for diluted EPS is based upon the number of weighted average shares of Lands' End common stock and common stock equivalents outstanding during the reporting periods using the treasury stock method in accordance with the ASC.
The following table summarizes the components of basic and diluted EPS:
Basic weighted average shares outstanding
Dilutive effect of stock awards
Diluted weighted average shares outstanding
Basic (loss) earnings per share
Diluted (loss) earnings per share
Anti-dilutive stock awards are comprised of awards which are anti-dilutive in the application of the treasury stock method and are excluded from the diluted weighted average shares outstanding. Total anti-dilutive stock awards were 17,719 and 30,673 shares for the Third Quarter 2016 and Year to Date 2016, respectively, due to the net loss reported. Total anti-dilutive stock awards were 129 and 126,602 shares for the Third Quarter 2015 and Year to Date 2015, respectively.
NOTE 3. OTHER COMPREHENSIVE (LOSS)
Other comprehensive (loss) income encompasses all changes in equity other than those arising from transactions with stockholders, and is comprised solely of foreign currency translation adjustments.
Beginning balance: Accumulated other comprehensive loss (net of tax of $5,467, $3,572, $5,053 and $3,931, respectively)
Other comprehensive (loss) income:
Foreign currency translation adjustments (net of tax (benefit) expense of $1,176, $(141), $1,590 and $(500), respectively)
Ending balance: Accumulated other comprehensive loss (net of tax of $6,643, $3,431, $6,643 and $3,431, respectively)
No amounts were reclassified out of Accumulated other comprehensive loss during any of the periods presented.
NOTE 4. DEBT
The Company's debt consisted of the following:
Term Loan Facility, maturing April 4, 2021
ABL Facility, maturing April 4, 2019
Less: Current maturities in Other current liabilities, net
Less: Unamortized debt issuance costs
The following table summarizes the Company's borrowing availability under the ABL Facility:
ABL maximum borrowing
Outstanding Letters of Credit
Borrowing availability under ABL
During First Quarter 2016, the Company adopted ASU 2015-03, Simplifying the Presentation of Debt Issuance, which requires an entity to present debt issuance costs as a deduction from the related debt liability. To conform to the current year presentation the Company reclassified $1.4 million of Prepaid expenses and other current assets and $6.0 million of Other assets to Long-term debt as of October 30, 2015. Similarly, as of January 29, 2016, the company reclassified $1.4 million of Prepaid expenses and other current assets and $5.6 million of Other assets to Long-term debt.
Interest; Fees
The interest rates per annum applicable to the loans under the Debt Facilities are based on a fluctuating rate of interest measured by reference to, at the borrowers’ election, either (i) an adjusted LIBOR rate plus a borrowing margin, or (ii) an alternative base rate plus a borrowing margin. The borrowing margin is fixed for the Term Loan Facility at 3.25% in the case of LIBOR loans and 2.25% in the case of base rate loans. For the Term Loan Facility, LIBOR is subject to a 1% interest rate floor. The borrowing margin for the ABL Facility is subject to adjustment based on the average excess availability under the ABL Facility for the preceding fiscal quarter, and will range from 1.50% to 2.00% in the case of LIBOR borrowings and will range from 0.50% to 1.00% in the case of base rate borrowings.
Customary agency fees are payable in respect of both Debt Facilities. The ABL Facility fees also include (i) commitment fees, based on a percentage ranging from approximately 0.25% to 0.375% of the daily unused portions of the ABL Facility, and (ii) customary letter of credit fees.
Representations and Warranties; Covenants
Subject to specified exceptions, the Debt Facilities contain various representations and warranties and restrictive covenants that, among other things, restrict the ability of Lands’ End and its subsidiaries to incur indebtedness (including guarantees), grant liens, make investments, make dividends or distributions with respect to capital stock, make prepayments on other indebtedness, engage in mergers or change the nature of their business. In addition, if excess availability under the ABL Facility falls below the greater of 10% of the loan cap amount or $15.0 million, Lands’ End will be required to comply with a minimum fixed charge coverage ratio of 1.0 to 1.0. The Debt Facilities do not otherwise contain financial maintenance covenants. The Company was in compliance with all financial covenants related to the Debt Facilities as of October 28, 2016.
The Debt Facilities contain certain affirmative covenants, including reporting requirements such as delivery of financial statements, certificates and notices of certain events, maintaining insurance, and providing additional guarantees and collateral in certain circumstances.
NOTE 5. STOCK-BASED COMPENSATION
Accounting standards require, among other things, that (i) the fair value of all stock awards be expensed over their respective vesting periods; (ii) the amount of cumulative compensation cost recognized at any date must at least be equal to the portion of the grant-date value of the award that is vested at that date and (iii) compensation expense includes a forfeiture estimate for those shares not expected to vest. Also in accordance with these provisions, for awards that only have a service requirement with multiple vest dates, the Company is required to recognize compensation cost on a straight-line basis over the requisite service period for the entire award.
The Company has granted time vesting stock awards ("Deferred Awards") and performance-based stock awards ("Performance Awards") to employees at management levels and above. Deferred Awards were granted in the form of restricted stock units that only require each recipient to complete a service period. Deferred Awards generally vest over three years or in full after a three year period. Performance Awards were granted in the form of restricted stock units which have, in addition to a service requirement, performance criteria that must be achieved for the awards to be earned. Performance Awards have annual vesting, but due to the performance criteria, are not eligible for straight-line expensing. Therefore, Performance Awards are amortized using a graded expense process. The fair value of all awards is based on the closing price of the Company’s common stock on the grant date. Compensation expense is reduced for estimated forfeitures of those awards not expected to vest due to employee turnover.
The following table summarizes the Company’s stock-based compensation expense, which is included in Selling and administrative expense in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations:
Performance Awards
Deferred Awards
Total stock-based compensation (benefit) expense
In Third Quarter 2016 there was a reversal of prior period expense due to the resignation of the former Chief Executive Officer.
Awards Granted Year to Date 2016
The company granted Deferred Awards to various employees during the Year to Date 2016, which generally vest ratably over a three year period. There were no Performance Awards granted in the Year to Date 2016.
Changes in the Company’s Unvested Stock Awards Year to Date 2016
Weighted Average Grant Date Fair Value
Unvested Deferred Awards, as of January 29, 2016
Unvested Deferred Awards, as of October 28, 2016
Total unrecognized stock-based compensation expense related to unvested Deferred Awards approximated $4.5 million as of October 28, 2016, which will be recognized over a weighted average period of approximately 2.2 years.
Unvested Performance Awards, as of January 29, 2016
Unvested Performance Awards, as of October 28, 2016
Total unrecognized stock-based compensation expense related to unvested Performance Awards approximated $0.5 million as of October 28, 2016, which will be recognized over a weighted average period of approximately 0.6 years.
NOTE 6. FAIR VALUE OF FINANCIAL ASSETS AND LIABILITIES
The Company determines fair value of financial assets and liabilities based on the following fair value hierarchy, which prioritizes the inputs to valuation techniques used to measure fair value into three levels:
Level 1 inputs—unadjusted quoted prices in active markets for identical assets or liabilities that the Company has the ability to access. An active market for the asset or liability is one in which transactions for the asset or liability occurs with sufficient frequency and volume to provide ongoing pricing information.
Level 2 inputs—inputs other than quoted market prices included in Level 1 that are observable, either directly or indirectly, for the asset or liability. Level 2 inputs include, but are not limited to, quoted prices for similar assets or liabilities in an active market, quoted prices for identical or similar assets or liabilities in markets that are not active and inputs other than quoted market prices that are observable for the asset or liability, such as interest rate curves and yield curves observable at commonly quoted intervals, volatilities, credit risk and default rates.
Level 3 inputs—unobservable inputs for the asset or liability.
Restricted cash is reflected on the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets at fair value. The fair value of restricted cash as of October 28, 2016, October 30, 2015 and January 29, 2016 was $3.3 million based on Level 1 inputs. Restricted cash amounts are valued based upon statements received from financial institutions.
Cash and cash equivalents, accounts receivable, accounts payable and other current liabilities are reflected on the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets at cost, which approximates fair value due to the short-term nature of these instruments.
Carrying values and fair values of long-term debt, including the short-term portion, in the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets are as follows:
Long-term debt, including short-term portion
Long-term debt was valued utilizing level 2 valuation techniques based on the closing inactive market bid price on October 28, 2016, October 30, 2015, and January 29, 2016. There were no nonfinancial assets or nonfinancial liabilities recognized at fair value on a nonrecurring basis as of October 28, 2016, October 30, 2015, and January 29, 2016.
NOTE 7. GOODWILL AND INTANGIBLE ASSET
The Company's intangible asset, consisting of a trade name, and goodwill were valued as a result of business combinations accounted for under the purchase accounting method. Goodwill represents the excess of the purchase price over the fair value of the net assets acquired. The net carrying amounts of goodwill and trade name are included within the Company's Direct segment.
ASC 350, Intangibles - Goodwill and Other, requires companies to test goodwill and indefinite-lived intangible assets for impairment annually, or more often if an event or circumstance indicates that the carrying amount may not be recoverable. There was no impairment charge recorded for the intangible asset in Year to Date 2016. As a result of the 2015 annual impairment testing the Company recorded a non-cash pretax intangible asset impairment charge of $98.3 million during Fiscal 2015. There was no impairment charge for the intangible asset recorded in any other prior years. There were no impairments of goodwill during any periods presented or since goodwill was first recognized. If actual results are not consistent with our estimates and assumptions used in estimating revenue growth, future cash flows and asset fair values, we could incur further impairment charges for the intangible asset or goodwill, which could have an adverse effect on our results of operations. The annual test for impairment will be conducted as of the end of Fiscal November 2016.
The following summarizes goodwill and the intangible asset:
Indefinite-lived intangible asset:
Gross Trade Name
Cumulative impairment
Net Trade Name
Total intangible asset, net
NOTE 8. INCOME TAXES
Lands’ End and Sears Holdings Corporation entered into a Tax Sharing Agreement in connection with the Separation which governs Sears Holdings Corporation’s and Lands’ End’s respective rights, responsibilities and obligations after the Separation with respect to liabilities for United States federal, state, local and foreign taxes attributable to the Lands’ End business. In addition to the allocation of tax liabilities, the Tax Sharing Agreement addresses the preparation and filing of tax returns for such taxes and dispute resolution with taxing authorities regarding such taxes. Generally, Sears Holdings Corporation is liable for all pre-Separation United States federal, state and local income taxes. Lands’ End generally is liable for all other income taxes attributable to its business, including all foreign taxes.
Prior to the Separation, all tax obligations were settled through Sears Holdings through Net parent company investment. At the date of Separation, certain tax attributes that were recorded in Net parent company investment were reclassified. During the Third Quarter 2016, as a result of filing its Fiscal Year 2015 income tax return, the Company recorded an increase in the deferred tax liabilities and a decrease in Additional paid in capital of $2.1 million related to the calculation of a deferred tax liability related to the LIFO inventory calculation that existed as of the date of the Separation.
As of October 28, 2016, the Company had UTBs of $8.3 million. Of this amount, $5.4 million would, if recognized, impact its effective tax rate, with the remaining amount being comprised of UTBs related to gross temporary differences or other indirect benefits. Pursuant to the Tax Sharing Agreement, Sears Holdings Corporation is generally responsible for all United States federal, state and local UTBs through the date of the Separation and, as such, an indemnification asset from Sears Holdings Corporation for the pre-Separation UTBs is recorded in Other assets in the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets. The indemnification asset was $14.4 million, $13.5 million and $13.7 million as of October 28, 2016, October 30, 2015, and January 29, 2016, respectively.
The Company classifies interest expense and penalties related to UTBs and interest income on tax overpayments as components of income tax expense. As of October 28, 2016, the total amount of interest expense and penalties recognized on our balance sheet was $6.4 million ($4.2 million net of federal benefit). The total amount of net interest expense recognized in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations was insignificant for all periods presented. The Company files income tax returns in the United States and various foreign jurisdictions. The Company is under examination by various income tax jurisdictions for the years 2009 to 2015.
During the Third Quarter 2015, Sears Holdings settled tax audits in certain state tax jurisdictions related to pre-Separation periods. As a result, the Company re-evaluated the reserves for the pre-Separation period and recorded a
$1.2 million reduction in income tax expense, before consideration of federal income tax benefit. Under the Tax Sharing Agreement, Sears Holdings indemnifies the Company for such liabilities and, as a result, the Company reduced the indemnification receivable by $1.2 million; such reduction was reflected as a decrease in Other assets in the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets and as Other expense (income), net in the Condensed Consolidated and Combined Statements of Operations.
NOTE 9. COMMITMENTS AND CONTINGENCIES
The Company is party to various claims, legal proceedings and investigations arising in the ordinary course of business. Some of these actions involve complex factual and legal issues and are subject to uncertainties. At this time, the Company is not able to either predict the outcome of these legal proceedings or reasonably estimate a potential range of loss with respect to the proceedings. While it is not feasible to predict the outcome of such pending claims, proceedings and investigations with certainty, management is of the opinion that their ultimate resolution should not have a material adverse effect on results of operations, cash flows or financial position taken as a whole.
Beginning in 2005, the Company initiated the first of several claims in Iowa County Circuit Court against the City of Dodgeville (the "City") to recover overpaid taxes resulting from the City’s excessive property tax assessment of the Company’s headquarters campus. In July 2016, the Company filed an amended and supplemental complaint to recover over paid property taxes for the 2016 tax year. As of November 30, 2016, the City has refunded, as the result of various court decisions, approximately $6.5 million in excessive taxes and interest to the Company in the following amounts: (1) approximately $1.6 million arising from the 2005 and 2006 tax years that was recognized in the fiscal year ended January 29, 2010; (2) approximately $1.6 million arising from the 2007, 2009 and 2010 tax years, recognized in the fiscal year ended January 31, 2014; (3) approximately $0.9 million arising from the 2008 tax year, recognized in the fiscal year ended January 30, 2015; (4) approximately $1.3 million arising from the 2011 and 2012 tax years, recognized in Second Quarter 2016; and (5) approximately $1.1 million arising from the 2007, 2009 and 2010 tax years, recognized in Third Quarter 2016; primarily within Selling and administrative costs in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations.
The claims arising from the 2005 through 2010 and 2012 tax years are closed. The Company's claims arising from tax years 2011 and 2013 through 2016 remain unresolved and are still pending before the courts. The Company believes that the potential additional aggregate recovery from the City arising from the 2011 and 2013 through 2016 tax years will range from $0.7 million to $2.0 million, none of which has been recorded in the Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
NOTE 10. RELATED PARTY TRANSACTIONS
According to statements on form Schedule 13D filed with the SEC by ESL, ESL beneficially owned significant portions of both the Company's and Sears Holdings Corporation's outstanding shares of common stock. Therefore, Sears Holdings Corporation, the Company's former parent company, is considered a related party.
In connection with and subsequent to the Separation, the Company entered into various agreements with Sears Holdings which, among other things, (i) govern specified aspects of the Company's relationship following the Separation, especially with regards to the Lands’ End Shops at Sears, and (ii) establish terms pursuant to which subsidiaries of Sears Holdings Corporation are providing services to us.
See further descriptions of the transactions in the Company's 2015 Annual Report on Form 10-K and proxy statement filed with the SEC on April 1, 2016 . The components of the transactions between the Company and Sears Holdings, which exclude pass-through payments to third parties, are as follows:
Lands’ End Shops at Sears
Related party costs charged by Sears Holdings to the Company related to Lands’ End Shops at Sears are as follows:
(in thousands, except for number of stores)
Rent, CAM and occupancy costs
Retail services, store labor
Financial services and payment processing
Supply chain costs
Number of Lands’ End Shops at Sears at period end
General Corporate Services
Related party costs charged by Sears Holdings to the Company for general corporate services are as follows:
The Company contracts with a subsidiary of Sears Holdings to provide agreed upon buying agency services, on a non-exclusive basis, in foreign territories from where the Company purchases merchandise. These services, primarily based upon quantities purchased, include quality-control functions, regulatory compliance, product claims management and new vendor selection and setup assistance. During Second Quarter 2016 the Company entered into a new buying agency services agreement with a subsidiary of Sears Holding and terminated the agreement that was entered into at the time of the Separation. The new agreement provides for a higher commission rate and a higher annual commission minimum, as well as enhanced sourcing services, including for product development, costing analyses, vendor communications, vendor strategy and quality assurance. Certain of these amounts are capitalized into inventory and are expensed through cost of goods sold over the course of inventory turns and included in Cost of sales in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Operations.
Use of Intellectual Property or Services
Related party revenue and costs charged by the Company to and from Sears Holdings for the use of intellectual property or services is as follows:
Lands' End business outfitters revenue
Credit card revenue
Royalty income
Gift card (expense)
The Company has entered into a contract with Sears Holdings Management Corporation, a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation, to provide call center services in support of Sears Holdings’ SYW. This income is net of agreed upon costs directly attributable to the Company providing these services. The income is included in Net revenue and costs are included in Selling and administrative expenses in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations. Total call center service income included in Net revenue was $2.0 million, $2.2 million, $5.8 million and $5.3 million for the Third Quarter 2016, Third Quarter 2015, Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively.
Additional Balance Sheet Information
At October 28, 2016, October 30, 2015 and January 29, 2016 the Company included $4.6 million, $5.1 million and $3.9 million in Accounts receivable, net, respectively, and $3.8 million, $9.4 million and $2.7 million in Accounts payable, respectively, in the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets to reflect amounts due from and owed to Sears Holdings.
At October 28, 2016, October 30, 2015 and January 29, 2016 a $14.4 million, $13.5 million and $13.7 million receivable, respectively, was recorded by the Company in Other assets in the Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets to reflect the indemnification by Sears Holdings Corporation of the pre-Separation UTBs (including penalties and interest) for which Sears Holdings Corporation is responsible under the Tax Sharing Agreement.
NOTE 11. SEGMENT REPORTING
The Company is a leading multi-channel retailer of clothing, accessories and footwear, as well as home products, and has two reportable segments: Direct and Retail. Both segments sell similar products and provide services. Product revenues are divided by product categories: Apparel and Non-apparel. The Non-apparel revenues include accessories, footwear, and home goods. Services and other revenue includes embroidery, monogramming, gift wrapping, shipping and other services. Net revenue is aggregated by product category in the following table:
Net revenue:
Non-apparel
Service and other
The Company identifies reportable segments according to how business activities are managed and evaluated. Each of the Company’s operating segments are reportable segments and are strategic business units that offer similar products and services but are sold either directly from its warehouses (Direct) or through its retail stores (Retail).
Adjusted EBITDA is the primary measure used to make decisions on allocating resources and assessing performance of each operating segment. Adjusted EBITDA is computed as Income before taxes appearing on the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations net of interest expense, depreciation and amortization and other significant items that while periodically affecting the Company's results, may vary significantly from period to period and may have a disproportionate effect in a given period, which may affect comparability of results. Reportable segment assets are those directly used in or clearly allocable to an operating segment’s operations. Depreciation, amortization, and property and equipment expenditures are recognized in each respective segment. There were no material transactions between reporting segments for any periods presented.
The Direct segment sells products through the Company’s e-commerce websites and direct mail catalogs. Operating costs consist primarily of direct marketing costs (catalog and e-commerce marketing costs); order processing and shipping costs; direct labor and benefits costs and facility costs. Assets primarily include goodwill and trade name intangible assets, inventory, accounts receivable, prepaid expenses (deferred catalog costs), technology infrastructure, and property and equipment.
The Retail segment sells products and services through dedicated Lands’ End Shops at Sears across the United States, the Company’s stand-alone Lands’ End Inlet stores and international shop-in-shops. Operating costs consist primarily of labor and benefits costs; rent, CAM and occupancy costs; distribution costs; and in-store marketing costs. Assets primarily include retail inventory, fixtures and leasehold improvements.
Corporate overhead and other expenses include unallocated shared-service costs, which primarily consist of employee services and financial services, legal and corporate expenses. These expenses include labor and benefits costs, corporate headquarters occupancy costs and other administrative expenses. Assets include corporate headquarters and facilities, corporate cash and cash equivalents and deferred income taxes.
Financial information by segment is presented in the following tables.
SUMMARY OF SEGMENT DATA
Corporate / other
Adjusted EBITDA:
Total adjusted EBITDA
Depreciation and amortization:
Total depreciation and amortization
Capital expenditures:
Total capital expenditures
NOTE 12. RECENT ACCOUNTING PRONOUNCEMENTS
Simplifying the Measurement of Inventory
In July 2015, the FASB issued ASU 2015-11, Simplifying the Measurement of Inventory. Under this ASU, non-LIFO inventory will be measured at the lower of cost and net realizable value, eliminating the options that currently exist for market valuation. The ASU defines net realizable value as the estimated selling prices in the ordinary course of business, less reasonably predictable costs of completion, disposal and transportation. No other changes were made to the current guidance on inventory measurement. This guidance was effective for Lands' End in the First Quarter 2016 and only applies to our international inventory as United States inventory is valued using LIFO. The adoption of this guidance did not have a material impact on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
Customer's Accounting for Fees Paid in a Cloud Computing Arrangement
In April 2015, the FASB issued ASU 2015-05, Customers' Accounting for Fees Paid in a Cloud Computing Arrangement, which clarifies the circumstances under which a cloud computing customer would account for the arrangement as a license of internal-use software under ASC 350-40. This guidance was effective for Lands' End in the First Quarter 2016. The adoption of this guidance did not have a material impact on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
Simplifying the Presentation of Debt Issuance Costs
In April 2015, the FASB issued ASU 2015-03, Simplifying the Presentation of Debt Issuance Costs, which changed the required presentation of debt issuance costs from an asset on the balance sheet to a deduction from the related debt liability. This guidance was adopted by the Company during First Quarter 2016. See Note 4, Debt, for further discussion.
In May 2014, the FASB issued ASU 2014-09, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, which provides guidance for revenue recognition. The standard’s core principle is that a company will recognize revenue when it transfers promised goods or services to customers in an amount that reflects the consideration to which the company expects to be entitled in exchange for those goods or services. In doing so, companies will need to use more judgment and make more estimates than under today’s guidance. These may include identifying performance obligations in the contract, estimating the amount of variable consideration to include in the transaction price and allocating the transaction price to each separate performance obligation. This guidance was deferred by ASU 2015-14, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, issued by the FASB in August 2015, and will be effective for Lands' End in the first quarter of its fiscal year ending February 1, 2019. Subsequently, the FASB has also issued accounting standards updates which clarify the guidance. The Company is currently in the process of evaluating the impact of adoption of this ASU and related clarifications on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
Compensation - Stock Compensation
In March 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-09, Compensation - Stock Compensation, which simplifies the accounting for the taxes related to stock based compensation, including adjustments to how excess tax benefits and a company's payments for tax withholdings should be classified. This guidance will be effective for Lands' End in the first quarter of its fiscal year ending February 2, 2018. The adoption of this guidance is not expected to have a material impact on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
Recognition of Breakage for Certain Prepaid Stored-Value Products
In March 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-04, Recognition of Breakage for Certain Prepaid Stored-Value Products. This update clarifies when it is acceptable to recognize the unredeemed portion of prepaid gift cards into income. This guidance will be effective for Lands' End in the first quarter of its fiscal year ending February 1, 2019. The Company is currently in the process of evaluating the impact of adoption of this ASU on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
Classification of Certain Cash Receipts and Cash Payments
In August 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-15, Classification of Certain Cash Receipts and Cash Payments. This update clarifies issues to reduce the current and potential future diversity in practice of the classification of certain cash receipts and cash payments within the statement of cash flows. This guidance will be effective for Lands' End in the first quarter of its fiscal year ending February 1, 2019. The Company is currently in the process of evaluating the impact of adoption of this ASU on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
In February 2016, the FASB issued ASU 2016-02, Leases, which will replace the existing guidance in ASC 840, Leases. This ASU requires a dual approach for lessee accounting under which a lessee would account for leases as finance leases or operating leases. Both finance leases and operating leases will result in the lessee recognizing a right-of-use asset and a corresponding lease liability. For finance leases, the lessee would recognize interest expense and amortization of the right-of-use asset, and for operating leases, the lessee would recognize a straight-line total lease expense. This guidance will be effective for Lands' End in the first quarter of its fiscal year ending January 31, 2020. The Company is currently in the process of evaluating the impact of adoption of this ASU on the Company's Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements.
ITEM 2. MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION AND RESULTS OF OPERATIONS
You should read the following discussion in conjunction with the Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements and accompanying notes included elsewhere in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q. This Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations contains forward-looking statements. The matters discussed in these forward-looking statements are subject to risk, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those made, projected or implied in the forward-looking statements. See “Cautionary Statements Concerning Forward-Looking Statements” below and "Item 1A. Risk Factors" in our Annual Report filed on Form 10-K for the year ended January 29, 2016, for a discussion of the uncertainties, risks and assumptions associated with these statements.
As used in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, references to the “Company”, “Lands' End”, “we”, “us”, “our” and similar terms refer to Lands' End, Inc. and its subsidiaries. Our fiscal year ends on the Friday preceding the Saturday closest to January 31. Other terms that are commonly used in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q are defined as follows:
•ABL Facility - Asset-based senior secured credit agreements, dated as of April 4, 2014, with Bank of America, N.A and certain other lenders
•Debt Facilities - Collectively, the ABL Facility and the Term Loan Facility
•ERP - Enterprise resource planning software solutions
•ESL - ESL Investments, Inc. and its investment affiliates, including Edward S. Lampert
•Fiscal 2016 - the fifty-two weeks ending January 27, 2017
•Fiscal 2015 - the fifty-two weeks ended January 29, 2016
•Fiscal November 2016 - the four week fiscal month ending November 25, 2016
•Fourth Quarter 2015 - The thirteen weeks ended January 29, 2016
•GAAP - Accounting principles generally accepted in the United States
•Same Store Sales - Net sales, from stores that have been open for at least 12 full months where selling square footage has not changed by 15% or more within the past fiscal year
•Sears Holdings or Sears Holdings Corporation - Sears Holdings Corporation, a Delaware Corporation, and its consolidated subsidiaries (other than, for all periods following the Separation, Lands' End)
•Sears Roebuck - Sears, Roebuck and Co., a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation
•SEC - United States Securities and Exchange Commission
•Second Quarter 2016 - The thirteen weeks ended July 29, 2016
•Separation - On April 4, 2014 Sears Holdings distributed 100% of the outstanding common stock of Lands' End to its shareholders
•Term Loan Facility - Term loan credit agreements, dated as of April 4, 2014, with Bank of America, N.A. and certain other lenders
•Third Quarter 2016 - the thirteen weeks ended October 28, 2016
•UK Borrower - A United Kingdom subsidiary borrower of Lands’ End under the ABL Facility
•Year to Date 2016 - the thirty-nine weeks ended October 28, 2016
Management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations accompanies our Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements and provides additional information about our business, financial condition, liquidity and capital resources, cash flows and results of operations. We have organized the information as follows:
Executive overview. This section provides a brief description of our business, accounting basis of presentation and a brief summary of our results of operations.
Discussion and analysis. This section highlights items affecting the comparability of our financial results and provides an analysis of our segment results of operations for the 2016 and 2015 third fiscal quarter and fiscal year to date periods.
Liquidity and capital resources. This section provides an overview of our historical and anticipated cash and financing activities. We also review our historical sources and uses of cash in our operating, investing and financing activities.
Contractual Obligations and Off-Balance-Sheet Arrangements. This section provides details of the Company's off-balance-sheet arrangements and contractual obligations for the next five years and thereafter.
Financial Instruments with Off-Balance-Sheet Risk. This section discusses financial instruments of the Company that could have off-balance-sheet risk.
Application of critical accounting policies and estimates. This section summarizes the accounting policies that we consider important to our financial condition and results of operations and which require significant judgment or estimates to be made in their application.
Recent accounting pronouncements. This section summarizes recently issued accounting pronouncements and the impact or expected impact on the Company's financial statements.
Executive Overview
Description of the Company
Lands’ End, Inc. is a leading multi-channel retailer of clothing, accessories and footwear, as well as home products. We offer products through catalogs, online at www.landsend.com, www.canvasbylandsend.com and affiliated specialty and international websites, and through retail locations, primarily at Lands’ End Shops at Sears, stand-alone Lands’ End Inlet stores and international shop-in-shops that sell merchandise in various retail department stores. We are a classic American lifestyle brand with a passion for quality, legendary service and real value, and we seek to deliver timeless style for men, women, kids and the home. Lands’ End was founded in 1963 in Chicago by Gary Comer and his partners to sell sailboat hardware and equipment by catalog. While our product focus has shifted significantly over the years, we have continued to adhere to our founder’s motto as one of our guiding principles: “Take care of the customer, take care of the employee and the rest will take care of itself.”
The Company identifies reportable segments according to how business activities are managed and evaluated. Each of the Company’s operating segments are reportable segments and are strategic business units that offer similar products and services but are sold either directly from our warehouses (Direct) or through our retail stores (Retail).
Following the Separation, we began operating as a separate, publicly traded company, independent from Sears Holdings. According to statements on form Schedule 13D filed with the SEC by ESL, ESL beneficially owned significant portions of both the Company's and Sears Holdings Corporation's outstanding shares of common stock. Therefore Sears Holdings Corporation, the Company's former parent company, is considered a related party both prior to and subsequent to the Separation.
The success of our Retail segment depends on the performance of the Lands’ End Shops at Sears. Under the terms of the master lease agreement and master sublease agreement pursuant to which Sears Roebuck leases or subleases to us the premises for the Lands’ End Shops at Sears, Sears Roebuck has certain rights to (1) relocate our leased premises within the building in which such premises are located, subject to certain limitations, including our right to terminate the applicable lease if we are not satisfied with the new premises, and (2) terminate without liability the lease with respect to a particular
Lands’ End Shop if the overall Sears store in which such Lands’ End Shop is located is closed or sold. Sears Holdings announced that it intends to continue to right-size, redeploy and highlight the value of its assets, including its real estate portfolio, in its transition from an asset-intensive, store-focused retailer and that it has entered into lease agreements with third party retailers for stand-alone stores. On July 7, 2015, Sears Holdings completed a rights offering and sale-leaseback transaction (the “Seritage transaction”) with Seritage Growth Properties (“Seritage”), an independent publicly traded real estate investment trust. Sears Holdings disclosed that as part of the Seritage transaction, it sold 235 properties to Seritage (the “REIT properties”) along with Sears Holdings’ 50% interest in each of three real estate joint ventures (collectively, the “JVs”). Sears Holdings also disclosed that it contributed 31 properties to the JVs (the “JV properties”). As of October 28, 2016, 55 of the REIT properties contained a Lands’ End Shop and 15 of the JV properties contained a Lands’ End Shop, the leases with respect to which Sears Roebuck retained for its own account. Sears Holdings disclosed that Seritage and the JVs have a recapture right with respect to approximately 50% of the space within the stores at the REIT properties and JV properties (subject to certain exceptions), and with respect to eight of the stores that contain a Lands’ End Shop, Seritage has the additional right to recapture 100% of the space within the Sears Roebuck store. If Sears Roebuck continues to dispose of retail stores that contain Lands’ End Shops, and/or offer us relocation alternatives for Lands’ End Shops that are less attractive than the current premises, our business and results of operations could be adversely affected. On October 28, 2016 the Company operated 219 Lands’ End Shops at Sears, compared with 227 Lands’ End Shops at Sears on October 30, 2015.
We experience seasonal fluctuations in our Net revenue and operating results and historically have realized a significant portion of our net sales and earnings for the year during our fourth fiscal quarter. We generated approximately 34% of our Net revenue in the fourth fiscal quarter of the past three years. Thus, lower than expected fourth quarter net revenue could have an adverse impact on our annual operating results.
Working capital requirements typically increase during the third quarter of the fiscal year as inventory builds to support peak shipping/selling period and, accordingly, typically decrease during the fourth quarter of the fiscal year as inventory is shipped/sold. Cash provided by operating activities is typically higher in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year due to reduced working capital requirements during that period.
The following table sets forth, for the periods indicated, selected income statement data:
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Depreciation and amortization is not included in our cost of sales because we are a reseller of inventory and do not believe that including depreciation and amortization is meaningful. As a result, our gross margins may not be comparable to other entities that include depreciation and amortization related to the sale of their product in their gross margin measure.
Net (Loss) Income and Adjusted EBITDA
We recorded a Net loss of $7.2 million in the Third Quarter 2016 compared to a Net income of $10.7 million in the Third Quarter 2015. In addition to our Net (loss) income determined in accordance with GAAP, for purposes of evaluating operating performance, we use an Adjusted EBITDA measurement. Adjusted EBITDA is computed as Net (loss) income appearing on the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations net of Income tax (benefit) expense, Other income, net, Interest expense, Depreciation and amortization, and certain significant items set forth below. Our management uses Adjusted EBITDA to evaluate the operating performance of our businesses, as well as executive compensation metrics, for comparable periods. Adjusted EBITDA should not be used by investors or other third parties as the sole basis for formulating investment decisions as it excludes a number of important cash and non-cash recurring items.
While Adjusted EBITDA is a non-GAAP measurement, management believes that it is an important indicator of operating performance, and useful to investors, because:
EBITDA excludes the effects of financings, investing activities and tax structure by eliminating the effects of interest, depreciation and income tax costs or benefits.
Other significant items, while periodically affecting our results, may vary significantly from period to period and have a disproportionate effect in a given period, which affects comparability of results. We have adjusted our results for these items to make our statements more comparable and therefore more useful to investors as the items are not representative of our ongoing operations.
We excluded a benefit related to the reversal of a portion of the product recall accrual recognized in Fiscal 2014 as this was an unusual event that affects the comparability of our financial results.
We excluded the gain or loss on disposal of property and equipment as management considers the gains or losses on disposal of assets to result from investing decisions rather than ongoing operations.
Loss (gain) on disposal of property and equipment
Adjusted EBITDA
In assessing the operational performance of our business, we consider a variety of financial measures. We operate in two reportable segments, Direct (sold through e-commerce websites and direct mail catalogs) and Retail (sold through stores). A key measure in the evaluation of our business is revenue performance by segment. We also consider gross margin and Selling and administrative expenses in evaluating the performance of our business.
To evaluate revenue performance for the Direct segment we use Net revenue. For our Retail segment, we use Same Store Sales as a key measure in evaluating performance. A store is included in Same Store Sales calculations on the first day it has comparable prior year sales. Stores in which the selling square footage has changed by 15% or more as a result of a remodel, expansion, reduction or relocation are excluded from Same Store Sales calculations until the first day they have comparable prior year sales. Online sales and sales generated through our in-store computer kiosks are considered revenue in our Direct segment and are excluded from Same Store Sales.
Discussion and Analysis
Third Quarter 2016 compared with the Third Quarter 2015
Net revenue for the Third Quarter 2016 was $311.5 million, compared with $334.4 million in the comparable period of the prior year, a decrease of $23.0 million or 6.9%. The decrease was comprised of a decrease in our Direct segment of $15.7 million and a decrease in our Retail segment of $7.3 million.
Net revenue in our Direct segment was $272.1 million for the Third Quarter 2016, a decrease of $15.7 million, or 5.5% from the comparable period of the prior year. The decrease in the Direct segment was a continuation of the difficult retail environment which led us to broaden our promotional activity with deeper discounting. The Direct segment did, however,
experience an incremental improvement from Second Quarter 2016 as the Company increased catalog circulation and improved catalog presentation. During the quarter our uniform business out performed the rest of the Direct segment.
Net revenue in our Retail segment was $39.3 million for the Third Quarter 2016, a decrease of $7.3 million, or 15.6% from the comparable period of the prior year. The decrease was driven by a 14.3% decrease in Same Store Sales, and a decrease in the number of Lands’ End Shops at Sears. The Same Store Sales decrease was attributable to the same competitive marketplace as in our Direct segment as well as declining traffic at our Lands' End Shops at Sears. On October 28, 2016, the Company operated 219 Lands’ End Shops at Sears, 14 global Lands’ End Inlet stores and no international shop-in-shops compared with 227 Lands’ End Shops at Sears, 14 global Lands’ End Inlet stores and five international shop-in-shops on October 30, 2015.
Total gross profit decreased $28.8 million to $133.7 million and gross margin decreased approximately 570 basis points to 42.9% of total Net revenue in the Third Quarter 2016, compared with $162.4 million, or 48.6% of total Net revenue, in the Third Quarter 2015. The gross profit decrease was comprised of a decrease in our Direct segment of $25.2 million and a decrease in our Retail segment of $3.6 million.
Gross profit in the Direct segment was $116.7 million compared with $141.9 million for the Third Quarter 2016 and Third Quarter 2015, respectively. Gross margin in the Direct segment decreased approximately 640 basis points to 42.9% in the Third Quarter 2016 versus 49.3% in the comparable prior year period. The decrease in Gross margin during the third quarter was primarily attributable to increased promotional activity in the highly competitive retail environment. Additionally, approximately 160 basis points of the decrease resulted from a $4.4 million write down of under performing Canvas by Lands' End inventory.
Retail segment gross profit decreased $3.6 million to $16.9 million in the Third Quarter 2016 from $20.5 million in the Third Quarter 2015. Retail segment gross margin decreased to 42.9% for the Third Quarter 2016 compared to 44.0% for the Third Quarter 2015 driven by increased promotional activity to remain competitive in current retail environment.
Selling and Administrative Expenses
Selling and administrative expenses were $132.4 million, or 42.5% of total Net revenue compared with $135.9 million or 40.6% of total Net revenue in the Third Quarter 2016 and Third Quarter 2015, respectively. During the quarter we incurred $1.2 million of expenses associated with the departure of the Company's former Chief Executive Officer.
The decrease in Selling and administrative expenses was primarily due to a decrease of $2.1 million in the Direct segment, a decrease of $1.7 million in the Retail segment and an increase of $0.3 million in the Corporate segment.
The Direct segment Selling and administrative expenses were $102.8 million compared with $104.9 million for the Third Quarter 2016 and Third Quarter 2015, respectively. The $2.1 million or 2.0% decrease, was primarily attributable to a property tax recovery related to our claims and ongoing litigation against the City of Dodgeville and lower variable costs resulting from lower revenue.
The Retail segment Selling and administrative expenses were $20.5 million compared with $22.2 million for the Third Quarter 2016 and Third Quarter 2015, respectively. The $1.7 million or 8.0% decrease was primarily attributable to a decrease in marketing investments and personnel costs.
Corporate / other Selling and administrative expenses increased to $9.1 million in the Third Quarter 2016 compared to $8.8 million in the Third Quarter 2015 due to increased severance expenses resulting from the CEO transition, partially offset by a decrease in other personnel costs.
Depreciation and amortization expense was $4.8 million in the Third Quarter 2016, an increase of $0.5 million or 12.6%, compared with $4.3 million in Third Quarter 2015, primarily attributable to an increase in depreciation associated with acquired information technology assets.
The decrease in Other operating income, net was attributable to the Third Quarter 2015 reversal of approximately $1.0 million of the product recall accrual that was recorded in Fourth Quarter 2014.
Operating (loss) income decreased to a $3.4 million loss in the Third Quarter 2016 from $23.3 million of income in Third Quarter 2015 primarily due to lower revenues and lower gross margin discussed above.
Interest expense was essentially unchanged at $6.1 million in the Third Quarter 2016 compared to $6.2 million in the Third Quarter 2015.
Other (Income) / Expense, Net
Other (Income) / Expense, Net in the Third Quarter 2015 includes a charge of $1.2 million from the reduction to a tax receivable from our former parent as a result of favorable tax settlements in certain tax jurisdictions.
Income tax benefit was $1.9 million for the Third Quarter 2016 compared with income tax expense of $5.6 million in the Third Quarter 2015. The decrease was primarily attributable to a Net loss in comparison to Net income in the prior year. The effective tax rate was 21.0% in the Third Quarter 2016 compared with 34.2% in the Third Quarter 2015. The change is primarily attributable to the effects of credits and other permanent differences for the Company.
As a result of the above factors, Net loss was $7.2 million and diluted loss per share was $0.23 in the Third Quarter 2016 compared with Net income of $10.7 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.33 in the Third Quarter 2015. Net loss for the Third Quarter 2016 includes the aforementioned $4.4 million inventory write-down ($3.0 million net of tax), as well as $1.2 million in one-time personnel costs net of reversals ($0.8 million net of tax), primarily related to the departure of the Company's former Chief Executive Officer.
As a result of the above factors, Adjusted EBITDA decreased to $1.3 million in the Third Quarter 2016 from $26.5 million in the Third Quarter 2015.
Year to Date 2016 compared with the Year to Date 2015
Net revenue for the Year to Date 2016 was $876.9 million, compared with $946.2 million in the comparable period of the prior year, a decrease of $69.3 million or 7.3%. The decrease was comprised of a decrease in our Direct segment of $55.2 million and a decrease in our Retail segment of $14.1 million.
Net revenue in our Direct segment was $750.7 million for the Year to Date 2016, a decrease of $55.2 million, or 6.9% from the comparable period of the prior year. The decrease was attributable to declines in all of our markets, though primarily concentrated in our U.S. consumer business. We realized declining performance in most of our major product categories, as the highly competitive and promotional retail environment negatively impacted our ability to generate traffic to our U.S. consumer websites.
Net revenue in our Retail segment was $126.1 million for the Year to Date 2016, a decrease of $14.1 million, or 10.1% from the comparable period of the prior year. The decrease was driven by a 7.9% decrease in Same Store Sales, and a decrease in the number of Lands’ End Shops at Sears. The Same Store Sales decrease was attributable to the same competitive marketplace as in our Direct segment as well as declining traffic at our Lands' End Shops at Sears. On October 28, 2016, the
Company operated 219 Lands’ End Shops at Sears, 14 global Lands’ End Inlet stores and no international shop-in-shops compared with 227 Lands’ End Shops at Sears, 14 global Lands’ End Inlet stores and five international shop-in-shops on October 30, 2015.
Total gross profit decreased $54.0 million to $399.5 million and gross margin decreased approximately 230 basis points to 45.6% of total Net revenue, compared with $453.5 million, or 47.9% of total Net revenue, for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively.
Gross profit in the Direct segment was $346.0 million compared with $390.5 million for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively. The decrease in Gross profit is largely attributable to lower revenue. Gross margin in the Direct segment decreased approximately 240 basis points to 46.1% in the Year to Date 2016 versus 48.5% in the comparable prior year period, primarily attributable to a highly competitive retail environment resulting in increased promotional activity and deeper product discounts. Additionally, approximately 60 basis points of the decrease resulted from a $4.4 million write down of under performing Canvas by Lands' End inventory.
Retail segment gross profit decreased $9.5 million to $53.3 million in the Year to Date 2016 from $62.8 million in the Year to Date 2015. Retail segment gross margin decreased approximately 260 basis points to 42.2% compared with 44.8% for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively, driven by the same factors which impacted our Direct segment.
Selling and administrative expenses were $390.3 million, or 44.5% of total Net revenue compared with $394.3 million or 41.7% of total Net revenue in the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively. The $4.0 million decrease was attributable to a $0.7 million decrease in the Direct segment, a $3.4 million decrease in the Retail segment, and the Corporate segment was essentially flat.
The Direct segment Selling and administrative expenses were $304.5 million compared with $305.2 million for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively. The $0.7 million or 0.2% decrease was primarily attributable to property tax recoveries related to our claims and ongoing litigation against the City of Dodgeville, partially offset by increased marketing investments.
The Retail segment Selling and administrative expenses were $60.3 million compared with $63.7 million for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively. The $3.4 million or 5.3% decrease was primarily attributable to a decrease in personnel expenses, and expenses related to closed stores.
Corporate / other Selling and administrative expenses were $25.5 million compared with $25.4 million for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively.
Depreciation and amortization expense increased to $13.4 million in the Year to Date 2016 compared to $12.9 million in the Year to Date 2015, primarily attributable to an increase in depreciation associated with acquired information technology assets.
The decrease in Other Operating (Income), Net was attributable to the Third Quarter 2015 reversal of approximately $3.4 million of the product recall accrual that was recorded in Fourth Quarter 2014.
Operating (loss) income decreased to a $4.2 million Operating loss in Year to Date 2016 from Operating income of $49.7 million in Year to Date 2015 primarily due to lower revenues and lower gross margin discussed above.
Interest expense is essentially unchanged at $18.5 million in the Year to Date 2016 compared with $18.6 million in the Year to Date 2015.
Other (Income) / Expense, Net in the Year to Date 2015 includes a charge of $1.2 million from the reduction to a tax receivable from our former parent as a result of favorable tax settlements in certain tax jurisdictions.
Income tax benefit was $6.3 million for the Year to Date 2016 compared with an Income tax expense of $11.4 million in the Year to Date 2015. The change was primarily attributable to an operating loss in the Year to Date 2016 compared to operating income in the Year to Date 2015. The effective tax rate was 29.7% in the Year to Date 2016 compared with 36.4% in the Year to Date 2015. The change is primarily attributable to the effects of credits and other permanent differences for the Company.
As a result of the above factors, Net loss was $15.0 million and diluted loss per share was $0.47 in the Year to Date 2016 compared with Net income of $19.9 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.62 in the Year to Date 2015. Net loss for the Year to Date 2016 includes the aforementioned $4.4 million inventory write-down ($3.0 million net of tax), as well as $1.2 million in one-time personnel costs net of reversals ($0.8 million net of tax), primarily related to the departure of the Company's former Chief Executive Officer. Year to Date 2015 contained a product recall adjustment that favorably impacted Net income by $2.1 million (after tax).
As a result of the above factors, Adjusted EBITDA decreased 84.5% to $9.2 million in the Year to Date 2016 from $59.2 million in the Year to Date 2015.
Our primary need for liquidity is to fund working capital requirements of our business, capital expenditures, debt service and for general corporate purposes. Our cash and cash equivalents and the ABL Facility serve as sources of liquidity for short-term working capital needs and general corporate purposes. We expect that our cash on hand and cash flows from operations, along with our ABL Facility, will be adequate to meet our capital requirements and operational needs for at least the next 12 months. Cash generated from our net sales and profitability, and somewhat to a lesser extent our changes in working capital, are driven by the seasonality of our business, with a disproportionate amount of net revenue and operating cash flows generally occurring in the fourth fiscal quarter of each year.
Description of Material Indebtedness
Debt Arrangements
Lands’ End entered into the ABL Facility, which provides for maximum borrowings of $175.0 million for Lands’ End, subject to a borrowing base, with a $30.0 million sub facility for the UK Borrower. The ABL Facility has a sub-limit of $70.0 million for domestic letters of credit and a sub-limit of $15.0 million for letters of credit for the UK Borrower. The ABL Facility is available for working capital and other general corporate purposes, and was undrawn at October 28, 2016 and October 30, 2015, other than for letters of credit. The Company had borrowing availability under the ABL Facility of $161.2 million as of October 28, 2016, net of outstanding letters of credit of $13.8 million.
Also on April 4, 2014, Lands’ End entered into the $515.0 million Term Loan Facility of which proceeds were used to pay a dividend of $500.0 million to a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation immediately prior to the Separation and to pay fees and expenses associated with the Debt Facilities of approximately $11.4 million, with the remaining proceeds used for general corporate purposes.
Maturity; Amortization and Prepayments
The ABL Facility will mature on April 4, 2019. The Term Loan Facility will mature on April 4, 2021 and will amortize at a rate equal to 1% per annum, and is subject to mandatory prepayment in an amount equal to a percentage of the borrower’s excess cash flows in each fiscal year, ranging from 0% to 50% depending on Lands’ End’s secured leverage ratio, and the proceeds from certain asset sales and casualty events.
Guarantees; Security
All domestic obligations under the Debt Facilities are unconditionally guaranteed by Lands’ End and, subject to certain exceptions, each of its existing and future direct and indirect domestic subsidiaries. In addition, the obligations of the UK Borrower under the ABL Facility are guaranteed by its existing and future direct and indirect subsidiaries organized in the United Kingdom. The ABL Facility is secured by a first priority security interest in certain working capital of the borrowers and guarantors consisting primarily of accounts receivable and inventory. The Term Loan Facility is secured by a second priority security interest in the same collateral, with certain exceptions.
The Term Loan Facility also is secured by a first priority security interest in certain property and assets of the borrowers and guarantors, including certain fixed assets and stock of subsidiaries. The ABL Facility is secured by a second priority security interest in the same collateral.
The interest rates per annum applicable to the loans under the Debt Facilities are based on a fluctuating rate of interest measured by reference to, at the borrowers’ election, either (i) LIBOR plus a borrowing margin, or (ii) an alternative base rate plus a borrowing margin. The borrowing margin is fixed for the Term Loan Facility at 3.25% in the case of LIBOR loans and 2.25% in the case of base rate loans. For the Term Loan Facility, LIBOR is subject to a 1% interest rate floor. The borrowing margin for the ABL Facility is subject to adjustment based on the average excess availability under the ABL Facility for the preceding fiscal quarter, and will range from 1.50% to 2.00% in the case of LIBOR borrowings and will range from 0.50% to 1.00% in the case of base rate borrowings.
Customary agency fees are payable pursuant to the terms of the Debt Facilities. The ABL Facility fees also include (i) commitment fees, based on a percentage ranging from approximately 0.25% to 0.375% of the daily unused portions of the facility, and (ii) customary letter of credit fees.
Subject to specified exceptions, the Debt Facilities contain various representations and warranties and restrictive covenants that, among other things, restrict the ability of Lands’ End and its subsidiaries to incur indebtedness (including guarantees), grant liens, make investments, make dividends or distributions with respect to capital stock, make prepayments on other indebtedness, engage in mergers or change the nature of their business. In addition, if excess availability under the ABL Facility falls below the greater of 10% of the loan cap amount or $15 million, Lands’ End will be required to comply with a minimum fixed charge coverage ratio of 1.0 to 1.0. The Debt Facilities do not otherwise contain financial maintenance covenants. The Company was in compliance with all financial covenants related to the Debt Facilities as of October 28, 2016.
The Debt Facilities include customary events of default including non-payment of principal, interest or fees, violation of covenants, inaccuracy of representations or warranties, cross defaults related to certain other material indebtedness, bankruptcy and insolvency events, invalidity or impairment of guarantees or security interests, and material judgments and change of control.
Operating activities used net cash of $67.3 million and $94.8 million for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively, primarily due to the combination of:
Lower inventories as the Company has worked diligently to manage inventory levels,
Higher accounts payable due to the timing of inventory receipts in the current quarter, and
Lower revenues, which drove a decrease in net (loss) income before non-cash items.
Net cash used in investing activities was $26.0 million and $18.1 million for the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, respectively. Cash used in investing activities for both periods was primarily used for investments to update our information technology infrastructure and property and equipment.
For Fiscal 2016, we plan to invest a total of approximately $35.0 million to $40.0 million in capital expenditures for strategic investments and infrastructure, primarily associated with our ERP investment, other technology investments and general corporate needs.
Net cash used by financing activities was $3.9 million for both the Year to Date 2016 and Year to Date 2015, consisting of our quarterly payments for the Term Loan.
Contractual Obligations and Off-Balance-Sheet Arrangements
There have been no material changes to our contractual obligations and off-balance-sheet arrangements as discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 29, 2016.
Financial Instruments with Off-Balance-Sheet Risk
Application of Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates
We believe that the assumptions and estimates associated with inventory valuation, goodwill and intangible asset impairment assessments and income taxes have the greatest potential impact on our financial statements. Therefore, we consider these to be our critical accounting policies and estimates.
There have been no material changes to the critical accounting policies and estimates described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 29, 2016.
As previously discussed, Lands' End reviews the Company's indefinite-lived intangible asset, the Lands’ End trade name, for impairment by comparing the carrying amount of the asset to the fair value on an annual basis, or more frequently if events occur or changes in circumstances indicate that the carrying value is not recoverable. At the date of its most recent annual impairment assessment, Lands' End determined that the income approach, specifically the relief from royalty method, was most appropriate for analyzing the Company's indefinite-lived asset. This method is based on the assumption that, in lieu of ownership, a firm would be willing to pay a royalty in order to exploit the related benefits of this asset class. The relief from royalty method involves two steps: (1) estimation of reasonable royalty rates for the assets and (2) the application of these royalty rates to a revenue stream and discounting the resulting cash flows to determine a value. The Company multiplied the selected royalty rate by the forecasted net sales stream to calculate the cost savings (relief from royalty payment) associated with the asset. The cash flows were then discounted to present value by the selected discount rate and compared to the carrying value of the asset.
As a result of the Fiscal 2015 annual impairment assessment, the Company recorded a non-cash pretax intangible asset impairment charge of $98.3 million during Fiscal 2015 to reduce the carrying value of the trade name to the fair value. During Year to Date 2016, there were no events or changes in circumstances that indicated that the carrying value of Lands' End trade name is not recoverable. As such, an impairment assessment was not performed and there was no impairment charge related to the trade name in Year to Date 2016. If actual results are not consistent with our estimates and assumptions used in estimating revenue growth, future cash flows and asset fair values, we could incur further impairment charges for the intangible asset or goodwill, which could have an adverse effect on our results of operations. The annual test for impairment will be conducted as of the end of Fiscal November 2016.
See Part I, Item 1, Note 12 – Recent Accounting Pronouncements, of the Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements (Unaudited) included in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for information regarding recent accounting pronouncements
Certain statements made in this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q contain forward-looking statements, including statements about our strategies and our opportunities for growth. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include without limitation information concerning our future financial performance, business strategy, plans, goals and objectives.
Statements preceded or followed by, or that otherwise include, the words “believes,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “project,” “estimates,” “plans,” “forecast,” “is likely to” and similar expressions or future or conditional verbs such as “will,” “may,” “would,” “should” and “could” are generally forward-looking in nature and not historical facts. Such statements are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of our management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.
The following additional factors, among others, could cause our actual results, performance, and achievements to differ from those described in the forward-looking statements: our ability to offer merchandise and services that customers want to purchase, including a product assortment with improved fit and quality; changes in customer preference from our branded merchandise; customers’ use of our digital platform, including customer acceptance of our efforts to enhance our e-commerce websites; customer response to direct mail catalogs and digital/social media marketing efforts; the success of our efforts to improve catalog quality and optimize catalog productivity; the success of our overall marketing strategies, some of which, if successful, may not produce positive results in the short term; the success of our efforts to optimize promotions to drive sales and maximize gross margin dollars; our maintenance of a robust customer list; our dependence on information technology and a failure of information technology systems, including with respect to our e-commerce operations, or an inability to upgrade or adapt our systems; the success of our ERP implementation; the success of our efforts to grow and expand into new markets and channels; fluctuations and increases in costs of raw materials; impairment of our relationships with our vendors; our failure to maintain the security of customer, employee or company information; our failure to compete effectively in the apparel industry; the performance of our “store within a store” business; if Sears Holdings sells or disposes of its retail stores, including pursuant to the recapture rights granted to Seritage Growth Properties, and other parties or if its retail business does not attract customers or does not adequately provide services to the Lands’ End Shops at Sears; legal, regulatory, economic and political risks associated with international trade and those markets in which we conduct business and source our merchandise; our failure to protect or preserve the image of our brands and our intellectual property rights; increases in postage, paper and printing costs; failure by third parties who provide us with services in connection with certain aspects of our business to perform their obligations; our failure to timely and effectively obtain shipments of products from our vendors and deliver merchandise to our customers; reliance on promotions and markdowns to encourage customer purchases; our failure to efficiently manage inventory levels; unseasonal or severe weather conditions; the seasonal nature of our business; the adverse effect on our reputation if our independent vendors do not
use ethical business practices or comply with applicable laws and regulations; assessments for additional state taxes; our exposure to periodic litigation and other regulatory proceedings, including with respect to product liability claims; incurrence of charges due to impairment of goodwill, other intangible assets and long-lived assets; our failure to retain our executive management team and to attract qualified new personnel; the impact on our business of adverse worldwide economic and market conditions, including economic factors that negatively impact consumer spending on discretionary items; the inability of our past performance generally, as reflected on our historical financial statements, to be indicative of our future performance; the impact of increased costs due to a decrease in our purchasing power following our separation from Sears Holdings (“Separation”) and other losses of benefits associated with being a subsidiary of Sears Holdings; the failure of Sears Holdings or its subsidiaries to perform under various transaction agreements or our failure to have necessary systems and services in place when certain of the transaction agreements expire; our agreements related to the Separation and certain agreements related to our continuing relationship with Sears Holdings were negotiated while we were a subsidiary of Sears Holdings and we may have received better terms from an unaffiliated third party; potential indemnification liabilities to Sears Holdings pursuant to the separation and distribution agreement; our inability to engage in certain corporate transactions after the Separation; the ability of our principal shareholders to exert substantial influence over us; adverse effects of the Separation on our business; potential liabilities under fraudulent conveyance and transfer laws and legal capital requirements; declines in our stock price due to the eligibility of a number of our shares of common stock for future sale; our inability to pay dividends; stockholders’ percentage ownership in Lands’ End may be diluted in the future; and increases in our expenses and administrative burden in relation to being a public company, in particular to maintain compliance with certain provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; and other risks, uncertainties and factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 29, 2016 and other filings with the SEC. We intend the forward-looking statements to speak only as of the time made and do not undertake to update or revise them as more information becomes available, except as required by law.
The market risk inherent in our financial instruments represents the potential loss arising from adverse changes in currency rates. A significant portion of our business is transacted in U.S. dollars, and is expected to continue to be transacted in U.S. dollars or U.S. dollar-based currencies. As of October 28, 2016, we had $21.5 million of cash denominated in foreign currencies, principally in British Pound Sterling, Euros and Yen. We do not enter into financial instruments for trading purposes or hedging and have not used any derivative financial instruments. We do not consider our foreign earnings to be permanently reinvested.
We are subject to interest rate risk with our Term Loan Facility and our ABL Facility, as both require us to pay interest on outstanding borrowings at variable rates. Each one percentage point change in interest rates associated with the Term Loan Facility would result in a $2.6 million change in our annual cash interest expenses. Assuming our ABL Facility was fully drawn to a principal amount equal to $175.0 million, each one percentage point change in interest rates would result in a $1.8 million change in our annual cash interest expense.
Disclosure Controls and Procedures
Based on their evaluation for the period covered by this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, Lands’ End’s Co-Interim Chief Executive Officers and Executive Vice Presidents, one of which is also the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Treasurer have concluded that, as of October 28, 2016, the Company’s disclosure controls and procedures (as defined in Rule 13a-15(e) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended) are effective.
There were no changes in our internal control over financial reporting that occurred during the Company’s third fiscal quarter ended October 28, 2016 that have materially affected, or are reasonably likely to materially affect, our internal control over financial reporting.
We are involved in various claims, legal proceedings and investigations arising in the ordinary course of business. Some of these actions involve complex factual and legal issues and are subject to uncertainties. At this time, the Company is not able to either predict the outcome of these legal proceedings or reasonably estimate a potential range of loss with respect to the proceedings. While it is not feasible to predict the outcome of pending claims, proceedings and investigations with certainty, management is of the opinion that their ultimate resolution should not have a material adverse effect on our results of operations, cash flows or financial position.
See Part I, Item 1 "Financial Statements - Notes to Condensed Consolidated Financial Statements," Note 9 Commitments and Contingencies - Legal Proceedings for additional information regarding legal proceedings (incorporated herein by reference).
There have been no material changes to the risk factors disclosed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended January 29, 2016, which was filed with the SEC on April 1, 2016.
During the Third Quarter 2016 and Third Quarter 2015, we did not issue or sell any shares of our common stock or other equity securities pursuant to unregistered transactions in reliance upon an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.
The following documents are filed as exhibits hereto:
Amended and Restated Certificate of Incorporation of Lands’ End, Inc. (incorporated by reference to Exhibit 3.1 of the Current Report on Form 8-K filed by Lands’ End, Inc. on March 20, 2014 (File No. 001-09769)).
Amended and Restated Bylaws of Lands’ End, Inc. (incorporated by reference to Exhibit 3.1 to the Company’s Form 8-K filed on April 8, 2014 (File No. 001-09769)).
Compensation Committee Resolutions dated September 23, 2016 regarding Co-Interim Chief Executive Officer Compensation.
Director Compensation Policy effective as of November 16, 2016.
Certification of Co-Principal Executive Officer and Principal Financial Officer Required Under Rule 13a-14(a) and 15d-14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.
Certification of Co-Principal Executive Officer Required Under Rule 13a-14(a) and 15d-14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended.
Certification of Co-Principal Executive Officers and Principal Financial Officer Pursuant to 18 U.S.C. Section 1350, as adopted pursuant to Section 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
XBRL Instance Document*
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Schema Document*
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Calculation Linkbase Document*
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Definition Document*
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Label Linkbase Document*
XBRL Taxonomy Extension Presentation Linkbase Document*
In accordance with Regulation S-T, the XBRL-related information in Exhibit 101 to this Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q shall be deemed to be “furnished” and not “filed.”
Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized.
/s/ James F. Gooch
James F. Gooch
Co-Interim Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Treasurer
(Co-Principal Executive Officer and Principal Financial Officer)
Dated: December 1, 2016
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Elizabeth Banks CBE DL
http://firstwomen.brightonmuseums.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ElizabethBanks.mp3
First Woman president of the Royal Horticultural Society RHS
October 2011, at home, Hergest Croft Gardens, Herefordshire
b.1941, Northamptonshire
Elizabeth Banks is a landscape architect and set up her own business in 1985 designing Rosemoor Gardens for the RHS 1987. She designed six Chelsea show gardens, five of which were awarded gold medals. She was elected first woman president of the Royal Horticultural Society in 2010, aged 69, its only female president to date since the society was founded in 1804. Banks was also the first professional horticulturalist to hold the role.
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Sapporo Dome
Sapporo City, Hokkaido Prefecture
Sapporo is the northernmost large city in Japan, and as such, it faces unique difficulties related to the weather. The city is located on the island of Hokkaido, about two hours by plane from Tokyo. It is a very scenic location, in the heart of a broad valley at the base of beautiful mountains. Sapporo has played host to the 1972 Winter Olympic Games, and is a popular winter sports mecca for tourists from the big cities, who are looking for an escape from the hustle and bustle. Located on Japan's northern frontier, Sapporo is a relatively new city, founded only about 150 years ago, though in population, it is Japan's fifth-largest metropolis. Since it is a relatively new city, Sapporo is laid out in a rectangular grid, with broad avenues, unlike the narrow, meandering lanes of most other Japanese cities.
Amidst the pleasant fields and rolling hills of suburban Sapporo is perhaps the most technically advanced feature of the 2002 World Cup -- Sapporo Dome Stadium. Because of its location, in the chilly northern regions of the country, Sapporo has much longer winters and heavier snowfalls than any other major city in Japan. Because of the severe winter weather, it is difficult to schedule soccer matches during the months of November-April.
This creates quite a problem for sports teams in the area. Consadole Sapporo has an energetic and loyal fan club, but their football season is naturally limited by weather conditions, since cold weather tends to discourage fans, and it is impossible to play football in deep snow. Even today, the schedule is adjusted to ensure that Consadole plays most of its matches in March and early April at away venues, but to help make home matches a bit less daunting to schedule, the city built a stadium that would reduce, even if it cannot eliminate, the problem.
In preparation for the 2002 World Cup, Sapporo built an all-weather stadium that can hold sporting events at any time of year. The only problem is that natural grass will not grow in an enclosed stadium, and J.League rules specify that all matches be played on natural turf.
To solve the problem, the architects of Sapporo Dome Stadium came up with a truly remarkable feat of engineering. Rather build a roof that could open and close, to let light into the stadium, they decided to build the pitch outside, in the sunlight, and move it into the stadium only when matches are being played. As the graphic on this page shows, the stadium actually has a movable pitch, which is elevated by a cushion of compressed air and moved into the stadium prior to a match. The stands then rotate so that they are as close to the pitch as possible.
Even this magnificent feat of engineering does not solve the problem completely. If the pitch is too heavy, even the powerful motors that carry it indoors cannor function, so if more than a few centimeters of snow falls, the movable pitch becomes meaningless. Nevertheless, Consadole is now able to schedule matches in April and early December without too much risk of a cancellation, and the snowiest months of the year (January and February) are off-season. The Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team, which can play on artificial turf, is able to use the stadium year-round. And as the pictures below should indicate, it is a very beautiful venue for both football and baseball. Indeed, it was used as a venue for the World Cup.
Sapporo Dome ("Hiroba") Capacity: 42,300
Home Team: Consadole Sapporo Completed: March 2001
Location: Sapporo City, Hokkaido, Japan
Building Area: 53,800 m2 Total Floor Area:(Open Arena) 97,503 m2
Roof Diameter: 245 m Stand Inclination: Max. 30 degree angle
Building Structure: The soccer field is entirely covered by the dome, to prevent matches from being affected by unfavorable weather conditions like rain, snow or strong wind. The dome has two basement levels, four levels above ground, and a two-level penthouse, with the soccer field on the second basement level.
Stadium Access
Sapporo Dome is located on the Sapporo city subway line, about a 10 minute walk from Fukuju station (the last stop on the "East" line). There are buses from the Sapporo (Chitose) Airport, which terminate at the Fukuju bus terminal, a short walk from the stadium.
Awaiting information on 2017 ticket prices
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SBIRT@IU
SBIRT@IUSM
1. Understanding SBIRT
2. Beyond SBIRT
3. Organizational SBIRT
Best Practices for Abusable Medication
Chronic Pain Prescriptions
Places to Refer
We ask everyone
Beyond SBIRT > Best Practices for Prescriptions of Abused Medications
Prescription abuse on the rise
Opioid prescribing for acute and chronic pain has been rising dramatically in the United States since the 1990s. In the years from 1997 to 2006, retail sales for morphine, hydrocodone and oxycodone rose 196%, 244%, and 732%, respectively.
Source: http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/arcos/retail_drug_summary/index.html
Meet Mr. Hawkins
Mr. Hawkins is a 46 year-old who comes to clinic for his first visit since losing his job a year ago. His major complaint is back pain that he describes as “8 out of 10” on his worst days.
Opioid abuse rising too
During a similar time frame, prescription opioid misuse has also been on the rise in the United States. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) reported that the estimated number of ED visits for non-medical use of opioid analgesics increased 111% from 2004 to 2008 (from 144,600 to 305,900 visits) and increased an additional 29% from 2007 to 2008. The highest numbers of ED visits were recorded for oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone, each of which showed statistically significant increases during the 5-year period.
Client Case: Mr. Hawkins
Mr. Hawkins has had this pain since a car accident during which he was hit from behind (he was a restrained driver) 2 years ago. He was seen in the Emergency Department after the crash but was released, being told that his x-rays were unremarkable.
With death rates tripling
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during the most recent decade, the number of drug poisoning deaths involving opioid analgesics more than tripled from about 4,000 in 1999 to 14,800 in 2008. Opioid analgesics were involved in more than 40% of all drug-poisoning deaths in 2008, up from about 25% in 1999.
Mr. Hawkins’ pain is described as a “dull ache” in the central lumbar area and is worsened by any type of bending or lifting more than 10 or 15 pounds. He also notes that if he stands or walks more than about 20 or 30 minutes, he has to stop due to the pain. He occasionally has a sharp pain that radiates from his back to his buttocks but this doesn’t happen very often. He takes ibuprofen with only minimal relief but has not tried other medications.
Indiana State Legislature Takes Action…
To directly address the problem of controlled analgesic overprescribing, the Indiana State Legislature passed a new resolution that took effect on December 15, 2013, known as the Title 844 Medical Licensing Board of Indiana Emergency Rule. This action allows the Attorney General’s office to move more quickly in taking enforcement action against practitioners who overprescribe and obtain records for investigation. As a result, new guidelines for the ongoing care and documentation of this care, have been mandated. A summary of the requirements are included in First Do No Harm.
First Do No Harm should REQUIRED READING for anyone who writes pain medications for any reason.
Also, see Bitterpill.in.gov for more information on prescription drug abuse.
We'd love your feedback
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Moreno | Kuoppala / Texto 28
by jomoreno | Dec 12, 2015 | Uncategorized
Vapaan Taiteen Tila
Monday 14.12.2015 7:30 pm
Texto 28 is a collaborative project between composers Josué Moreno and Visa Kuoppala. The initial form of the project was a one hour fixed media piece done by overdubbing takes of electroacoustic improvisation restricted by a post-Cageian open score. It resulted in a subtle, fragile and enigmatic sound-environment where the aural image didn’t reveal whether it was composed, improvised or something else. In this live version the score has been modified to be performed as a real-time performance, based on quiet electroacoustic improvisation but including indeterminate elements and ascetic restrictions on playing.
Free entrance. Doors open at 19:00, music starts promptly at 19:30.
Excerpt from a rehearsal:
Visa Kuoppala is a Finnish composer, improviser and field recordist. He is particularly active in the areas of acousmatic composition and electroacoustic improvisation, where he is exploring the poetic, emotional and atmospheric qualities of enigmatic or ambiguous sounds. For his improvisation practice he has developed a granular synthesis and feedback -based instrument called Malegra, which he plays both solo and in groups. At present he is working on a PhD in electroacoustic composition at the Music department of University of Birmingham under the supervision of Jonty Harrison.
https://visatapani.wordpress.com/
https://soundcloud.com/visatapani
In his artistic practice Josué Moreno is pursuing the creation of beautiful sonic spaces while keeping the meaning of “beauty” as wide as possible. His work —which varies from purely instrumental music till sound installations and interactive software— has been presented in important festivals and forums such as Jiem (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid), Synthèse (Bourges), Festival de Música Contemporánea de Alicante and Seoul International Computer Music Festival. His work has been supported and commissioned by institutions such as Fundación Phonos (Barcelona), Sibelius Academy Development Centre Helsinki, CDMC(Centro para la Difusión de la Música Contemporánea), Musicadhoy/Operadhoy, ENPARTS (European Network of Performing Arts). His music has been published in several CDs of recent release under the labels Marmita-Música Viva and AMEE. He worked in the generative design, interactivity and implementation of the sound environment for the Finnish Pavilion of the Shanghai Expo 2010.
http://josuemoreno.eu/language/en/
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Overall, the percentage of dialysis patients who were positive for antibodies among those sampled was 8%. But since dialysis patients aren't representative of the entire U.S. population, the researchers standardized the results with respect to age, sex, race and ethnicity and region.
While seven states had 0% of patients having antibodies, New York topped the list with 33%.
The scientists also saw racial and economic differences in antibody rates: Compared to the whites, residents of predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods were two to three times more likely to have antibodies, people living in poorer areas were two times more likely and those living in the most densely populated areas were 10 times more likely.
The number of U.S. coronavirus cases passed 7 million on Friday, with California the hardest hit state so far in a pandemic that has crippled the country for more than six months.
The United States has been averaging about 41,500 cases daily, down from the pandemic's midsummer peak, but states in the Midwest and West are seeing case numbers climb, The New York Times reported.
It was less than a month ago that the United States reached 6 million cases, the Times reported. It took over three months for the country to record its first million cases.
New study shows coronavirus mutating rapidly
A new study of more than 5,000 genetic sequences of the coronavirus reveals the virus's continual accumulation of mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious, the Washington Post reported.
But researchers did not find that these mutations have made the virus deadlier.
Every mutation is a roll of the dice, and with transmission so widespread in the United States that the virus has had plenty of opportunities to change, potentially with troublesome consequences, study author James Musser, of Houston Methodist Hospital, told the Post.
"We have given this virus a lot of chances," Musser said. "There is a huge population size out there right now."
The research was posted on the preprint server MedRxiv and has not been peer-reviewed. Earlier this month, a larger batch of sequences was published by scientists in the United Kingdom. Those scientists also concluded that a mutation that changes the structure of the "spike protein" on the surface of the virus may be driving the outsized spread of that particular strain.
David Morens, a top virologist at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the finding "may have implications for our ability to control it."
"Wearing masks, washing our hands, all those things are barriers to transmissibility, or contagion, but as the virus becomes more contagious it statistically is better at getting around those barriers," Morens explained.
Not only that, the virus may be able dampen the durability of any vaccine, Morens added.
"Although we don't know yet, it is well within the realm of possibility that this coronavirus, when our population-level immunity gets high enough, this coronavirus will find a way to get around our immunity," Morens said. "If that happened, we'd be in the same situation as with flu. We'll have to chase the virus and, as it mutates, we'll have to tinker with our vaccine."
One-shot vaccine moves to larger trials
In news that might help make vaccinating all Americans against COVID-19 more easy to accomplish, the first coronavirus vaccine that only requires a single shot has entered the final stages of testing in the United States, the Post reported.
The international trial will eventually recruit up to 60,000 participants. The vaccine, made by Johnson & Johnson, is the fourth to enter the large, Phase 3 trials that determine effectiveness and safety, the Post reported.
Paul Stoffels, the company's chief scientific officer, predicted on Tuesday there may be enough data to have results by the end of the year and the company plans to manufacture 1 billion doses next year.
Three other vaccine candidates have a head start, with U.S. trials that began earlier this summer, but the vaccine being developed by Johnson & Johnson could be easier to administer and distribute if it's proven safe and effective, the Post reported.
The company is initially testing a single dose, while the other vaccines require a second shot three to four weeks after the first one, the newspaper said. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine can also be stored in liquid form at refrigerator temperatures for three months, whereas two of the three other vaccines must be frozen or kept at ultra-cold temperatures for long-term storage, the Post reported.
"A single-shot vaccine, if it's safe and effective, will have substantial logistic advantages for global pandemic control," said Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who partnered with Johnson & Johnson to develop the vaccine.
"It is a really good thing that we have this diversity of platforms because this is a critical crisis in terms of our global circumstance," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. "Now, here in the U.S. with 200,000 deaths, we want to do everything we can without sacrificing safety or efficacy."
Cases keep mounting
By Monday, the U.S. coronavirus death toll neared 205,000, according to a Times tally.
According to the same tally, the top five states in coronavirus cases as of Monday were: California with over 811,600; Texas with more than 770,000; Florida with more than 700,500; New York with over 460,000; and Georgia with over 298,000.
Curbing the spread of the coronavirus in the rest of the world remains challenging.
By Monday, India's coronavirus case count had passed 6 million, just over one month after hitting the 3 million mark, the Times reported.
More than 95,500 coronavirus patients have died in India, but when measured as a proportion of the population, the country has had far fewer deaths than many others. Doctors say this reflects India's younger and leaner population.
Still, the country's public health system is severely strained, and some sick patients cannot find hospital beds, the newspaper said. Only the United States has more coronavirus cases.
Meanwhile, Brazil passed 4.7 million cases and nearly 141,700 deaths as of Monday, a Johns Hopkins tally showed.
Cases are also spiking in Russia: The country's coronavirus case count has passed 1.1 million. As of Monday, the death toll in Russia was over 20,000, the Hopkins tally showed.
Worldwide, the number of reported infections passed 33 million on Monday, with over 998,000 deaths, according to the Hopkins tally.
SOURCES: The Lancet news release; Washington Post; The New York Times
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The real Horse Whisperer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Brannaman
The Truth Behind Pixar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KwPHaylRjo
Fruitville Station * * *
In the very early morning of January 1st, 2009, Oscar Grant III was fatally shot by transit cop Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitville Station in Oakland, California. This followed a fight on the BART train after which the police tried to detain several suspects. Oscar Grant was likely resisting arrest. The scene at the BART station was chaotic, possibly bordering on a riot. Johannes Mehserle claimed that he thought that he was reaching for his Tazer, but accidentally grabbed and fired his gun instead.
This incident lead to protests, riots, a conviction of Mehserle, and multiple lawsuits.
The movie Fruitville Station portrays the last 24 hours of the life of 22 year old Oscar Grant. Oscar Grant is portrayed as a former convicted drug dealer, and a father, who was trying to get his life back on track. He is shown in a loving relationship with his mother, his girlfriend, and his daughter. He tries to get his old grocery store job back, but fails. Desperate, he sets up a drug deal, but then backs out. He celebrates his mother's birthday on New Year's Eve 2008, and then travels with friends to see fireworks in San Francisco. During the return trip on the BART train, he is attacked by a former prison adversary, and then is detained by police at the Fruitville station. While resisting arrest, the unarmed Oscar Grant is fatally shot.
The movie has a couple of weakness in that it portrays Oscar Grant only in a positive light, and any story about 24 hours in an individual's life is going to be light on plot and somewhat meandering. What is great about the movie is that it gives a really good sense of what it must be like to be a young black man trying to survive under difficult circumstances. The message of the movie can be considered a referendum on all people living under similar conditions.
Cockneys Versus Zombies * * *
The story of Cockneys Versus Zombies is exactly what you would expect from the title. In this respect, it is somewhat predictable. It invites comparison to the slightly better Shaun of the Dead or the much better Attack the Block. So why should you see it? Because it is a dark comedy that will make you care about the characters for 90 minutes. The humor is pretty low key, but combine that with the zombie story and it manages to entertain.
Zombie movies have become way too abundant. Consider the following joke from the movie:
“You have to shoot them in the head!”
“Everybody knows that!”
'Ride Along' rolls over 'Jack Ryan' to win U.S. weekend box office
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/19/us-boxoffice-idUSBREA0I0D520140119
The Wizard Of Oz Royal Variety 2010 - This is interesting. I watched 4 times. (70 years after The Wizard of Oz movie, the story still fascinates people.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stCIkeMGTTc
25 Greatest Unscripted Scenes in Films
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTFQBHBeleE
Ender's Game * * * *
Ender's Game is a military science fiction movie based upon a wonderful novella of the same name. Sometime in the future, the human race is attacked by an alien race called the Formics and the humans barely repel the attack. In a desperate attempt to prevent another attack, the humans plan to take the battle to the Formic home world. In the hope of developing new, brilliant leadership, the military begins training a few talented children chosen for space combat. They go through a series of training simulations, i.e. "games" to prepare them for war. Ender Wiggin is a particularly brilliant cadet who is taken under the wing of the fanatical Colonel Highland Graf, played by Harrison Ford. I like Harrison Ford's portrayal of Graf as a man who has only one purpose in life: Destroy the enemy.
Watching Ender's Game is a deeply visceral experience. I had my doubts about whether this novella could be adapted to the big screen, but the movie felt intense to me. I am wondering if the movie will have the same effect on a smaller screen, i.e. Home video? Maybe one of the reasons the movie felt so intense to me is that I knew what the surprise ending was from having read the book. The movie and the book raise a few moral questions about the possible genocide of an alien race.
I highly enjoyed Ender's Game and felt that it was loyal to the book, which, by the way, is one of the best books I ever read. The book has spawned many sequels, so maybe we will see more of Ender Wiggin on the big screen.
Some of the events in the book are abbreviated or omitted in the movie, including not telling us that Ender unintentionally kills one of the other cadets.
It took me at least an hour after I saw the movie to realize that Ender's sister is played by Abigail Breslin. It bugs me that I missed this at first. The pretty little girl from The Ultimate Gift, Zombie Land, and Little Miss Sunshine has grown into a pretty teenager.
Maleficent trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYemY3xFsB4
Frozen Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3VwJm4NpJ4
Midnight Cowboy * * 1/2.
Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young man from Texas, moves to New York City, where he hopes wealthy women will pay him for his sexual favors. Instead, unable to find any such clients, he is repeatedly cheated and manipulated by various individuals he encounters. After his money has run out, and he has been evicted from the room in which he had been living, Buck is invited by a sickly street hustler named Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), who was among the persons who had earlier swindled him, to live in his own squalid flat in a condemned building. Despite their differences, the two men soon become emotionally attached to one another and together attempt to survive from day to day.
On the surface, Midnight Cowboy seems like one of the most depraved and depressing movies you will ever see. The pace is slow and the movie is repetitive. However, it was the best picture winner in 1969. The movie has a social conscious as it explores the seedy underbelly of New York. The performances by Hoffman and Voight are extremely good and almost redeem the movie. The relationship between Buck and Rizzo hints at hidden homosexual feelings.
The film did not deserve its original "X" rating, which is probably mostly due to the multiple homosexual references, not to mention some very adult themes, so the movie was later re-rated at an "R.". There are a great many nude scenes in the film, but most of them are very brief. This is the first and probably the last "X" rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Roger Ebert gave the movie three stars.
The True Meaning of "Star Trek Into Darkness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBRf8DVkc-8
The Impossible * * * *
The Impossible is an inspirational movie about the courage of a family struggling to survive the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Thailand. What I liked about the film is that the family members faced a terrible ordeal with courage, and when possible, helped others.
Invictus * * * 1/2.
Invictus is a deeply inspirational film about Nelson Mandela, who is portrayed as an elder statesman of high ideals on par with Abraham Lincoln, and the rugby team that he helped promote. The movie would have us believe that their victory in the 1995 World Cup helped mend a racially divided nation.
The truth about Nelson Mandela and South Africa is far less pleasant. Nevertheless, I like the movie for its high ideals even if they don't match the reality of Nelson Mandela.
A Dolphin Tale * * *
I feel about A Dolphin Tale the same way I feel about Invictus. The principle characters are so good-natured, so honorable in their intentions and kindhearted that it immediately made me think that the movie stretched the truth quite a bit. The characters are inspirational for their goodness, kind of like The Ultimate Gift and although the movie is rated PG, it can easily been mistaken for a G rated kids film.
Despite the obvious corniness of A Dolphin Tale, it is a corniness that works extremely well. These characters are so charming that we want to like them, and the dolphin Winter (playing herself) makes us want to root for her.
'Ride Along' rolls over 'Jack Ryan' to win U.S. we...
The Wizard Of Oz Royal Variety 2010 - This is inte...
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by Olaf Olafsson
The haunting, vivid story of a nun whose past returns to her in unexpected ways, all while investigating a mysterious death and a series of harrowing abuse claims
A young nun is sent by the Vatican to investigate allegations of misconduct at a Catholic school in Iceland. During her time there, on a gray winter’s day, a young student at the school watches the school’s headmaster, Father August Franz, fall to his death from the church tower.
Two decades later, the… (more)
Two decades later, the child—now a grown man, haunted by the past—calls the nun back to the scene of the crime. Seeking peace and calm in her twilight years at a convent in France, she has no choice to make a trip to Iceland again, a trip that brings her former visit, as well as her years as a young woman in Paris, powerfully and sometimes painfully to life. In Paris, she met an Icelandic girl who she has not seen since, but whose acquaintance changed her life, a relationship she relives all while reckoning with the mystery of August Franz’s death and the abuses of power that may have brought it on.
In The Sacrament, critically acclaimed novelist Olaf Olafsson looks deeply at the complexity of our past lives and selves; the faulty nature of memory; and the indelible mark left by the joys and traumas of youth. Affecting and beautifully observed, The Sacrament is both propulsively told and poignantly written—tinged with the tragedy of life’s regrets but also moved by the possibilities of redemption, a new work from a novelist who consistently surprises and challenges.
Fiction Thrillers Nordic literature
Publisher: Ecco (December 03, 2019)
Nordic literature
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The concept Deeds represents the subject, aboutness, idea or notion of resources found in University of San Diego Libraries.
The Resource Deeds
795 Items that share the Concept Deeds
Abolishing the Santa Rosa Island National Monument
Abolishing the Santa Rosa Island National Monument, Fla
Acceptance of bequest of the late William F. Edgar
Acceptance of title to sites for public-building projects
Accepting title to certain lands near Anniston, Ala
Acknowledgment of conveyances in the District of Columbia
Acknowledgment of deeds in the Philippine Islands and Porto Rico for real estate in the District of Columbia and the territories
Acknowledgment of deeds in the Philippine Islands, etc
Acknowledgment of deeds, etc., in Guam, Samoa, and the Canal Zone
Acquisition of land adjacent to Bolling Field, D.C
Acquisition of land adjacent to Bolling Field, District of Columbia
Acquisition of land at Camp Bullis, Tex
Acts passed by the General Assembly of Maryland concerning the Territory of Columbia and the City of Washington
Additional districts for recording deeds, etc., in Indian Territory
Additional recording district (No. 27) in the Indian Territory
Additional recording district in Indian Territory
Additional recording district in the Indian Territory
Adjust titles to lands
Adjusting certain conflicts respecting state school indemnity selections
Adjusting titles to lands acquired by the United States
Adjustment of titles within the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma
Amend section 10 of the act entitled "An act extending the homestead laws and providing for right-of-way for railroads in the District of Alaska, and for other purposes", approved May 14, 1898, as amended
Amend sections 546 and 547 of the code of the District of Columbia
Amending District code as to accepting deeds, wills, etc., as prima facie evidence
Amending Public Law 885, Eightieth Congress
Amending an act authorizing the conveyance of a portion of Fort Schuyler, N.Y., to the State of New York
Amending an act entitled "An act to establish a uniform system of bankruptcy throughout the United States," approved July 1, 1898, and acts amendatory thereof and supplementary thereto
Amending conveyance of certain real property to City of Richmond, Calif
Amending section 2 of the Act of March 29, 1956 (70 Stat. 58), authorizing the conveyance to Lake County, Calif., of the Lower Lake Rancheria
Amending section 553 of the Code of Law for the District of Columbia
Amending section 553, Code of Law for the District of Columbia
Amending section 555, code of law for District of Columbia
Amending the Act of March 22, 1946, for the purpose of correcting the description of the small parcel of land authorized to be conveyed to the State of Wyoming by such act
Amending the Code of Law of the District of Columbia
Amending the Code of Law of the District of Columbia in respect to the recording, in the Office of the Recorder of Deeds, of bills of sale, mortgages, deeds of trust, and conditional sales of personal property
Amending the Code of Laws of the District of Columbia in respect to the recording, in the Office of the Recorder of Deeds, of bills of sale, mortgages, deeds of trust, and conditional sales of personal property
Amending the act authorizing the conveyance of certain lands to Miles City, Mont., in order to extend for 5 years the authority under such act
Amending the act of August 26, 1935, to permit certain real property of the United States to be conveyed to states, municipalities, and other political subdivisions for highway purposes
Amending the act of August 26, 1935, to permit certain real property of the United States to be conveyed to states, municipalities, and other political subdivisions for highway purposes : report (to accompany H.R. 11522)
Amending the act of June 4, 1953 (67 Stat. 41)
Amending the acts approved April 16 and July 27, 1906 (34 Stat. 116 and 519), so as to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands on the Huntley reclamation project, Yellowstone County, Mont., to school district No. 24, Huntley project schools, Yellowstone County, Mont
Amending the laws relating to fees charged for services rendered by the Office of the Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia and the laws relating to appointment of personnel in such office
Appointment of new trustees in deeds of trust
Appointment of recorder of deeds, District of Columbia
Approval of title to certain real estate in the District of Columbia
Approve deed of conveyance of certain land in Seneca Oil Spring Reservation, N.Y
Authorize acceptance of proposed donation of property in Maxwell, Nebr., for federal building purposes
Authorize and direct the Secretary of the Navy to convey by gift to the City of Savannah, Ga., the naval radio station, the buildings, and apparatus, located upon land owned by said city
Authorize filing of actions in state courts to quiet title lands adjacent to Muncie, Ind
Authorize loan from Public Works Administration by District of Columbia to build small courts building
Authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to execute a quitclaim deed of certain land located in the village of Lyons, N.Y
Authorize the conveyance of land to the State of Minnesota
Authorizing David H. Forman and Julia Forman to bring suit against the United States to determine title to certain lands in Maricopa County, Ariz
Authorizing Joe Graham Post, No. 119, American Legion, upon certain conditions, to lease the lands conveyed to it by the Act of June 15, 1933
Authorizing Joe Graham Post, No. 119, to lease certain lands conveyed to it
Authorizing Secretary of the Army to convey certain land to the State of Virginia
Authorizing Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands on the Gila reclamation project, Arizona, to the University of Arizona
Authorizing a 6-month extension on the time limit for the conveyance of certain property to the State of Louisiana under Public Law 235
Authorizing a perpetual easement to Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Authorizing a quitclaim deed to property owned by Jacob F. Riedel
Authorizing an exchange of certain lands with William W. Kiskadden in connection with the Rocky Mountain National Park, Colo
Authorizing an exchange of land in Eagle County, Colo
Authorizing an exchange of lands between the City of Eastport, Maine, and the United States, and the conveyance of a roadway easement to the City of Eastport, Maine
Authorizing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands erroneously conveyed to the United States
Authorizing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to transfer approximately 9 acres of land in the Hualapai Indian Reservation, Ariz., to school district No. 8, Mohave County, Ariz
Authorizing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to transfer approximately 9 acres of land on the Hualapai Indian Reservation, Ariz., to school district No. 8, Mohave County, Ariz
Authorizing and directing the conveyance of certain tracts of land in the State of Mississippi to Richard C. French, Lewis M. French, and Ruth French Hershey
Authorizing and directing the transfer of certain federal property to the government of American Samoa
Authorizing and directing the transfer of certain federal property to the government of American Samoa : report (to accompany S. 3558)
Authorizing construction of recorder of deeds building in the District of Columbia
Authorizing conveyance for school purposes of certain land in Acadia National Park to the town of Tremont, Maine
Authorizing conveyance of 29 acres to the City of Warner Robins, Ga
Authorizing conveyance of 29 acres to the city of Warner Robins, Ga. : report (to accompany H.R. 5927)
Authorizing conveyance of United States interest in certain lands in the village of Sag Harbor, N.Y
Authorizing conveyance of certain lands to the State of Vermont
Authorizing conveyance of certain property at Boston Neck, Narragansett, R.I., to the State of Rhode Island
Authorizing conveyance of land in Orange County, N.Y., to the village of Highland Falls, N.Y
Authorizing conveyance of land in Tarrant and Wise Counties, Tex., to the State of Texas
Authorizing conveyance of land near Grand Prairie, Tex., to the State of Texas
Authorizing conveyance of land to the State of Wyoming
Authorizing conveyance to the City of Anniston, Ala., of certain real property within Fort McClellan, Ala
Authorizing issuance of deeds to certain Indians or Eskimos
Authorizing land conveyance to the State of Wyoming comprising a part of Francis E. Warren Air Force base
Authorizing payments by the Administrator of Veterans' Affairs on the purchase of automobiles or other conveyances by certain disabled veterans
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to convey certain land in Necedah, Wis., to the village of Necedah
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to convey certain land to the City of Sioux Falls, S. Dak., for park and recreational purposes, for an amount equal to the cost to the United States of acquiring such lands from the city
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to convey certain lands in the State of Rhode Island to the town of North Kingstown, R.I
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to convey certain lands in the State of Wyoming to the City of Cheyenne, Wyo
Context of Deeds
[Validating acknowledgments taken before United States commissioners appointed by circuit courts of United States or by supreme court of deeds recorded in District of Columbia]
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to convey certain lands in the state of Wyoming to the city of Cheyenne, Wyo. : report (to accompany S. 857)
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to convey certain property which has been declared surplus to the needs of the United States to the City of Roseburg, Oreg
Authorizing the Administrator of General Services to transfer certain land to Richard M. Tinney and John T. O'Connor, Jr
Authorizing the Administrator of Veterans' Affairs to convey certain lands and to lease certain other land to Milwaukee County, Wis
Authorizing the Administrator of Veterans' Affairs to reconvey to Richland County, S.C., a portion of the Veterans' Administration Hospital Reservation, Columbia, S.C
Authorizing the Administrator of Veterans' Affairs to reconvey to the Helene Chamber of Commerce certain described parcels of land situated in the City of Helena, Mont
Authorizing the Administrator of Veterans' affairs to convey certain land to the City of Milwaukee, Wis
Authorizing the Administrator of the General Services Administration to convey certain land to the City of Milwaukee, Wis
Authorizing the Commissioners of the District of Columbia to prescribe the processes and procedures for recording instruments of writing in the Office of the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia
Authorizing the County of Custer, State of Montana, to convey certain lands to the United States
Authorizing the Federal Works Administrator to accept and dispose of real estate devised to the United States by the late Maggie Johnson, of Polk County, Ark
Authorizing the Panama Canal Company to convey to the Department of State an improved site in Colon, Republic of Panama
Authorizing the President to transfer to the Government of Haiti certain property of the United States in Haiti
Authorizing the Secretary of Agriculture to convey certain lands to Springfield Township, Montgomery County, Pa., for highway and ornamental park purposes
Authorizing the Secretary of War to convey a certain parcel of land to the Captain William Edmiston Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution
Authorizing the Secretary of the Army to convey a 6.89-acre tract of land to the State of Texas for National Guard purposes
Authorizing the Secretary of the Army to convey land at Fort Belvoir, Va
Authorizing the Secretary of the Army to convey to the State of Kentucky title to certain lands situated in Hardin and Jefferson Counties, Ky
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey a certain parcel of land, with improvements, to the City of Alpena, Mich
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey abandoned school properties in the Territory of Alaska to local school officials
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain federally owned land under his jurisdiction to school district No. 24 of Lake County, Oreg
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands erroneously conveyed to the United States
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands on the Gila reclamation project, Arizona, to the University of Arizona
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands situated in Clark County, Nev., to the Boulder City Cemetery Association for cemetery purposes
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands to the Churntown elementary school district, California
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to convey to Indian tribes certain federally owned buildings, improvements, or facilities on tribal lands or on lands reserved for Indian administration
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to determine and confirm by patent in the nature of a deed of quitclaim the title to lots in the City of Pensacola, Fla
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to determine the validity of titles to lands acquired in the administration of the reclamation laws
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to grant to the State of California, for state highway purposes, a tract of land situated in San Bernardino County, Calif
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to issue quitclaim deeds to the States for certain lands
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to quitclaim to the heirs of Jesus Gonzales all right, title, and interest of the United States in a certain described tract of land within the Carson National Forest, N. Mex
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to sell certain lands of the Agua Caliente Band of Mission Indians, California, to the Palm Springs Unified School District
Authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to transfer certain property of the United States Government (in the Wyoming National Guard Camp Guernsey target and maneuver area, Platte County, Wyo.) to the State of Wyoming
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to convey Casa Dorinda estate in Santa Barbara County, Calif., to Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred B. Bliss
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to convey certain land to State of California in exchange for other land
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to convey certain property to Solano County, Calif., and to acquire certain other property in Solano County
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to convey certain property to Solano County, Calif., and to acquire certain other property in Solano County : report (to accompany H.R. 697)
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to convey to the State of Rhode Island, for highway purposes only, a strip of land within the naval advance base depot at North Kingstown, R.I
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to grant to the City of Canton, Ohio, for highway purposes only, a strip of land situated within the United States naval ordnance plant at Canton, Ohio
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to transfer land for resettlement in Guam
Authorizing the Secretary of the Navy to transfer land for resettlement in Guam, and for other purposes
Authorizing the Texas Hill Country Development Foundation to convey certain land to Kerr County, Tex., and such county to convey a portion thereof to the State of Texas
Authorizing the conveyance by quitclaim deed of certain land to the Brownsville Navigation District of Cameron County, Tex
Authorizing the conveyance by the Army of certain property in Philadelphia, Pa. : report (to accompany S. 2210)
Authorizing the conveyance by the army of certain property in Philadelphia, Pa
Authorizing the conveyance of a certain tract of land in North Carolina to the City of Charlotte, N.C
Authorizing the conveyance of a parcel of land at the naval supply depot, Bayonne, N.J., to the American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corp
Authorizing the conveyance of a parcel of land at the naval supply depot, Bayonne, N.J., to the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Corporation
Authorizing the conveyance of a portion of Camp Mabry, Tex., to the State of Texas for National Guard purposes
Authorizing the conveyance of a portion of the United States military reservation at Fort Schuyler, N.Y., to the State of New York for use as a maritime school
Authorizing the conveyance of certain land in Macon, Ga
Authorizing the conveyance of certain land to the Pecwan Union School District for use as the site of a school
Authorizing the conveyance of certain land to the State of Michigan
Authorizing the conveyance of certain land to the State or Oregon
Authorizing the conveyance of certain land to the state of Michigan : report (to accompany H.R. 65)
Authorizing the conveyance of certain lands in Shiloh National Military Park to the State of Tennessee for the relocation of highways
Authorizing the conveyance of certain lands to the City of Cheyenne, Wyo
Authorizing the conveyance of certain lands within the Fort Douglas Military Reservation
Authorizing the conveyance of certain property in Iowa to the State of Iowa for National Guard purposes
Authorizing the conveyance of certain property of the United States to the State of New Mexico
Authorizing the conveyance of certain property to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico
Authorizing the conveyance of certain property to the Methodist Church, Acworth, Ga
Authorizing the conveyance of certain public lands in the State of Minnesota to such state for use for park, recreational, or wildlife-refuge purposes
Authorizing the conveyance of certain public lands in the State of Nevada to the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, acting for the State of Nevada
Authorizing the conveyance of certain war housing projects to the City of Norfolk, Va
Authorizing the conveyance of certain war-housing projects to the City of Warwick, Va., and the City of Hampton, Va
Authorizing the conveyance of homestead allotments to Indians, Aleuts, or Eskimos in Alaska
Authorizing the conveyance of land at Fort Devens, Mass., to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Authorizing the conveyance of land in John Day Reservoir to the City of Arlington, Oreg
Authorizing the conveyance of land in John Day Reservoir to the city of Arlington, Oreg. : report (to accompany S. 2362)
Authorizing the conveyance of lands within Caven Point Terminal and Ammunition Loading Pier, New Jersey, to the New Jersey Turnpike Authority
Authorizing the conveyance of real property to Sacramento County, Calif
Authorizing the conveyance of real property to Sacramento County, Calif. : report (to accompany H.R. 2247)
Authorizing the conveyance of the United States Fish Hatchery property at Butte Falls, Oreg., to the State of Oregon
Authorizing the conveyance of the Wilmington, N.C., reserve shipyard
Authorizing the conveyance of tribal lands from the Shoshone Indian Tribe and the Arapahoe Indian Tribe of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming to the United States
Authorizing the conveyance to Lake County, Calif., of the Lower Lake Rancheria
Authorizing the conveyance to the City of Anniston, Ala., of certain real property within Fort McClellan, Ala
Authorizing the conveyance, for school purposes, of certain land in Acadia National Park to the town of Tremont, Maine
Authorizing the exchange of lands acquired by the United States for the Silver Creek recreational demonstration project, Oregon, for the purpose of consolidating holdings therein
Authorizing the exchange of lands between the United States and El Paso, Tex
Authorizing the execution of mortgages and deeds of trust on individual Indian trust or restricted land
Authorizing the partition or sale of inherited interests in allotted lands in the Tulalip Reservation, Wash
Authorizing the sale of Government-owned housing to the City of Hooks, Tex
Authorizing the sale of certain lands to the Sisters of St. Joseph in Arizona, Incorporated
Authorizing the sale of inherited interests in trust and restricted allotted lands and restricted purchased allotted lands in the State of Minnesota, and for other purposes
Authorizing the sale of inherited interests in trust and restricted allotted lands and restricted purchased allotted lands in the state of Minnesota, and for other purposes : report (to accompany H.R. 1150)
Authorizing the transfer of three units of the Fort Belknap Indian irrigation project to the landowners within the project
Authorizing the transfer of three units of the Fort Belknap Indian irrigation project to the landowners within the project : report (to accompany S. 1889)
Authorizing the transfer of war housing projects to the City of Moses Lake, Wash
Aztec land bill
Bill to quiet title
Bill to quiet title : report (to accompany H.R. 12491)
Board of road commissioners in the Territory of Alaska
Cashier in Office of Recorder of Deeds
Certain conveyances of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, etc
Certain real estate, Crawfordsville, Ind
Changes in allotments
Chanslor-Canfield Midway Oil Co. subsurface rights
Chanslor-Canfield Midway Oil Company subsurface rights
Christ Church, Washington Parish, District of Columbia
Claims of certain registers and receivers of United States land offices, etc
Claims of title to portions of Fort Clinch Reservation, Amelia Island, Florida
Clearing the title to property belonging to Gallaudet College
Clearing the title to property belonging to Gallaudet College : report (to accompany H.R. 12699)
Closing the Office of the Recorder of Deeds on Saturdays
Communication from the President of the United States, transmitting suggested legislation requested by the Commissioners of the District of Columbia authorizing the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia to expend from the fees and emoluments of his office $5,872.20 for new equipment
Confirmation of title of certain purchasers from Louisiana of lands formerly included in Live Oak Naval Reserve on Navy Commissioners Island, in St. Mary Parish, La., now abandoned
Confirming and establishing the titles of the states to lands beneath navigable waters within state boundaries and to the natural resources within such lands and waters and providing for the use and control of said lands and resources and for the control, exploration, development, and conservation of certain resources of the continental shelf lying outside of state boundaries
Confirming in states and territories title to land granted by United States in aid of schools
Confirming title of a section of land on what was known as the Fort Sisseton Military Reservation to the State of South Dakota
Confirming title to certain land in South Dakota
Confirming title to certain land to Nebraska
Confirming title to certain lands granted to the State of Washington
Consideration of H.R. 8137
Consideration of House Joint Resolution 225
Construction of a recorder of deeds building in the District of Columbia
Convey certain land within the Carson National Forest, N. Mex., to Jose C. Romero
Convey certain lands in Minnesota to Signa M. Lodoen and Nels R. Lodoen
Convey certain lands to Lillian I. Anderson, Valentine, Ariz
Convey certain portions of Military Reservation at Monterey, Calif
Convey land to Skyline Churches Cemetery
Convey lands to Signa M. and Nels R. Lodoen, in Minnesota
Convey to the State of Maine certain land in Kittery, Me
Conveyance by Secretary of Army of certain land to Mary Ann Aust upon payment of appraised fair market value thereof
Conveyance of Bunker Hill Island in Lake Cumberland near Burnside, Ky., to the Commonwealth of Kentucky for public park purposes
Conveyance of Jackson Barracks, La
Conveyance of a certain tract of land to the State of Texas
Conveyance of absentee Shawnee lands
Conveyance of certain land at Fort Phillip Kearney Military Reservation to the State of Rhode Island
Conveyance of certain land in the County of Los Angeles, State of California
Conveyance of certain land of the United States to the City of Salem, Oreg
Conveyance of certain land of the United States to the State of Indiana
Conveyance of certain land to Miles City, Mont., for park purposes
Conveyance of certain land to Nome, Alaska
Conveyance of certain land to school district No. 15, Lincoln County, Mont
Conveyance of certain lands of the United States to the City of Gloucester, Mass
Conveyance of certain lands of the United States to the town of Savannah Beach, Tybee Island, Ga
Conveyance of certain lands to Fallon, Nev
Conveyance of certain lands to the City of Henderson, Nev
Conveyance of certain real property of the United States situated in the State of Pennsylvania
Conveyance of certain real property of the United States to the City of Boise, Idaho
Conveyance of certain real property to City of Richmond, Calif
Conveyance of certain tracts of land in the State of Mississippi to Richard C. French, Lewis M. French, and Ruth French Hershey
Conveyance of inherited lands by certain Indians. Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, transmitting a copy of a report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, with the draft of a bill relating to conveyance of inherited lands by certain Indians
Conveyance of land in District of Columbia
Conveyance of land in Madison County, Ky., to Pioneer National Monument Association
Conveyance of land to Astoria, Oreg
Conveyance of land to Keosauqua, Iowa
Conveyance of land to Keosauqua, Iowa : report (to accompany S. 1453)
Conveyance of land to Minnesota
Conveyance of land to the Board of Supervisors of York County, Va
Conveyance of land to the Borough of Stonington, New London County, Conn
Conveyance of land to the City of Duluth, Minn
Conveyance of lands to Arlington County, Va., in order to connect Lee Boulevard with the Arlington Memorial Bridge
Conveyance of lands to the town of Cordova, Alaska
Conveyance of lighthouse property to City of Atlantic City, N.J
Conveyance of lighthouse property to the City of Atlantic City, N.J
Conveyance of portion of Fort Devens Military Reservation to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Conveyance of property in Yalobusha County, Miss
Conveyance of property in Yalobusha County, Miss. : report (to accompany H.R. 1735)
Conveyance of real estate
Conveyance of tract of land in the vicinity of Williamsburg, Va
Conveyance of tribal lands
Conveyance to Georgia State Board of Education
Conveyance to South Carolina School District
Conveyance to State of Iowa of Agricultural Byproducts Laboratory
Conveyance to Tennessee of certain land deeded to the United States for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and not needed therefor
Conveyance to United States of certain lands in Arizona
Conveyance to United States of certain lands in Arizona for use in maintaining air-navigation facilities
Conveyance to home demonstration club of Rena Lara, Miss
Conveyance to the State of Florida of a certain tract of land in that state owned by the United States
Conveyance to the town of Ipswich, Mass., of lighthouse property at Castle Neck for public use
Conveying by quitclaim deed certain land to the State of Texas
Conveying by quitclaim deed to the City of Oakland, Calif., a certain strip of land for street purposes
Conveying by quitclaim deed, certain land in the Whitney Reservoir area to the State of Texas
Conveying certain land of the United States in trust to the Citizen Band of Potawatomi Indians of Oklahoma
Conveying certain land of the United States in trust to the Citizen Band of Potawatomi Indians of Oklahoma : report (to accompany H.R. 7990)
Conveying certain land to the State of Arkansas
Conveying certain lands in Powell town site, Shoshone reclamation project, Wyoming, to Park County, Wyo
Conveying certain lands taken from W.W. Stewart by the United States
Conveying certain lands to Lillian I. Anderson, Valentine, Ariz
Conveying certain lands to the City of St. Augustine, Fla
Conveying certain lands to the State of Wyoming
Conveying certain property in the City of San Juan, P.R
Conveying certain property in the State of Georgia
Conveying certain public land in Wyoming to Clara Dozier Wire
Conveying of certain lands to the state of Delaware
Conveying to the City of Bridgeport, Conn., Fayerweather Island, which has been used as the Black Rock Light Station Reservation
Correcting error in conveyance
Correctionary deed for land of New Post Office at New York, N.Y
Corrective deed to certain real estate, New York, N.Y
Creek Indian lands in Alabama
Deed and other records of the Office of Indian Affairs
Deed for part of lot in the District of Columbia
Deeds of conveyance in the District of Columbia
Deeds of reconveyance for certain lands, Mount Pleasant, Isabella County, Mich
Deeds to take effect at the death of the grantor
Direct the Administrator of General Services to convey to the City of Mobile, Ala., all the right, title, and interest of the United States in and to certain land
Direct the Administrator of General Services to convey to the city of Mobile, Ala., all the right, title, and interest of the United States in and to certain land : report (to accompany S. 47)
Directing the Administrator of General Services to convey to the City of Mobile, Alabama, all the right, title, and interest of the United States in and to certain land
Directing the Administrator of General Services to convey to the city of Mobile, Alabama, all the right, title, and interest of the United States in and to certain land : report (to accompany H.R. 2386)
Directing the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Army to transfer and convey certain lands and thereby facilitate administration and give proper cognizance to the highest use of United States lands
Directing the Secretary of War to execute an easement deed for park, recreational, and other public purposes
Directing the Secretary of the Army or his designee to convey a 3-acre tract of land situated about 6 miles south of the City of San Antonio, in Bexar County, Tex., to the State of Texas
Directing the Secretary of the Army to convey certain land to the State of Rhode Island
Directing the Secretary of the Army to convey certain lands to the Two Rock Union School District, a political subdivision of the State of California, in Sonoma County, Calif., and to furnish said school district water free of charge
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain land in the District of Columbia to the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain land to Palm Beach County, Fla
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain land to school district No. 5, Linn County, Oreg
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain land to school district numbers 5, Linn County, Oreg
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands in Boulder County, Colo., to W.F. Stover
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands in Navajo County, Ariz
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain lands in Navajo County, Ariz. : report (to accompany S. 220)
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain property in the State of North Dakota to the City of Bismarck, N. Dak
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain property in the state of North Dakota to the city of Bismarck, N. Dak. : report (to accompany S. 1663)
Directing the Secretary of the Interior to convey certain public lands in the State of Nevada to the City of Henderson, Nev
Disposition of certain lots, Hot Springs Reservation
District of Columbia recorder of deeds
Eliminate straw party deeds in joint tenancies
Enabling the Oregon Short Line Railroad Co. to convey title to certain lands in Idaho to the Pocatello First Corp. of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Enabling the Oregon Short Line Railroad Company to convey title to certain lands in Idaho to the Pocatello First Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints : report (to accompany H.R. 10586)
Enabling the State of Arizona and the town of Tempe, Ariz., to convey to the Salt River Agricultural Improvement and Power District, for use by such district, a portion of certain property heretofore transferred under certain restrictions to such state and town by the United States
Exchange of land at Benicia Arsenal, Calif
Exchange of land with Cave Hill Cemetery Company for roadway purposes
Exchange of lands between Colonial Realty Company and the United States
Exchange of lands between San Diego, Calif., and the United States
Exchange of lands between the Colonial Realty Company and the United States
Exchange of lands in the vicinity of the Pentagon Building, Arlington, Va
Exchange of tribal acreage on Fort Hall Indian School
Execution in the Philippine Islands and Porto Rico of deeds for land in the District of Columbia
Extending and continuing the provisions of the act entitled "An act authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to determine and confirm by patent in the nature of a deed of quitclaim the title to lots in the City of Pensacola, Fla."
Fees charged by Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia
Fees to be charged by the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia
Fireproof bookshelves and file cases in Office of Recorder of Deeds, etc
Further amending the act authorizing the conveyance of certain lands near Miles City, Mont. in order to extend for 1 year the authority under such act : report (to accompany H.R. 12091)
Further amending the act authorizing the conveyance of certain lands to Miles City, Mont., in order to extend for 1 year the authority under such act
Garza-Little Elm project -- Conveyance of land to City of Lewisville, Tex
Granting certain property to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Granting the right, title, and interest of the United States in and to certain lands to the City of Crawford, Nebr
Granting the right, title, and interest of the United States in and to certain lands to the city of Crawford, Nebr. : report (to accompany H.R. 6179)
Granting the title of public lands to the town of Safford, Ariz., for the use of its municipal water system
Granting to the City of Miles City, Mont., certain land in Custer, Mont., for industrial and recreational purposes and as a museum site
Grosse Point Lighthouse Reservation
Henderson, Nev
Homestead entries
Illinois and Wabash land companies
In the Senate of the United States. Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, transmitting statement of amounts paid United States attorneys in New York for examining titles to lands, etc
Increasing the amount for construction of building for office of recorder of deeds of District of Columbia
Index in Office of Recorder of Deeds
Indian reserves under certain treaties
Investigation of needs of the Office of the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia
Issuance of land patent to Buhl, Idaho
Issuance of patents for lands held under color of title
Issuing patents for lands held under color of title
King Theological Hall
Land Titles in Illinois
Land conveyance in Saline County, Ark
Land conveyance to Bethel Baptist Church of Henderson, Tenn
Land conveyance to Bethel Baptist Church of Henderson, Tenn. : report (to accompany S. 669)
Land conveyance to clear title, Cascade, Colo
Land conveyance to clear title, Cascade, Colo. : report (to accompany S. 2772)
Land conveyance to the State of Florida
Land conveyance to the state of Florida : report (to accompany H.R. 9818)
Land conveyance, Bibb County, Ga
Land conveyance, Bibb County, Ga. : report (to accompany H.R. 12503)
Land conveyance, Glendale, Ariz
Land conveyance, Kennebec Arsenal, Augusta, Maine
Land conveyance, Phelps County, Mo
Land exchange -- Chattahoochee National Forest
Land exchange near Pentagon Building
Land in Bibb County, Ga
Land in Montgomery County, Tenn
Land reconveyance to Salt Lake City, Utah
Land records of the District of Columbia
Land title clarification
Land title clarification within Stanislaus National Forest, Calif
Land titles in the District of Columbia
Land transfer -- County of Custer, Mont
Land transfer -- West Marks Baptist Church of Quitman County, Miss
Land transfer to Bonham, Tex
Land transfer to Central, N. Mex
Land transfer to Cheyenne, Wyo
Land transfer to Grand Junction, Colo
Land transfer to North Little Rock, Ark
Land transfer to Whipple, Ariz
Land transfer to the City of Biloxi, Miss
Land transferred to Roseburg, Oreg
Letter from the Attorney-General, transmitting a report of the commission to investigate the title of the United States to lands relative to lot 20, square 253, in the District of Columbia
Letter from the Secretary of War, submitting, with accompanying documents, a recommendation as to the transfer of certain military property in Porto Rico
Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, transmitting draft of proposed legislation authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to accept a correctionary deed to the United States to certain land in the city of New York, N.Y., for a post-office building site
Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, transmitting draft of proposed legislation authorizing the acceptance of a correctionary deed to the land composing the site of the new Post Office at New York City
Lincoln Farm Association
Lot 53, square 140, in the District of Columbia
Mandan Town and Country Club
Memorial of Charles Bulfinch, et al., praying that their title to certain lands in the Territory of Oregon may be confirmed
Message from the President of the United States returning without his approval the Joint Resolution (H.J. Res. 225) to quiet the titles of the respective states, and others, to lands beneath tidewaters and lands beneath navigable waters within the boundaries of such States and to prevent further clouding of such titles
Message from the President of the United States, in relation to the proceedings instituted under a resolution of Congress to try the title to the Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River
Military reservation at Baton Rouge, La
Mineral reserve rights
Moneys deposited in registry of United States Courts
New building for Recorder of Deeds, Municipal Court, and Juvenile Court of District of Columbia
Oregon and California Railroad land grant
Patent to entrymen for homesteads upon reclamation projects
Permit the United States to be made a part defendant in certain cases
Permit the United States to be made a party defendant in a certain case
Permit the United States to be made a party defendant in certain cases
Permitting the United States to be made a party defendant in certain cases
Permitting the issuance of unrestricted deeds for town-site lands held by Alaska natives
Plats of subdivisions outside of the Cities of Washington and Georgetown
Platting lands in the Fort Peck Reservation, Mont. Letter from the Secretary of the Interior, transmitting a communication from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs relating to the platting of lands within the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana
Prevent loss of title of United States lands in territories or possessions through adverse possession or prescription
Proceedings relating to the nomination and rejection of James C. Matthews, of New York, to be Recorder of Deeds in the District of Columbia
Property conveyance in Austin, Travis County, Tex
Property conveyance, Camp Dodge and Polk County Target Range, Iowa
Provide fees to be charged by the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia, and for other purposes
Providing for a 6 months extension on the time limit for the conveyance of certain property to the State of Louisiana under Public Law 235
Providing for adjustments in the lands or interests therein acquired for the Albeni Falls Reservoir project, Idaho, by the reconveyance of certain lands or interests therein to the former owners thereof
Providing for adjustments in the lands or interests therein acquired for the Belton Reservoir project, Texas, by the reconveyance of certain lands or interests therein to the former owners thereof
Providing for adjustments in the lands or interests therein acquired for the Demopolis Lock and Dam, Alabama, by the reconveyance of certain lands or interests therein to the former owners thereof
Providing for adjustments in the lands or interests therein acquired for the Jim Woodruff Reservoir, Fla. and Ga., by the reconveyance of certain lands or interests therein to the former owners thereof
Providing for adjustments in the lands or interests therein acquired for the Jim Woodruff Reservoir, GA., by the reconveyance of certain lands or interests therein to the former owners thereof
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Homeland – Read Online Version
October 21, 2018Cory DoctorowComments: 0
[prelude]
A commercial interlude
As you read through this free ebook, you’ll notice that it is dotted, here and there, with appreciations of great bookstores — stores that I love, stores that have shown me love. As a former bookseller and a book hoarder for life, bookstores are my natural habitat. It’s my hope that as you read this, you’ll (ahem) bookmark these stores for regular visits and show them the love they deserve.
I’ve also dotted this ebook with “commercial interludes,” in which I shamelessly pitch the commercial editions of this book. This, after all, is my living. It’s how I feed my family. It’s how I come to have the extraordinary privilege of sitting in an office all day, making up stories and putting them down in words, which is all I ever wanted to do, since I was six years old. This being the 21st century, there is no way I can force you to pay for this book before reading it — you can get pretty much any ebook on the Internet for free with no more difficulty than you’d undergo if you were to buy it through legit channels — so I hope that by giving you this, and trusting you, that you will reward me by helping to support me and my publisher (whose contribution to this book can’t be overstated).
Now, perhaps you’re thinking, “Hey, I don’t really need a commercial ebook, and I don’t want the print book — can’t I just say thank you some other way?” The answer to that is a resounding yes. As with my other recent books, I have assembled a list of librarians, teachers, and people from other public institutions who would like to get a free copy of Homeland for their kids and patrons. I pay an assistant, the wonderful Olga Nunes, to check out each of these people and ensure that they are who they say they are, and then we list them here:
‹http://craphound.com/homeland/donate›
If you want to tip me for this book, don’t send me cash. Instead, send one of those institutions a copy of this book — buy it from your local store and have it shipped, or buy it online — and that way a bunch of kids will get access to it, and I’ll get the sale credited to my name, which means bigger advances, bigger publicity budgets, and more foreign sales for me. It’s a way to pay your debts forward in realtime, and it’s pretty nifty (if I do say so myself).
(And I do)
Back to buying the book. This book is published by Tor Teen, and like all Tor books, all of its ebook editions are DRM-free. The hardcovers (and the paperbacks, when they ship) pay me a healthy royalty, and go to support a publisher that has poured huge amounts of money and time into making my books better and bringing them to the world. In other words, they’re not just good books — they’re books that do good. Here’s how you get yours:
Amazon Kindle (DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free)
Google Books (DRM-free)
Apple iBooks (DRM-free)
Indiebound (will locate an independent store near you!)
Booksamillion
You don’t have to buy the book from an online seller, either. Here’s a tool that will find you independent stores in your area that have copies on their shelves.
This section is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they’d been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start, Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.
This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. That means:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link ‹http://craphound.com/homeland›
Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get our permission
More info here: ‹https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/›
See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
GOSH: London, England
London’s GOSH doesn’t even stock my books. They’re strictly graphic novels. But what a store! They’ve got this absolutely choice corner store on Berwick Street, right in the middle of Soho, amidst the dirty bookstores, brothels, vintage vinyl stores, upscale dim sum places, and rad Australian coffee-houses. The store is spacious, having successfully resisted the comic-store-manager’s traditional vice of piling stuff up and stacking it close to maximize the funnybooks and tchotchkes. Instead, it has this brilliantly curated look-and-feel, dominated by huge tables full of brilliantly hand-picked choices, and a basement full of oversized hardcovers and long-boxes full of old singles. You really couldn’t ask for a better comic store in a better location.
GOSH: 1 Berwick St, London, W1F 0DR +44 20 7636 1011
The copyright thing
The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I’ve got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here’s what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.
I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It’s nice that they can’t just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I’m in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I’ve got a great agent and a decade’s experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world’s copyright treaties). What’s more, there’s just not that many of these negotiations — even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of this book (which would put it in the top millionth of a percentile for novels), that’s still only fifty or a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.
I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It’s just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It’s ridiculous to say that people who want to “loan” their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it’s a fine thing.
Copyright laws are increasingly passed without democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament recently passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a “Great Firewall of Britain” that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don’t like. This law was passed in 2010 without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.
It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada negotiated secret copyright treaties called “The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA) and “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TPP) that have all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan was to agree to them in secret, without public debate, and then force the world’s poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless they do. In America, the plan was to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. ACTA began under Bush, but the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm, and presided over the creation of TPP. The secret part of the plan failed — ACTA ran into heavy opposition in Congress and has been rejected by Mexico and the European Parliament — but the treaty isn’t dead yet, and has supporters on both sides of the house who keep attempting to bring it back under a new name. This is a bipartisan lunacy.
So if you’re not violating copyright law right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright’s mission, they couldn’t do any better than they’re doing now. Just as this book is coming into print (February, 2013), the big American ISPs and big American entertainment companies are rolling out “six strikes” — a voluntary plan to harass people accused, without proof, of downloading, and ultimately, to disconnect them from the net.
So, basically, screw that. Or, as the singer and American folk hero Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
About derivative works
Most of my previous books have been released under a slightly different Creative Commons license, one that allowed for derivative works (that is, new creative works based on this one). Keen observers will have already noticed that this book is licensed “NoDerivs” — that is, you can’t make remixes without permission.
A word of explanation for this shift is in order. When I first started publishing under Creative Commons licenses, I had to carefully explain this to my editor and publisher at Tor Books. They were incredibly forward-looking and gave me permission to release the first-ever novel licensed under CC — my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (‹http://craphound.com/down/)›. This ground-breaking step was only possible because I was able to have intense, personal discussions with my publisher.
My foreign rights agents are the inestimable Danny and Heather Baror, and collectively they have sold my books into literally dozens of countries and languages, helping to bring my work to places I couldn’t have dreamed of reaching on my own. They subcontract for my agent Russell Galen, another inestimable personage without whom I would not have attained anything like the dizzy heights that I enjoy today. They attend large book fairs in cities like Frankfurt and Bologna in order to sell the foreign rights to my books, often negotiating with one of a few English-speakers at a foreign press, who then goes back and justifies her or his decisions to the rest of the company.
The point is that this is nothing like my initial Creative Commons discussion with Tor. That was me sitting down and making the case to editors I’ve known for years (my editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has known me since I was 17). My foreign rights are sold by a subcontractor of my representative to a representative of a press I’ve often never heard of, who then has to explain my publishing philosophy to people I’ve never met, using a language I don’t speak.
Danny and Heather have asked — not demanded, asked! — that I consider publishing books under a NoDerivs license, so that I can consult with them before I authorize translations of my books. They want to be able to talk to potential foreign publishers about how this stuff works, to give me time to talk with them, to ease them into the idea, and to have the kind of extended conversation that helped me lead Tor into their decision all those years ago.
And I agreed. Free/open culture is something publishers need to be led to, not forced into. It’s a long conversation that often runs contrary to their intuition and received wisdom. But no one gets into publishing to get rich. Working in the publishing industry is virtually a vow of poverty. The only reason to get into publishing is because you flat-out love books and want to make them happen. People work in publishing for the same reason writers write: they can’t help themselves.
So I want to be able to have this conversation, personally, unhurriedly, one-to-one. I want to keep all the people involved in my books — agents, subagents, foreign editors and their bosses — in the loop on these discussions. I will always passionately advocate for CC licensing in all of my work. I promise you that if you write to me with a request for a noncommercial derivative use, that I will do everything in my power to see that it is authorized.
And in the meantime, I draw your attention to article 2 of all Creative Commons licenses:
Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection under copyright law or other applicable laws.
Strip away the legalese and what that says is, “Copyright gives you, the public, rights. Fair use is real. De minimus exemptions to copyright are real. You have the right to make all sorts of uses of all copyrighted works, without permission, without Creative Commons licenses.
Rights are like muscles. When you don’t exercise them, they get flabby. Stop asking for stuff you can take without permission. Please!
Pandemonium: Cambridge, Mass
As you might expect, a town like Cambridge, Mass, is full of amazing nerdware purveyors. When you’re in spitting distance of both MIT and Harvard, there is a hell of a built-in market for Cool Stuff. But sitting atop the mountain of geeky stores is Pandemonium Books, a comics/RPG/book store right on Mass Ave (they used to be in The Garage in Harvard Square, and their departure has left a huge hole in that space). There is practically nothing I like better than to start a walk at MIT (possibly with a stop at the MIT bookstore) and up Mass Ave, to Harvard, with a long, lingering stop at Pandemonium. There’s always something going on there — someone playing a tabletop game, trading Magic cards, or just talking animatedly about the kind of books I love.
Pandemonium: 4 Pleasant St, Cambridge, MA 02139 +1 617 547 3721
Donations and a word to teachers and librarians
Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I’m not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I’ve found it.
Here’s the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who’d love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids’ hands, but don’t have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won’t stretch to cover, which is why I sponsored a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself at ‹http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/›.
There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.
I’m proposing that we put them together.
If you’re a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Homeland, email ‹freehomelandbook@gmail.com› with your name and the name and address of your school. It’ll be posted to ‹http://craphound.com/homeland/donate/› by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Homeland and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to ‹http://craphound.com/homeland/donate/› and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to ‹freehomelandbook@gmail.com› so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don’t want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we’ll keep you anonymous, otherwise we’ll thank you on the donate page.
I’ve done this with a ton of books now, and gotten thousands of books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this — one of my readers called it “paying your debts forward with instant gratification.” That’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it?
For Alice and Poesy, who make me whole.
The second commercial interlude
Me again. That’s all the forematter. I admit that there’s rather a lot of it. You’re not obliged to read it all (though I think it’s pretty cool, especially the part about buying copies to give to schools and libaries ).
And you’re not obliged to read this interlude, nor the ones that follow. I’ve been giving away free ebooks for nearly a decade now, and my readers have rewarded my generosity with generosity of their own. I’ve had a pair of New York Times bestsellers, quit my day-job, and now I write full time. And I’m still giving away ebooks, and trusting that you, the reader, will reciprocate. You can either buy a book or ebook (always, always, always DRM-free) from one of the big online sellers, or buy a copy from a local bookseller .
BakkaPhoenix: Toronto, Canada
This chapter is dedicated to BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto, Canada. Bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant I am today. I wandered in for the first time around the age of 10 and asked for some recommendations. Tanya Huff (yes, the Tanya Huff, but she wasn’t a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of H. Beam Piper’s “Little Fuzzy” into my hands, and changed my life forever. By the time I was 18, I was working at Bakka — I took over from Tanya when she retired to write full time — and I learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books. I think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at Bakka over the years! For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan –and me!)
BakkaPhoenix Books: 84 Harbord Street, Toronto, Canada M5S 1G5, +1 416 963 9993
Chapter 1.
Attending Burning Man made me simultaneously one of the most photographed people on the planet and one of the least surveilled humans in the modern world.
I adjusted my burnoose, covering up my nose and mouth and tucking its edge into place under the lower rim of my big, scratched goggles. The sun was high, the temperature well over a hundred degrees, and breathing through the embroidered cotton scarf made it even more stifling. But the wind had just kicked up, and there was a lot of playa dust — fine gypsum sand, deceptively soft and powdery, but alkali enough to make your eyes burn and your skin crack — and after two days in the desert, I had learned that it was better to be hot than to choke.
Pretty much everyone was holding a camera of some kind — mostly phones, of course, but also big SLRs and even old-fashioned film cameras, including a genuine antique plate camera whose operator hid out from the dust under a huge black cloth that made me hot just to look at it. Everything was ruggedized for the fine, blowing dust, mostly through the simple expedient of sticking it in a zip-lock bag, which is what I’d done with my phone. I turned around slowly to get a panorama and saw that the man walking past me was holding the string for a gigantic helium balloon a hundred yards overhead, from which dangled a digital video camera. Also, the man holding the balloon was naked.
Well, not entirely. He was wearing shoes. I understood that: playa dust is hard on your feet. They call it playa-foot, when the alkali dust dries out your skin so much that it starts to crack and peel. Everyone agrees that playa-foot sucks.
Burning Man is a festival held every Labor Day weekend in the middle of Nevada’s Black Rock desert. Fifty thousand people show up in this incredibly harsh, hot, dusty environment, and build a huge city — Black Rock City — and participate. “Spectator” is a vicious insult in Black Rock City. Everyone’s supposed to be doing stuff and yeah, also admiring everyone else’s stuff (hence all the cameras). At Burning Man, everyone is the show.
I wasn’t naked, but the parts of me that were showing were decorated with elaborate mandalas laid on with colored zinc. A lady as old as my mother, wearing a tie-dyed wedding dress, had offered to paint me that morning, and she’d done a great job. That’s another thing about Burning Man: it runs on a gift economy, which means that you generally go around offering nice things to strangers a lot, which makes for a surprisingly pleasant environment. The designs the painter had laid down made me look amazing, and there were plenty of cameras aiming my way as I ambled across the open desert toward Nine O’Clock.
Black Rock City is a pretty modern city: it has public sanitation (portable chem-toilets decorated with raunchy poems reminding you not to put anything but toilet paper in them), electricity and Internet service (at Six O’Clock, the main plaza in the middle of the ring-shaped city), something like a government (the nonprofit that runs Burning Man), several local newspapers (all of them doing better than the newspapers in the real world!), a dozen radio stations, an all-volunteer police force (the Black Rock Rangers, who patrolled wearing tutus or parts of chicken suits or glitter paint), and many other amenities associated with the modern world.
But BRC has no official surveillance. There are no CCTVs, no checkpoints — at least not after the main gate, where tickets are collected — no ID checks at all, no bag-searches, no RFID sniffers, no mobile phone companies logging your movements. There was also no mobile phone service. No one drives — except for the weird art cars registered with the Department of Mutant Vehicles — so there were no license plate cameras and no sniffers for your E-Z Passes. The WiFi was open and unlogged. Attendees at Burning Man agreed not to use their photos commercially without permission, and it was generally considered polite to ask people before taking their portraits.
So there I was, having my picture taken through the blowing dust as I gulped down water from the water-jug I kept clipped to my belt at all times, sucking at the stubby built-in straw under cover of the blue-and-silver burnoose, simultaneously observed and observer, simultaneously observed and unsurveilled, and it was glorious.
“Wahoo!” I shouted to the dust and the art cars and the naked people and the enormous wooden splay-armed effigy perched atop a pyramid straight ahead of me in the middle of the desert. This was The Man, and we’d burn him in three nights, and that’s why it was called Burning Man. I couldn’t wait.
“You’re in a good mood,” a jawa said from behind me. Even with the tone-shifter built into its dust-mask, the cloaked sand-person had an awfully familiar voice.
“Ange?” I said. We’d been missing each other all that day, ever since I’d woken up an hour before her and snuck out of the tent to catch the sunrise (which was awesome), and we’d been leaving each other notes back at camp all day about where we were heading next. Ange had spent the summer spinning up the jawa robes, working with cooling towels that trapped sweat as it evaporated, channeling it back over her skin for extra evaporative cooling. She’d hand-dyed it a mottled brown, tailored it into the characteristic monkish robe shape, and added crossed bandoliers. These exaggerated her breasts, which made the whole thing entirely and totally warsome. She hadn’t worn it out in public yet, and now, in the dust and the glare, she was undoubtedly the greatest sand-person I’d ever met. I hugged her and she hugged me back so hard it knocked the wind out of me, one of her trademarked wrestling-hold cuddles.
“I smudged your paint,” she said through the voice-shifter after we unclinched.
“I got zinc on your robes,” I said.
She shrugged. “Like it matters! We both look fabulous. Now, what have you seen and what have you done and where have you been, young man?”
“Where to start?” I said. I’d been wandering up and down the radial avenues that cut through the city, lined with big camps sporting odd exhibits — one camp where a line of people were efficiently making snow cones for anyone who wanted them, working with huge blocks of ice and a vicious ice-shaver. Then a camp where someone had set up a tall, linoleum-covered slide that you could toboggan down on a plastic magic carpet, after first dumping a gallon of waste water over the lino to make it plenty slippery. It was a very clever way to get rid of grey water (that’s water that you’ve showered in, or used to wash your dishes or hands — black water being water that’s got poo or pee in it). One of the other Burning Man rules was “leave no trace” — when we left, we’d take every scrap of Black Rock City with us, and that included all the grey water. But the slide made for a great grey water evaporator, and every drop of liquid that the sliders helped turn into vapor was a drop of liquid the camp wouldn’t have to pack all the way back to Reno.
There’d been pervy camps where they were teaching couples to tie each other up; a “junk food glory hole” that you put your mouth over in order to receive a mysterious and unhealthy treat (I’d gotten a mouthful of some kind of super-sugary breakfast cereal studded with coconut “marshmallows” shaped like astrological symbols); a camp where they were offering free service for playa bikes (beater bikes caked with playa dust and decorated with glitter and fun fur and weird fetishes and bells); a tea-house camp where I’d been given a very precisely made cup of some kind of Japanese tea I’d never heard of that was delicious and sharp; camps full of whimsy; camps full of physics; camps full of optical illusions; camps full of men and women; a kids’ camp full of screaming kids running around playing some kind of semi-supervised outdoor game — things I’d never suspected existed.
And I’d only seen a tiny slice of Black Rock City.
I told Ange about as much as I could remember and she nodded or said “ooh,” or “aah,” or demanded to know where I’d seen things. Then she told me about the stuff she’d seen — a camp where topless women were painting one others’ breasts, a camp where an entire brass band was performing, a camp where they’d built a medieval trebuchet that fired ancient, broken-down pianos down a firing range, the audience holding its breath in total silence while they waited for the glorious crash each piano made when it exploded into flinders on the hardpack desert.
“Can you believe this place?” Ange said, jumping up and down on the spot in excitement, making her bandoliers jingle.
“I know — can you believe we almost didn’t make it?”
I’d always sort of planned on going out to see The Man burn — after all, I grew up in San Francisco, the place with the largest concentration of burners in the world. But it took a lot of work to participate in Burning Man. First, there was the matter of packing for a camping trip in the middle of the desert where you had to pack in everything — including water — and then pack it all out again, everything you didn’t leave behind in the porta-potties. And there were very strict rules about what could go in those. Then there was the gift economy: figuring out what I could bring to the desert that someone else might want. Plus the matter of costumes, cool art and inventions to show off… Every time I started to think about it, I just about had a nervous breakdown.
But this year, of all years, I’d made it. This was the year both my parents lost their jobs. The year I’d dropped out of college rather than take on any more student debt. The year I’d spent knocking on every door I could find, looking for paid work — anything! — without getting even a nibble.
“Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is cash-poor and time-rich,” Ange said solemnly, pulling down her face mask with one hand and yanking me down to kiss me with the other.
“That’s catchy,” I said. “You should print T-shirts.”
“Oh,” she said. “That reminds me. I got a T-shirt!”
She threw open her robe to reveal a proud red tee that read MAKE BEAUTIFUL ART AND SET IT ON FIRE, laid out like those British “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters, with the Burning Man logo where the crown should be.
“Just in time, too,” I said, holding my nose. I was only partly kidding. At the last minute, we’d both decided to ditch half the clothes we’d planned on bringing so that we could fit more parts for Secret Project X-1 into our backpacks. Between that and taking “bits and pits” baths by rubbing the worst of the dried sweat, body paint, sunscreen, and miscellaneous fluids off with baby wipes once a day, neither of us smelled very nice.
She shrugged. “The playa provides.” It was one of the Burning Man mottoes we’d picked up on the first day, when we both realized that we thought the other one had brought the sunscreen, and just as we were about to get into an argument about it, we stumbled on Sunscreen Camp, where some nice people had slathered us all over with SPF 50 and given us some baggies to take with. “The playa provides!” they’d said, and wished us well.
I put my arm around her shoulders. She dramatically turned her nose up at my armpit, then made a big show of putting on her face-mask.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go out to the temple.”
The temple was a huge, two-story, sprawling structure, dotted with high towers and flying buttresses. It was filled with robotic Tibetan gongs that played strange clanging tunes throughout the day. I’d seen it from a distance that morning while walking around the playa, watching the sun turn the dust rusty orange, but I hadn’t been up close.
The outer wings of the temple were open to the sky, made of the same lumber as the rest of the whole elaborate curlicue structure. The walls were lined with benches and were inset with niches and nooks. And everywhere, every surface, was covered in writing and signs and posters and pictures.
And almost all of it was about dead people.
“Oh,” Ange said to me, as we trailed along the walls, reading the memorials that had been inked or painted or stapled there. I was reading a handwritten, thirty-page-long letter from an adult woman to her parents, about all the ways they’d hurt her and made her miserable and destroyed her life, about how she’d felt when they’d died, about how her marriages had been destroyed by the craziness she’d had instilled in her. It veered from wild accusation to tender exasperation to anger to sorrow, like some kind of emotional roller coaster. I felt like I was spying on something I wasn’t supposed to see, except that everything in the temple was there to be seen.
Every surface in the temple was a memorial to something or someone. There were baby shoes and pictures of grannies, a pair of crutches and a beat-up cowboy hat with a hatband woven from dead dried flowers. Burners — dressed and undressed like a circus from the end of the world — walked solemnly around these, reading them, more often than not with tears running down their faces. Pretty soon, I had tears running down my face. It moved me in a way that nothing had ever moved me before. Especially since it was all going to burn on Sunday night, before we tore down Black Rock City and went home.
Ange sat in the dust and began looking through a sketchbook whose pages were filled with dense, dark illustrations. I wandered into the main atrium of the temple, a tall, airy space whose walls were lined with gongs. Here, the floor was carpeted with people — sitting and lying down, eyes closed, soaking in the solemnity of the moment, some with small smiles, some weeping, some with expressions of utmost serenity.
I’d tried meditating once, during a drama class at high school. It hadn’t worked very well. Some of the kids kept on giggling. There was some kind of shouting going on in the hallway outside the door. The clock on the wall ticked loudly, reminding me that at any moment, there’d be a loud buzzer and the roar and stamp of thousands of kids all trying to force their way through a throng to their next class. But I’d read a lot about meditation and how good it was supposed to be for you. In theory it was easy, too: just sit down and think of nothing.
So I did. I shifted my utility belt around so that I could sit down without it digging into my ass and waited until a patch of floor was vacated, then sat. There were streamers of sunlight piercing the high windows above, lancing down in grey-gold spikes that glittered with dancing dust. I looked into one of these, at the dancing motes, and then closed my eyes. I pictured a grid of four squares, featureless and white with thick black rims and sharp corners. In my mind’s eye, I erased one square. Then another. Then another. Now there was just one square. I erased it.
There was nothing now. I was thinking of nothing, literally. Then I was thinking about the fact that I was thinking about nothing, mentally congratulating myself, and I realized that I was thinking of something again. I pictured my four squares and started over.
I don’t know how long I sat there, but there were moments when the world seemed to both go away and be more present than it ever had been. I was living in that exact and very moment, not anticipating anything that might happen later, not thinking of anything that had just happened, just being right there. It only lasted for a fraction of a second each time, but each of those fragmentary moments were… well, they were something.
I opened my eyes. I was breathing in time with the gongs around me, a slow, steady cadence. There was something digging into my butt, a bit of my utility belt’s strap or something. The girl in front of me had a complex equation branded into the skin of her shoulder blades, the burned skin curdled into deep, sharp-relief mathematical symbols and numbers. Someone smelled like weed. Someone was sobbing softly. Someone outside the temple called out to someone else. Someone laughed. Time was like molasses, flowing slowly and stickily around me. Nothing seemed important and everything seemed wonderful. That was what I’d been looking for, all my life, without ever knowing it. I smiled.
“Hello, M1k3y,” a voice hissed in my ear, very soft and very close, lips brushing my lobe, breath tickling me. The voice tickled me, too, tickled my memory. I knew that voice, though I hadn’t heard it in a very long time.
Slowly, as though I were a giraffe with a neck as tall as a tree, I turned my head to look around.
“Hello, Masha,” I said, softly. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Her hand was on my hand and I remembered the way she’d twisted my wrist around in some kind of martial arts hold the last time I’d seen her. I didn’t think she’d be able to get away with bending my arm up behind my back and walking me out of the temple on my tiptoes. If I shouted for help, thousands of burners would… well, they wouldn’t tear her limb from limb, but they’d do something. Kidnapping people on the playa was definitely against the rules. It was in the Ten Principles, I was nearly certain of it.
She tugged at my wrist. “Let’s go,” she said. “Come on.”
I got to my feet and followed her, freely and of my own will, and even though I trembled with fear as I got up, there was a nugget of excitement in there, too. Of course this was happening now, at Burning Man. A couple years ago, I’d been in the midst of more excitement than anyone would or could want. I’d led a techno-guerrilla army against the Department of Homeland Security, met a girl and fallen in love with her, been arrested and tortured, found celebrity, and sued the government. Since then, it had all gone downhill, in a weird way. Being waterboarded was terrible, awful, unimaginable — I still had nightmares — but it happened and then it ended. My parents’ slow slide into bankruptcy, the hard, grinding reality of a city with no jobs for anyone, let alone a semi-qualified college dropout like me, and the student debt that I had to pay every month. It was a pile of misery that I lived under every day, and it showed no sign of going away. It wasn’t dramatic, dynamic trouble, the kind of thing you got war stories out of years after the fact. It was just, you know, reality.
And reality sucked.
So I went with Masha, because Masha had been living underground with Zeb for the better part of two years, and whatever else she was, she was someone whose life was generating a lot of exciting stories. Her reality might suck too, but it sucked in huge, showy, neon letters — not in the quiet, crabbed handwriting of a desperate and broke teenager scribbling in his diary.
I went with Masha, and she led me out of the temple. The wind was blowing worse than it had been before, real white-out conditions, and I pulled down my goggles and pulled up my scarf again. Even with them on, I could barely see, and each breath of air filled my mouth with the taste of dried saliva and powdery gypsum from my burnoose. Masha’s hair wasn’t bright pink anymore; it was a mousy blonde-brown, turned grey with dust, cut into duckling fuzz all over, the kind of haircut you could maintain yourself with a clipper. I’d had that haircut, off and on, through much of my adolescence. Her skull bones were fine and fragile, her skin stretched like paper over her cheekbones. Her neck muscles corded and her jaw muscles jumped. She’d lost weight since I’d seen her last, and her skin had gone leathery brown, a color that was deeper than a mere summer tan.
We went all of ten steps out from the temple, but we might have been a mile from it — it was lost in the dust. There were people around, but I couldn’t make out their words over the spooky moan of the wind blowing through the temple’s windows. Bits of grit crept between my goggles and my sweaty cheeks and made my eyes and nose run.
“Far enough,” she said, and let go of my wrist, holding her hands before her. I saw that the fingertips on her left hand were weirdly deformed and squashed and bent, and I had a vivid recollection of slamming the rolling door of a moving van down on her hand as she chased me. She’d been planning to semi-kidnap me at the time, and I was trying to get away with evidence that my best friend Darryl had been kidnapped by Homeland Security, but I still heard the surprised and pained shout she’d let out when the door crunched on her hand. She saw where I was looking and took her hand away, tucking it into the sleeve of the loose cotton shirt she wore.
“How’s tricks, M1k3y?” she said.
“It’s Marcus these days,” I said. “Tricks have been better. How about you? Can’t say I expected to see you again. Ever. Especially not at Burning Man.”
Her eyes crinkled behind her goggles and her veil shifted and I knew she was smiling. “Why, M1k3y — Marcus — it was the easiest way for me to get to see you.”
It wasn’t exactly a secret that I was planning to come to Burning Man that year. I’d been posting desperate “Will trade work for a ride to the playa” and “Want to borrow your old camping gear” messages to Craigslist and the hackerspace mailing lists for months, trying to prove that the proverbial time-rich kid could out-determination cash-poorness. Anyone who was trying to figure out where I was going to be over Labor Day weekend could have googled my semi-precise location in about three seconds.
“Um,” I said. “Um. Look, Masha, you know, you’re kind of freaking me out. Are you here to kill me or something? Where’s Zeb?”
She closed her eyes and the pale dust sifted down between us. “Zeb’s off enjoying the playa. Last time I saw him, he was volunteering in the cafe and waiting to go to a yoga class. He’s actually a pretty good barista — better than he is at being a yogi, anyway. And no, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to give you something, and leave it up to you to decide what to do with it.”
“You’re going to give me something?”
“Yeah. It’s a gift economy around here. Haven’t you heard?”
“What, exactly, are you going to give me, Masha?”
She shook her head. “Better you don’t know until we make the handoff. Technically, it would be better — for you, at least — if you never knew. But that’s how it goes.” She seemed to be talking to herself now. Being underground had changed her. She was, I don’t know, hinky. Like something was wrong with her, like she was up to something, or like she could run at any second. She’d been so self-confident and decisive and unreadable. Now she seemed half crazy. Or maybe one-quarter crazy, and one-quarter terrified.
“Tonight,” she said. “They’re going to burn the Library of Alexandria at 8 P.M.. After that burn, walk out to the trash fence, directly opposite Six O’Clock. Wait for me if I’m not there when you show up. I’ve got stuff to do first.”
“Okay,” I said. “I suppose I can do that. Will Zeb be there? I’d love to say hello to him again.”
She rolled her eyes. “Zeb’ll probably be there, but you might not see him. You come alone. And come out dark. No lights, got it?”
“No,” I said. “Actually, no. I’m with Ange, as you must know, and I’m not going out there without her, assuming she wants to come. And no lights? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
For a city of fifty thousand people involved with recreational substances, flaming art, and enormous, mutant machines, Black Rock has a remarkably low mortality rate. But in a city where they laughed at danger, walking after dark without lights — lots of lights, preferably — was considered borderline insane. One of the most dangerous things you could do at Burning Man was walk the playa at night without illumination: that made you a “darktard,” and darktards were at risk of being run into by art bikes screaming over the dust in the inky night, they risked getting crushed by mammoth art cars, and they were certain to be tripped over and kicked and generally squashed. Burning Man’s unofficial motto might have been “safety third,” but no one liked a darktard.
She closed her eyes and stood statue-still. The wind was dying down a little, but I still felt like I’d just eaten a pound of talcum powder and my eyes were stinging like I’d been pepper-sprayed.
“Bring your girly if you must. But no lights, not after you get out past the last art car. And if both of you end up in trouble because you wouldn’t come out alone, you’ll know who’s fault it was.”
She turned on her heel and walked off into the dust, and she was out of my sight in a minute. I hurried back to the temple to find Ange.
WORD: Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn is full of kick-ass indie stores, but if I had to pick just one to visit (thankfully, I don’t!), it would be Word, the tiny, adorable, perfect little store with the big basement that is a hub for community events. They’re smart, sassy, and forward-looking, and their staff room (where visiting authors get to sit down and eat a quick take-out dinner) is full of funny stickers and posters — even moreso than the usual indie store staff-room.
Word: 126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222, +1 718 383 0096
They burn a lot of stuff at Burning Man. Of course, there’s the burning of The Man himself on Saturday night. I’d seen that on video a hundred times from a hundred angles, with many different Men (he is different every year). It’s raucous and primal, and the explosives hidden in his base made huge mushroom clouds when they went off. The temple burn, on Sunday night, was as quiet and solemn as the Man’s burn was insane and frenetic. But before either of them get burned, there are lots of “little” burns.
The night before, there’d been the burning of the regional art. Burner affinity groups from across America, Canada and the rest of the world had designed and built beautiful wooden structures ranging from something the size of a park bench up to three-story-tall fanciful towers. These ringed the circle of open playa in the middle of Black Rock City, and we’d gone and seen all of them the day we arrived, because we’d been told that they’d burn first. And they did, all at once, more than any one person could see, each one burning in its own way as burners crowded around them, held at a safe distance by Black Rock Rangers until the fires collapsed into stable configurations, masses of burning lumber on burn-platforms over the playa. Anything that burned got burned on a platform, because “leave no trace” meant that you couldn’t even leave behind scorch marks.
That had been pretty spectacular, but tonight they were going to burn the Library of Alexandria. Not the original, of course: Julius Caesar (or someone!) burned that one in 48 B.C., taking with it the largest collection of scrolls that had ever been assembled at that time. It wasn’t the first library anyone had burned, and it wasn’t the last, but it was the library that symbolized the wanton destruction of knowledge. The Burning Man Library of Alexandria was set on twenty four great wheels, on twelve great axles, and it could be hauled across the playa by gangs of hundreds of volunteers who tugged at the ropes affixed to its front. Inside, the columned building was lined with nooks that were, in turn, stuffed with scrolls, each one handwritten, each a copy of some public domain book downloaded from Project Gutenberg and hand-transcribed onto long rolls of paper by volunteers who’d worked at the project all year. Fifty thousand books had been converted to scrolls in this fashion, and they would all burn.
LIBRARIES BURN: it was the message stenciled at irregular intervals all over the Library of Alexandria, and sported by the librarians who volunteered there, fetching you scrolls and helping you find the passages you were looking for. I’d gone in and read some Mark Twain, a funny story I remembered reading in school about when Twain had edited an agricultural newspaper. I’d been delighted to discover that someone had gone to the trouble of writing that one out, using rolled-up lined school note-paper and taping it together in a continuous scroll that went on for hundreds of yards.
As I helped the librarian roll up the scroll — she agreed that the Twain piece was really funny — and put it away, I’d said, unthinkingly, “It’s such a shame that they’re going to burn all these.”
She’d smiled sadly and said, “Well, sure, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Ninety percent of the works in copyright are orphan works: no one knows who owns the rights to them, and no one can figure out how to put them back into print. Meanwhile, the copies of them that we do know about are disintegrating or getting lost. So there’s a library out there, the biggest library ever, Ninety percent of the stuff anyone’s ever created, and it’s burning, in slow motion. Libraries burn.” She shrugged. “That’s what they do. But maybe someday we’ll figure out how to make so many copies of humanity’s creative works that we’ll save most of them from the fire.”
And I read my Mark Twain and felt the library rock gently under me as the hundreds of rope-pullers out front dragged the Library of Alexandria from one side of the open playa to the other, inviting more patrons to get on board and have a ride and read a book before it all burned down. On the way out, the librarian gave me a thumbdrive: “It’s a compressed copy of the Gutenberg archive. Fifty thousand books and counting. There’s also a list of public domain books that we don’t have, and a list of known libraries, by city, where they can be found. Feel free to get a copy and scan or retype it.”
The little thumbdrive only weighed an ounce or two, but it felt as heavy as a mountain of books as I slipped it gravely into my pocket.
And now it was time to burn the Library of Alexandria. Again.
The Library had been hauled onto a burn-platform, and the hauling ropes were coiled neatly on its porch. Black Rock Rangers in their ranger hats and weird clothes surrounded it in a wide circle, sternly warning anyone who wandered too close to stay back. Ange and I stood on the front line, watching as a small swarm of Bureau of Land Management feds finished their inspection of the structure. I could see inside, see the incendiary charges that had been placed at careful intervals along the Library’s length, see the rolled scrolls in their nooks. I felt weird tears in my eyes as I contemplated what was about to happen — tears of awe and sorrow and joy. Ange noticed and wiped the tears away, kissed my ear and whispered, “It’s okay. Libraries burn.”
Now three men stepped out of the crowd. One was dressed as Caesar in white Roman robes and crown, sneering magnificently. The next wore monkish robes and a pointed mitre with a large cross on it. He was meant to be Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, another suspect in the burning of the Library. He looked beatifically on the crowd, then turned to Caesar. Finally, there was a man in a turban with a pointed beard — Caliph Omar, the final person usually accused of history’s most notorious arson. The three shook hands, then each drew a torch out of his waistband and lit it from a firepot burning in the center of the Library’s porch. They paced off from one another, and stationed themselves in the middle of the back and side walls, and, as the audience shouted and roared, thrust their torches lovingly in little holes set at the bottom of the walls.
There must have been some kind of flash powder or something in those nooks, because as each man scurried away, great arcs of flame shot out of them, up and out, scorching the Library walls. The walls burned merrily, and there was woodsmoke and gunpowder in the air now, the wind whipping it toward and past us, fanning the flames. The crowd noise increased, and I realized I was part of the chorus, making a kind of drawn-out, happy yelp.
Now the incendiary charges went, in near-perfect synch, a blossom of fire that forced its way out between the Library’s columns, the fire’s tongues lashing at sizzling embers — fragments of paper, fragments of books — that chased high into the night’s sky. The heat of the blast made us all step back from one another, and embers rained out of the sky, winking out as they fell around us like ashen rain. The crowd moved like a slow-motion wave, edging its way out of the direction of the prevailing wind and the rain of fire. I smelled singed hair and fun fur and a tall man in a loincloth behind me smacked me between the shoulders, shouting, “You were on fire, sorry!” I gave him a friendly wave — it was getting too loud to shout any kind of words — and continued to work my way to the edge.
Now there were fireworks, and not like the fireworks I’d seen on countless Fourth of July nights, fireworks that were artfully arranged to go off in orderly ranks, first one batch and then the next. These were fireworks with tempo, mortars screaming into the sky without pause, detonations so close together they were nearly one single explosion, a flaring, eye-watering series of booms that didn’t let up, driven by the thundering, clashing music from the gigantic art cars behind the crowd, dubstep and funk and punk and some kind of up-tempo swing and even a gospel song all barely distinguishable. The crowd howled. I howled. The flames licked high and paper floated high on the thermals, burning bright in the desert night. The smoke was choking and there were bodies all around me, pressing in, dancing. I felt like I was part of some kind of mass organism with thousands of legs and eyes and throats and voices, and the flames went higher.
Soon the Library was just a skeleton of structural supports in stark black, surrounded by fiery orange and red. The building teetered, its roof shuddered, the columns rocked and shifted. Each time it seemed the building was about to collapse, the crowd gasped and held its breath, and each time it recovered its balance, we made a disappointed “Aww.”
And then one of the columns gave way, snapping in two, taking the far corner of the roof with it, and the roof sheared downward and pulled free of the other columns, and they fell, too, and the whole thing collapsed in a crash and crackle, sending a fresh cloud of burning paper up in its wake. The Black Rock Rangers pulled back and we rushed forward, surrounding the wreckage, crowding right up to the burning, crackling pile of lumber and paper and ash. The music got a lot louder — the art cars were pulling in tight now — and there was the occasional boom as a stray firework left in the pile sent up a glowing mortar. It was glorious. It was insane.
It was over, and it was time to get moving.
“Let’s go,” I said to Ange. She’d taken the news about Masha calmly, but she’d said, “There’s no way I’m letting you go out there alone,” when I told her that Masha had insisted on meeting me.
“That’s what I told her,” I said, and Ange stood on tiptoes, reached up, and patted me on the head.
“That’s my boy,” she said.
We threaded our way through the dancing, laughing crowd, getting facefulls of woodsmoke, pot smoke, sweat, patchouli (Ange loved the smell, I hated it), ash and playa dust. Soon we found ourselves through the crowd of people and in a crowd of art cars. It was an actual, no fooling art car traffic jam: hundreds of mutant vehicles in a state of pure higgledy-piggledy, so that a three story ghostly pirate ship (on wheels) found itself having to navigate through the gap between a tank with the body of a ’59 El Camino on a crane arm that held it and its passengers ten feet off the ground and a rocking, rolling electric elephant with ten big-eyed weirdos riding on its howdah. Complicating things was the exodus of playa bikes, ridden with joyous recklessness by laughing, calling, goggled cyclists and streaming off into the night, becoming distant, erratic comets of bright LEDs, glowsticks, and electroluminescent wire.
EL wire was Burning Man’s must-have fashion accessory. It was cheap and came in many colors, and glowed brightly for as long as the batteries in its pack held out. You could braid it into your hair, pin or glue it to your clothes, or just dangle it from anything handy. Ange’s jawa bandoliers were woven through and through with different colors of pulsing EL wire, and she’d carefully worked a strand into the edge of her hood and another down the hem of her robe, so she glowed like a line drawing of herself from a distance. All my EL wire had been gotten for free, by harvesting other peoples’ dead EL wire and painstakingly fixing it, tracking down the shorts and faults and taping them up. I’d done my army surplus boots with EL laces, and wound it in coils around my utility belt. Both of us were visible from a good distance, but that didn’t stop a few cyclists from nearly running us down. They were very polite and apologetic about it, of course, but they were distracted. “Distracted” is a permanent state of being on the playa.
But as we ventured deeper into the desert, the population thinned out. Black Rock City’s perimeter is defined by the “trash fence” that rings the desert, not too far in from the mountain-ranges that surround it. These fences catch any MOOP (“matter out of place”) that blows out of peoples’ camps, where it can be harvested and packed out — leave no trace and all that. Between the trash fence and the center of the city is two miles of open playa, nearly featureless, dotted here and there with people, art, and assorted surprises. If Six O’Clock Plaza is the sun, and The Man and temple and the camps are the inner solar system, the trash fence is something like the asteroid belt, or Pluto (allow me to pause for a moment here and say, PLUTO IS TOO A PLANET!).
Now we were walking in what felt like the middle of nowhere. So long as we didn’t look over our shoulders at the carnival happening behind us, we could pretend that we were the only people on Earth.
Well, almost. We pretty much tripped over a couple who were naked and squirming on a blanket, way out in the big empty. It was a dangerous way to get your jollies, but nookie was a moderately good excuse for being a darktard. And they were pretty good-natured about it, all things considered. “Sorry,” I called over my shoulder as we moved past them. “Time to go dark ourselves,” I said.
“Guess so,” Ange said, and fiddled with the battery switch on her bandoleer. A moment later, she winked out of existence. I did the same. The sudden dark was so profound that the night looked the same with my eyes open and shut.
“Look up,” Ange said. I did.
“My God, it’s full of stars,” I said, which is the joke I always tell when there’s a lot of stars in the sky (it’s a killer line from the book 2001, though the idiots left it out of the movie). But I’d never seen a sky full of stars like this. The Milky Way — usually a slightly whitish streak, even on clear, moonless nights — was a glowing silvery river that sliced across the sky. I’d looked at Mars through binox once or twice and seen that it was, indeed, a little more red than the other stuff in the sky. But that night, in the middle of the desert, with the playa dust settled for a moment, it glowed like a coal in the lone eye of a cyclopean demon.
I stood there with my head flung back, staring wordlessly at the night, until I heard a funny sound, like the patter of water on stone, or —
“Ange, are you peeing?”
She shushed me. “Just having a sneaky playa-pee — the portasans are all the way back there. It’ll evaporate by morning. Chill.”
One of the occupational hazards of drinking water all the time was that you had to pee all the time, too. Some lucky burners had RVs at their camps with nice private toilets, but the rest of us went to “pee camp” when we needed to go. Luckily, the bathroom poetry — “poo-etry” — taped up inside the stalls made for pretty good reading. Technically, you weren’t supposed to pee on the playa, but way out here the chances of getting caught were basically zero, and it really was a long way back to the toilets. Listening to Ange go made me want to go, too, so we enjoyed a playa-pee together in the inky, warm dark.
Walking in the dark, it was impossible to tell how close we were to the trash fence; there was just black ahead of us, with the slightly blacker black of the mountains rising to the lighter black of the starry sky. But gradually, we were able to pick out some tiny, flickering lights — candle-lights, I thought — up ahead of us, in a long, quavering row.
As we got closer, I saw that they were candles, candle lanterns, actually, made of tin and glass, each with a drippy candle in it. They were placed at regular intervals along a gigantic, formal dinner table long enough to seat fifty people at least, with precise place settings and wine glasses and linen napkins folded into tents at each setting. “W. T. F.?” I said, softly.
Ange giggled. “Someone’s art project,” she said. “A dinner table at the trash fence. Woah.”
“Hi there,” a voice said from the dark, and a shadow detached itself from the table, and then lit up with EL wire, revealing itself to be a young woman with bright purple hair and a leather jacket cut down into a vest. “Welcome.” Suddenly there were more shadows turning into people — three more young women, one with green hair, one with blue hair, and…
“Hello, Masha,” I said.
She gave me a little salute. “Meet my campmates,” she said. “You’ve met before, actually. The day the bridge went.”
Right, of course. These were the girls who’d been playing on Masha’s Harajuku Fun Madness team when we’d run into them in the Tenderloin, moments before the Bay Bridge had been blown up by parties unknown. What had I called them? The Popsicle Squad. Yeah. “Nice to see you again,” I said. “This is Ange.”
Masha inclined her chin in a minute acknowledgement. “They’ve been good enough to let us use their dinner table for a little conversation, but I don’t want to spend too much time out here. Plenty of people looking for me.”
“Is Zeb here?”
“He went for a pee,” she said. “He’ll be back soon. But let’s get started, okay?”
“Let’s do it,” Ange said. She’d stiffened up beside me the minute I’d said hi to Masha, and I had an idea that maybe she wasn’t as cool about this meeting as she’d been playing it. Why should she be?
Masha brought us down to the farthest end of the table, away from her friends. We seated ourselves, and I saw that what I’d thought were bread-baskets were in fact laden with long-lasting hippie junk-food: whole-wheat pop-tarts from Trader Joe’s, organic beef jerky, baggies of what turned out to be home-made granola. High energy food that wouldn’t melt in the sun. Masha noticed me inspecting the goods and she said, “Go ahead, that’s what it’s there for, help yourself.” I tore into a pack of jerky (stashing the wrapper in my utility belt to throw away later at camp — turning gift-economy snacks into MOOP was really bad manners) and Ange got herself a pop-tart, just as Masha leaned across the table, opened the little glass door in the candle-lantern, and blew the candle out. Now we were just black blobs in the black night, far from the nearest human, invisible.
I felt a hand — Masha’s hand — grab my arm in the dark and feel its way down to my hand and then push something small and hard into my fingers, then let go.
“That’s a USB stick, a little one. It’s a crypto key that will unlock a four-gigabyte torrent file that you can get with a torrent magnet file on The Pirate Bay and about ten other torrent sites. It’s called insurancefile.masha.torrent, and the checksum’s on the USB stick, too. I’d appreciate it if you would download and seed the file, and ask anyone you trust to do the same.”
“So,” I said, speaking into the dark toward where Masha was sitting. “There’s this big torrent blob filled with encrypted something floating around on the net, and if something happens, you want me to release the key so that it can be decrypted, right?”
“Yes, that’s about the size of things,” Masha said. I tried to imagine what might be in the insurance file. Blackmail photos? Corporate secrets? Pictures of aliens at Area 51? Proof of Bigfoot’s existence?
“What’s on it?” Ange said. Her voice was a little tight and tense, and though she was trying to hide it, I could tell she was stressing.
“Are you sure you want to know that?” Masha said. Her voice was absolutely emotionless.
“If you want us to do something other than throw this memory stick into a fire, you’re goddamned right we do. I can’t think of any reason to trust you, not one.”
Masha didn’t say anything. She heaved a sigh, and I heard her unscrew a bottle and take a drink of something. I smelled whiskey.
“Look,” she said. “Back when I was, you know, inside at the DHS, I got to know a lot of things. Got to see a lot of things. Got to know a lot of people. Some of those people, they’ve stayed in touch with me. Not everyone at DHS wants to see America turned into a police state. Some people, they’re just doing their jobs, maybe trying to catch actual bad guys or fight actual crime or prevent actual disasters, but they get to see things as they do these jobs, things that they’re not happy about. Eventually, you come across something so terrible, you can’t look yourself in the mirror anymore unless you do something about it.
“So maybe you copy some files, pile up some evidence. You think to yourself, ‘Someday, someone will have the chance to speak out against this, and I’ll quietly slip them these files, and my conscience will forgive me for being a part of an organization that’s doing such rotten stuff.’
“So what happened is, someone you used to work with, someone who got a bad deal and has been underground and on the road, someone you trust, that person contacts you from deep underground and lets it be known that she’ll hold on to all those docs for you, put them together with other peoples’ docs, see if there are any interesting connections between them. That person will take them off your hands, launder them so no one will ever know where they came from, release them when the moment comes. This is quite a nice service to provide for tortured bureaucrats, you see, since it’s the kind of thing that lets them sleep at night and still deposit their paychecks.
“Word gets around. Lots of people find it useful to outsource their conscience to a disgraced runaway outlaw, and, well, stuff does start to trickle in. Then pour in. Soon, you’re sitting on gigabytes of that stuff.”
“Four gigabytes, by any chance?” I said. I was feeling a little lightheaded. Masha was giving me the keys to decode all the ugliest secrets of the American government, all the stuff that had so horrified loyal DHS employees that they’d felt the need to smuggle it out. Masha herself would be so hot that she was practically radioactive: I could hardly believe that space-lasers weren’t beaming out of the sky to kill her where she sat. And me? Well, once I had the key, no one could be sure I hadn’t downloaded the insurance file and had a look, so that meant I was, fundamentally, a dead man.
“About that,” she said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“You have no right to do this,” Ange said. “Whatever you’re up to, you’re putting us in danger, without asking us, without us knowing anything about it. How dare you?”
Masha cut her off with a sharp “Shh” sound.
“Don’t shush me –” Ange began, and I heard/felt/saw Masha grab her and squeeze. “Shut up,” she hissed.
Ange shut up. I held my breath. There was the distant wub wub wub of terrible dubstep playing from some far-away art car, the soughing of the wind blowing in the slats of the trash fence, and there — had I heard a footstep? Another footstep? Hesitant, stumbling, in the dark? A soft crunch, there it was again, crunch, crunch, closer now, and I felt Masha coil up, get ready to run, and I tasted the beef-jerky again as it rose in my throat, buoyed up on a fountain of stomach acid. My ears hammered with my pulse and the sweat on the back of my neck dried to ice in an instant.
Crunch, crunch. The steps were practically upon us now, and there was a bang that made me jump as Masha leaped away from the table, knocked over her chair, and set off into the dark of the playa.
Then there was a blazing light, right in my face, blinding me, and a hand reaching out for me, and I scrambled away from it, grabbing for Ange, screaming something in wordless terror, Ange shouting too, and then a voice said, “Hey, Marcus! Stop! It’s me!”
I knew that voice, though I’d only heard it for an instant, long ago, on the street in front of Chavez High.
“Zeb?” I said.
“Dude!” he shouted, and I was grabbed up in a tight, somewhat smelly hug, my face pressed against his whiskered cheek. His blazing headlamp blinded me, but from what I could feel, he’d grown a beard of the same size and composition as a large animal, a big cat or possibly a beaver. The terror drained out of me, but left behind all its nervous energy, and I found myself laughing uproariously.
Suddenly, small strong hands separated us and Zeb was rolling on the playa, tackled by Masha, who must have circled back and recognized his voice. She was calling him all sorts of names as she wrestled him to the ground, straddling his chest and pinning his arms under her elbows.
“Sorry, sorry!” he said, and he was laughing too, and so was Masha, and so was Ange, for that matter. “Sorry, okay! I just didn’t want to disturb you. The girls told me you were down here. Thought a light would kill the atmosphere.”
Masha let him up and gave him a kiss in a spot on his cheek where his beard was a little thinner.
“You are such an idiot,” she said. He laughed again and tousled her hair. Masha was a totally different person with Zeb, playful and younger and not so totally lethal. I liked her better.
“Ange, this is Zeb. Zeb, this is Ange.” He shook her hand.
“I’ve heard of you,” she said.
“And I’ve heard of you, too,” he said.
“Okay, sit down, you idiots, and turn off that damned light, Zeb.” Masha was getting her down-to-business voice back, and we did what she said.
I still felt angry at her for what she’d done to us, but after being scared witless and then let down an instant later, it was hard to get back to that angry feeling. All my adrenaline had been dumped into my bloodstream already, and it would take a while to manufacture some more, I guess. Still, things were far from settled. “Masha,” I said, “you know that what you’ve done here is really unfair, right?”
I couldn’t see or hear her in the dark, and the silence stretched on so long I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep or tiptoed away. Then, suddenly, she said, “God, you’re still a kid, aren’t you?”
The way she said it made me feel like I was about eight years old, like I was some kind of hayseed with cow crap between my toes, and like she was some kind of world-traveling superspy underground fugitive ninja.
“Up yours,” I said, trying to make it sound cynical and mean, and not like I was a widdle kid with hurt feewings. I don’t think I was very successful.
She gave a mean laugh. “I mean it. ‘Fair’? What’s fair got to do with anything? There is stuff going on in the world, bad stuff, the kind of stuff that ends up with dead people in shallow graves, and you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. Is it fair to all the people who risked everything to get me these docs for you to walk away from them, because you don’t want to have your safe little life disrupted?
“Oh, M1k3y, you’re such a big hero. After all you bravely, what, bravely told other people’s stories to a reporter? Because you held a press conference? What a big, brave man.” She spat loudly.
Yeah, it got me. Because you know what? She was right. Basically. Give or take. There’d been plenty of nights when I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought exactly these thoughts. There’d been kids in the Xnet who did stuff that was way crazier than anything I’d done, kids whose jamming had put them right up against Homeland Security and the cops, kids who’d ended up in jail for a long time, without any newspaper coverage advertising their bravery. Some of them were probably still in there. The fact that I didn’t know for sure — didn’t even know all their names, or how many there were — was yet another reason that I didn’t deserve anyone’s admiration.
Every bit of clever, flashy wit ran and hid in the furthest corners of my mind. I heard Zeb shuffle his feet uncomfortably. No one knew what to say.
Except Ange. “Well, I suppose not everyone can be a sellout,” she said. “Not everyone can be a snitch who gets to sit in the hidden bunkers and spy on the ones who’re getting beaten and jailed and tortured and disappeared. Not everyone can draw a fat salary for their trouble until the day comes that it’s all too much for their poor little conscience and they just have to go and run away to a beach in Mexico somewhere, lying in the bed they made for themselves.”
It made me smile, there in the dark. Go, Ange! Whatever my sins were, they were sins of omission: I could have done more. But Masha’d done the worst kind of evil: sins of commission. She’d done wrong. Really, really wrong. She’d tried to make up for it since. But she was in no position to shame me.
Another one of those long silences. I thought about dropping the USB stick in the dust and walking off in the dark. You know what stopped me?
Zeb.
Because Zeb was a hero. He’d broken out of Gitmo-By-the-Bay and instead of running, he’d come and found me at Chavez High so that he could pass on Darryl’s note. He could have just hit the road, but he hadn’t. And I’d told his secrets to the world, put him in harm’s way. This wasn’t just Masha’s mission, this was Zeb’s mission, too. They were a team. I owed him. We all did.
“Enough,” I said, swallowing hard on all the stupid emotions, trying to find some of that Zen calm I’d attained at the temple. “Enough. Fine, it’s not fair. Life’s not fair. I’ve got this thing now. What do I do with it?”
“Keep it safe,” Masha said, her voice back in that emotionless zone that I guessed she was good at finding when she needed it. “And if you ever hear that I’ve gone down, or Zeb’s gone down, release it. Shout it from the mountaintops. If I ever ask you to release it, release it. And if you haven’t heard from me by the Friday of the next Burning Man, one year from now, release it. Do you think you can do that?”
“Sounds like something I could manage,” I said.
“I figure even you can’t screw this up,” she said, but I could tell she was just putting up her tough-chick front, and I didn’t take it personally. “Okay, fine. I’m out of here. Don’t screw up, all right?”
I heard her feet crunch away.
“See you at camp, babe!” Zeb called at her retreating back, and his headlamp came back on, dazzling me again. He grabbed a pop-tart from the basket and opened it, chewed at it enthusiastically. “I love that girl, honestly I do. But she is so tightly wound!”
It was so manifestly true that there was nothing for it but to laugh, and so we did, and it turned out that Zeb had some beer that he gift-economied to us, and I had some cold-brew coffee concentrate in a flask that we dipped into afterwards, just to get us back up from the beer’s mellow down, and then we all needed pee camp, and we went back into the night and the playa and the dust.
Barnes and Noble: USA
This section is dedicated to Barnes and Noble, a US national chain of bookstores. As America’s mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, Barnes and Noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others potential readers, the B&N stores kept the careers of many writers afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn’t possibly afford to keep on their limited shelves. B&N has always had strong community outreach programs, and I’ve done some of my best-attended, best-organized signings at B&N stores, including the great events at the (sadly departed) B&N in Union Square, New York, where the mega-signing after the Nebula Awards took place, and the B&N in Chicago that hosted the event after the Nebula Awards a few years later. Best of all is that B&N’s “geeky” buyers really Get It when it comes to science fiction, comics and manga, games and similar titles. They’re passionate and knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the excellent selection on display at the stores.
Barnes and Noble Nook
All day long, people had been telling me that the weather man said we were in for a dust storm, but I just assumed that “dust storm” meant that I’d have to tuck my scarf under the lower rim of my goggles, the way I had been doing every time it got windy on the playa.
But the dust storm that blew up after we left Zeb behind and returned to the nonstop circus was insane. The night turned white with flying dust, and our lights just bounced back in our faces, creating gloomy grey zones in front of us that seemed to go on forever. It reminded me of really bad fog, the kind of thing you get sometimes in San Francisco, usually in the middle of summer, reducing all the tourists in their shorts and T-shirts to hypothermia candidates. But fog made it hard to see, and the dust-storm made it hard — nearly impossible — to breathe. Our eyes and noses streamed, our mouths were caked with dust, every breath triggered a coughing fit. We stumbled and staggered and clutched each other’s hands because if we let go, we’d be swallowed by the storm.
Ange pulled my ear down to her mouth and shouted, “We have to get inside!”
“I know!” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out how to get back to camp: I think we’re around Nine O’Clock and B.” The ring roads that proceeded concentrically from center-camp were lettered in alphabetical order. We were at Seven Fifteen and L, way out in the hinterlands. Without the dust, the walk would have taken fifteen minutes, and been altogether pleasant. With the dust… well, it felt like it might take hours.
“Screw that,” Ange said. “We have to get inside somewhere now.” She started dragging me. I tripped over a piece of rebar hammered into the playa and topped with a punctured tennis ball — someone’s tent stake. Ange’s iron grip kept me from falling, and she hauled me along.
Then we were at a structure — a hexa-yurt, made from triangular slabs of flat styrofoam, duct taped on its seams. The outside was covered with an insulating layer of silver-painted bubble wrap. We felt our way around to the “door” (a styro slab with a duct tape hinge on one edge and a pull-loop). Ange was about to yank this open when I stopped her and knocked instead. Storm or no storm, it was weird and wrong to just walk into some stranger’s home.
The wind howled. If someone was coming, I couldn’t hear them over its terrible moaning whistle. I raised my hand to knock again, and the door swung open. A bearded face peered out at us and shouted, “Get in!”
We didn’t need to be asked twice. We dove through the door and it shut behind us. I could still hardly see; my goggles were nearly opaque with caked-on dust, and the light in the hexayurt was dim, provided by LED lanterns draped with gauzy scarves.
“Look at what the storm blew in,” said a gravelly, jovial voice from the yurt’s shadows. “Better hose ’em off before you bring ’em over here, John, those two’ve got half the playa in their ears.”
“Come on,” said the bearded man. He was wearing tie-dyes and had beads braided into his long beard and what was left of his hair. He grinned at us from behind a pair of round John Lennon glasses. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Shoes first, thanks.”
Awkwardly, we bent down and unlaced our shoes. We did have half the playa in them. The other half was caught in the folds of our clothes and our hair and our ears.
“Can I get you two something to wear? We can beat the dust out of your clothes once the wind dies down.”
My first instinct was to say no, because we hadn’t even been introduced, plus it seemed like more hospitality than even the gift economy demanded. On the other hand, we weren’t doing these people any kindness by crapping up their hexayurt. On the other other hand —
“That’d be so awesome,” Ange said. “Thank you.”
That’s why she’s my girlfriend. Left to my own devices, I’d be on-the-other-handing it until Labor Day. “Thanks,” I said.
The man produced billowy bundles of bright silk. “They’re salwar kameez,” he said. “Indian clothes. Here, these are the pants, and you wrap the tops around like so.” He demonstrated. “I get them on eBay from women’s clothing collectives in India. Straight from the source. Very comfortable and practically one size fits all.”
We stripped down to our underwear and wound the silk around us as best we could. We helped each other with the tricky bits, and our host helped, too. “That’s better,” he said, and gave us a package of baby wipes, which are the playa’s answer to a shower. We went through a stack of them wiping the dust off each other’s faces and out of each other’s ears and cleaning our hands and bare feet — the dust had infiltrated our shoes and socks!
“And that’s it,” the man said, clasping his hands together and beaming. He had a soft, gentle way of talking, but you could tell by the twinkle of his eyes that he didn’t miss anything and that something very interesting was churning away in his mind. Either he was a zen master or an axe-murderer — no one else was that calm and mirthful. “I’m John, by the way.”
Ange shook his hand. “Ange,” she said.
“Marcus,” I said.
Lots of people used “playa names,” cute pseudonyms that let them assume new identities while they were at Burning Man. I’d had enough of living with my notorious alter ego, M1k3y, and didn’t feel the need to give myself another handle. I hadn’t talked it over with Ange, but she, too, didn’t seem to want or need a temporary name.
“Come on and meet the rest.”
“The rest” turned out to be three more guys, sitting on low cushions around a coffee table that was littered with paper, dice, and meticulously painted lead figurines. We’d interrupted an old-school gaming session, the kind you play with a dungeon master and lots of role-playing. I’m hardly in any position to turn up my nose at someone else’s amusements — after all, I spent years doing live-action role-play — but this was seriously nerdy. The fact that they were playing in the middle of a dust storm on the playa just made it more surreal.
“Hi!” Ange said. “That looks like fun!”
“It certainly is,” said a gravelly voice, and I got a look at its owner. He had a lined and seamed face, kind eyes, and a slightly wild beard, and he was wearing a scarf around his neck with a turquoise pin holding it in place. “Are you initiated in the mysteries of this particular pursuit?”
I slipped my hand into Ange’s and did my best not to be shy or awkward. “I’ve never played, but I’m willing to learn.”
“An admirable sentiment,” said another man. He was also in his fifties or sixties, with a neat grey Van Dyke beard and dark rimmed glasses. “I’m Mitch, this is Barlow, and this is Wil, our dungeon master.”
The last man was a lot younger than the other three — maybe a youthful forty — and clean-shaven, with apple cheeks and short hair. “Hey, folks,” he said. “You’re just in time. Are you going to sit in? I’ve got some pre-rolled characters you can play. We’re just doing a mini-dungeon while we wait out the storm.”
John brought us some cushions from the hexayurt’s recesses and sat down with crossed legs and perfect, straight yoga posture. We settled down beside him. Wil gave us our character sheets — I was a half-elf mage, Ange was a human fighter with an enchanted sword — and dug around in a case until he found hand-painted figurines that matched the descriptions. “My son paints them,” he said. “I used to help, but the kid’s a machine — I can’t keep up with him.” I looked closely at the figs. They were, well, they were beautiful. They’d been painted in incredible detail, more than I could actually make out in the dim light of the yurt. My character’s robes had been painted with mystical silver sigils, and Ange’s character’s chain mail had each ring picked out in tarnished silver, with tiny daubs of black paint in the center of each minute ring.
“These are amazing,” I said. I’d always thought of tabletop RPGs as finicky and old fashioned, but these figs had been painted by someone very talented who really loved the game, and if someone that talented thought this was worth his time, I’d give it a chance, too.
Wil was a great game-master, spinning the story of our quest in a dramatic voice that sucked me right in. The other guys listened intently, though they interjected from time to time with funny quips that cracked one other up. I got the feeling they’d known one other for a long time, and when we took a break for fresh mint tea — these guys knew how to live! — I asked how they knew one other.
They all smiled kind of awkwardly at one another. “It’s kind of a reunion,” Mitch said. “We all worked together a long time ago.”
“Did you do a startup together?”
They laughed again. I could tell that I was missing something. Wil said, “You ever hear of the Electronic Frontier Foundation?” I sure had. I figured it out a second before he said it: “These guys founded it.”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “You’re John Perry Barlow?” The guy in the kerchief nodded and grinned like a pirate. “And you’re John Gilmore?” John shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “And you’re Mitch Kapor?” The guy with the Van Dyke gave a little wave. Ange was looking slightly left out. “Ange, these guys founded EFF. That one started the first ISP the San Francisco; that one commercialized spreadsheets; and that one wrote the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.”
Barlow laughed like a cement-mixer. “And turned teraliters of sewage into gigaliters of diesel fuel with tailored algae. Also, I wrote a song or two. Since we’re on the subject.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Barlow also wrote songs for the Grateful Dead.”
Ange shook her head. “You make them sound like the elder gods of the Internet.”
“Enough with the ‘elder’ stuff,” Mitch said, and sipped his tea. “You certainly seem to know your Internet trivia, young man.”
I blushed. A couple of times on the playa, people had recognized me as M1k3y and come over to tell me how much they admired me and so on, and it had embarrassed me, but now I wanted these guys to know about that part of my life and I couldn’t figure out how to get it out without sounding like I was boasting to three of the all-time heroes of the Internet. Again, Ange saved me. “Marcus and I worked with some EFF people a couple years ago. He started Xnet.”
Wil laughed aloud at that. “That was you?” he said. He put on a hard-boiled detective voice: “Of all the yurts in all the playa, they had to walk into mine.”
Mitch held out his hand. “It’s an honor, sir,” he said. I shook his hand, tongue-tied. The others followed suit. I was in a daze, and when John told me that he “really admired the work” I’d done, I thought I’d die from delight.
“Enough!” Ange said. “I won’t be able to get his head out of the door if it gets any more swollen. Now, are we here to talk or to roll some goddamned dice?”
“I like your attitude,” Wil said, and thumbed through his notebook and set down some terrain tiles on the graph paper in front of us. Ange turned out to be a master strategist — which didn’t surprise me, but clearly impressed everyone else — and she arrayed our forces such that we sliced through the trash hordes, beat the mini-bosses, and made it to the final boss without suffering any major losses. She was a born tank, and loved bulling through our adversaries while directing our forces. Wil gave her tons of extra XP for doing it all in character — barbarian swordsmistress came easily to her — and her example led us all, so by the time we got to the dragon empress in her cavern at the middle of the dungeon, we were all talking like a fantasy novel. Barlow was a master at this, improvising heroic poetry and delivering it in that whiskey voice of his. Meanwhile, Mitch and John kept catching little hints that Wil dropped in his narration, discovering traps and hidden treasures based on the most obscure clues. I can’t remember when we’d had a better time.
Mitch and Barlow kept shifting on their cushions, and just as we broke through into the main cavern, they called for a stretch break, and got to their feet and rubbed vigorously at their lower backs, groaning. Wil stretched, too, and checked the yurt’s door. “Storm’s letting up,” he called. It was coming on to midnight, and when Wil opened the door, a cool, refreshing breeze blew in, along with the sound of distant music.
Part of me wanted to rush back out into the night and find some music to dance to, and part of me wanted to stay in the yurt with my heroes, playing D&D. That was the thing about Burning Man — there was so much I wanted to do!
Wil came over and handed me another cup of mint tea, the leaves floating in the hot water. “Pretty awesome. Can’t believe these guys let me DM their game. And I can’t believe I ran into you.” He shook his head. “This place is like nerdstock.”
“Have you known them for long?”
“Not really. I met Barlow and Gilmore a while back, when I did a fundraiser for EFF. I ran into Gilmore at random today and I told him I’d brought my D&D stuff along and the next thing I knew, I was running a game for them.”
“What kind of fundraiser were you doing?” Wil looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him.
“Oh,” he said, and stuck his hands in his pockets. “They brought me in to pretend-fight a lawyer in a Barney the Purple Dinosaur costume. It was because the Barney people had been sending a lot of legal threats out to web sites and EFF had been defending them, and, well, it was a lot of fun.”
I knew him from somewhere. It was driving me crazy. “Look, do I know you? You look really familiar –“
“Ha!” he said. “I thought you knew. I made some movies when I was a kid, and I was on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and –“
My jaw dropped so low I felt like it was in danger of scraping my chest. “You’re Wil Wheaton?”
He looked embarrassed. I’ve never been much of a Trek fan, but I’d seen a ton of the videos Wheaton had done with his comedy troupe, and of course, I knew about Wheaton’s Law: Don’t be a dick.
“That’s me,” he said.
“You were the first person I ever followed on Twitter!” I said. It was a weird thing to say, sure, but it was the first thing that came to mind. He was a really funny tweeter.
“Well, thank you!” he said. No wonder he was such a good narrator — he’d been acting since he was like seven years old. Being around all these people made me wish I had access to Wikipedia so I could look them all up.
We sat back down to play against the megaboss, the dragon empress. She had all kinds of fortifications, and a bunch of lethal attacks. I figured out how to use an illusion spell to trick her into moving into a side corridor that gave her less room to maneuver, and this made it possible for the fighters to attack her in waves while I used a digging spell to send chunks of the cave roof onto her head. This seemed like a good idea to me (and everyone else, I swear it!), right up to the time that I triggered a cave-in that killed us all.
But no one was too angry with me. We’d all cheered every time I rolled a fifteen or better and one of my spells brought some roof down on the dragon’s head, and no one had bothered too much about all those dice-rolls Wil was making behind his screen. Besides, it was nearly 1 A.M. and there was a party out there! We changed out of John’s beautiful silk clothes and back into our stiff, dust-caked playa-wear and switched on all our EL wire and fit our goggles over our eyes and said a million thanks and shook everyone’s hands and so on. Just as I was about to go, Mitch wrote an email address on my arm with a Sharpie (there was plenty of stuff there already — playa coordinates of parties and email addresses of people I planned on looking up).
“Ange tells me you’re looking for a job. That’s the campaign manager for Joseph Noss. I hear she’s looking for a webmaster. Tell her I sent you.”
I was speechless. After months of knocking on doors, sending in resumes, emailing and calling, an honest-to-goodness job — with a recommendation from an honest-to-goodness legend! I stammered out my thanks and as soon as we were outside, I kissed Ange and bounced up and down and dragged her off to the playa, nearly crashing into a guy on a dusty Segway tricked out with zebra-striped fun fur. He gave us a grin and a wave.
We didn’t see Masha or Zeb again until the temple burn, on Sunday night, the last night.
We’d burned The Man the night before, and it had been in-freaking- sane. Hundreds of fire-dancers executing precision maneuvers, tens of thousands of burners sitting in ranks on the playa, screaming our heads off as fireballs and mushroom-clouds of flame rose out of The Man’s pyramid, then the open-throated roar as it collapsed and the Rangers dropped their line and we all rushed forward to the fire, everyone helping everyone else along, like the world’s most courteous stampede. I flashed on the crush of bodies in the BART station after the Bay Bridge blew, the horrible feeling of being forced by the mass of people to step on those who’d fallen, the sweat and the stink and the noise. Someone had stabbed Darryl in that crowd, given him the wound that started us on our awful adventure.
This crowd was nothing like that mob, but my internal organs didn’t seem to know that, and they did slow flip-flops in my abdomen, and my legs turned to jelly, and I found myself slowly sliding to the playa. There were tears pouring down my face, and I felt like I was floating above my body as Ange grabbed me under my armpits, struggling to get me to my feet as she spoke urgent, soothing words into my ears. People stopped and helped, one tall woman steering traffic around us, a small older man grabbing me beneath my armpits with strong hands, pulling me upright.
I snapped back into my body, felt the jellylegged feeling recede, and blinked away the tears. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry.” I was so embarrassed I felt like digging a hole and pulling the playa in over my head. But neither of the people who’d stopped to help seemed surprised. The woman told me where to find the nearest medical camp and the man gave me a hug and told me to take it easy.
Ange didn’t say anything, just held me for a moment. She knew that I sometimes got a little wobbly in crowds, and she knew I didn’t like to talk about it. We made our way to the fire and watched it for a moment, then went back out into the playa for the parties and the dancing and forgetting. I reminded myself that I was in love, at Burning Man, and that there might be a job waiting for me when I got back to San Francisco, and kicked myself in the ass every time I felt the bad feeling creeping up on me.
Temple burn was very different. We got there really early and sat down nearly at the front and watched the sun set and turn the temple’s white walls orange, then red, then purple. Then the spotlights went up, and it turned blazing white again. The wind blew and I heard the rustle of all the paper remembrances fluttering in its nooks and on its walls.
We were sitting amid thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, but there was hardly a sound. When I closed my eyes, I could easily pretend that I was alone in the desert with the temple and all its memories and good-byes and sorrows. I felt the ghost of that feeling I’d had when I’d sat in the temple and tried to clear my mind, to be in the present and throw away all my distractions. The temple had an instantly calming effect on me, silenced all the chattering voices in the back of my head. I don’t believe in spooks and ghosts and gods, and I don’t think the temple had any supernatural effect, but it had an absolutely natural effect, made me sorrowful and hopeful and calm and, well, soft-edged all at once.
I wasn’t the only one. We all sat and watched the temple, and people spoke in hushed tones, museum voices, church whispers. Time stretched. Sometimes I felt like I was dozing off. Other times I felt like I could feel every pore and every hair on my body. Ange stroked my back, and I squeezed her leg softly. I looked at the faces around me. Some were calm, some softly cried, some smiled in profound contentment. The wind ruffled my scarf.
And then I spotted them. Three rows back from us, holding hands: Masha and Zeb. I nearly didn’t recognize them at first, because Masha had her head on Zeb’s shoulder and wore an expression of utter vulnerability and sadness, absolutely unlike her normal display of half-angry, half-cocky impatience. I looked away before I caught her eye, feeling like I’d intruded on her privacy.
I turned back to the temple just in time to see the first flames lick at its insides, the paper crackling and my breath catching in my chest. Then a tremendous column of fire sprouted out of the central atrium, whooshing in a pillar a hundred yards tall, the heat and light so intense I had to turn my face away. The crowd sighed, a huge, soft sound, and I sighed with it.
There was someone walking through the crowd now, a compact woman in goggles and grey clothes in a cut that somehow felt military, though they didn’t have any markings or insignia. She was moving with odd intensity, holding a small video camera up to one eye and peering through it. People muttered objections as she stepped on them or blocked their view, then spoke louder, saying “Sit down!” and “Down in front,” and “Spectator!” This last with a vicious spin on it that was particularly apt, given her preoccupation with that camera.
I looked away from her and tried to put her out of my mind. The temple was burning along its length now, and someone near me drew a breath and let out a deep, bassy “Ommmmmm” that made my ears buzz. Another voice joined in, and then another, and then I joined in, the sound like a living thing that traveled up and down my chest and through my skull, suffusing me with calm. It was exactly what I needed, that sound, and as my voice twined with all those others, with Ange’s, I felt like a part of something so much larger than myself.
A sharp pain in my thigh made me open my eyes. It was the lady with the camera, facing away from me, scanning the fire and the crowd with it, and she’d caught some of the meat of my thigh as she stepped past me. I looked up in annoyance, ready to say something really nasty, and found myself literally frozen in terror.
You see, I knew that face. I could never have forgotten it.
Her name was Carrie Johnstone. I’d called her “Severe Haircut Woman” before I learned it. The last time I’d seen her in person, she’d had me strapped to a board and ordered a soldier hardly older than me to waterboard me — to simulate my execution. To torture me.
For years, that face had haunted my nightmares, swimming out of the dark of my dreams to taunt me; to savage me with sharp, animal teeth; to choke me out with a tight bag over my face; to ask me relentless questions I couldn’t answer and hit me when I said so.
A closed-door military tribunal had found her not guilty of any crime, and she’d been “transfered” to help wind down the Forward Operating Base in Tikrit, Iraq. I had a news alert for her, but no news of her ever appeared. As far as I could tell, she’d vanished.
It was like being back in my nightmares, one of those paralysis dreams where your legs and arms won’t work. I wanted to shout and scream and run, but all I could do was sit as my heart thundered so loud that my pulse blotted out all the other sounds, even that all-consuming Ommmm.
Johnstone didn’t even notice. She radiated an arrogant disregard for people, her face smooth and emotionless as the people around her asked her (or shouted at her) to move. She took another step past me and I stared at her back — tense beneath her jacket, coiled for action — as she strode back through the crowd, disappearing over the horizon, hair beneath a stocking cap that was the same desert no-color as her clothes.
Ange squeezed my hand. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shook my head and squeezed back. I wasn’t going to tell her I’d just seen the bogeywoman on the playa. Even if that was Johnstone, so what? Everyone came to Burning Man, it seemed — software pioneers, fugitives, poets, and me. I hadn’t seen any rules against war criminals attending.
“It’s nothing,” I choked out. I looked over the crowd. Johnstone had disappeared. I turned back to the burning temple, tried to find the peace I’d felt a moment before.
By the time the temple burned down, I’d nearly convinced myself that I’d imagined Johnstone. After all, it had been dark, the only light the erratic flicker of the temple. The woman had held a camera to her face, obscuring it. And I’d seen her from below. I’d been visiting all my ghosts that night, seeing the faces of friends lost and betrayed and saved in the temple’s fire. I’d only seen the face for a moment. What were the odds that Carrie Johnstone would be at Burning Man? It was like finding Attila the Hun at a yoga class. Like finding Darth Vader playing ultimate frisbee in the park. Like finding Megatron volunteering at a children’s hospital. Like finding Nightmare Moon having a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese.
Thinking up these analogies — and even dumber ones that I won’t inflict upon you — helped me calm down as Ange and I walked slowly away from temple burn with the rest of the crowd, a solemn and quiet procession.
“Going home tomorrow,” I said.
“Exodus,” Ange said. That’s what it was called at Burning Man, and it was supposed to be epic — thousands of cars and RVs stretching for miles, being released in “pulses” every hour so that the traffic didn’t bunch up. We’d scored a ride back with a Lemmy from Noisebridge, the hackerspace I hung around at in San Francisco. I didn’t know him well, but we knew where he was camped and had arranged to meet him with our stuff at 7 am to help him pack his car. Getting up that early would be tricky, but I had a secret weapon: my contribution to the Burning Man gift economy, AKA cold-brew coffee.
You’ve had hot coffee before, and in the hands of a skilled maker, coffee can be amazing. But the fact is that coffee is one of the hardest things to get right in the world. Even with great beans and a great roast and great equipment, a little too much heat, the wrong grind, or letting things go on too long will produce a cup of bitterness. Coffee’s full of different acids, and depending on the grind, temperature, roast, and method, you can “overextract” the acids from the beans, or overheat them and oxidize them, producing that awful taste you get at donut shops and Starbucks.
But there is Another Way. If you make coffee in cold water, you only extract the sweetest acids, the highly volatile flavors that hint at chocolate and caramel, the ones that boil away or turn to sourness under imperfect circumstances. Brewing coffee in cold water sounds weird, but in fact, it’s just about the easiest way to make a cup (or a jar) of coffee.
Just grind coffee — keep it coarse, with grains about the size of sea salt — and combine it with twice as much water in an airtight jar. Give it a hard shake and stick it somewhere cool overnight (I used a cooler bag loaded with ice from ice camp and wrapped the whole thing in bubble wrap for insulation). In the morning, strain it through a colander and a paper coffee filter. What you’ve got now is coffee concentrate, which you can dilute with cold water to taste — I go about half and half. If you’re feeling fancy, serve it over ice.
Here’s the thing: cold-brew coffee tastes amazing, and it’s practically impossible to screw it up. Unlike espresso, where all the grounds have to be about the same size so that the high pressure water doesn’t cause fracture lines in the “puck” of coffee that leave some of the coffee unextracted and the rest overextracted, cold-brew grounds can be just about any size. Seriously, you could grind it with a stone axe. Unlike drip coffee, which goes sour and bitter if you leave the grounds in contact with the water for too long, cold-brew just gets yummier and yummier (and more and more caffeinated!) the longer the grounds sit in the water. Cold-brewing in a jar is pretty much the easiest way to make coffee in the known universe — if you don’t mind waiting overnight for the brew — and it produces the best-tasting, most potent coffee you’ve ever drunk. The only downside is that it’s kind of a pain in the ass to clean up, but if you want to spend some more money, you can invest in various gadgets to make it easier to filter the grounds, from cheap little Toddy machines all the way up to hand-blown glass “Kyoto drippers” that look like something from a mad scientist’s lab. But all you need to make a perfectly astounding cup of cold-brewed jet fuel is a mason jar, coffee, water, and something to strain it through. They’ve been making iced coffee this way in New Orleans for centuries, but for some unknown reason, it never seems to have caught on big-time.
All week, I’d been patrolling the playa armed with a big thermos bottle filled with cold-brew concentrate, pouring out cups to anyone who seemed nice or in need of a lift. Every single person I shared it with had been astounded at the flavor. It’s funny watching someone take a sip of cold-brew for the first time, because it looks and smells strong, and it is, and coffee drinkers have been trained to think that “strong” equals “bitter.” The first mouthful washes over your tongue and the coffee flavor wafts up the back of your throat and fills up your sinus cavity and your nose is all, “THIS IS INCREDIBLY STRONG!” And the flavor is strong, but there isn’t a hint of bitterness. It’s like someone took a cup of coffee and subtracted everything that wasn’t totally delicious, and what’s left behind is a pure, powerful coffee liquor made up of all these subtle flavors: citrus and cocoa and a bit of maple syrup, all overlaid on the basic and powerful coffee taste you know and love.
I know I converted at least a dozen people to the cult of cold-brew over the week, and the only challenge had been keeping Ange from drinking it all before I could give it away. But we’d have jet fuel in plenty for the morning’s pack-up and Exodus. I’d put up all the leftover coffee to brew before we went to the temple burn, and if we drank even half of it, our ride would have to let us out of the car during the Exodus pulses to run laps around the playa and work off the excess energy.
Thinking about this, I took my thermos off my belt and gave it a shake. “Want some magic bean juice?” I asked.
“Yum,” Ange said, and took the flask from me and swigged at it.
“Leave some for me,” I said, and pried it out of her fingers and drank the last few swallows. The deep, trancelike experience of temple burn had left me feeling like I wanted to find someone’s pillow camp and curl up on a mountain of cushions, but it was my last night on the playa, and I was going to dance, so I needed some rocket fuel.
Just as I lowered the flask, I spotted Masha and Zeb again, walking stiffly beside each other, faces set like stone, expressionless. They were at least fifty yards away from me, in the dark of night, and at first I thought they were just in some kind of deeply relaxed state from the extraordinary events of the night. But I soon saw that there was something definitely wrong. Walking very close behind them were a pair of large men in stocking caps just like the ones Carrie Johnstone — or her twin — had been wearing, and they had tight grey-black scarves pulled over their faces, though it wasn’t blowing dust just then. The crowd parted a little and I saw that they were dressed as Carrie Johnstone had been, the same semi-military jackets and baggy pants and big black boots. There was something wrong with them, and I couldn’t place it for a moment, but then it hit me: they were darktards — no EL wire, no lights. And for that matter, Zeb and Masha had gone dark.
I saw all this in a second and mostly reconstructed it after the fact, because I was already moving. “This way,” I said to Ange, and grabbed her hand and started to push through the crowd. There was something really wrong with that little scene, and Masha might not be my favorite person in the world, but whatever was going down with her and Zeb and those two guys, I wanted to find out about it.
Even as we pushed through the crowd, part of my brain was already telling me a little story about how it would all be okay: It’s probably not even them. Those two guys probably have EL wire all over their clothes, but they’re saving battery. Boy, is Ange going to think I’m a paranoia case when I tell her what I thought I saw —
The four were heading out into the dark of the open playa now, and there was someone bringing up the rear, emerging from the crowd behind them. It was Carrie Johnstone, and I saw her profile clearly now, silhouetted by the orange light of a flamethrower flaring a fireball into the night as a mutant vehicle zoomed past. There was no doubt at all in my mind now, this was her. She was sweeping her head from side to side in a smooth, alert rhythm, like the Secret Service bodyguards that shadowed the president when you saw him on TV.
Ange was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her, and she was pulling on my hand, so I let go of her, because I knew it was Carrie Johnstone, and I knew that Zeb and Masha were under her power. I had been under her power. So had Ange. I knew what that meant, and I wasn’t going to let her snatch anyone else.
All five of them were vanishing into the night and I began to push and shove my way through the crowd, not caring anymore if I stepped on someone’s toes or bumped into them. People swore at me, but I barely heard them. My vision had shrunk to a narrow tunnel with Carrie Johnstone at the end of it. I patted at my utility belt and found my thermos, which was made of hard metal alloy. It didn’t weigh much, but if you hit someone from behind with it, as hard as you could, they’d know they’d been hit. That’s what I was going to do to Carrie Johnstone.
I was making a wordless noise. It started off quietly, under my breath, but it was quickly turning into a roar. No, not a roar, a battle cry. For years, this woman had haunted and hunted me in my dreams. She’d humiliated me, broken me — and now she was doing it again to someone else. And I had her in my sights and in my power.
Someone on a playa bike nearly ran me down but swerved at the last moment and fell over right in front of me, clipping my shin. I didn’t even slow down. In fact, I sped up, leapt over the bike and took off at a run.
But first, an interlude
This is a dirty trick. I freely admit it. I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you scrolled straight to the action, but before you do, I hope you’ll consider buying a copy of this book for a deserving school or library ).
Or perhaps you’ve got a hankering to own a well-made, DRM-free, interlude-free print or ebook version of this book. This handy link will find an indie bookseller in your neighborhood who’s got stock of it. And if you don’t want to leave your chair there’s always:
I’d never run like that in my life, a flat-out sprint with my feet barely touching the ground. I was just taking another step when the whole night turned hellish orange around me, and then there was a terrible whoomph sound, and a blast of heat and noise and wind lifted me off my feet and threw me face first into the dust.
I was dazed for a moment — we all were — and then I rolled over and picked myself up. My nose was bleeding, and when I put my hand up to it, it brushed against my lip and it felt weird, numb and wet, and I thought, in a distant, abstract way, I’ve really done a number on my face, I guess. That same part of me quietly chided myself for violating first-aid protocol by moving around after an injury. Even if I didn’t have a spinal injury or a concussion, I might have broken some small bone that hadn’t had a chance to start sending pain-signals to my brain yet, might be mashing that broken bone under all my weight as I climbed to my feet.
I told the voice to shut up. I remember that very clearly, actually thinking, Shut up, you, I’m busy, like you’d do to a yappy dog. Because whatever had turned the sky orange, whatever had sent that gust of heat and wind and sound through the night, Carrie Johnstone had been responsible for it, and it had been part of her plan to take Zeb and Masha out. I knew it. Not in the way I knew what my address was, but in the way that I knew that a ball thrown straight into the air would come straight back again. A logical certainty.
I set off back in the direction that Masha and Zeb and Johnstone and her goons had been heading, out into the darkness, limping a little now as my right knee started to complain, loudly. I told it to shut up, too.
They were gone. Of course they were. Unlit, moving fast, out there on the playa, they could have disappeared just by moving off a hundred yards in nearly any direction. They probably had night-scopes and all sorts of clever little asshole-ninja superspy gadgets that they could use to avoid me if they wanted to.
If she wanted to. Carrie Johnstone probably could have killed me without breaking a sweat, and I’m sure her goons could have done the same. They were some sort of soldiers, while I was a scrawny nineteen year old from San Francisco whose last fight had been settled in Mrs. Bapuji’s day-care with a firm admonishment to share the Elmo doll with little Manny Hernandez.
But I didn’t care. I was on a mission. I wasn’t a coward. I wasn’t going to sit back and wait for other people to do all the work. So I lurched into the dark.
There was no sign of them. I called out their names, screaming myself hoarse, running this way and that, and I was still running when Ange caught up with me, grabbed my arm, and pulled me bodily back to the infirmary tent. There were a lot of us there, waiting to be seen by the paramedics, nurses, EMTs, and doctors who streamed from across the playa to help with the aftermath of the worst disaster in the history of Burning Man.
Octotank, the art car that exploded, had started out life as a ditch digger, and it retained the huge, powerful tank treads and chassis. A maker collective working out of a warehouse in San Bernardino had removed everything else, and meticulously mounted an ancient Octopus carnival ride atop it. You’ve seen Octopus rides, though your local version might have been called “the Spider,” “the Schwarzkopf Monster,” or “the Polyp.” They’ve got six or more articulated arms, each one ending in a ride seat, sometimes just a chair with a lap bar and sometimes a full cage.
Now, that would have been cool enough, but then the mutant vehicle designers had mounted a flamethrower to the roof of each of Octotank’s cars and hooked them up to an Arduino controller that caused them to fire in breathtaking sequences. They all drew their fuel from the same massive reservoir mounted to one side of Octotank’s body, but each one had a mechanism that injected the fuel with different metal salts, and these impurities all burned with different bright colors. When Octotank was in motion, all eight cars swinging around in the night as it trundled across the playa, shooting tall pillars of multi-colored flame into the sky from the swirling mandalas of its cars, well, it was magnificent.
Right up to the moment it exploded, of course.
The fuel reservoir was already half empty, thankfully, otherwise it would have done more than knock me (and about a hundred other people) on my face — it would have incinerated us.
Miraculously, no one was incinerated, though a couple dozen were burned badly enough that they were airlifted to Reno. Octotank had been built by careful, thoughtful makers, and they’d put in triple fail-safes, the final measure being that the reservoir had been built with its thinnest wall on the outer, lower edge, so if it ever did blow, it would direct its force into the ground and not the driver or the riders. The force of the blast had knocked Octotank over, snapping off two of its arms, but the riders had been strapped down by their lap belts and had rolled with the vast, broken mechanisms, getting scrapes and a few broken bones.
As for me, my nose was broken, I had a pretty ugly cut to my forehead, and I’d bitten partway through my lip and needed three stitches. I had a sprained knee and a headache that could have been used to jackhammer concrete. But compared to a lot of the people who crowded in — and around — the infirmary camp that night, I’d gotten off light.
Ange and I sat with our backs against an RV in the infirmary camp. A woman in a pink furry cowboy hat and a glittering corset who’d identified herself as a nurse asked me to stick close so that they could watch for signs of concussion. I didn’t want to sit still, but Ange made me and called me an idiot when I argued.
We didn’t find out what had happened right away, couldn’t have. We weren’t looking at Octotank when it blew. Ange, being short, had been lost in a forest of taller bodies, trying to catch up to me (one of the reasons she didn’t get hurt is that she was in among everyone else, and found herself in the middle of a pile of people — once she was sure that the people on the bottom were being seen to, she’d taken off again after me). I’d been running around in the dark, looking everywhere for Masha, Zeb, and the goon squad.
So we got the story second-hand and third-hand from people in the infirmary. There were lots of wild theories, and everyone was buzzing about the Department of Mutant Vehicles, which certified all the art cars on the playa, and which was staffed with legendary mechanics and pyrotechnicians. Could they have missed some critical flaw in Octotank’s build?
I didn’t think so.
Wild Rumpus: Minneapolis, MN
This chapter is dedicated to Wild Rumpus, a store that is, all on its own, a reason to go to Minneapolis (there are other reasons to go to Minneapolis, but even if they went away, this one would do). They have a very nice chicken at Wild Rumpus, who wanders the countertop and greets the customers. You can buy her eggs. There are rats under the floor at Wild Rumpus, and you can see them through transparent panels (in the horror section, of course). And there are books. Great books. Lots of them. And nice places to sit and read them. Plus, very clever people to help you find the book you need to read next.
Wild Rumpus: 2720 West 43rd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55410, +1 612 920 5005
I convinced Ange to let me go and get some water from the infirmary’s big cooler — “My butt’s getting numb” — and took the chance to survey the human wreckage. It was terrible, and I thought I knew what had caused it.
When I got back to Ange, I handed her my water bottle and watched her drink, then said, “Ange, if I told you something crazy, would you listen?”
She rolled her eyes. “Marcus Yallow, you’ve been telling me crazy things since the night I met you. Have I ever not listened?”
She had a point. “Sorry,” I said. I leaned in close to her. “Back at the temple burn, do you remember a woman walking around with a camera, right in front?”
She shrugged. “Not really. Maybe?”
I swallowed. What I was about to say sounded crazy in my head, and it was going to sound crazier out in the air, and it was just for starters. “It was Carrie Johnstone,” I said.
Ange looked puzzled for a moment, like she was trying to place the name.
“Wait, Carrie Johnstone? The Carrie Johnstone?”
I nodded. “I got a couple of good looks at her. I’m sure.” I didn’t sound sure. “I’m pretty sure.”
“So she’s a burner now? That’s weird.”
“I don’t think she’s a burner, Ange. I think she was here to kidnap Masha and Zeb.”
“Uh-huh,” Ange said. “Marcus –“
“Dammit,” I said, “you said you’d listen!”
She shut her mouth, opened it, shut it. “I did. Sorry. Go on.”
So I told her about what I’d seen, Zeb and Masha and the goons, and my stupid, half-baked attempt to catch them as they’d marched into the night.
“So what are you saying?”
“What do you think I’m saying, Ange?”
“It sounds like you think that Johnstone and her pals kidnapped Masha and Zeb.”
I didn’t say anything. Of course that’s what I was thinking, but that was just for starters. I had another idea, one that was even more crazy-sounding. I wanted to know — had to know — whether it would occur to Ange, too, or whether I’d just had my brains rattled when I face-planted into the gypsum flats of Black Rock Desert.
“What?” she said. Then she opened her eyes a little wider. “You think that Johnstone blew up Octotank to — what, to cover her getaway?”
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at Ange, because she was staring at me like I was nuts.
“Look at it this way: they’ve been driving fire-breathing art cars around the desert for decades now, without a single major mishap. The first time one goes boom, it happens just as Carrie Johnstone, a war criminal with a history of ruthless disregard for human life, is in the middle of kidnapping a rogue agent who has been trafficking in giant troves of secret documents. The timing of the explosion is perfect, and a hundred percent of the attention on the playa is occupied for the next several hours. Meanwhile, they could get away in a million ways — hell, they could just stroll over to the trash fence and hop over it and leg it out over the mountains, or jump into a waiting car. The Black Rock Rangers will all be scrambling to help the wounded, not patrolling with night-scopes for people trying to sneak in without a ticket.”
“Yeah,” Ange said. “I suppose.” She squeezed my hand again. “Or: people have been driving home-made flamethrowermobiles around the desert for decades, and it was only a matter of time until one blew up. And you saw someone, in the dark, do something that looked like a kidnapping, but at a distance, and right before you had your head knocked around and broke your nose, after a week’s worth of sleep deprivation, recreational chemical use, and caffeine abuse.” She said it calmly and evenly, and kept hold of my hand as I struggled to go.
“Marcus,” she said, grabbing my chin and forcing me to look into her eyes. I winced as she put pressure on the sutures in my lip, but she didn’t loosen her grip. “Marcus, I know what you’ve been through. I went through it too, some of it, at least. I know that improbable things happen sometimes. I was there when Masha gave you her key. You have the right to believe what you believe.”
“But,” I said. I could hear there was a but coming.
“Occam’s Razor,” she said.
Occam’s Razor: the rule that says that when you’re confronted with a lot of explanations for a given phenomenon, the least complicated one is the one that is most likely to be right. Maybe your parents won’t let you into the locked drawer in their bedroom because they’re secret spies and they don’t want you finding their cyanide capsules and blowdart rigs. Or maybe that’s just where they keep their (eww) sex toys. Given that you know that your parents have had sex at least once, and given that (in San Francisco, at least) odds are good they’ve bought the odd dildo or two over the years, the super-spy hypothesis has to be shuffled to the bottom of the pile. Or, to put it another way, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
“I like Occam’s Razor,” I said. “It’s a useful thinking tool. But it’s not a law. Sometimes, the unlikely happens. It’s happened to both of us. I saw what I saw, and I saw it just a few days after I saw Masha, who is mixed up in all kinds of espionage stuff, and who was acting paranoid as hell. Maybe she had a good reason for that.”
“Yeah. And maybe all that stuff primed you to interpret anything that happened in the days that followed in dramatic and scary ways.” She let go of me and looked away at the crowds of people. “Marcus, if you think you know what happened, you know what you should do. Masha told you what to do.”
If you ever hear that I’ve gone down, or Zeb’s gone down, release it. Shout it from the mountaintops.
You know what? I hadn’t even thought of that. I’d been so fixated on rescuing Masha, or proving I wasn’t losing my mind, I’d totally forgotten that I was her insurance policy, that she’d fully expected that she might “go down” and that she’d entrusted me with her personal countermeasure.
Now that I thought of it, I found that the idea terrified me.
“I don’t know what’s in her insurance file,” I said, “but I’ve got an idea that if we were to make it public, it’d make some very powerful people very angry at us.” I flashed on how I’d felt when Johnstone had been standing right over me, that paralyzing horror that started somewhere at the bottom of my spine and froze me to the spot. I believed that Johnstone had kidnapped Masha to keep the contents of that file a secret. What would she do to me if I released it?
Worse: what would she do if Masha told her I had the insurance file?
“Oh, crap,” I said. “Oh, Ange, what’ll we do?”
We both agreed that we didn’t have to do anything that night. I was injured, we were in the middle of the playa without functional laptops, and, to be honest, we were both scared witless about the insurance file and what might happen if we were to go public with it. I still had the USB stick with me — I’d kept it in my utility belt, in its little secure zip-up money-belt section. I kept compulsively checking it until Ange made me stop. After a few hours, we decided that I didn’t have a concussion and snuck away before anyone could disagree with us. We caught a few precious hours’ sleep in the tent, holding tight to each another, before the alarm on Ange’s cheap, rugged plastic watch went off, weep-weep-weep, and we got up to break camp and start Exodus.
We’d slept in our clothes — it got cold at night in the desert, even with our sleeping bags zipped together for shared warmth — and when we got outside the tent and stood, I saw that my burnoose and the front of my T-shirt were crusted with dried blood from my broken nose and swollen lip. My nose and lip felt like they’d ballooned to elephantine proportions in the night, though when I brushed the dust off a nearby car’s side mirror and checked my reflection, I saw that they were merely double their normal size. I looked like I’d been run over by a tank, one of my eyes blackened, my mouth distorted in a weird, pouty sneer, my taped-up nose misshapen and bulbous.
“Groagh,” I said, and my lip split again and began to seep blood. My face hurt. They’d given me some Tylenol 3s at the infirmary and I took two of them, washing them down with cold-brew, undiluted straight from the mason jar, then kept on swigging at the bean juice. I needed energy if I was going to help Ange break down our camp and lug our gear across Black Rock City to the camp where the guy who was giving us our ride had been staying.
Ange said, “You just sit down, Marcus, I got this.”
I shook my head and said, “Nogh,” a painful syllable that made my face bleed some more.
“Forget it, sit down.”
I shook my head again.
“God, you’re stubborn,” she said. “Fine, kill yourself. Don’t come running to me when you’re dead.”
I waved at her and handed her the cold-brew jar. She made a face. “There’s blood in that one.” I looked at the rim and saw it was smeared with red from my lip. I dug another jar out of the ice chest and passed it to her. She went to work on it. “Got to drink plenty of water, too,” she said. “Remember, this stuff is a diuretic.”
She was right. I alternated two swigs of water for every swig of cold-brew at regular intervals over the next forty-five minutes, as I crammed, jammed, piled and mashed our stuff into our bags. The biggest item to pack, by far, was Secret Project X-1 and all its assorted bits and pieces.
When I joined Noisebridge, I hadn’t really known what I wanted to do. All I knew was that these maker-types had set up a hackerspace in the Mission, filled it with lathes and laser-cutters and workbenches and drill presses, and that anyone could join and use the gear to make, well, anything. I’d hung around for a month or two, dropping by after classes to just sit on the sofa and see what people were up to, bringing along my laptop and school-books and studying in between watching as my fellow Noisebridgers invented every mad and amazing thing under the sun.
Noisebridge was a fantastic place. It had its own space program. Seriously. Almost every month, they launched homebrew weather-balloons crammed with cameras and instrument packages to heights of seventy thousand feet and more and retrieved them. There were people hacking robots, cars, clocks, pet doors, toys, and rollerblades — not to mention video-game consoles, server hardware, autonomous flying drones, and so on and so on.
And they had 3D printers, devices that could produce actual physical objects on demand, based on 3D files they made or downloaded from the net. Most of these had started off life as MakerBots, an amazing and popular open source 3D printer kit that you assembled yourself. MakerBots printed in plastic, using spools of cheap plastic wire, and the results were pretty amazing, especially considering that the kits cost less than a thousand dollars, and you could make one for less if you scrounged around for the parts in surplus catalogs and the prodigious bins of spare electronics at Noisebridge.
Being open source, MakerBots were a hacker’s paradise, and people all over the world had modified their printers to do extraordinary and amazing things. The big excitement when I joined Noisebridge was a successful conversion to laser-based powder printing, which involved using an apparatus to spread a thin layer of plastic powder on the printing surface, then melting it into specific forms with a laser, then adding another layer of powder and melting it again with the laser, over and over, until you’d built up the whole solid shape.
Powder-based printers cost a lot more than MakerBots — like $500,000 or more — and they were all locked up in a complicated set of patents that meant that only a few companies could make and sell them. But patents didn’t stop people from modding their MakerBots to do powder, and once they started, it became the most popular form of MakerBot modding in the world. Naturally it was: the objects that came out of a powder printer were much smoother and more detailed than the stuff that came out of a plastic wire printer, and with a powerful enough laser, you could use metallic powders and produce precisely made objects in stainless steel, brass, silver — whatever you wanted.
But what interested me wasn’t printing in steel: it was printing in sand. There were lots of people around the world who were experimenting with alternatives to plastic or metal powder as a printing medium, because, well, anything you could melt with a laser could be fed into a printer. You could print the most wonderful stuff with sugar or make brittle, tragically short-lived stuff out of the whey powder they sold in bulk for body-building. But like I say, sand was the stuff that caught my imagination. When you melt sand, you get glass, and a beautiful, streaky kind of glass it was, and every day brought more amazing sculptures and jewelry and action figures and, well, everything made of melted sand. As a printing material, sand was as cheap as it got, cheaper even than whey powder.
But there wasn’t any sand on the playa. What we had instead was dust. Gypsum dust, the stuff that they make drywall out of. In other words, stuff that you could (theoretically) make some wicked structures out of.
That was my plan, anyway. I made my own MakerBot, downloading the plans from their site, lasercutting the balsa wood, building the Arduino-based controller, scrounging parts when I could, buying them when I absolutely couldn’t find them, but only through surplus stores. In the end, it cost me less than $200, and took me about two months, and it worked beautifully. As soon as I got it working, I promptly broke it (of course) and tried to get it running as a powder printer. That was a lot more complicated, and the powerful laser it required cost as much as the rest of the printer. But I got it working, too.
And while I was gutting through that breakdown/upgrade/fix cycle, I hated every minute of it, felt like the world’s biggest idiot for not being able to do something that everyone else (for some extremely specialized definition of “everyone else”) seemed able to pull off. But you know what? I couldn’t stop. Because whenever something went wrong, it always seemed like the solution was tantalizingly within reach, and if I just did one more thing I’d have it all working. One more thing and one more thing and one more thing again, and then, miraculously, it worked! I went from nearly comatose to elated beyond all reason in one millionth of a second, as the air above my workbench was filled with the sweet, toxic smell of melting sand and a bead of glass formed on the build platform. The bead took form, and my calibration testfile, a block with several holes in it that were sized to snugly fit a collection of standard bolts I kept in my pocket for testing, began to take shape.
I didn’t need to use them. I could see that it was working. I’d taken that stupid printer apart and put it back together hundreds of times. I knew its movements like the movements of my own hands and its sounds like I knew the sound of my own heart. I laughed and danced on the spot, for real, and watched it go through its paces for a few minutes, before the excitement got to me and I raced out onto Mission Street, ready to grab the first person I could lay hands on and drag them back to Noisebridge to see my machine working! Of course, as soon as I got out the door, I realized it was three in the morning, and there was no one to be seen.
So that was my MakerBot, and the plan had been — what else — to mod it to print in playa dust, using melted sugar as a fuser. Sugar’s strong — melt some caramels and brush them onto a 2 x 4 and clamp another 2 x 4 to the spot overnight while the “glue” sets and you’ll get a joint that’s so strong the wood will tear apart before the glue gives. But sugar is also water-soluble, so when I was done, my playa-dust prints could be dissolved in water. “Leave no trace,” just like Burning Man principle eight says. I did some test runs, using powdered drywall that I ground up in an old hand-cranked coffee grinder, and I had it working pretty well when I disassembled the MakerBot and packed it up to take to the playa.
That was Secret Project X-1, and I swear it worked like a charm when I left San Francisco. I have no idea why it failed so miserably when we got to Black Rock City. The solar panels tested out good, and I borrowed a multimeter from another camp and checked every circuit and contact, and everything seemed to be in working order. But the stubborn, evil bastard refused to even turn on.
Even bloodied and bruised and traumatized and terrorized, I still felt a pang when I packed away X-1 again. I had this incredible plan to 3D print the most amazing shapes and objects out of playa dust — fanciful animals, busts of famous monsters, all the best junk from Thingiverse, the online library of free 3D forms. I was going to be the best, coolest, cleverest burner in the history of the playa. A legend. Instead, I was the guy who sweated and swore at his invention for 24 hours straight before his girlfriend went upside his head and told him to stop swearing at his printer and get out there and enjoy Burning Man. She was totally right, and everyone liked my cold-brew, but man, it hurt to pack away X-1 without having printed a single widget.
“You’ll get it working next year,” Ange said. “Don’t worry.” She looked off at the cloud of dust rising from the playa as fifty thousand burners packed up and got ready to turn Black Rock City back into Black Rock Desert (though there’d be cleanup teams staying behind for a few months going over the whole desert, erasing the final signs of human occupation). “We have to go.”
DreamHaven: Minneapolis, MN
Back in chapter 5, I mentioned that there were other reasons to go to Minneapolis, apart from the wonderful Wild Rumpus. Well, of course there are. Minneapolis is a hotbed of dangerously awesome science fictional activity: birthpplace of the Scribblies, a group of writer that includes Emma Bull and Will Shetterley and Steve Brust; home to Bruce Schneier, security expert and explainer par excellence, and, of course, the home of Dreamhaven Books. Dreamhaven is a fantastic sf/f/h store with a prodigous comics section, a huge collection of great memoribilia (my favorite zombie mask comes from there) (yes, I have a favorite zombie mask. Also a second-favorite zombie mask, but that’s another story). They’re also a publisher of brilliant, odd and beautiful sf/f/h books, including a very nice line of Neil Gaiman limited editions.
Dreamhaven Books: 2301 East 38th Street, Minneapolis MN 55406, +1 612 823 6161
We hardly spoke on the long drive home. Our ride, Lemmy — a guy in his forties who had been coming to Burning Man for twenty years — told us that Exodus was usually like a party, with people getting out of their vehicles between pulses and hanging out, dancing, chatting. But after the night’s explosion and injuries, no one wanted to party down. The hourly pulse of cars released onto the winding road to Reno was like a funeral procession, and it was no better once we got to the little Indian reservation towns on the way to Reno and stopped for gas.
That matched my mood perfectly, to tell the truth. I was all beat up, and the painkillers made me groggy, while the jerking and jouncing of the car on the roads kept me from sleeping. Ange took over the driving in Reno, and I finally found my way into sleep, waking up briefly when we gassed up again in Sacramento, and then the next thing I knew, I was back home on Potrero Hill, at my parents’ front door.
I kissed Ange good-bye and dragged my knapsack and duffelbag to the front door, fumbling my key into the lock. I had planned on calling my parents from Reno to let them know I was on the way, but sleep had taken precedence, and now I was heading home with a face that looked like it had been through a meat grinder and a pocket full of government secrets that were being hunted by a ruthless torturer. Hey Mom, hey Dad! Funny thing, you’ll never guess what happened to me while I was out in the middle of the desert. Yay, this was going to be f-u-n.
The house was a mess. That was the new normal. It started when Dad lost his job and started spending a lot of time at home. Who knew he was such a slob? Mom refused to pick up after him (yay, Mom!), but she also turned out to have a high grodiness tolerance. By the time she lost her job, well, the place was already a pit. And it didn’t get better after that.
I stepped over the scatter of shoes by the front door and dragged my junk through a pile of old newspapers, knocking them over and sending them slithering to the floor. “Hi, guys,” I said. I wished that I’d be able to get my butt upstairs and into bed before I had to hold down a conversation, but I knew it wasn’t very likely.
“Marcus!” Mom called from the living room. “We were so worried!” And one second later, there she was in the hallway, and gasping at my face. “Oh my word,” she said, her British accent and funny little Britishisms ramping up the way they did when she was stressing.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “There was an accident at Burning Man and –“
“We heard all about it,” she said.
Duh. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the stuff that happened at Burning Man would be news in the rest of the world. San Francisco was the birthplace of Burning Man, so of course they’d heard. And then they hadn’t heard from me. Christ, I was a rotten son.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really. It’s better than it looks. I just had some painkillers before we left and fell asleep or I would have called –“
Now Dad was in the hallway, too. “God, Marcus, what happened?”
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. “Can I make you a deal? How about if I tell you what happened really quickly, then I go have a shower and sleep, and then we can talk it over?”
This is what I love about my parents: they both looked at each other with their eyebrows up, like, That sounds reasonable to me, and nodded, and said, “Okay,” and then gave me a crushing hug that felt so good, even if I was so tired I could barely stay vertical.
I unlaced my boots — bending over caused a fresh headache to blossom right behind my eyes — and kicked them off with two little puffs of playa dust. Dad cleared a pile of books off the sofa while Mom made tea for me and her and coffee for Dad (I’m embarrassed to say that despite all my efforts to educate him, Dad still drank — ugh — instant). I told them the story as quickly as I could, leaving out the part about Masha and Zeb and Carrie Johnstone. Here, back in San Francisco, it all seemed, I don’t know, remote? Like something that happened to someone else, or something I’d read about in a book. Maybe it was the painkillers, or Ange’s (understandable) skepticism, but I found myself questioning my own memories.
“Oh,” I said, as I was finishing up. “Someone offered me a job, too! Someone running for senator who needs a new webmaster or something. I’m going to drop them a line in the morning.”
“That’s fantastic, sweetie,” Mom said, looking like she meant it. Dad said some nice things too, but I could tell that he was thinking about the job he didn’t have. After my trial and conviction — for stealing Masha’s phone, of all things — he “mysteriously” found that he couldn’t get his security clearance renewed. So that meant that a lot of his consulting gigs dried up. We’d been worried, but not totally freaked, because at least he had his adjunct professorship at UC Berkeley. But then California went broke — really, really broke, not like all the other times it had gone broke as I was growing up — and the UC system got its budgets slashed to practically nothing. Adjuncts had been the first to go. And of course, when he lost his job, I lost my discount on tuition, and started piling up the student debt. That’s right: my Xnet stuff cost my dad his job, and that cost me my college education. I think that’s called the “law of unintended consequences” but I just like to think of it as FAIL.
“Okay, shower now,” I said, having a sip of my tea. It was milky and sugary and strong, the way Mom liked it, and it was the taste of my childhood, the flavor of the sick days when Mom had taken care of me while I lay in bed with the flu or a stomach ache. I decided to take it up with me, to finish after I showered. But I didn’t make it into the shower. I didn’t even undress. I flopped down on my bed amid the piles of clothes I’d pulled out of my bag while I was repacking the week before to make room for X-1, and I was snoring in seconds.
When I woke up the sky was dark and my tea was cold. I finally had that shower, staying under the hot water until it ran ice cold, scrubbing the dust out of my pores. Then I went into my room and started piling up laundry and separating out gear that needed to be hosed down outside in the driveway or wiped down on my workbench. Finally, I unpacked my utility belt and found myself holding on to a dusty USB stick.
Normally I’m pretty careful with my data. That means that I don’t leave anything important on a USB stick. People lose those things all the time. The first thing to do with something important is to stick it in a computer — my latest frankenbook, a hand-built laptop called Lurching Abomination that was the distant descendant of Salmagundi, the first laptop I ever built for myself. Lurching Abomination had a whopper of a hard drive, two terabytes, and I used TrueCrypt to give myself a “plausible deniability” partition, so that if you just turned it on and entered a crypto key, you’d get what looked like a normal ParanoidLinux installation with a browser and an email client that was hooked up to my public email addresses and Xnet accounts, where I got all the spam and friend requests from strangers and bots and stuff.
But if you — or if I — entered another password when starting up the machine, there was another ParanoidLinux instance hiding on that monster disk, and this one was only hooked up to my private accounts, my private bookmarks, my private calendars, my private social nets, and so on. With a little bit of monkeying, I could boot into the secure, secret version of my computer, fire up a virtual computer in a window, and put the plausible deniability version in that.
Next to Lurching Abomination was a standalone hard drive, and Lurch was smart enough to check every few minutes and see if the disk was connected, and if it was, to back itself up. That disk was also encrypted (duh — what would the point of doing all the crazy stuff with Lurch’s disk be if I was going to make an unscrambled copy of all the data and leave it on my desk?). The disk’s enclosure had enough smarts to try to periodically hook up to one of the big servers at Noisebridge and try to make a copy of itself there.
This all more or less worked, most of the time, and it meant that within a few minutes of copying any files onto my laptop, they would be encrypted, copied to my desktop drive, and copied again to Noisebridge’s array. That server was synched up with a massive storage farm run by and for hackspaces, located in an old nuclear fallout shelter somewhere in England (seriously!). So yeah, do your worst, steal my laptop, burn down my house, nuke San Francisco, and I’ll still have a backup. Mwa-ha-ha. Yeah, it’s crazy-paranoid, but: a) I’d been through some paranoid stuff, and b) it wasn’t much harder than just using a commercial backup program, only my solution was safer and more robust and cheaper.
My hand hovered over the USB port. The USB stick was a no-name version, squarish and cheap looking, its case glued shut unevenly by some fifteen year-old chained to a machine in China. You saw them lying smashed on the sidewalk, and people advertising banks or soda pop pressed them into your hands when you came out of the BART station. There was no way to tell if it was a 4GB stick or 500GB. It could hold all the books ever written or a video of someone’s cat chasing a laser pointer or a buttload of ugly pornography.
Or it could contain the key to a trove of military and state secrets so hot that Carrie Johnstone would come out of the night and kidnap you to get them back. Only one way to find out.
The keyfile was less than 5K. It was just a long string of random numbers, and somewhere out there was the torrent file that they’d decrypt. But the keyfile itself was so small that I could have read it aloud to Ange on the phone, if I didn’t mind reciting stuff like “I_?4Wac0`5_9`Ym4|PL” for an hour or so, and if Ange was willing to write it all down without getting a single letter, number, or weird piece of punctuation wrong.
Once I’d copied the key to my computer, I found myself sweating, my heart thundering in my chest. My hands shook as I typed the command that forced an immediate backup — I didn’t want to wait ten minutes for the next scheduled backup. I didn’t want to risk having Carrie Johnstone and her goons break down the door and stick a bag over my head and shove me into a waiting helicopter headed straight to Afghanistan. Of course, the next thing I did was start to download the torrent file.
If you haven’t been paying close attention, you might just think BitTorrent = “pirate movie download” but there’s plenty of cleverness in the way it works. Files are broken up into thousands of little pieces, and you can request any of the pieces you’re missing from anyone who’s got it. As you get more and more pieces of the file, you start to get requests from others, too — the whole thing is called a “swarm” and as you can see, the more people who are downloading, the faster the download gets. That’s pretty cool, since in the physical world, the more people there are trying to get something, the harder all of them have to try to get at it. Imagine if food was was like BitTorrent: every time you ate a meal, there’d be more food left over for everyone else to eat.
Of course, the downside of BitTorrent is that if only a few people have copies of a file, then there are only a few people who can share it with you. I typed “insurancefile.masha.torrent” into the search fields for a dozen BitTorrent search engines starting with The Pirate Bay, the biggest of them all. There were about ten “seeders” — computers that had whole copies of the file — out there on the net, and two other machines downloading it. That was interesting. Maybe they were evil government spooks who wanted to try to crack the files and find out what Masha had. Or maybe they were just random copyright-enforcement bots that downloaded everything and checked to see whether it contained anything worth suing over.
Either way, I wasn’t going to use my IP address to download that file. My parents got their Internet through AT&T, a scumbag phone company with a track record of handing over their customers’ data to the cops without court-orders. Grabbing sensitive files off the net through them was like calling up the director of the DHS and saying, “Hey, are you missing any sensitive data? Because I’m small, defenseless, and unarmed, and I got ’em. Want my address?”
Which is why, no matter what, I always scraped up the money to pay for a subscription to IPredator, the proxy service operated by the Pirate Bay folks. IPredator was specifically designed to make it impossible for anyone else to tell what you’ve been downloading. It ping-ponged your data between Copenhagen and Stockholm, across an international border, and kept no logs or records of who was doing what. It was blazing fast — for a proxy, which are never as fast as a naked net connection — and it was run by some of the world’s baddest-ass hacker anti-authoritarians, people who made me look like a goody two-shoes obedient toddler who could barely turn on a computer. If anyone could make my download anonymous, it was those cats.
While the file trickled in, I hit my email. I’ve never been much of an email user — it’s not like my friends and I used it to figure out when to hook up, we all used Twitter and Xnet’s Facebook overlay (which scrambled our updates and messages) — but all my profs had used it while I was at Berkeley, and then everyone I was hitting up for work expected me to give them an email address. God, but email was tedious. People expected you to answer all of it, and there was: So. Much. Spam. When it came to Twitter and Xnet, I could just take everything that had come in while I was at Burning Man and mark it as read, and no one would get pissed off at me. But people who sent you email took it personally if you didn’t reply. It was just how email worked. Even I felt put out if someone didn’t reply to my email.
Download download download. Spam spam spam. Delete delete delete. The stupid email ritual, so beloved of my parents. So boring. When I finally whittled down the huge log of crap to a little toothpick of actual mail, my eye jumped to one sent by “Joseph Noss.” Of course, it was probably a fund-raising appeal, since my email address seemed to have found its way into the mailing lists of every political candidate in the state. But in my notebook, there was the email address for Joseph Noss’s campaign manager, carefully copied after Mitch Kapor had written it on my arm with his Sharpie. The coincidence was…interesting.
I opened it.
> From: Joseph Noss <joe@joenossforsenate.com>
> To: Marcus Yallow <myallow271828183@gmail.com>
> Subject: Webmaster
> Dear Marcus,
> My campaign manager, Flor, tells me she heard from Mitch Kapor that you were thinking of coming on board to be our webmaster. Your name sounded familiar so I looked you up, and, well, you know what I found. From what I can see, you would be absolutely perfect for the job. Can you give me a call when you get this? We really need to make this happen, like, YESTERDAY. My personal cellular number is 510-314-1592.
> Joe
I read it twice and reached for my phone, everything else forgotten. After all these months of searching and begging, someone was offering me a job, and it was someone so cool his phone number was the first seven digits of pi. I mean, woah.
I dialed his number without having to look back at the screen — seriously, that was the coolest phone number I’d ever seen — and listened as the phone rang. Just before he picked up, I looked at the clock on my computer and realized it was nearly 11 P.M. on Sunday night. I fought the reflex to hang up the phone as he answered.
“Joseph Noss speaking,” he said, and yup, that was him all right. I’d heard his voice on TV and YouTube enough to recognize it instantly, a deep growly sound like the “This is CNN” guy or an old soul singer.
“Um,” I said, and pinched my leg to make myself stop saying Um, which is a trick Ange taught me. “Hello, sir, this is Marcus Yallow. You sent me an email? I hope it’s not too late –“
“Not at all, Marcus, I was up late working. Sorry to say it, but 11 P.M. is prime time for me.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I’ve always been a night owl.”
It’s funny, but I liked him right off. Something in that voice — he sounded like someone who thought hard about things, and who was listening hard to everything he heard.
“I’m glad you called me, Marcus. I know you’ve been involved in little-p politics before, but as far as I can tell, you don’t have any experience with the big-P kind, the kind that involves elections and so on. Is that right?”
“That’s right, sir.” I thought, Ah well, it was worth a shot. I didn’t have the experience he was looking for after all.
But he said, “That’s fine. We’ve got lots of experience with that sort of thing around here. Listen, Marcus, I want to give you a sense of the challenge we’re up against here, and then maybe you can tell me whether you think you’re the right sort of person to help us out.
“Now, California’s got a reputation for being a little crazy, but we’re trying to do something that’s crazy even by California standards. You know I’m an independent candidate, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The received wisdom here is that ‘independent’ is a synonym for ‘unelectable.’ The Dems and the Republicans have got all the major donors sewn up, they’ve got efficient machines, they’ve got close friends at every TV and radio station and newspaper in the state, and they’ve got national organizations they can draw on. Independents start with a huge disadvantage, and it only gets worse when push comes to shove, because if we gain even a little ground, well, the big boys bring in their big boys and crush us like bugs.
“I could have gotten the Democratic nomination. They know me from my days at City Hall, they know that this district is one where African-American candidates generally do well, and I’m thought of as a decent sort who can be relied upon to raise a decent amount of cash and stay honest and sober once he gets elected, which puts me far ahead of most of the jokers around these parts.
“I could have had the nomination. Between you and me, they asked, several times, and in several ways. They seemed pretty sure that a campaign for Joe Noss would be something of a sure bet. But the more I thought about this, the more I realized that I didn’t want the nomination. I’ve seen what it means to be elected with major party support: it means that you have to toe the line. By which I mean, when there is a vote where your conscience tells you to go one way and party discipline tells you to go the other way, well, you’d best tell your conscience to sit that one out.
“That wouldn’t be so bad if you could trust the party, but I can’t say as I trust either party in this country. You’ve got ‘progressive’ Democratic presidents who believe it’s legal to assassinate American citizens overseas, who think that we should be spying on phone calls and email without warrants — well, I could go on, but I think you know what I mean.”
“I do,” I blurted. Maybe it was all the weird events of the past week, but listening to Joe talk made me excited, made me want to go out and man a barricade for him or something. It was the way he talked, even over the phone; it made you feel like whatever this guy was doing, it was going to work, and that if you were lucky, you’d get to be a part of it.
“I believe you do, Marcus! But it’s not just the Dems, of course. I know many Republicans who are honorable, generous, thoughtful people. My father was one such Republican. But there are power-brokers in the Republican party who are insane. I don’t say that as a figure of speech. I mean it literally. There are important movers and shakers in the RNC who believe that the Earth is five thousand years old. And these are people who made their fortunes pumping sweet crude in Texas! You think they tell their geoengineers to only pump oil in places that accord with the Young Earth theory of creation? Now, those people are hardly the worst — there’s plenty who think that torturing isn’t just something you have to do when there’s no alternative, but something you should do all the time. People who believe that anyone with ten million dollars is, by definition, good, and anyone without ten cents to his name is, by definition, a criminal. The thought of being beholden to these, well, let’s use the word my daddy liked, because Daddy was a polite, well-spoken man, and he’d have called these people dunces, these dunces, well, I never even considered it for a moment.
“No, I thought to myself, ‘Joe, there’s some smart people who think you could win this election with their help. Maybe you could win it without their help. Maybe if you took up positions that people believed in, positions that were grounded in evidence and compassion, not ideology or lining your pockets, you’d be able to beat the all-powerful party machines and show up in the Senate without a single corporate logo sewn onto your suit jacket.’
“Of course, there was no way I’d be able to do this using the old-fashioned methods — all the tactics we developed to win elections in the last century. I knew that this campaign would rise or fall on the strength of our technology use.
“Now, I might be over twenty-five –” he chuckled, a sound as deep as the ocean “– but I know a thing or two about technology. Enough, at least, to know how much I don’t know. Finding the right tech people has been my top priority since I started this thing, and I think I’ve found some good people who can do top-level strategy and such. But I haven’t found anyone to be my special forces commando, if you will. A doer, not just a thinker. So when your name came up, well, it made me excited, Marcus. I think you could be the delta force ninja of our technology team. Does that sound like your sort of thing?”
My mouth was so dry I could barely talk and my palms were so sweaty I could barely hold the phone, but I managed to blurt out, “Yes, absolutely, that sounds like my dream job!”
“I was hoping you’d say that. Now, it’s not my job to hire you, that’s my campaign manager’s job. But my recommendations do carry a little weight around here. I’m looking at her diary right now, and it looks like she’s free tomorrow morning at 8:30 A.M.. That’s a little early for a night owl, I know, but if I were to put a meeting with you in her calendar, do you think you could make it?”
“Even if I have to stay up all night, Mr. Noss.”
“Call me Joe. And I hope that won’t be necessary. Get yourself some sleep and set an alarm. I’ll tell Flor to expect you at 8:30. That’s Flor Prentice Y Diaz. Let me spell it for you.”
“It’s okay, I’ve just googled her,” I said.
“Of course you have,” he said. “Do your research now, then get yourself into bed and don’t forget the alarm!”
“I won’t,” I said.
I spent the next twenty minutes poring over everything I could find about Flor Prentice Y Diaz — parents were Guatemalan refugees, raised in the Bay Area, master’s in public policy from Stanford, former executive director of a big homelessness charity. A photo showed a handsome but severe Hispanic woman in her fifties, wrinkles around her eyes and deep lines around her mouth, big dark eyes that seemed to bore straight through me. Then I noticed where the photo had come from: a profile in the Bay Guardian by Barbara Stratford. I checked the time in my menubar. It was coming up on midnight, which was probably too late to call Barbara and ask her to put in a good word for me. But I did send her an email asking her to drop my name to Flor Prentice Y Diaz if she got a chance. Email did have its uses.
I checked the status of my big torrent download. The file was halfway down, and there were eight more downloaders in the swarm. I wondered how many of them worked for three-letter spy agencies in the DC area.
There was a soft knock at my door. I opened it. It was Mom.
“Hey, you,” she said. “How long have you been up?”
“A couple hours, I guess,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t come downstairs, but when I checked my email, I found a message from Joseph Noss asking me to call him about the job, so I called him and he wants me to go in tomorrow morning to meet with his campaign manager at 8:30 A.M.. I think I’ve found a job!”
Mom smiled and reached out and stroked my hair, the way she used to do when I was a kid. It was a tell she had, whenever she was feeling especially proud of me. It made me happy all over. “That’s wonderful news, love. How are you feeling, though?” Tentatively, she touched the tape over my nose. I flinched a little. The painkillers had worn off.
“Well, my nose is still broken, but my headache is gone. Apart from that, I feel fine. It looks much worse than it is. And it could have been a lot worse. As it was, I basically tripped and fell on my face.” I shook my head. “There were lots of people who got hurt worse than me, caught right in the explosion.”
She took her hand away. “I wish you’d called. We were — well, we were worried, Marcus.” She didn’t say anything about the other times I’d gone missing, like after the Bay Bridge blew up, when I was being held and humiliated on Treasure Island by Carrie Johnstone and her jolly friends from the DHS; or when I’d gone underground, run away with Zeb only to be caught by Johnstone again, this time for a round of simulated execution on her waterboard. Neither of those incidents had been very pleasant for me, but they’d been hell on my parents, too. I was a jerk.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was fast asleep by the time we got back into cell-phone range. But yeah, you’re right, I should have called.”
We sat there silently for a little while, each of us remembering the bad times before. “How’s your job search going, Mom?”
“Oh,” she said, “oh, don’t worry about me. There’s little bits of contract work coming in all the time. Nothing earth-shaking, just a little freelance editing and such. But between that and the savings and Dad’s severance, we’re getting by.”
I didn’t bother to ask what they would do when Dad’s severance ran out. I’d overheard them talking about that enough times to know that it was a sensitive subject — and the fact that they always shut up about it when I entered the room told me that they didn’t want me to worry about it. Dad had sold his car the month before and they’d listed the parking spot in our driveway for rent on Craigslist, which I thought was pretty clever, even if it would be weird to have some stranger using our driveway. But yeah, I could see what they could see: first you lose your job, then your car, then what? Mom had torn up her flowerbeds in the back-yard and planted vegetables, which tasted great, but I knew that taste had less to do with things than the grocery bill. The drawer full of takeout menus hadn’t been opened in months, and Mom and Dad had a tendency to disappear on the bus whenever Safeway had a big sale on meat, coming back with huge bags full for the freezer. I didn’t have anything against saving money, but I couldn’t help but wonder where it might all end. There were a lot of For Sale signs on our block, and one or two empty places with foreclosure notices taped to the door.
“Well,” I said. “Got to get up early tomorrow!”
“Are you going to wear a suit?” Mom said. “I could get something out of your father’s closet.”
“Mom,” I said, “they’re hiring me to be their webmaster — I’m pretty sure they don’t want a dweeb in a suit.”
She opened her mouth like she wanted to argue with me, then shut it again. “I’m sure you know what you’re talking about,” she said. “But just be sure to dress up smart, all right? No one likes a slob, even if he is the webmaster.”
“Good night, Mom.”
“I love you, Marcus.”
“Love you, too.”
Good thing I set three alarms. I managed to switch off both my phone and my alarm clock without even waking, but the raging music blaring out of Lurching Abomination’s external speakers — Trudy Doo and the Speedwhores performing “Break It Off,” which features some of the craziest death-metal screaming ever to be committed to MP3 by an all-girl post-punk anarcho-queer power-trio — was impossible to sleep through. It was 7:15.
I showered and peeled off the tape over my nose and grimaced at my beat-up face. Oh well, nothing to be done about it. Thinking of my mother’s advice, I dug through my closet and found a white button-up shirt that I’d last worn to my graduation, and the grey wool slacks I’d worn at the same event. I even found the brown leather shoes that went with the outfit, and gave them a vigorous wipe with an old sock, bringing out a bit of a shine. As I buttoned up the shirt and tucked it in and got the line of buttons even with my fly, I found myself growing excited. Mom was right (as usual): dressing up made me feel competent, like the kind of guy you’d want to hire.
Dad was already at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal with sliced bananas and strawberries.
“Woah! You’re looking suave, son,” he said. I saw that he’d shaved off the stubble he’d sported the night before, and was dressed in his workout clothes.
“You going to the gym?” I said.
“Jogging,” he said. “Just started. We’re not using the gym anymore.” Translation: we can’t afford the gym anymore.
“That’s great,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, and I wished I hadn’t said anything, because he looked embarrassed, which wasn’t usual for him. “Your mother told me about your big interview. There’s more oatmeal on the stove and there’s sliced fruit in that bowl.”
Dad hadn’t made me breakfast since I was thirteen years old, when I started insisting that I was too old to have breakfast prepared for me and switched to grabbing some toast on my way out the door. I realized he must have gotten up early just to make sure that I went off to Joe’s office with a full tummy. It made me want to hug him, but something held me back, like acknowledging what a big deal this was would have spoiled the illusion of normalcy.
I hadn’t seen 8 A.M. in the Mission since I dropped out of school. I stopped in at the Turk’s for a lethally strong pour-over and let him fuss over me when I told him I was going in for a job interview. The Mission’s always been a place with a lot of homelessness, but it seemed like things were worse than they’d ever been. At least, I couldn’t remember seeing quite so many people sleeping on the edge of the sidewalk or in the doorways of boarded-up stores. I couldn’t remember smelling quite so much pungent human pee-stink from the curbs.
I finished my coffee just as I reached Joseph Noss’s campaign headquarters, between 22nd and 23rd on Mission, in a storefront that had been a huge discount furniture place for most of my life, but which had shut down the year before and had been sitting empty until now.
The big windows were plastered with orange and brown NOSS FOR STATE SENATE signs, neither Democrat blue nor Republican red. I checked my phone: 8:20. I was early. I tried the door, but it was locked. I rapped on the glass and peered in, trying to see if there was anyone inside. It was dark, and no one answered. I knocked again. Nothing. Oh, well. I stood by the door and waited for Flor Prentice Y Diaz, trying to project an air of employability.
She arrived at exactly 8:29, wearing blue jeans, a nice blouse, and a kerchief over her hair, and carrying a take-out cup from the Turk’s. She had a serious, almost angry face on as she walked down the street, like there was a lot on her mind, but when she saw me, she smiled, then frowned as she took in my battered face. “Marcus?” she said.
I smiled back and extended my hand. “Hi there! Sorry about this –” I scrunched up my face. “I was at Burning Man last weekend and, well, a car exploded at me. It looks a lot worse than it is, really.”
She shook my hand. Her grip was gentle, dry and warm. “I heard about that,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay to be here? If you want to reschedule –“
I waved my hands. “No, no! Honestly, I’m fine. Besides, Joe — Mr Noss — said that he was in a hurry, right?”
“Well, that’s very true. All right then, let’s get inside, shall we?”
She dug a big key ring out of her handbag and opened the doors, reaching out with one hand to hit a lightswitch. The fluorescents flickered on all around the cavernous space, revealing trestle-table desks with snarls of power-strips beneath them. There were still signs advertising cheap sofas on some of the walls, and a long checkout counter that was now covered with silk-screening stuff. Someone had installed a big extractor fan over the table, but I could still smell the paint-y smell of the silk-screening station. Clotheslines hanging from the stained old drop ceiling were draped with shirts and posters in the campaign’s orange and brown.
“This is where the magic happens,” she said, crossing to a desk right in the middle of the floor. It had more papers on it than most, and a big external monitor. She slid a laptop out of her purse and connected its power cable and monitor cable and woke it up and entered her password. I politely looked away as she typed it, but I could hear that it was admirably long and complex — there was also the telltale sound of a shift key being depressed and several of those unmistakable spacebar bangs.
“Sounds like a good password,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Ever since I had my Yahoo mail compromised a few years ago and everyone I knew got an email saying I was stranded in London after being mugged and asking for them to wire money to help me out. I expect you’ve got your own little security rituals, right?”
I nodded. “Just a few. But as soon as you start looking into security, you discover that there’s always more you could be doing.”
She was staring intently at her screen as her email streamed in. I noticed she wasn’t breathing, which was something I’d read about: email apnea. People unconsciously hold their breath when they’re looking at their inboxes. I made a mental note to mention it to her later if I got the job.
“I like your taste in coffee,” I said, as she slumped back and gasped for air. “The Turk is awesome.”
“He’s one of a kind,” she said, sipping. She’d pulled some papers from her purse. I recognized my resume. She tapped my address. “You live pretty close to here, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I went to Chavez High, just up the street.”
“I sent my kids there, too. But that would have been before your time.”
I was feeling good about the interview. We were bonding. We had all this stuff in common — Chavez High, the Turk… We hadn’t even talked about Barbara Stratford.
She set the resume down on her desk. “You seem like a very nice person, Marcus.” Suddenly, I was a lot less confident. Her expression had turned into a professional mask. “But you don’t exactly have a lot of work experience, do you?”
I felt my cheeks burning. “No,” I said. “I mean –” I took a deep breath. “My dad got laid off from UC Berkeley last year and I had to drop out. No more discount tuition. So I’ve been looking for work ever since. But I’ve had some campaign experience, the Coalition of Voters for a Free America for two summers.”
“Yes,” she said. “Volunteer experience, right?”
“Right,” I said. “We were all volunteers. But I’m very responsible. And I believe in Joe, and I believe that the Internet can change politics for the better — make it more accountable, more transparent. That’s why I want to work here.”
As I said it, it felt like exactly the right sort of thing to be saying. But when I was done, her expression was harder than ever. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve heard all that before. I’ve been hearing it for twenty years now. But the fact is that elections are won by a lot of shoe leather and a lot of money and a lot of hand-shakes, the way they always have been. I know that Joe has lots of pie-in-the-sky ideas about reinventing elections and reforming politics, but I run the campaign and I think that reforming politics will be a big enough job to get through, and maybe we can leave the reinventing stuff for the next candidate.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Some innate, primitive sense of organizational politics told me I should just keep my mouth shut.
“We’ve got a lot of people around here with big ideas about how the world should be run. That’s fine. That goes with the territory when you’re running as an independent — you get independent-minded people working for you. But the bottom line is that this is a campaign to elect a candidate. It’s not a lab for egalitarian, consensus-based organizational reform. It’s not a high tech startup.
“Right now, this campaign needs a webmaster. That’s someone who’ll put up a website that doesn’t get hacked the minute we stick it online. That website’s got to help us raise money, it’s got to help us mobilize voters, and it’s got to help us win an election. I want to make myself clear on this point, because I’ve hired a few webmasters in my day, and I know a thing or two about some of the problems endemic to the trade. I’m looking for a website that gets the job done: nothing more and nothing less. I don’t want it to be one micron prettier than it needs to be. I don’t want it to be one quantum more technically elegant than it needs to be. And because our webmaster is also going to be our IT department, I need someone who can keep us all reasonably secure, keep our computers backed up, and keep the network up. Someone who’s available on-call twenty-four-seven right up to election day.
“So, now that you’ve heard my little speech, I need to ask you, does that sound like you, Marcus?”
But Joe said he wanted a delta-force ninja, is what I didn’t say. I had already figured out enough to know that what Joe wanted and what Joe got was filtered through his campaign manager, who held the decision to hire me in her hands.
“I have done all those things in the past,” I said. “I’m reliable. I’m a fast learner. I believe in Joseph Noss. I may not have had much work experience, but that’s only because no one’s given me the chance. There are lots of people in San Francisco who could be your webmaster, but how many of them have helped run an underground network that beat back the DHS and restored the Bill of Rights to San Francisco?” I spent most of my life telling people that M1k3y was just part of a movement, scuffing my toe when people told me how much they admired me. But something told me that this wasn’t the right time to be humble.
Her smile came back. “Okay, that was well said.” She finished off the Turk’s coffee. “I’ve asked around about you. Barbara Stratford called me as I was on my way in to work this morning to put in a good word for you. There are lots of people who think the world of you as a leader and a techno-guerrilla. But none of them have ever employed you, and we have more than enough ‘leaders’ around here. Have you ever read The Time Machine, Marcus?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I wrote a paper on it in AP English.”
“Then you’ll remember the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi were the privileged surface dwellers, enjoying a life of high-tech sophistication and ease. But under the ground, there was an army of Morlocks, toiling away night and day in the subterranean engine rooms, making sure that everything was humming along tickedy-boo.”
“You want Morlocks, not Eloi, right?”
She smiled. “Bright boy. Yes, exactly. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s the job that needs doing. What I’m asking you to do now is look inside yourself and ask, ‘Do I want to do the job that needs doing, even if it’s boring and workaday and merely necessary and not at all exciting? You say you believe in Joe — do you support him enough to join his army as a grunt and not a general?”
I could see why she was the campaign manager, and not Joe. Joe had made me want to take to the streets, but she made me want to prove I could get the job done. They must make a great team.
Which is not to say that I wasn’t disappointed. I had hoped that I’d be greeted as a revolutionary hero and given a squadron of tough info-commandos to boss through a series of action-hero adventures. But the way that Flor Prentice Y Diaz pushed at me, implying that I was just a kid who wanted the spotlight more than he wanted to help, it was like a set of spurs in the belly. So even as I was thinking, Man, that’s an effective motivational technique, I was also thinking, I’ll show her!
I made a showy salute. “Yes ma’am, general, ma’am.”
Her smile got wider. “All right, all right. I’m giving you a hard time this morning, because you come with a lot of advance recommendations, but there are also lots of warning flags. You’re a bright young man, and bright young men are nice to have around, but in my experience, they need quite a lot of adult supervision. So I intend on supervising you very closely until I’m convinced that you have learned the difference between what we need and what you’d like us to have.”
I blinked and replayed what she just said. “Does that mean I’m hired?”
She waved off the question. “Oh, Marcus, you’ve been hired since we sat down here. Joe loves you, or at least he loves your reputation, and he’s as excited as a puppy about having you around here. But I needed to make sure you understood what working here entails.”
I couldn’t stop myself, I held my arms over my head like a quarterback after a touchdown: “All right!” I shouted.
She laughed at me. “Down, boy. Yes, you’ve got a j-o-b. Marian, our HR person, will talk over your pay and such with you later. But before we get started, there’s one thing we need to discuss, and that’s all this hacker business.”
I composed myself. “Yes?”
“Don’t. Do. It. You’ve done all sorts of clever things with computers, no doubt. You’ve outsmarted the feds and raided their data, you’ve gone wandering around computer systems where you had no business being. It’s all in the grand old tradition of the Bay Area, but it has no place here. The first time I catch so much as a whiff of anything illegal, immoral, dangerous, or ‘leet'” — she made finger quotes — “I will personally bounce your ass to the curb before you have a chance to zip your fly. Do I make myself crystal clear?”
“You can really turn on and off the scary voice at will, huh?”
“I can. I find it’s a useful way of indicating to my colleagues when I expect to be taken seriously.”
“And you can do this really kind of stone-faced, severe facial expression, too. That’s really amazing.” What can I say? I’d just gotten a job. The joy was was bringing out my inner weisenheimer.
“This face? This isn’t my severe face. This is about gale force one. You do not want to be around for a force five.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Joseph-Beth Booksellers: Cincinnati, OH and Lexington, KY
Joseph-Beth Booksellers is a small chain of huge stores in the midwest. People who are lucky enough to live in a town anywhere near a Joe-Beth already know about it: it’s that massive store, open late, with incredible events, a great restaurant, and well-informed helpful staff. Visitors to towns like Lexington, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Crestview Hills may not understand that when they pass by that “Joseph-Beth Booksellers” sign that they should be braking hard and swinging into the parking lot. I mean, all those towns have things to see, but could any be so marvellous as a well-managed, handsomely appointed, well-stocked bookstore? Plus, the last time I signed at a Joe-Beth (Charlie Stross and I kicked off the tour for Rapture of the Nerds at the Lexington store), they took me bourbon shopping afterward, which was well above and beyond the call of duty.
Joseph-Beth Booksellers: 2692 Madison Road, Cincinnati OH 45208, +1 513 396 8960
Joseph-Beth Booksellers: 161 Lexington Green Cir, Lexington, KY, 40503, +1 859 273 2911
I spent the rest of the morning jumping straight into the work with both feet. The previous webmaster, a volunteer, had just gone back to school at Brown, but she’d left behind a neat sheet of passwords and configuration data, as well as information on our network contracts. I figured the thing to do was to conduct an audit of everything I’d be in charge of, checking that it was all where it was supposed to be, doing what it was supposed to be doing. I grabbed a stack of one-side-printed paper out of a recycling box and three-hole punched it, then snapped it into a used three-ring binder I found in a supply closet. I could have used Lurch to take notes — I’d brought it in, booted into its plausible deniability partition, with all that deadly secret stuff locked away on disk sectors that were indistinguishable from random noise. But I needed to be able to walk and write, sitting down at peoples’ desks and getting their names and copying down their network cards’ MAC addresses and such, and paper is just easier for that sort of thing. I’d type it all in later.
Every so often I’d look up and see Flor watching me from her desk in the middle of the room. She’d catch my eye and then nod in satisfaction — at my hustle, I assumed. It made me feel good — like someone was noticing how I was busting my butt to make a good impression on my first day. I may be a Morlock, but it was nice to know the Eloi were looking on in approval. After talking with Flor, I’d remembered that the Morlocks ate the Eloi, which made the whole analogy a little weird. I wondered if she’d intended that, and if so, what it was supposed to mean.
Joe had swept in around 10 A.M. with one phone pressed to his head and another in his hand, and had been swarmed by about a dozen staffers and volunteers with urgent questions. He clamped one phone between his ear and shoulder and used his free hand to point at people in the mob and then at places they were to wait for him, all the while without losing his place in the animated conversation he was having. As the crowd dispersed, he said his good-byes and dropped his phone into one pocket, then did the same with the other one.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered black guy with his greying hair cropped short. His skin was somewhere between an americano and a macchiato, a few shades darker than the high-necked sweater he wore over comfortable-looking blue-jeans and black Converse. I decided I could dress down for work the next day.
I was in the middle of going through every line of the WiFi router’s configuration file, plugged straight into it at the very back of the room. Much as I wanted to jump up and introduce myself, I decided to play it morlock and let him get on with all the urgent stuff he needed to do and try to find a quiet moment later to say hello.
But Joe scouted around the room, spotted me, and said, loudly, “Marcus, all right!” and half jogged straight to me, hand already out.
“Hello, sir,” I said.
“Marcus, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re joining us. Flor tells me she’s very impressed with you. I’m not surprised. I imagine you’ve got plenty to do to get up to speed, but please ask Flor to put you in my diary for tomorrow, whenever she can squeeze you in, so we can talk about strategy, all right?”
“All right,” I said, making an effort not to stammer. In person, Joseph Noss just radiated charisma, and it made me tongue-tied. Here was a guy who just felt, I don’t know, important and smart, and I wanted to impress him, but everything I could think of to say felt too boring to burden him with.
“Good man,” he said, and slapped my shoulder before turning on his heel to jog back to Flor’s desk, pointing at the staffers he was ready to hear from as he went. They converged in a huddle at Flor’s desk and I went back to work.
“Marcus?” someone said from behind me, a few minutes later.
I looked up, and into a semi-familiar face. It was a guy about my age, or maybe a little younger, with a scruffy beard, and he was grinning so widely I thought his head would fall off. I recognized him from somewhere, but I couldn’t think where. I decided I’d try to fake it. I stood up and shook his hand. “Hey, man!” I said. “Great to see you again!”
He clapped in uncontainable delight. “Dude, I can’t believe it’s you. Are you the new webmaster? Really?”
“Yup,” I said. “Sweet gig, huh?”
He shook his head furiously. “No. Way. I can’t believe it! Marcus Yallow is our webmaster? Oh man!”
This was more familiar territory — someone going all gushy and me not knowing what to say in response. Been there, done that, still don’t know what to do when it happens. “So, uh, what have you been up to?”
“I’m the swag barista,” he said, thumping his chest. He was wearing a SAN FRANCISCO NEEDS NOSS shirt, done like an old-timey sci-fi movie poster, with a giant Joe standing astride the Golden Gate bridge. “I design the T-shirts and posters. I try to do a new one every couple days, and screen them on demand. Keep it fresh, mix it up, you know? One thing I wanted to ask you about was whether you could put up a Threadless clone for the website so I could do little shirt-community for all the Nossers out there?”
“Uh,” I said, “yeah. Sure, why not?” We were running the site on OpenCampaign, which was a free mod of WordPress designed for election campaigns. It could run WordPress plugins with no additional work, and the one that was based on the Threadless user-generated T-shirt site was one I’d looked at before. It didn’t seem like it’d be too hard to run.
“You are such a dude. God, I can’t believe this! Wait until I tell Nate. He is going to flip out.”
And that’s when I remembered him. “Liam?” I said.
“Yeah, of course! Liam! I’ve been volunteering here all summer! Ever since I saw Joe’s July Fourth video. That stuff was straight-up inspiring, yo.”
I had friends who ended their sentences with yo, but always ironically, making fun of the people who were trying to talk all “street” and badass. Liam wasn’t being ironic. He really did end his sentences with yo.
“Yo,” I said, then felt mean about it and gave him a friendly slug on the shoulder. “Liam, man, I didn’t recognize you at first with the beard and all. How cool that we’re going to be working together?”
“Me too. Look, do you have lunch plans? Want to get a burrito? I know a great place up on Valencia –“
“Sure, burritos sound great,” I said. I hefted my notebook and said, “I’d better get back to work if I’m going to get time for a lunch-break, then.”
He did a couple of dance-steps on the spot, then gave me a surprise hug, a real crusher that involved lifting me a couple inches off the floor. “See you at lunch!”
Once upon a time, I’d been part of a tight foursome of awesomely close friends. Darryl, Jolu, Van, and I had done everything together since we’d been little kids. But after the whole Xnet thing, well, one thing happened and then another. Van and Darryl started dating, and Van didn’t like Ange at all (and there was all the weirdness about the fact that she’d been secretly crushing on me, which loomed up like an invisible wall whenever we saw each other). Darryl went off to Berkeley, and we’d seen each other a little at first, but between classes, Van, and his psychotherapy for all the crazy nightmares and freak-outs he still had thanks to the horrors of Gitmo-by-the-Bay, we barely had time to say hi. Jolu, meanwhile, had graduated from his job at Pigspleen to a sweet gig as a programmer on a startup that was commercializing municipal data, cranking out services based on the feeds put out by City Hall. He had a ton of new friends, including a bunch of intimidatingly smart civic hackers, and when they were all really going at it, I could only understand about half of what they said. We didn’t see much of each other.
And then there was Ange, who was the world’s most perfect girlfriend: funny, smart, exciting. She liked the same movies and games that I did, liked the same books and music, and was always up for keeping me company when she wasn’t at school — she’d gotten into SFSU for communications studies and was acing her courses. So even though I missed my friends, it wasn’t like I was actually lonely or anything — so somehow I never got around to calling them or IMing them or poking them and seeing how they were doing.
But it had been a long time since I’d had a regular gang of friends, a little posse of my own. And I missed that.
Liam’s friend Nate joined us for lunch, taking BART down from his mom’s place downtown. He, too, gave me a crushing hug, and then he and Liam exchanged one of the same. These guys were as Californian as they came, and they loved their physical contact. I’d been born and raised in San Francisco, but my mom was British, and so I just hadn’t gotten into the whole super-huggy scene ever.
We ended up at my favorite burrito joint, and I got tongue, which Ange had convinced me to try and which turned out to be amazingly tasty, provided you didn’t think too hard about the fact that you were, you know, eating a tongue. Liam ordered one, too, and raved about how good it tasted and how he wished he’d tried it sooner.
“I still can’t believe you’re our webmaster,” Liam said. “That’s like, I don’t know, Bruce Lee being your bouncer or something.”
“Or Jack Daniels being your bartender,” Nate said. He had the same beard as Liam.
“I think Jack Daniels is dead, or made up,” Liam said.
“Okay, it’s like Steve Wozniak fixing your PC,” Nate said.
“Dude, old school,” Liam said. “Woz is the guy who built the first Apple computers,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“Oh,” Liam said. “Yeah! Of course you do! Listen to me, huh?”
I wanted to find some way to politely say, “Hey, Liam, don’t worry about impressing me, okay? I already like you, and all this stuff is just making you sound kind of desperate.” But every way I could think of saying that would make Liam feel like a loser and make me sound like a dick.
“What are you up to, Nate?” I said, pointedly changing the subject.
He shrugged. “Being unemployed. Polishing my nonexistent resume.” Another shrug.
“I know how that feels,” I said. “I was unemployed until this morning.”
They both boggled at me.
“No way,” Liam said. “How could you be out of work? I assumed they’d poached you from some rad start-up or Google or something.”
Now it was my turn to shrug. It seemed like unemployment talk always involved a fair bit of shrugging and looking away. “Dunno,” I said. “I dropped out of school months ago, couldn’t afford it anymore, and I’ve been looking ever since.”
“Man,” Nate said. “That’s crazy. If you couldn’t find work, what hope do I have?”
I didn’t have an answer for him. I was starting to actually feel guilty about having a job, and I’d been employed for less than a day.
We finished our awkward lunch and went back to work, and I went back to mapping out the network and figuring out what needed fixing and what didn’t, and I didn’t even think about the torrent I’d downloaded the night before until I got home and rebooted my computer into my secret partition and the machine reconnected to IPredator and started seeding the file again.
The torrent contained a huge — HUGE — zipfile that was encrypted. Of course, I had the key. And somewhere out there, Masha was being held captive — or worse — and I was pretty sure that she wanted me to dump the file and the key now.
I really wanted to talk this over with someone. Ange, of course. But she was still in class and wouldn’t be out for hours. And this wasn’t the kind of subject I wanted to talk about over the phone or email or IM or — well, I kind of felt like we should talk about it in a soundproofed room at the bottom of a mineshaft, but I didn’t have either of those things.
I had been avoiding thinking about this for nearly thirty-six hours now. I’d had good excuses: I’d been blown up. I’d been doped up. I’d been asleep. I’d gotten a job. I’d had my first day at work. But I’d run out of excuses for inaction.
But wait! I just thought of a new excuse: it would be insane to have the decrypted file sitting on my drive, even on a secret partition. I couldn’t get over the thought that a snatch team could break down my door at any time and haul me away. If I was loaded up on my “secret” partition at that point, it’d be easy for them to see what I was up to.
I decided I needed to build a few more layers of security into the system before I started to handle this info-plutonium.
First things first: go shopping for a virtual machine. Let me explain that, because VMs had become my best friends lately.
You can write a program that works just like your computer’s microprocessor. You designate a file to act as your virtual computer’s hard drive, and then you load it up with an operating system and any programs you want to run. When you “turn on the computer” — that is, when you run the program — it looks at the virtual drive and loads in the virtual operating system and follows all the instructions it finds there, passing them on to your real computer, which is running underneath all this.
It used to be that the main use for VMs was to simulate old computers on new ones — so you could simulate some ancient game console, an old Game Boy or whatever, and play all the vintage games. There’s a mega-huge games VM called MA.M.E, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, that can play pretty much every old game, ever.
The key word here is “old.” That’s because running a pretend computer inside a real computer is slow. But computers double in speed every eighteen months or so — this is called Moore’s Law, for Gordon Moore, who helped start Intel. That means a brand-new computer will be about sixty-four times faster than a computer you could buy for the same money six years ago, which means that so long as you’re working with old VMs, you probably won’t even notice the lag.
But lately, computer manufacturers have been figuring out how to design chips to run VMs more efficiently, so the gap between a VM and the real computer it runs on keeps shrinking. This means that it’s easier than ever to try out new operating systems and new programs. If there’s something you’re really paranoid about, you can just run a free VM program, install a free OS on it, and run anything you want in that little sandbox. Nothing that happens in that VM can affect your real computer — not unless you give it privileges to see your real hard drive and real files. The VM is like a head in a jar, and you can tell it anything you want about what’s going on in the world and it’ll have to believe you.
You can download hundreds — thousands! — of VMs from the Internet and just fire them up as you need them. Want to turn an old computer into a router or a file server for an hour or a day or a year? Various sysadmins have bottled up perfectly tuned VMs that run any specialized function like that out of the box. There are even user-reviews to help you figure out which ones are the good ones. And since it’s all built on open, free code like Linux, anyone can modify, improve, and redistribute them.
I went hunting for an extra paranoid VM, and I found one. It started with a copy of ParanoidLinux, my own favorite distro, and nuked any programs and services you didn’t need, to make it all the more bulletproof. ParanoidVM also stored its user files in TrueCrypt plausible deniability chunks, so there was no way to tell from the forensic examination of the disk how many users there were and how many files they had.
That was good for starters, but I wanted a dead man’s switch: something that would cause the whole thing to lock itself and shut down if I didn’t do something every fifteen minutes. So I wrote a little script that hit me up for a password every quarter hour. If I didn’t enter it, it would issue a system-wide command to kill any VMs that were running, then erase itself. So if a snatch squad were to nab me, all the work I’d done on the files would disappear unless they could torture the password out of me in a quarter of an hour.
They’d still have the key and the torrent file, but they wouldn’t know whom I’d shown anything to or what we’d talked about. All I’d have to do is key in my password every fifteen minutes, and not go off to the toilet or forget and go to dinner, or I’d lose everything I’d worked on up to the last save-point.
There’s a technical term for this kind of security work: yak-shaving — wasting time doing silly chores to avoid something harder and more important. There was an old essay I liked about working for Google by a hacker called Dhanji Prasanna, which talked about “shaving the entire yak pen at the zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign yaks you’ve never seen before and whose barbering you know little about.”
That’s the territory I was heading into. It was time to decrypt the file.
It had been a while since I’d decrypted an encrypted ZIP file with a very long password. There was a specialized command you could use to specify that the password was in a file, and I couldn’t remember it at first. I looked up how to do it. I did it. The list of files scrolled past faster than my eye could follow. Lots of files. LOTS AND LOTS of files.
810,097 files.
What had Masha said? Eventually, you come across something so terrible, you can’t look yourself in the mirror anymore unless you do something about it.
That was a lot of dirty laundry, yo.
I could tell at a glance that they had human-generated file names — weird punctuation, weird capitalization, and both were all over the place. Computers might do weird capitalization, but every file would have been weird in the same way. Some had pretty descriptive names like “bribes paid to senate Def Cttee.doc” and others were more cryptic, like HumIntAfgh32533. There was a file called WATERBOARDING.PPT, a set of PowerPoint slides. My stomach curdled into a hard ball just looking at it.
I double clicked it. The first slide was just a title: “STRESS INTERROGATION SEMINAR 4320.” The next slide was a long confidentiality notice, naming a bunch of private military contractors who, apparently, had been involved in producing this presentation. And the next slide —
— showed a boy, about my age, restrained in padded cuffs at the ankles, wrists and chest, strapped to an angled wooden board that held his head lower than his feet, mouth covered tightly in saran-wrap, having water poured down his nose in a splashing stream out of a bucket with a spout, held by two large, clean, white hands. The boy’s body was arched up like a bow, straining against his restraints, pulling so hard that every muscle in his body stood out. He looked like an anatomical illustration.
He looked like a torture victim.
The saran wrap was an evil touch. The water is poured down the nose, but it can’t go into the lungs, because the body is tilted backwards. His body is tilted backwards. The body — his body — knows that there’s water going into the windpipe and it’s desperate for air. His mouth gasps, but the saran wrap only lets the air go out, because every time he tries to suck air in, the plastic makes a tight seal. The only place air could enter is his nose, and the water is pouring into his nose and so he can’t breathe that way.
Eventually, his lungs empty out entirely, collapse like spent balloons, shrivel like raisins. His brain, starved of oxygen, begins to die. He may pull his bonds so hard he breaks his bones.
The government likes to call waterboarding a “simulated execution.” It’s not a simulation, though. They nearly kill you. If they don’t stop, they will kill you.
One of the men at Guantanamo Bay, America’s secret prison, was waterboarded more than 180 times. Nearly died 180 times. They say he planned 9/11. Maybe he did. But whatever he told them, they’d be crazy to trust it. When you’re being slowly murdered, you will say anything and everything to get loose.
But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was hypnotized by that boy, by the expression on his face, the veins standing out in his forehead, the terror in his eyes. I’d been there. I’d had that look in my eyes.
Time stopped.
And then, the image disappeared. The window it was in disappeared. The VM that was in disappeared. My dead man’s switch had been prompting me for a password, had run out of time, and had killed the VM and deleted itself like a good boy. I hadn’t even noticed the password prompt. I’d been staring at that picture.
That picture was only one slide, from one file, out of more than 800,000 files. This was going to take a while.
Ange rang the bell around dinner time, and my mom sent her up to my room. She let herself in and snuck up on me and put her arms around my neck and kissed the top of my head. I pretended I didn’t hear her or see her reflection in my screen. It was a game we played. We were adorable.
“Hey there, workin’ man, how was your first big day at the office?”
“Pretty much like I said in my texts; I’m mostly trying to figure out what the job will entail, trying to get a handle on everything. I told you about that Liam guy, too, right?”
“Yeah, how weird is that? Small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
“Well, he got less sweaty about things by the end of the day, came by for a real chat, and it turns out he knows his stuff pretty well and had lots of good ideas for me, some authentication ideas I hadn’t thought of for managing guest laptops.”
“I think it’s adorable that you’ve got a little groupie,” she said, pulling up my spare chair and transferring the clutter of MakerBot parts to my bed before sitting down.
“It’s embarrassing,” I said. “How was class?”
She crossed her eyes. “I thought that after high school I’d get to start learning like an adult, without everything being about how many factoids I can regurgitate on cue during exams. But pretty much all of my courses give seventy-five percent of the grade based on exams.”
“Well, you could always leak the exams,” I said, and her hands were over my mouth before I’d gotten the words out.
“Don’t. Even. Joke,” she said.
Ange’s deep, dark secret is that she stole and published the No Child Left Behind tests when she was in the eleventh grade, along with the answer-sheets. The school board never figured out who was responsible for it, and they claimed that the stunt had cost millions. Served ’em right.
“Sorry,” I said. “But there’s worse ideas. And who better to do it?”
“Tell you what, let’s figure out what to do about Masha’s little bombshell first. We can recycle anything we come up with for any final exams I should happen to find myself in possession of.”
“That’s why I love you; you’re always thinking.”
We joked a lot about love, but the truth was, I did love her, with a weird, scary kind of intensity. It probably had to do with drifting away from my gang of friends and dropping out of school — Ange was pretty much the only person I saw on a regular basis who wasn’t a parent of mine. Every now and then, this freaked me out a little. I think it freaked her out, too — I was looking forward to getting a little more balance in my life from having a job with co-workers.
“So, what have you got?”
I felt that little paranoid shiver. You could eavesdrop on a room by bouncing a laser off the glass. The sound waves from the voices in the room made the glass vibrate, and the laser picked up the vibrations. I’d seen a demo of this in a YouTube video of a presentation from DEFCON, the big hacker conference in Vegas. The sound wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good. Good enough to pick out every word and recognize the speakers’ voices.
“Um,” I said. “Give me a sec, okay?”
I plugged a set of speakers into my laptop and then stretched out their wires until I could press them on the window-glass. Then I used my computer’s random-number generator, /dev/random and requested some random white noise. The speakers began to hiss with staticky sound. I cranked them up to the point where I couldn’t stand it, then turned them down a notch or two. I made sure the blinds were seated over the speakers again. Maybe a laser could pick up on the sound in the room, but I couldn’t think of any way to subtract random noise from the audio signal. That didn’t mean it was impossible, but at least we couldn’t be eavesdropped on by anyone stupider than me.
“Huh,” Ange said, observing this ritual. “Well, that’s pretty intense.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It sure is.” We moved the chairs so we could both see my laptop and I showed her my VM and the dead man’s switch.
“Not bad,” she said. “Okay, you’ve convinced me that you’re worried about this stuff. Which, I suppose, means that you’re sure that you saw Masha and Zeb get taken off the playa, and that means you think the explosion was deliberate.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Back down the rabbit hole, here we go.”
“Wait till you see.” I brought up the VM, brought up the directory listing. Sat back.
“What is this I don’t even,” she said, staring wide-eyed at the listing. I handed her the mouse. She started clicking, beginning from the top. The first item was budget_8B5S.xls. It turned out to be a spreadsheet listing income and outgo. The titles down the left side were peoples’ names. Across the top was a list of companies with bland names like “Holdings import/export” and “Property Management Ltd” and in the middle were dollar figures. None of them were very big — $1,001, $5,100 — the biggest was $7,111.
“A lot of ones in those figures,” I said.
Ange nodded. “Yeah. That’s interesting, isn’t it?” She stared at them for a while longer and got out her laptop. “You still like IPredator for anonymity?”
“Generally. But why don’t you run it through Tor after IPredator.” Tor — The Onion Router — would bounce the browser requests through a bunch of random computers, and none of those computers would know where the request came from and where it was going. It was slow — slower than IPredator, which was slower than the raw network connection. But there’s a time to be paranoid, and this was it.
I stared at the mysterious spreadsheet for a while. The dead man’s switch asked for a password and I entered it.
“There you go. I knew I’d read about this. The number one appears more frequently than other numbers in financial data.”
“What? Why?”
She showed me the article, a summary of a paper at a security conference. “A lot more stuff costs between $10 and $19 or $100 and $199 than $20 and up, or $200 and up. Retail psychology: people are more likely to buy stuff that costs $9 than $10; it’s a big jump. Ninety-nine dollars has less psychological weight than $100, but $999 is a lot less crazy than $1,000. So you get a lot of clusters of numbers with ones in them. But when people make up numbers, faking their finances or cheating on their taxes, you get a much more even distribution of numbers. It’s one of the ways the IRS looks for tax cheats. I read about it in a book on data-journalism — tried to get my section’s TA to read it last year but she said she had to get us ready for the exams and to show it to her again afterward.
“So all these ones, they’re inserted by someone who knows he’s making up numbers and wants to be sure that there’s plenty of extra ones to make the statistical distribution look right. Someone who doesn’t expect a human being to look at these numbers closely, but worried that a computer might spot them.”
She peered at my spreadsheet and started to type again, but the dead man’s switch wanted a password again and I didn’t grab the computer in time to enter it. The VM disappeared.
“That’s frustrating,” she said.
“I’ll teach you the password.”
“What if you set the timeout to longer? Thirty minutes?”
I shook my head. “I think I could probably hold out against someone who wanted my password for fifteen minutes, especially if they were on a snatch team that broke the door down and didn’t have any time to prepare. Thirty minutes, though…”
“Oh,” she said.
“There’s a presentation in there on how to do waterboarding. A PowerPoint. It’s got bar-graphs showing the time to brain-damage based on age and general health.”
“Oh,” she said again. She knew that there were times when showering would give me uncontrollable shakes. Being executed will do that to you.
I brought up the VM and opened the spreadsheet again. Ange started to enter the names.
“They’re all staffers for Illinois State Assemblyman Bedfellow. The logical next step is to look up which committees that Assemblyman is on, and what all he voted on. Data Journalism 101 — or it would be, if there was a Data Journalism course in my program.”
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“No,” she said. “That’s just one file. There’s 800,000 more. We can’t do this retail. We have to find a wholesale approach.”
“We need Jolu,” I said. “This is his thing.”
We’d been brainstorming for hours. Ange was even more paranoid than I was. She had me clone the VM — easy, just copy the data file — and then set up a new TrueCrypt file that had one copy of the VM in its regular storage, and another copy in a hidden plausible deniability partition.
“Here’s how it’ll work: the snatch squad comes in, bags and tags you and grabs the computer. They start looking around, but before they can get very far, there’s a password prompt. They start to rubber-hose you for the password, but you gut it out. Whoosh, the dead man’s switch trips, the VM takes itself down, the data is scrambled.
“But then what happens?”
I chewed my lip. I had thought this through this far before and hadn’t liked what came next. “They try to get the password out of me to decrypt the file.”
I said, “And if you’re here, they can work on you, too.”
“Which is why we’re doing this. Because right away we can give them a password, and that password will unlock this copy of the VM. It’s got a full set of the leaks. But that’s not the copy we work with. That’s the one we hide in the plausible deniability partition. And that’s where we keep all our notes, any mailing lists of people who know about this and work on it with us. We never give them that password. Our story is, we kept the leaks on this encrypted VM, and we didn’t keep notes on them. We didn’t know what to do about them. It’s believable. I mean, we don’t know what to do with them.”
We did that. We came up with two long, crazy passwords and practiced them on each other until we had them memorized. Then we stared at each other.
“We need Jolu,” I said again. “He’s all about wholesale data these days.”
Ange nuked the VMs, turning them back into random-seeming gibberish. “Those speakers are driving me crazy,” she said. “Are you sure they’ll stop this laser-listener stuff?”
“Fine,” she said. “Let’s turn them down for a while, anyway.
“So, Jolu. You know that bringing Jolu into this is pretty much the same kind of dick move that Masha pulled when she brought you into it.”
“I know. But it’s different with Jolu. He’s my friend. One of my best friends.”
She chewed on some words for a while. “Marcus, no offense, but is that still true? When was the last time you guys actually hung out? When was the last time you even talked?”
I squirmed. She was right. “Okay, point taken, but that doesn’t mean we’re not still friends. We don’t dislike each other, we’re just, you know, busy with our own things. I’ve known Jolu for most of my life, since I was a little kid. He’s the right guy for this.”
“I don’t mean to make you all defensive, all right? It’s just that you’re about to put Jolu into a really hard spot, and it’s the kind of thing that you should be really, really sure about before you do it.”
“Jolu wouldn’t turn me down. This is important.”
Ange gave me a long, long look. Here’s what she wasn’t saying: If this is so important, why didn’t you drop everything to do something about it? Why didn’t you go to the cops, or the press? Why are you screwing around with a new job instead of making this your top priority?
It was a thought that I kept having too, and of course, I knew the answer, and so did Ange. I was too scared to go public. The last time I spilled everything to the press, I’d ended up in a torture chamber. The stuff Masha had dumped on me was a lot more important and scary than what I’d had to say that time, too, if our small samples were anything to go by.
Besides, Masha hadn’t told me to rescue her. She’d told me to get the material out. I would. Maybe if the material was out there, Carrie Johnstone would realize that snatching Masha would do no good and let her and Zeb go.
Book People: Austin, TX
Austin, TX is one of those cities that turns out to be an unlikely and distant suburb of Berkeley, a counterculture town where “Keep Austin Weird” is the citywide mantra. Of course, it’s got a lot of great places to buy books, but man, Book People is a hell of a store. I visit most of these stores as a touring author, but stepping through their doors instantly turns me into a reader, and all I want to do is browse the shelves, read the staff reviews, and pick over the staff-picks. Book People is one of the stores where the urge to do this is strongest.
Book People: 603 N. Lamar, Austin TX 78703, +1 512 472 5050
I’ve always done my best work at night, and I knew all the tricks — combining careful doses of coffee, catnaps and showers to get my tortured, sleep-deprived brain to perform during daylight, while still cranking away through the vampire hours, where inspiration lurked in every shadow.
Jolu was the same, and that was one reason we got along so well. I can’t count how many 3 A.M.s I’d shared with him over Skype or IM, or in person as we snuck out of the house to go dingledodie around the streets of San Francisco. So even though it was 8 P.M. when Ange and I finally finished arguing, I didn’t worry about whether he’d be free for the evening.
Though I did feel a little weird as my finger hovered over his icon in my speed dial. That thing, you know it: you haven’t called someone in a long time, so it’s weird to call them, so you don’t call them, and more time goes by, and it gets weirder…
“Marcus!” he said. There was a lot of noise in the background, clinking bottles and glasses and loud talk.
“Jolu!” I said. “Look, man, I’m sorry to call you out of the blue –“
“One sec,” he said. “Let me go somewhere quieter.” I heard him navigate what sounded like a busy party. “Hey dude! Long time no speak!”
“I’m sorry to call you out of the blue –“
“No, no, it’s cool. It’s great, actually! Nice to hear from you.”
Wonder if you’ll feel the same way after I turn your life upside down.
“Can I meet you somewhere? It’s important.”
“Marcus?” he said. “Important how?”
“Important important. The kind of important I don’t want to talk about on the phone.”
I distinctly heard him say Oh shit under his breath. “Of course,” he said. “Right now?”
“Yeah, now would be good.”
“Um.” A long pause. “What about the place where you met Ange?”
“You mean –” I stopped myself. Good old Jolu. Anyone listening in wouldn’t know where I met Ange. He was more paranoid than I was, and that was before I told him what was up. He really was the right man for the job. “Okay, when?”
“Give me an hour?”
“Okay,” I said. “And Jolu? Thanks.”
I heard him snort, and I could totally picture the half-smile that went with it, one bushy eyebrow raised in a quizzical expression. “No need. Anytime for you, man. You know that.”
Friends. Nothing like them.
I met Ange at a key-signing party Jolu and I threw at Sutro Baths on Ocean Beach. The weird old/new ruins were spooky and dramatic, and the night was burned into my memory forever. Ange laughed when I told her where we were headed. She’d taken me there again on our first anniversary, with a picnic supper, and we’d watched the sun go down and necked on the blanket before we got too cold.
“I think we should switch off our phones,” Ange said.
“Yeah,” I said. That’s the thing about paranoia — it’s catching. But she was right — our phones would send our location to the phone companies, and if someone really wanted to snoop on us, it was always possible that they could find some way to tap into the GPSes on them. Then there’d be this really clear data-trail: Marcus called Jolu, then Ange, Marcus and Jolu all met up at Ocean Beach. Might was well get reflective orange vests and stencil CO-CONSPIRATOR on them. I took the battery out of my phone for good measure.
We were a quarter of an hour early — the buses were with us — and Jolu was ten minutes early. He hugged us both tightly, and Ange kissed him on the cheek. It had been months since I’d seen him — he’d dropped in on an open data lecture at Noisebridge — and he looked different. He’d grown a tidy little mustache and pointed sideburns, and had his hair styled in a short razor-cut that looked somehow grown up, cool, and business-like all at once. He’d always been better-dressed than the rest of us, but he was particularly natty that night in a button-up shirt with slightly wiggly stripes that made my eyes cross when I stared at them, heavy old denim jeans with big rivets, and elaborate leather shoes. I was in my old thrift-store jeans, beat-up motorcycle boots caked with playa dust, and a hoodie, and I felt like a slob.
He had wine on his breath. “I hope it wasn’t a totally excellent party,” I said.
“Just a release party for a new traffic-predicting app,” he said, shrugging. “We get users’ anonymized GPS data at different times on different roads and try to predict traffic jams ahead of time, also looking at all the planned road maintenance and anything realtime from the DOT. You share your calendar with us and we look at where you’re going and use that to give you advice on what roads to avoid to get there on time.”
“Woah, creepy,” Ange said. I’d been thinking it, but hadn’t wanted to say anything.
Jolu wasn’t offended, though. He just grinned. “Yeah, it is. I mean, everyone is opt-in, and we anonymize the data when we get it so we don’t know where you’ve been, just that someone has been there. But yeah, if we had a data leak, there’d be an awful lot of stuff there you might not want the world to know.” He sat down on a rock and fished some gum out of his pockets, offered it around. It was black licorice gum, his favorite, the kind that turned your tongue and spit disgusting black. Just the smell of it made me smile and sent me spinning back in time to the old days.
“Or if the police seized your servers,” Ange said. “It’s so weird that we do all this Xnet stuff to keep our personal information from being captured by the government, but we give it to companies and the cops can just waltz in to their data centers whenever they want and just take it all.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Jolu said. “Get me to tell you about the lawful intercept stuff some time, okay? It’ll curl the hair on your toes.”
“So, speaking of the police and servers,” I said. “I’ve got an interesting technical problem I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I figured you might.”
“Before I start — is your phone on by any chance?”
He pulled it out of his pocket and removed the back, showed me the missing battery. “Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo,” which was the punchline to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.
Jolu listened attentively, asking a few questions as we told the story. I put in my theory about the explosion on the playa and Ange didn’t say anything about not believing me. When we were done, we both looked at him across the darkness and the grey no-color of the light leaking from the streetlamps on the cliff above us.
“So what do we do now?” he said.
He shook his head. “Duh. Yes, ‘we.’ Did you think I wouldn’t get involved?”
“The last time you sat where you’re sitting and I sat where I’m sitting, you told me that it was different for you. You told me that the risk was bigger if you’re brown than if you’re white.”
“Yeah, I said that. It’s every bit as true today as it was, then, too.”
“But you’re in.”
He looked out into the darkness and didn’t say anything. I smelled his gum.
“Marcus,” he said. “Have you noticed how messed up everything is today? How we put a ‘good’ president in the White House and he kept right on torturing and bombing and running secret prisons? How every time we turn around, someone’s trying to take away the Internet from us, make it into some kind of giant stupid shopping mall where the rent-a-cops can kick you out if they don’t like your clothes? Have you noticed how much money the one percent have? How we’re putting more people in jail every day, and more people are unemployed every day, and more people are losing their houses every day?”
“I’ve noticed,” I said. “But haven’t things always been screwed up? I mean, doesn’t everyone assume that their generation has the most special, most awful problems?”
“Yeah,” Ange said. “But not every generation has had the net.”
“Bingo,” Jolu said. “I’m not saying it wasn’t terrible in the Great Depression or whatever. But we’ve got the power to organize like we’ve never had before. And the creeps and the spooks have the power to spy on us more than ever before, to control us and censor us and find us and snatch us.”
“Who’s going to win?” I said. “I mean, I used to think that we’d win, because we understand computers and they don’t.”
“Oh, they understand computers. And they’re doing everything they can to invent new ways to mess you up with them. But if we leave the field, it’ll just be them. People who want everything, want to be in charge of everyone.”
“So we’re going to win?”
Jolu laughed. “There’s no winning or losing, Marcus. There’s only doing.”
“Man, I leave you alone for a couple of months and you turn into Yoda.”
“So what do we do?” Ange asked again.
“Well, we’re not going to be able to look at 800,000 of these.”
“810,097,” I said.
“That. I think we need to build some kind of site for these things, something secure and private, where we can run searches on them, try to find the good stuff, leave notes for each other.”
“And then what do we do with them?”
“We release them.”
“Duh,” Ange said. “But how do you think we’ll do that? How do you put the information in a place where people will see it and care about it, but not a place that can be traced back to us?”
Jolu shrugged and stared at the ruins. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on the kind of stuff we find. Maybe we google journalists who sound like they’d be interested in the story and email the docs to them from throwaway accounts. Something else, maybe. I don’t know. But when you’ve got a problem that has two parts, and one part comes first, and you know how to solve that part, the best thing to do is solve that part and see if a solution to the rest suggests itself while you’re working.”
“That sounds right,” I said.
“I suppose,” Ange said. “But, Marcus, what about Zeb and Masha?”
“Yeah. Well, I don’t know how we work that out. Maybe releasing the material will put them in more danger. Maybe it’ll take them out of danger. We know who took her: Carrie Johnstone. That’s got to be part of the story, however we release it.”
“You’re sure it was her?” Jolu asked.
“There are some faces I’ll never, ever forget. Hers is one of them. It was her.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s talk about forward secrecy,” he said.
It turned out Jolu had been hanging out with some heavy Tor dudes who were working on “darknet sites” — “hidden services” that could host files and message boards, sites that anyone could reach, providing they knew the address. But these were unlike regular sites: even if you knew the address, you couldn’t figure out where the physical computer it led to was, who was running it, what server you’d have to sieze to shut it down. Darknet sites were places you could visit but couldn’t shut down.
“So you’ve got these rendezvous points, they’re servers that know some other servers that know some other servers that know the way to reach the darknet site. You ask a rendezvous site to introduce you to the server and it does this dance with the other servers down the line, and creates a temporary circuit that bounces your connection through a one-off route to the darknet machine, so every time you visit the site, there’s a different, random way to reach it.
“What I want to do is grab a cheapo server-on-demand VM and slap a ParanoidLinux install on it — nothing unencrypted, ever. Then we slap a copy of your data on it, and a clone of Google Spreadsheets. Grab a doc, put its title in the first field, a description in the next field, and a place where you can put some keywords. Smack together a script that runs every couple of minutes and searches for those keywords in the uncategorized documents, and automatically suggests possibly related ones.”
“And then what? We look at 800,000 documents, us three?” I figured I might be able to do a hundred docs a night, depending on how complicated they were. At that rate, it’d take us three a year or so to get through them all. Too slow.
“No, not us three. With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. We’ve got to bring more people in. People we can trust.”
Jolu said, “Yeah, I know a few of those.”
I was almost late for work the next day. After coming home, I’d stayed up for hours banging away at the document dump. I hadn’t meant to, but Jolu’s idea of searching for words in the dump gave me some ideas.
The first thing I searched for was “Masha” and “Zeb.” I got a few documents with “zebra” and “mashallah,” but nothing else. I tried “Marcus” and “Yallow.” There were five “Marcus”es but none of them were me.
Then I tried “Carrie Johnstone” and hit the jackpot.
Carrie Johnstone had been a busy little soldier in Iraq. There were more than four hundred documents that mentioned her by name. I went after them alphabetically at first, but it was all confusing, until I had the bright idea of sorting them by date and starting with the oldest and reading toward the newest — a document that was just over a month old.
Reading those four hundred documents — some very short, some very long — kept me up to three in the morning, and the more I read, the more I learned about Carrie Johnstone’s weird and terrible career in and out of the U.S. military.
The first documents dated from Johnstone’s career at FOB Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s old palace. There was a memo she’d written describing the handover of a bunch of Iraqi prisoners to the Iraqi police. I didn’t see at first why anyone would bother to save the document, but the next memo explained it. It was a memo explaining why they hadn’t told the Red Cross about the transfer of prisoners, and hadn’t gotten any kind of chain-of-custody receipts from the Iraqi cops. A little googling and I figured out what that meant: fifty-one men, women and children had vanished into the custody of Iraq’s police force, and no one knew whatever became of them. They had been arrested after anonymous tips, or snatched off the street for “suspicious behavior.” And for all anyone knew, they were nameless and rotting in a jail somewhere, while their families wrote them off for dead. Or maybe they were dead, dumped in a mass grave.
Then she’d ended up at FOB Grizzly, working as an “intelligence officer” alongside the military police. She’d been reprimanded for unauthorized “stress interrogations” of suspected terrorists, and had overseen an arrest sweep that brought in more than five hundred suspects, all of whom had been released over the coming months as it emerged that they had nothing to do with terrorism.
It was around then that she left the military, and though she’d written a letter of resignation, there was also a memo from a commanding officer to Army Human Resources Command saying that she’d been “shown the door” after an “incident” involving “materiel.” Another memo was more explicit — she’d been involved in a plan that delivered American guns and ammo to private mercenaries working for a military contractor, and those guns and that ammo had been part of a massacre that killed over a hundred people.
From there, she’d gone private, working for the military “contractor” — hired killers, according to a quick search — and had distinguished herself with a very lucrative bid to take over the management contract for the FOB she’d been fired from.
It was ugly.
As I lay in bed with my thoughts swirling, I wondered if Carrie Johnstone had snatched Masha because the leaks file had so much embarrassing material about her, personally, or whether she’d been hired to retrieve them for the U.S. government. How could the Army fire her one day and then re-hire her to do the same job at ten times her old salary a month later? Were they on crazy pills?
I couldn’t afford to drag my ass around work the next day, so I didn’t. I pounded the Turk’s coffee and munched chocolate espresso beans and finished my inventory and network map. Joe surprised me by scheduling me for lunch. The first I heard of it was when he showed up at my desk at 12:30 and stood over it, smiling expectantly at me.
“Hi, Joe,” I said.
“Lunchtime, Marcus?”
We went to a nice veggie place where they knew him by name and seated us right away. He knew their names, too, and greeted everyone from the waiter to the guy who filled up our water glasses personally, switching to Spanish as necessary and asking sincere, friendly questions about their wives and husbands and kids and health.
The sincere part was the weirdest thing. When I was really on fire and feeling very, very sociable, I might remember half of the names of the people I saw. I just sucked at names. And when people told me about their kids or parents or siblings or whatever, I tried to be interested, but I mean, how interested can you really be in the lives of people you barely know or have never met at all?
But Joe had the uncanny ability to seem really, genuinely interested in people. When he talked to you, you felt like he was also listening to you, carefully, thoughtfully, and not waiting for you to finish talking so that he could say whatever he was going to say next. It made him seem, I don’t know, holy or something, like one of those people out of a religious story who overflows with love for his fellow man.
And the weirdest part? He didn’t make me feel like a dick for not being that interested myself. Instead, he made me want to try to be more like him, more caring.
After our water glasses were full and we’d put in our orders, he said, “Thank you for making the time to see me today. I know you must be busy.”
If it was anyone else, I’d have thought he was blowing smoke up my ass, but he really sounded like he thought being the webmaster/sysadmin/net guy was the hardest job in the world and he felt lucky that all he had to do was run around and try to get elected.
“You’re welcome — I mean, it’s a pleasure. I mean, it’s wonderful. I’m so glad to have a job, and it’s such a cool job, too. Everyone’s really nice and interesting and I really believe in your platform, so, well, it’s just great.” I was babbling like an idiot and I couldn’t seem to stop — and he didn’t seem to notice.
“You remember when I spoke to you on the phone the other night, I mentioned how my campaign would need great technology to be successful. And I’m sure that when you and Flor chatted she had some pointed opinions about that and what her side of the campaign needed from you. You might be wondering who wins in a little struggle like that. I wanted to give you some context to help you resolve that.
“Flor is your boss — and she’s my boss, too. She’s in charge of the campaign from top to bottom, and I’m familiar with her ideas about what campaigns need vis-a-vis boots on the ground, knocking on doors, and raising money. She’s right as far as she goes, and that’s why I let her be my boss.
“But I’m the candidate, and I have some additional priorities. I say ‘additional’ — not ‘different.’ Flor is right about needing money, boots and door-knocking. But once you’ve got all that running to the best of your ability, there’s more that I want you to get thinking about. I want you to tell me how technology can help me reach people who would otherwise be beyond my reach. I want you to tell me how technology can transform the way that voters and their representatives collaborate to produce good, accountable government. Every wave of technology, from newspapers to radio to TV, has transformed politics, and not always for the better. Some people think that the Internet is a tool for politicians to raise money or coordinate volunteers, but I don’t think that’s even one percent of what technology can do for politics. I want you to help me figure out the other ninety-nine percent.”
Woah. “Okay,” I said. “Do you want, what, an essay or a website or something?”
He smiled. “Let’s start with a chat, like this one, tomorrow at the end of the day. I’ll have Flor put it in both of our schedules.”
It made me feel good and a little scared — I really didn’t want to let him down, but all I could think of was darknet sites and leaked docs. I wondered what he would say if I told him that I was sitting on more than 800,000 confidential, compromising government memos. But I also remembered what Flor had said: The first time I catch so much as a whiff of anything illegal, immoral, dangerous or ‘leet’ I will personally bounce your ass to the curb before you have a chance to zip your fly.
I went over to Ange’s after work. Jolu had already set up our darknet site and grabbed a copy of the docs off BitTorrent. I’d handed him a USB stick with the key on it, and by the time I got my computer up into a secure mode with a dead man’s switch and an anonymized, private network connection, the site was ready to go.
In fact, it was already going. Jolu had met with Van on his lunch break, and she’d plowed through more than fifty docs while I’d been bringing the Joe for Senate servers’ patch levels up to date. I wondered whether Van had had a chance to talk to Darryl. He’d been my best friend, as tight as a brother, but I hadn’t seen him in months. It was all too weird between us — the fact that he was with Van and that Van had confessed that she’d once had a crush on me; the unwordly fragility of his mind after his time in Gitmo-by-the-Bay; his constant struggle to keep up with even a half-time courseload at Berkeley. I thought of what seeing that nasty little waterboarding PowerPoint would do to Darryl.
It wasn’t just Van working on the docs, either. Jolu had enlisted some of his other trusted friends, people with cryptic handles like Left-Handed Mutant and Endless Vegetables. I hoped Jolu was right to trust them. I hoped he’d been cagey about where the docs had actually come from. Out of curiosity, I googled the strangers’ handles and confirmed to my satisfaction that they didn’t appear to have been used before. It would have been such a basic mistake to recycle a nickname that you’d already used someplace that could be linked to your real identity.
Endless Vegetables was working his (or her) way through a gigantic pile of documents on student loans, judging from the tags and summaries. I vaguely knew that the government guaranteed student loans made by universities, which were sold to banks that collected on them. The darknet docs went into disgusting details — like a series of jokey emails between a congressman who’d gotten a tearful letter from a constituent who’d been hit with crazy penalties that turned her $20,000 loan into a $180,000 loan and an executive at the bank who’d assessed the penalties. The congressman sounded like he was pretty good friends with the banker, and they made it sound like this girl’s problem was hilarious.
Jolu had added an “I’m feeling lucky” button to the spreadsheet that would bring up a random, uncataloged doc. I hit it and found myself looking at a cryptic set of numbers and acronyms. I tried to google the search terms but found myself getting nowhere, so I grabbed another, and then another. It was mesmerizing, like channel surfing on a massive cable network that only got heavy, strange programs about corruption, murder, and sleaze.
“Jeebus H Christmas,” Ange said. “Have a look at the doc I just checked in.”
I resorted the spreadsheet by author and found Ange’s latest contribution, loaded it up. It was an instruction manual for a “lawful intercept” network appliance sold to cops and governments for installation at an Internet Service Provider. The appliance monitored all incoming requests for updates to Android phones, and checked to see if the phone’s owner was on a list of targets. If they were, the appliance took over the network session and sent a fake update to the phone that gave spies and spooks the power to secretly turn on the phone’s GPS, camera, and mic. I stared in mounting horror at the phone on the bed next to me, then flipped it over and took out the battery.
“Keep reading,” Ange said. She’d been following the auto-linked documents and found a bunch of captured emails and phone sessions. One was a complaint from a DHS field operative about a target who’d installed “ParanoidAndroid” on his phone and couldn’t be gotten at.
“What’s ParanoidAndroid?” I asked.
“I’m reading up on that now,” Ange said. “Looks like it’s a fork from the CyanogenMod.” I knew about Cyanogen, of course — hackers had taken the source code for Google’s Android operating system and made a fully free and open version that could do all kinds of cool tricks. “It doesn’t accept updates unless their checksums match with other users and the official releases. Lets you tell whether an update is real or a spoof.”
“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s install it!”
Ange pointed at her phone, which was already cabled to her laptop. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“Do mine next?”
There was more. Other lawful intercept appliances would disguise themselves as iTunes updates for Macs and PCs, and another one worked by sending fake updates to your browser. Then there were the saved emails between a senior DHS IT manager who’d worked at one of these companies before going to Homeland Security. His old boss was explaining how they were using a shell company in Equatorial Guinea — a country I’d never even heard of! — to market their products in China, Iran, and other countries.
It just got worse. Logs of law enforcement requests to install spyware bugs on people involved in peaceful protest groups. Reports of break-ins by suspected criminals who’d used the systems to spy on their victims.
I was trying to figure out how all this stuff could possibly work. After all, software updates usually went over SSL, which used cryptographic certificates to verify the identity of the sender. How were they spoofing connections from Apple and Google and Microsoft and Mozilla?
Oh, that’s how. A search on “certificates lawful intercept” brought up another email exchange, this one with a huge American security company that had one of the “signing certificates” that were trusted by all browsers and operating systems. They’d been supplying blank certificates to the DHS for years, it seemed — certificates that would give the government the power to undetectably impersonate your bank or your company, or Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Ange and I split up the remaining lawful intercept docs, getting deeper and deeper into the terrifying secrets of snoops and spies. Before I knew it, it was 2 A.M. and I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Want to stay over?” Ange said as I yawned for the tenth time in five minutes.
“I think I already have,” I said. We’d started staying over at each other’s houses that summer, and while it had been weird at first (especially over breakfast with the parents!), everyone had gotten used to it. My parents had more important stuff to worry about, and Ange’s mom was just one of those cool grownups who seemed to have an instinctive grasp of what mattered and what didn’t.
University Bookstore: Seattle, WA
This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duane’s a real science fiction fan — I first met him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 — and it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. One great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the “shelf review” — the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited from Duane’s tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore are second to none.
University Bookstore: 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ
Once upon a time, terrorists blew up a bridge in my city and killed over four thousand people. They told me everything changed. They told me that we didn’t have the same rights we used to, because catching terrorists was more important than our little freedoms.
They say they caught the terrorists. One of the guys, who had been killed by a drone in Yemen, supposedly thought the whole thing up. I guess I’m okay with him being dead if that’s the case. I hope it’s the case. No one would show us the proof, of course, because of “national security.”
But “everything is different” turned out to be a demand and not a description. It pretended to describe what the new reality was, but instead it demanded that everyone accept a new reality, one where we could be spied on and arrested and even tortured.
A few years later, everything changed again. It seemed like overnight, no one had jobs anymore, no one had money anymore, and people started to lose their houses. It was weird, because now that it was obvious that everything had changed, no one wanted to talk about how everything had changed.
When the streets are full of armed cops and soldiers telling you that everything is different, everyone can point at one thing, a thing with a human face, and agree, “It’s different, it’s different.”
But when some mysterious social/financial/political force upends the world and changes everything — when “everything is different now” is a description and not a demand — somehow, it gets much harder to agree on whether things are different and what we need to do about it.
It was one thing to demand that the armed guards leave our streets. It was another to figure out how to demand that the silent red overdue bills and sneaky process servers with their eviction notices go away.
I was nearly late getting to work the next day, but I just squeaked in. I’d stolen back one of my T-shirts from Ange’s laundry pile (she liked to steal mine and sleep in them), and it smelled wonderfully of her, and put me in a good mood as I came through the door and made a beeline for my desk.
“Dude!” Liam said, practically bouncing in place by my chair. “Can you believe it?”
“What?” I said.
“You know! The darknet stuff!”
All the blood rushed out of my head and into my gut and swirled there like a stormy ocean. My ears throbbed with my pulse. “What?” I said.
“You didn’t see?”
He leaned over me and moused to my browser, went to the front page of Reddit, a site where you could submit and vote on news stories. Every item on the front page talked about “darknet leaks.” Feeling like I was in a horror movie, I clicked one of them. It was a story on wired.com, about a file that had been anonymously dumped into pastebin.com, instructions for using a lawful intercept appliance to take over Android phones and work their cameras. Whoever had dumped the file had sent an email to a reporter at wired.com saying that there were more than 800,000 documents like it on a darknet site, that volunteers were combing through them, and there was a lot more to come. It didn’t say where they’d come from or who the volunteers were.
I went back to Reddit and checked the others. How many darknet docs had leaked? It seemed like everyone had the same story, in different variants — 800,000 docs, darknet, more to come, but nothing more. I started to calm down.
“You’ve got an Android phone, right?” Liam said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. But I run ParanoidAndroid — it’s an alternate OS that resists that kind of spyware.”
“Really?” Joe said. He’d walked up on us on cats-paw feet while we were talking, and I jumped in my seat. “Woah, sorry, calm down there, Marcus. I’ve got an Android phone, too. Tell you what, I’ll order in pizza for lunch if you’ll give us a workshop on keeping our phones secure. Sounds like the kind of thing we should all know about.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Of course.” Though as soon as I saw the Wired story, I’d started scheming to take lunch off and find a WiFi network with weak, crackable WEP security so that I could hop on, tunnel into the darknet, and try to figure out what had just happened. I mean, I knew better than anyone that there was no such thing as perfect security, and I understood that it was likely that someone, someday, would get a look at the darknet docs who we hadn’t invited in. But I didn’t think that day would be the day after we set up the darknet!
But I couldn’t screw up my job. I’d been desperate for work for so long, and it was such a cool job. The fact that I might now be the target of a ruthless mercenary army didn’t mean that I didn’t have to help Joe get elected.
So I did my job, and when the pizza came, I stood with a slice in one hand and a white-board pen in the other and sketched out a little flowchart of how your phone could be taken over, and what could be done with your phone after it was pwned.
Joe munched thoughtfully at a slice, wiped his fingers and his mouth, and put up his hand. “So you’re saying that the police could take over our phones?”
“No!” Liam said, vibrating in his chair. “He’s saying anyone could –“
I put up my hands and Liam calmed down. “What I mean is, once the intercept appliance is installed at the phone company’s data center, anyone who has a login and password for it could use it.”
“But who has that login and password? The police, yes?”
“Probably not, actually. The leaks suggested that these appliances were managed by the phone company or ISP. So a police officer calls up the lawful intercept technicians and they set it up for him. So the list of anyone who could break into the ISP’s network, anyone who could bribe or blackmail someone at the ISP, anyone who can convincingly pretend to be a police officer to the ISP, anyone who can get a real police officer to give him access, or anyone who can pay someone to do any of the above.”
“So you’re saying that turning anyone’s phone into a superbug is as easy as fixing a parking ticket?”
“I’ve never fixed a parking ticket,” I said. “I don’t drive. Is it hard to fix a parking ticket?”
Joe drummed his fingers on the table. “Not if you’re rich or well connected. Or so I’m told.”
“Yeah,” I said, “rich or well-connected people could turn any phone into a mobile bug. In theory there’s no reason this is limited to Android phones. It could work by pushing out updates to iTunes, or Firefox, or any app. They’d just need a signing certificate and –” I stopped talking, because I’d just remembered that there hadn’t been anything about the signing certificates in the leak. “And things like that. So theoretically, any computer, any phone, anything that updates itself automatically could be turned into a bug once these things are installed.”
My hands were sweating. Joe and the rest of the office might not know what a “signing certificate” was, but Liam did, and he looked like he was committing every word I uttered to memory. “Uh,” I said. “Also, once your computer is infected with this stuff, it’s possible that people other than the police or whoever bugged you will start to watch what you do.”
Joe put his hand up again. “Explain?” he said.
“Oh, well, here’s how it would work. Say I pay someone to bug your computer. Now your computer has some malicious software on it that can, I don’t know, look out your camera, listen to your mic, watch your keystrokes, snatch files off your hard drive, the whole thing. The bug will have some kind of control software, a program that I run to access your computer. Maybe that program lives on a server somewhere else, in which case anyone who breaks into that server can then break into all the infected computers and phones and stuff. Or maybe it lives on your computer, so if I take over your computer, I can jump from it to all the infected computers. But also, if someone figures out that your computer is running the bug, maybe they can connect directly to your computer — like they could hang around outside your house and crack your WiFi password and wait for your computer to log on, and then snag it, or maybe they don’t know who you are and they just sit at Starbucks all day waiting for anyone with the bug to join the network and then they grab the computer’s controls.”
Paranoid commercial interlude
This is the part that always freaks people out, me included. The idea that there’s someone inside your phone, listening, watching. Gives me the creeps just looking at it. There are a lot of libraries that won’t stock ebooks at all because they refuse to give in to the publishers’ demands to use DRM, so they rely on print copies, like the ones you can donate here ). This has the side effect of reducing their patrons’ reliance of spyware-vulnerable machines designed to accommodate the DRM.
When it comes to the commercial editions of my books, you can always be sure that they’re DRM-free. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Lucky for me, my publisher Tor agrees: All of its ebooks are DRM free, always. But when I love a book, I want a hardcopy, something I can shove in a friend’s hand and say, “here, you have to read this.” Either way, I hope you’ll consider buying a copy of this book:
Flor put up her hand. “How realistic is this? I mean, this all sounds pretty scary, but can you give me an idea of how many computers have been infected this way? In the real world, is this something I need to worry about? Or is it like being struck by lightning?”
I shrugged. “I guess I’m the wrong guy to ask about that. I’ve never used this stuff, never shelled out a hundred grand for one of these boxes. I’m guessing if the police buy them, they must use them. I mean, you could think of this as HIV. Your computer has an immune system, all the passwords and so forth that stop it from being taken over by parasites. Once it’s bugged, it’s got a compromised immune system. So parasites can come in and infect it.” I thought a moment. I was calming down. No, that’s not right, I was just excited now, and not scared, because it was kind of cool that everyone in the office was hanging on my every word. It made me feel important and smart. “Actually, it’s like the network has an immune system, including things like Internet Service Providers who don’t conspire to trick your computer into downloading malicious software. When your ISP’s router tells you a file is coming from Google or Apple or Mozilla, your computer assumes that that’s where the packets are coming from. But once you start monkeying with that, once you create a procedure that tells ISPs to start secretly lying to their customers, well, it seems to me like you can expect that to start happening.”
“So what do we do?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, for Android, that’s easy. It’s open and free, which means Google has to publish the source code for the operating system. A group of privacy hackers have created an alternate version called ParanoidAndroid that checks a bunch of places every time it gets an update and tries to figure out how trustworthy it is. It used to be really hard to install, but it keeps on getting easier. I’ve made up a little installer script that you can download from the intranet that makes it even simpler. Just plug in your Android phone and run the script and it should just work. Let me know if it doesn’t.”
“But how do we know we can trust your script?” Flor said. “Maybe you’re bugging us all.”
Liam practically leapt to his feet: “Marcus would never do that –“
I had to laugh. “No, she’s right. You’re right, Flor. You’ve got no reason to trust me. I’ve only been here a couple of days. I mean, you guys asked me to work here, so it’s not likely that I’d have planned to take over this place with malicious software, but maybe I’m the kind of guy who goes around doing it all the time.” I thought about it. “So, you could google everything I just told you and download ParanoidAndroid yourself — but maybe I planted all that information there for Google to find. I guess it all depends on how paranoid you’re feeling.”
“I’m feeling moderately paranoid, with a side of prudence and common sense,” Joe announced, getting a laugh. “I’ll install it. Then what do I do?”
“Nothing, unless your phone throws a warning about an update. Then you can google it or ask me, or rely on your own judgment. There’s a paranoia flag for Ubuntu Linux, too, if any of you are running that — it’ll tell you if an update doesn’t match up with the fingerprints on the public servers. Sorry, but I don’t know about anything comparable for Mac or Windows.” I stood with my hands folded again. “Is there any more pizza?”
Jolu threw a little instant browser chat app up on darknet for us, and started it off with
> ALL RIGHT, WHO SPILLED THE BEANS? FIRST RULE OF DARKNET IS NO ONE TALKS ABOUT DARKNET -Swollen Rabbit
“Swollen Rabbit” was the handle he’d chosen for himself — he’d also put up a nickname generator to help us all choose random, single-use, cool-sounding handles for the system.
I felt like he wasn’t taking this very seriously — all those caps and the jokey tone. We were dealing with a plutonium spill and he was treating it like a minor nuisance.
> This is serious folks. Swollen Rabbit, are you sure it was a leak from one of us and not a break-in? -Nasty Locomotive
> it’s impossible to be sure but yeah. I’ve been over the logs and I don’t see anyone except us. Maybe someone’s got a screenlogger infection or something? -Swollen Rabbit
Oh yeah, of course. Maybe we were bugged. That’d be a weird form of humor: to use a bug to spy on someone who’d found a leak about bugs and then leak the leak to the press using the bug… It was weird enough that it made me feel dizzy if I thought about it enough. I decided to fall back on Occam’s Razor. The idea that someone blabbed was a lot simpler.
> I know I can trust you and the rest of our crew and Tasty Ducks
— that was Ange —
> but what about all your friends? -Nasty Locomotive
> Wait why should we trust YOUR crew? Who died and made you infallible? -Restless Agent
That was one of the people Jolu had brought in, though I didn’t know anything else about him (or her). Jolu and I had decided it’d be better if we kept everything on a need-to-know basis. I didn’t need to know who Restless Agent was, just that the handle represented someone Jolu trusted utterly.
But Jolu or no, I found myself getting ready to clobber this Restless Agent person. How dare anyone call Darryl and Van and Ange and me into question? Ange, meanwhile, had already read the message on her screen. She was sitting cross-legged on my bed, hair in her eyes, bent over her laptop. As soon as my fingers began to pound angrily on the keyboard, she said, “Woah there, hoss. Calm down.”
“But –” I said.
“I know, I know. Someone is wrong on the Internet. Count to ten. In ternary.”
“One. Two. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Twenty. Twenty one. Twenty two. One hundred. One oh one. One oh two.” I stopped. “Wait, I lost count. Is one-oh-two ten or eleven?” I could count in binary when I was angry, but counting in ternary — base three — took too much concentration. “Fine, you win. I’m calm.”
> You’re right, you can’t. -Tasty Ducks
> You don’t know us and we don’t know you. And we can’t keep this up if someone here is showing off by letting blabby writers into the darknet. So what do we do? Shut it down? -Tasty Ducks
> I could turn on logging and make it visible to everyone. Then we’d know who got to see every document. If a doc leaked we’d have the list of everyone who saw it. If enough docs leaked we’ll be able to narrow down the list and find the one person who saw everything -Swollen Rabbit
> Assuming only one person is blabbing -Nasty Locomotive
> Yeah maybe we’re all running our mouths -Poseidon Snake
That was another of Jolu’s buddies.
> Logging sounds like a good plan. If we can all see what everyone’s done, it’ll keep us all honest -Nasty Locomotive
> Unless I’m the rat in which case I could be editing the logs and you suckers would never know -Swollen Rabbit
> Ell Oh Ell. You’re such a comedian. If you’re the rat we’re all dead meat. Don’t be the rat, dude -Tasty Ducks
“All right, fine, that’s settled for now,” I said. “Thanks for keeping me from turning into Angry Internet Man.”
“Any time. It was kind of weak for you to just say ‘how can we trust your friends’ where everyone could see it.”
I wanted to argue, but it wasn’t really an arguable point. After all, I’d lost my cool when Restless Agent did exactly the same thing.
“Yeah, okay, fine.” I paged up and down through the monster spreadsheet with its 800,000-plus rows. “So what are we going to read through today, anyway?”
“More of the lawful intercept stuff, I guess. There’s hundreds more suggested docs. Since the story’s out there, it’d make sense to find out more.”
“Okay,” I said. “You take suggested docs from the first half, I’ll take the ones from 400,000 onward. My mom says you’re welcome to stay for dinner, by the way.”
“Deal,” she said, and we got to work.
One thing about the darknet docs I should probably mention: they were mostly unbelievably boring. Rows of numbers. Indecipherable memos written in bureaucratic jargon, laden with acronyms and names of people and agencies I’d never heard of. It was tempting to skip over these and look for juicy ones — or at least ones I could understand — but every so often I’d find something that made some other doc make sense, a piece of the puzzle falling into place, and I’d be glad I’d read it.
For example, there was a list from the San Francisco Unified School District about schools that had participated in a “laptop anti-theft trial” that had run the year before. It used some kind of phone-home software on all the school-issued laptops that checked in with the school district every day or two. The district used it to track down stolen laptops — getting IP addresses from the software and turning them over to the cops. I noted without much interest that Chavez High was on the list of trial sites, the name standing out immediately, seeing as how I’d carried a backpack with the school’s name through four years of attendance.
But ten or fifteen documents later, I found myself looking at a brochure for a product called LaptopLock, which was the product used in the trials. I wondered why Jolu’s algorithm had tagged this stuff as relevant to the lawful intercept documents — which keywords had made it jump out. It turned out that the matching words were “covert activation” and “webcam.” “Covert activation” was self-explanatory — if you had software that phoned home after a laptop was stolen, you wouldn’t want it to advertise that that was what it was doing. “Attention thief: I am about to tell the police your IP address. Do you want me to continue? [OK] [CANCEL].”
But why would you want to activate the webcam on a stolen laptop? I paged through the brochure. Oh, right, to take pictures of the thief. The software could covertly activate the webcam — turn it on without turning on the little “camera on” light — take a pic and silently send it back to the school board. Well that was creepy. I wondered if any students had ever found a password and login and used that little “feature” to spy on other students. My laptop sat open on my desk all the time — when I was sleeping, when I was getting dressed, when Ange and I were —
So then I went digging for more docs. I had a product name now, something I could use to search on, and hoo-boy were there a lot of hits for LaptopLock in the darknet docs. I did my sort-by-date trick and found myself reading through emails from a worried IT manager at the San Francisco Unified to her boss about the fact that there was a principal who was using LaptopLock’s administrative interface to watch students — not laptop thieves — at all sorts of hours, including early in the morning (when they might be getting dressed), and late at night (when they might be sleeping).
The IT manager had looked at the principal’s shared-drive folder and found thousands of pics of students and their families, sometimes naked, sometimes asleep. There was also audio and video of students and their parents having private conversations. The IT manager’s boss was furious — because the IT manager wasn’t supposed to be “snooping” on school principals. The argument got more and more vicious, as the IT manager pointed out that her snooping was nothing compared to this principal, and ended with the IT manager’s resignation letter. I felt bad for her — she was an honorable geek, and it wasn’t easy to find new jobs in this bad old modern world of ours.
It wasn’t just the San Francisco United School Board where a principal got a little power-crazy with the old LaptopLock control panel. It turns out that pretty much every school district had someone (or a few people) in positions of power who felt that spying on students was part of their job. But in the case of the San Francisco Unified School District, that someone was a certain school board member named Fred Benson.
Once upon a time, Fred had been a vice principal at Chavez High, and from that lordly height, he’d presided like a warden or a king, doling out harsh justice against anyone who offended his delicate sense of conservative morality.
Such as, ahem, me.
But old Fred had “retired” when it became clear that San Francisco and California were no longer going to put up with a city occupied by the forces of “law and order” — that is, the torturing, kidnapping, lying paramilitary who’d taken the city hostage in the name of “protecting us from terrorism.” It had been so sad to see him pack up his desk and hit the bricks, just another casualty of the war on the war on terror.
But Fred was a retired athlete, the kind of thrusting, vigorous guy who just can’t take it easy. He’d run for the school board — unopposed, except for a crank candidate who’d been convicted of three counts of felony fraud in a real estate swindle, who nevertheless got nearly half the vote — and had been collecting a tidy public salary and enjoying his ascent to the exalted pinnacle of the education system by bossing around teachers and trying to impose his “leadership style” on the whole school district.
In case you didn’t catch it, I don’t like this guy.
But even I was surprised to discover that old Fred was such a prolific user of the district’s LaptopLock system. After all, he wasn’t responsible for students at all, but look at that, he requested so many specific LaptopLock activations that the district’s IT department had given him his own login, to save on work. Someone in that department wasn’t happy about it, and that person had helpfully logged Fred’s many, many, many uses of the system.
Did I say uses? I mean abuses.
“Come on, we’ve got to leak this,” I said. “I mean, come on, Ange. Seriously? You don’t think I should go public with this?”
“No, Marcus, I think it’s a really stupid idea. You’ve just got through yelling at everyone about a leak. Once you do it, everyone’ll do it. We agreed that we’d catalog the whole dump, decide on the highest priority stuff, then publish it in a way that kept us all safe. If you get us all busted tomorrow, Masha and Zeb are doomed. Hell, we’re doomed. You don’t have any right to put us all in jeopardy just to settle a score with some vice principal you have a hate-on for.”
“He’s a Peeping Tom! It’s not just a personal vendetta. People have the right to know that this guy is spying on their kids. That could have been me, Ange. I’ve still got friends at Chavez High, kids that Benson hates — you can bet he’s all over them, night and day.”
“You’re just picturing him sitting in his house and rubbing his hands and getting off on all his power and secrecy, admit it. Benson’s not the worst monster in these files. Look at what the others have been up to. Look at 439,412.”
I scrolled to the line, read the summary:
STATE DEPARTMENT BILL OF LADING. FREIGHT FORWARDING FOR LAWFUL INTERCEPT APPLIANCE TO SYRIA. SEE 298,120
And 298,120:
EMBASSY STAFF INTELLIGENCE REPORT ON TORTURE-MURDER OF DISSIDENTS CAUGHT WITH LAWFUL INTERCEPT APPLIANCE
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh. So cut it out. Maintain discipline. This isn’t kid’s stuff, it’s the big leagues.”
And before I had a chance to get angry with her — really angry, the kind of angry you get when you’ve been totally wrong and someone calls you out and you don’t have any excuse so you get mad instead — my mom called up the stairs, “Marcus, Ange, time for supper!”
There’d been a time when we’d had “family dinner” practically every night — either something that my mom or dad cooked in a huge frenzy of pots, pans, clatter, and smells, or, if everyone was too tired, something from a delivery restaurant. I’d even been known to cook from time to time, and I liked it, though it took a lot of energy to get started. Facing down the empty kitchen always seemed like a major chore. But I made a mean rack of lamb, and when I cooked pizza, there weren’t ever any leftovers, no matter how much I made.
Family dinners had evaporated along with my parents’ jobs. The contract work they got in pieces sometimes kept one or another away at suppertime, but the real reason was that they were trapped in the house together all day, and half the time I was there with them, and so no one much wanted to spend an hour at the table playing pass-the-peas. There just wasn’t much small talk available to us. “How was your day?” was a painfully stupid question when the farthest apart you’ve been since getting up is about five yards.
But everyone put in an effort when Ange came over. My parents really liked her. Hey, so did I. Plus it was fun to watch her eat.
“Smells great!” she said as she came into the kitchen, as she always did. She already had her mister in her hand. When I’d met her, she was mixing up her chili oil at about 200,000 Scovilles, as hot as a mild Scotch Bonnet Pepper. But she was always in training, working her way up to higher heights of culinary daring. She mixed up a new batch of oil once a month, starting with a lethal, tight-stoppered bottle of crushed Red Savina Habanero in a few ounces of oil. She diluted this a little less every month, playing with the levels until it was just right. For Ange, “just right” was the temperature that made sweat appear on her upper lip within a minute of putting a drop of oil on her tongue.
A couple times a year, she’d actually taken the temperature of her oil, mixing a little alcohol in with her month’s dose, then progressively diluting it in sugar water until she could barely taste the heat. The last time she checked, she’d been up to 320,000 Scovilles. It was around then that I started insisting that she brush her teeth between her eating and us kissing. I was starting to get chemical burns on my lips.
“It’s just chips and sausages,” Mom said. “Proper British comfort food, you know.”
“Cooked by an American, no less,” Dad said from the stove.
“Oi! I put the chips in the oven, didn’t I?” Mom said. When Mom says “chips,” she’s speaking British and means “fries” — specifically the sweet potato oven fries she makes herself and freezes. I have to admit, they’re pretty awesome.
“Yes, my dear, you certainly did. Plus, you supervised.”
Dad set down the platter of faintly sizzling meat on the table. He once did some freelance work helping an organic meat cooperative with its data mining and ecommerce tuning, and when he’d written to them asking if they had anything else for him, they’d taken pity on him and offered to sell him some meat at employee rates. So we had all the emu, venison, and buffalo sausage we could want, as often as we wanted. I especially liked the venison, which tasted very good, assuming you didn’t think too much about Bambi while you ate it.
Dad went back to turn off the stove’s extractor fan, which had been humming loudly while it sucked out all the delicious meaty smoke and steam. Then he smacked himself in the forehead. “Wait, Ange, you’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?”
I hid a smile. Ange had gone veggie at the start of the summer, but Burning Man had brought out her inner carnivore — especially the trips to camps where they were handing out kick-ass barbecue.
“It’s okay,” Ange said. “Beef is just a highly processed form of vegetable matter.”
“Riiiight,” Dad said, and forked a couple of sausages onto her plate before sitting down himself.
It felt curiously wonderful to be having dinner as a family again, with a big plateful of food in front of me and my parents making bright conversation as though they weren’t in a mild, continuous panic about the mortgage and the grocery bill.
But it couldn’t last. I had to say something stupid.
“I saw the coolest thing the other day,” I said. “It was from a history of crypto in World War II and there was this chapter on the history of cipher machines — Enigmas and such — at Bletchley Park, in England.”
“Which ones were they again?” Mom said.
“The ones the Nazis used to scramble their messages,” Dad said. “Even I know that.”
“Sorry,” Mom said. “I’m a little rusty on my Nazi gadgets.”
“Actually,” Ange said, swallowing a huge mouthful of buffalo sausage, “the Enigmas weren’t exactly ‘Nazi.’ They were developed in the Netherlands, and sold as a commercial product to help bankers scramble their telegrams.”
“Right, I said. “And all the Axis powers used them. So the first generations of these were, you know, beautiful. Just really well made by some totally badass engineers, copying the Dutch models, but after adding a bunch of cool tricks so they’d produce harder-to-break ciphers. There were about ten iterations of these things, the Enigma and its successors, and they kept on adding rotors and doing other stuff to make them stronger. But at the same time, they were using up all their best raw materials on killing people. So by the end of the war, you’ve got this box with twelve rotors, up from the original three, but it’s made of sandwich metal and looks, I don’t know, boringly functional, without any of that flair and craftsmanship of the first generation. I guess they were in a pretty bad mood by then. They probably spent half their time overseeing slave labor or tending the death-camp adding machines. So, basically, everything elegant and beautiful in these things was just sucked out by the war, until all that was left was something you wouldn’t call ‘beautiful’ unless you were totally insane.”
“Woah,” Ange said. “Symbolic.”
I play-punched her in the shoulder. “It was, doofus. It was like a little illustration of the collapse of everything good in a society. I’ll show you the pictures later. Those first-gen machines were awesome, just amazingly made. They were like works of art. The last versions looked like they’d been built by someone who was absolutely miserable. You’ll see.”
Mom and Dad didn’t say anything. I didn’t think much of it, then I saw a silent tear slip down Dad’s cheek. I felt weirdly ashamed and embarrassed. Dad got up wordlessly from the table and went to the bathroom, came back a few minutes later. None of us said anything while he was gone, and the silence continued after he got back, his face freshly washed and still slightly damp.
He ate a few mouthfuls and said, quietly, “Amazing how a society can just slide into the crapper, huh?”
Mom gave a brittle laugh. “I don’t think it’s as bad as all that, Drew.”
He put his fork down and chewed and chewed and chewed at his food, chewed like he was angry at it. The words that came out after he swallowed had a choked, tight feel. “Isn’t it? There were three more foreclosures on our street today, Lillian. Today. And as for slave labor, just think about how much of what we own is stamped ‘Made in China,’ and how much of our ‘Made in the USA’ came out of a prison somewhere.”
“Drew –” Mom said.
“Marcus, Ange, I’m very sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay Dad,” I began.
“No, I mean I’m sorry that you’ve inherited such a miserable, collapsing old country. A place where rich bankers own everything, where you’ve got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don’t get sick, where –“
He clamped his lips shut and looked away. I’d seen a bill on Mom’s desk from a health insurance company warning us that we’d lose our coverage if we didn’t make a payment. I’d tried not to think too hard about it.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said again. His skin had gone pale beneath his beard, and it made the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and in his neck stand out. He looked twenty years older than he had at the start of dinner.
“Cheer up, Drew,” Mom said. “Honestly, it could be much worse. There’s plenty who’d be grateful for our problems. Let’s have a glass of wine and watch The Daily Show, all right? I PVRed it.” When my parents got rid of their cable box, I’d built them a cheapie PVR using MythTV and an old PC. It only worked with the few HD broadcast channels that aired in San Francisco, but it automatically converted the files so they could play on our phones and laptops, and snipped out all the commercials.
Dad looked down and didn’t say anything.
“Come on, Ange,” I said. We were pretty much through with dinner anyway. And there were darknet docs to plow through.
Mysterious Galaxy: San Diego and Rendondo Beach, CA
This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California, and Redondo Beach, CC. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I’ve been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers’ Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and when I’ve stopped in LA on tour. Every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they’ll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I’ve never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA, USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
2810 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach, CA 90278 +1 310 542 6000
If you ever want to blow your own mind, sit down and think hard about what “randomness” means.
I mean, take pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Everyone who’s passed sixth-grade math knows that pi is an “irrational” number. It has no end, and it never repeats (as far as we know):
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273 724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609…
And so on. With a short computer program, you can compute pi all day long. Hell, you can compute it to the heat-death of the universe.
You can grab any thousand digits of pi and about a hundred of them will be 1s, a hundred will be 2s, and so on. But there’s no pattern within those digits. pick any digit of pi — digit 2,670, which happens to be 0. The next digit happens to be 4, then 7, then 7, then two 5s. If you were rolling a ten-sided die and you got these outcomes, you’d call it random. But if you know that 047755 are the values for the 2,670th – 2,675th digits of pi, then you’d know that the next “dice roll” would be 5 (again!). Then 1. Then 3. Then 2.
This isn’t “random.” It’s predictable. You may not know exactly what “random” means (I certainly don’t!), but whatever “random” means, it doesn’t mean “predictable,” right?
So it would be crazy to call pi a “random number,” even though it has a bunch of random-like characteristics.
So what about some other number? What if you asked your computer to use some kind of pseudorandom algorithm to spit up some grotendous number like this: 2718281828459045235360287471352662497757. Is that random?
Well, not really. That also happens to be a number called “e,” which is sometimes called “Napier’s constant.” Never mind what “e” means, it’s complicated. The point is that e is a number like Pi. Every digit in it can be predicted.
How about if your random-number generator gave you this number:
222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
Is that random?
Well, duh. No.
Why isn’t it random? Because if I said, “What’s the one hundredth digit of a number that consists of a thousand twos?” you’d know the answer. You wouldn’t be surprised.
It turns out a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a decent definition of “random.” One of the best definitions anyone’s ever come up with is “A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down.”
If you just went lolwut, don’t panic. This is hard, but cool. So, take our friend pi again. You could write a program to print out pi in, like two hundred characters. Maybe less. pi itself is infinite, which is a lot more than two hundred characters long. So the simplest way to express pi is definitely to write the “print out pi program” and not to write out all the infinite digits of pi.
And if pi is easy, “222222222222222222222222222222222222222222” and so on is really easy. In python, it’d be: “print ”.join([‘2’]*42)”. Perl’s more compact: “print 2×42”. But even in verbose old BASIC, a programming language that’s so flowery and ornate it’s practically Shakespearean, it’s:
10 PRINT “2” 20 GOTO 10 30 END
That’s thirty characters, which is shorter than 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 to infinity. A lot shorter. So if we mean a random number is a surprising one — one that has no easily expressed pattern or structure, then we can say that:
A number is “random” if the shortest program you can write to print that number out is longer than the number itself.
This has a neat compactness to it, the ring of a good rule: short, punchy and to the point. A guy named Gregory Chaitin came up with this neat rule, then he came up with a hell of a twist on it. He was so proud of this feat that he mailed a paper to one of math’s great mad geniuses, a guy called Kurt Godel (pronounced “Girdle,” more or less) and messed everything up by asking, “How do you know whether you’ve come up with the shortest program for printing out a number?”
Which was a good point. Programmers are always coming up with novel ways of solving problems, after all. And there may be some hidden pattern to a number you didn’t even realize was there. Say I asked you to write a program to print out this number:
6464126002437968454377733902647251281941632007684873625176406596754069362175887930785591647877727473927200291034294956244766130820072925073452917076422662104767303786316995423745511745652202278332409680352466766319086101120674585628731741351116229207886513294124481547162818207987716834634132236223411778823102765982510935889235916205510876329808799316517252893800123781743489683215159056249334737020683223210011863739577056747386710217321237522432524162635803437625360680866916357159455152781780392177432282343663377281118639051189307590166665074295275838400854463541931719053136365972490515840910658220181473479902235906713814690511605192230126948231611341743994471483304086248426913950233671341242512386402665725813094396762193965540738652422989787978219863791829970955792474732030323911641044590690797786231551834959303530592378981751589145765040802510947912342175848284188195013854616568030175503558005494489488487135160537559340234574897951660244233832140603009593710558845705251570426628460035
Look all you want, you probably won’t find any pattern at all (if you do, it’s a product of your imagination). So is it random? Nope. It’s part of pi: digits 100,000-101,000, to be specific. Now you can write a very short program to print out that number: just add a line to the “print out pi” program that says, “only start printing when you get to the 100,000th digit, and stop 1,000 digits later.”
What Chaitin realized was that no one could ever know for sure whether a sufficiently long, interesting number could be printed out with a program shorter than it. That is, you could never tell whether any big number was random or not. In fact, maybe there were no random numbers. He called this “incompleteness” as in “You can never be completely sure you know if a number is random.”
Godel was already famous for the idea of “incompleteness,” the idea that mathematical systems couldn’t prove themselves. Chaitin saw incompleteness in the way we thought about random numbers, too.
As far as anyone knows, he was right. We basically can never know whether something is random or totally predictable. He is one of mathematics’s great smartasses.
Fun fact: Godel went crazy at the end of his life and became convinced that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and ended up starving himself to death. No one knows exactly why he went crazy, but I sometimes wonder if all that uncertainty drove him around the bend.
I didn’t leak the docs on LaptopLock. Neither did Ange. Neither did Jolu. According to the logs, we were the only ones that had touched them.
But they leaked anyway.
Of course, Liam knew about it before I did. He pretty much ran over to my desk as soon as he saw the story on Reddit. “You went to Chavez High, right?”
“Uh, yeah?”
“Did you know this Fred Benson skeeze?”
He didn’t have to say anything else, really. By that point, I knew exactly what this had to be about. But it was worse than that. The pastebin dumps of the stuff about LaptopLock were all headed “DARKNET DOC ______” with the number of the document. The highest-numbered LaptopLock document happened to be 745,120, and several people had already noted this and concluded that somewhere out there, there was a site called “darknet docs” with at least 745,120 documents on it.
We were blown.
“It’s amazing, right? I mean, can you believe it? I wonder what else they’ve got?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Huh. Wow.”
Liam dragged a chair over to my desk. He put his head close to mine. He smelled of Axe body spray, which may just be the most disgusting scent known to humankind.
“Marcus,” he said, in a low voice, “dude. You remember yesterday, when you were talking about root certs and stuff? It sounded like maybe you knew more about the subject than you were letting on.”
“Did it.”
“I mean, look, you’re Marcus Yallow. If there’s a darknet, you’ve gotta be all over that shit, yo. I mean, seriously, dude.” He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I never knew what to say when someone ended a sentence with “yo.” They always seemed to be acting out some script for a bromance comedy movie that I hadn’t had a chance to see. But Liam was so excited he was shaking a little. “Come on, hook me up, man.”
Ah, there it was. Liam wasn’t stupid. He was enthusiastic and a little immature, but he listened carefully and knew that 10 plus 10 equaled 100 (in binary, at least). His heart was in the right place. And Jolu had brought his friends into the darknet clubhouse. But I couldn’t just randomly start signing up overenthusiastic puppies like Liam without talking to everyone else. Especially as there appeared to be someone in our base, possibly killing our doodz.
“Liam, I seriously, totally, honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Really? Like pinky-swear really?”
“Cross my eyes and hope to fry. I don’t even have a Reddit account. I can’t believe how much stuff they’ve dug up on the administrators who were using LaptopLock.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Liam said, already forgetting his conviction that I was the ringleader of some leak-gang in his excitement at the awesome power of the Internet hivemind. “You should see what happens when Anon d0xxes someone.”
I knew about Anonymous — the weird non-group that was an offshoot of /b/, the messageboard on 4chan where everyone was anonymous and the name of the game was to be as humorously offensive as possible. I knew that they kept spinning out these sub-groups that did something brave or stupid or vicious (or all three), like getting thousands of people to knock PayPal offline in protest of PayPal cutting off Wikileaks. I knew that they had some incredibly badass hackers in their orbit, as well as plenty of kids who drifted in and out without knowing much about computers or politics, but who liked the camaraderie or the power or the lulz (or all three).
But I can’t say as I spent a lot of time on them. I’d had my time in the cyberguerrilla underground and I had decided I didn’t want anymore to do with it, especially when it came to crazy, impossible-to-describe “movements” that spent as much time squabbling among themselves as they did fighting for freedom and lulz.
“D0xxes,” I said, trying to remember what it meant.
“Yeah, they get really righteously pissed at someone and they d0x them, dig up all the documents they can about them that they can find — court records, property records, marriage, birth and death, school records, home address, work address, phone number, news dumps… everything. It’s insane, like the DHS turned inside out, all that weird crap all the different agencies and companies and search engines know about you, just, like, hanging out there, all of it where the search engines can find it, forever. The stuff they found about your douchey old vice principal is nothing, man. If Anon gets on this tip, bam, it’s going to be sick.”
Now I remembered what d0xxing meant. Yikes. “Do you ever wonder if there’s anyone else who can do that sort of thing?”
“What do you mean? Like the cops or the FBI or something?”
“Well, I mean, sure, yeah, of course they can do all this stuff.” And more, I thought, imagining what you might dig up with a lawful intercept appliance. “But what about, I don’t know, some CEO? Or a private military contractor?”
“You mean, is there someone like Anonymous out there, but doing it for the money instead of the lulz? Like hackers for hire or whatever? Oh, man, I’m totally sure there are. It’s not like you have to be an angel or a genius to learn how to do an SQL injection or crack a crappy password file. I bet you half the creeps who used to give me noogies at recess are laughing it up at private intelligence outfits these days.”
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered how many of those particular kinds of creeps were drawing a paycheck from Carrie Johnstone and whether any of them might be hanging out in our darknet, messing with our heads.
I took a long lunch (feeling like a total slacker for grabbing extra time off on my third day at work) and asked Ange and Jolu to meet me in South Park, which was about the same distance from Ange’s school and Jolu’s and my offices. It was a slightly scuzzy little park right in the middle of SoMa — south of Market — but it had been ground zero for a whole ton of dotcom start-ups and tech companies and it was always full of the right kind of nerds. I felt comfortable there.
Jolu arrived first, looking cool and grown-up as usual. A couple of the people eating their lunches on the benches around us recognized him and waved at him.
“How do you do it?” I said when he sat down.
“What?” he said, smiling like he and I were in on some enormous joke together.
“I don’t know; how are you so cool? I’m crapping myself over this darknet stuff, I look like I dressed myself in the dark, I can’t figure out how to cut my hair so I don’t look fifteen years old, and you, you’re so totally, I don’t know, you know, styling.”
He gave me that easy smile again. “I don’t know, Marcus. I used to be kind of anxious all the time, did I look “cool,” was I going to get in trouble, was the world going to end or whatever? And then one day, I just thought, You know, whatever’s happening, I’m not going to improve it by having a total spazz attack. So I decided to just stop. And I did.”
“You’re a Zen master, you know that?”
“You should try it, pal. You’re looking a little freaked out, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Well, you know: ‘When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'”
“Yeah, I’ve heard you say that before. I guess what I’m asking is, how’s that working out for you?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed my hands on my jeans. “Not so good.”
“Why don’t you try just cooling it down for a minute or two, see if you can’t get your head right before this all kicks off?”
If it had been anyone except Jolu, I might have been offended, but I’d known Jolu forever, and he knew me as well as anyone in the world. I remembered that feeling I’d had in the temple that time I’d lain in the dust among the gongs and the Omm, the total peace and calm that had washed over me like a warm bath. I could remember how that felt, but I couldn’t feel it — the harder I chased it, the more elusive it felt.
Jolu put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a gentle shake. “Easy there, hoss. Don’t sprain anything. You look like you’re getting ready to kung-fu my ass. This is about relaxing, not stressing out. If it’s hard, you’re doing something wrong.”
I actually felt really bad, like I’d failed at something. To cover up for it, I kind of hammed it up, putting my face in my hands and acting like I was experiencing some kind of artistic torment.
“Don’t sweat it, Marcus. Just something to keep in mind, all right? There’s the stuff that’s happening out there in the world, which we only have limited control over, and the stuff that’s happening in our heads, which we can have total control over — in theory, at least. I’ve noticed that you spend a lot of time trying to change the outside world, but not much energy on changing how the outside world makes your inside world feel. I’m not saying you should give up on changing the world, but you might try doing a little of both for a while, see what happens.”
He was smiling when he said it, and I knew he wasn’t trying to be a dick, but it still made me feel ashamed. I guess because I knew he was right. All my life, people had been telling me to chill out, calm down, take it easy, but for some reason, taking it easy was hard, while freaking out came naturally.
He looked worried now. “Okay, forget I said anything. I only brought it up because you asked. Let’s talk about the current situation, right? As in, what the hell’s going on with the darknet? Who’s reading over our shoulders? What are they up to?”
“Good,” I said. I was relieved by the change of subject.
“Start with the process of elimination, because we need to start somewhere. The logs say no one but me, you, and Ange accessed those docs. Are you sure Ange didn’t leak them? Don’t get mad, okay? It’s just about covering all the bases.”
“Yeah, I get t
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-Maseru-
What you need to know about Maseru
Maseru is the capital and largest city of Lesotho. It is also the capital of the Maseru District. Located on the Caledon River, Maseru lies directly on the Lesotho-South Africa border. Maseru is Lesotho’s capital city with a population of 330,760 in the 2016 census. The city was established as a police camp and assigned as the capital after the country became a British protectorate in 1869. When the country achieved independence in 1966, Maseru retained its status as capital. The name of the city is a Sesotho word meaning “red sandstones”.
Maseru is a landlocked country encircled by South Africa. The city is on the Caledon River. Traditional crafts feature at the cone-shaped Basotho Hat, a shop and information center. On the Thaba Bosiu plateau, east of the city, are ruins dating from the 19th-century reign of King Moshoeshoe. Thaba Bosiu overlooks Mount Qiloane, a conical mountain that is one of the nation’s symbols.
Population: 519 186 (2016)
Area: 138 km²
The Loti (plural: maLoti) is the currency of the Kingdom of Lesotho. It is subdivided into 100 Lisente (sg. Sente). It is pegged to the South African rand on a 1:1 basis through the Common Monetary Area, and both are accepted as legal tender within Lesotho.
Maseru has a subtropical highland climate (Cwb, according to the Köppen climate classification), categorised by warm, rainy summers and cool to chilly, dry winters. The average mean daily temperature during summer — from December to March in the Southern Hemisphere — is 22 °C (72 °F). During winter, between June and September, the average temperature is 9 °C (48 °F). The hottest month is January, with temperatures between 15 and 33 °C (59 and 91 °F). During the coldest month, July, the temperatures range from −3 to 17 °C (27 to 63 °F). The average rainfall ranges from 3 mm in July to 111 mm (4.4 inches) in January.
Maseru is located in northwest Lesotho by the South African border, denoted by the Mohokare River. The two countries are connected by a border post at the Maseru Bridge, which crosses the river. On the South African side, Ladybrand is the town closest to Maseru. The city lies in a shallow valley at the foot of the Hlabeng-Sa-Likhama, foothills of the Maloti Mountains.The elevation of the city is listed as 1,600 metres (5,200 ft) above sea level. The city has an area of around 138 square kilometres (53 sq mi).
The commerce in the city is centered on two neighboring central business districts, which have developed around Kingsway and serve as major employment centres. The western business district holds larger office buildings, department stores and several banks. The eastern business district hosts mainly smaller businesses, markets and street vendors.[1] The central business districts are the largest employment centers within the city.[1]
Maseru’s economy is one that is growing at a very rapid speed, which is notable particularly in terms of foreign investment and tourism since independence from Britain, and economic ruin when political violence broke out in 1998. Since the riots the city has worked hard to undo the damage caused.
Maseru’s industry is split into two main areas. The one to the north of the central business districts along Moshoeshoe Road holds flour mills and other major companies. The other industrial sector lies to the south of the central business districts, at the Thetsane district, and houses mainly textile and footwear companies.[1]
Up until 2004 Maseru had a growing textile industry supported by and invested in by Chinese manufacturing concerns. Since the expiration of the Multi Fibre Arrangement the textile industry in Lesotho has diminished.[14] The city’s products once included candles, carpets and mohair products but these have been overshadowed by South African industries.
A railway line, built in 1905, bridges the Mohokare River to connect Maseru with Marseilles on South Africa’s Bloemfontein–Bethlehem main line.
Kingsway, the road joining the former Leabua Jonathan Airport, now Mejametalana Airport and the Royal Palace in Maseru, was the first paved road in Lesotho. Having previously been just a dirt path, it was renovated in 1947 for the visit of members of the British Royal Family. It remained the only paved road in the country until Lesotho’s independence in 1966. Two main roads lead outside of Maseru, Main North 1 to the northeast and Main South 1 to the southeast toward Mazenod and Roma. The South African N8 road leads from the Maseru Bridge border post west towards Ladybrand and Bloemfontein.
An international airport called the Moshoeshoe I International Airport is nearby, at Thoteng-ea-Moli, Mazenod. The National University of Lesotho is located in Roma, 32 kilometres (20 mi) from Maseru.
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Vancouver, BC, Canada – The Royal Architecture Institute of Canada (RAIC) announced today that MGA | Michael Green Architecture has been awarded two Governor General’s Medals in Architecture, the highest distinction given to an architectural project in Canada. The awards recognize the firm’s design of Ronald McDonald House BC & Yukon and the Wood Innovation and Design Centre – two milestone projects that represent MGA’s passion and commitment to community through meaningful architecture and innovation.
“The recipients of these awards are among Canada’s finest architects,” said His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada. “I’m delighted to see such deserving projects being recognized and I offer my sincere congratulations to the recipients.”
The awards build on national recognition for MGA’s work, including a 2015 RAIC Innovation Award and previous Governor General’s Awards. The awards program, created by the RAIC and jointly administered with the Canada Council for the Arts, honours twelve projects every two years. It serves as an important contribution to the development of the discipline and practice of architecture, and increases public awareness of architecture as a vital cultural force in Canadian society.
MGA’s two distinct, award-winning projects not only showcase significant innovation in wood engineering and construction, but also demonstrate new approaches to enduring, socially-focused and sustainable design. Ronald McDonald House BC & Yukon and the Wood Innovation and Design Centre were each completed in late 2014.
RONALD MCDONALD HOUSE BC & YUKON (RMHBC)
The new RMHBC provides a ‘home-away-from-home’ for BC and Yukon families with children receiving treatment at BC Children’s Hospital. From the beginning of the design process, MGA’s approach was to create a solution that would feel like a home and not a hotel. The firm sought to preserve the nurturing, social connection that was found in the former 12-family house through the design of the new – much larger – 73-family facility.
The design of the House fosters inclusiveness and community building, and allows families to find both solace and connection as they go through one of the most significant and challenging moments of life. The new House is comprised of four smaller houses, each stitched together with common areas such as dining rooms, living rooms and courtyards.
The new House is intended to serve the RMHBC charity for the duration of its 100-year lease. To achieve this, the design team introduced significant innovations in mass timber architecture by developing a hybrid CLT wall and TJI floor system combined with masonry cladding. It is the first example globally of this approach as a strategy to create a highly durable and cost-effective solution with low maintenance requirements.
RMHBC has been recognized with a series of prestigious awards, including a Lieutenant-Governor of BC Award in Architecture, a North American Wood Design Award, and most recently was named a finalist in the Architizer A+ Awards. The project was begun at MGA’s predecessor firm, mcfarlane green biggar Architecture + Design and completed at MGA. Michael Green was the Project Principal throughout.
WOOD INNOVATION AND DESIGN CENTRE (WIDC)
Completed in 2014, the Wood Innovation and Design Centre (WIDC) has been recognized as a demonstration project in BC and around the globe. Realized as a design-build in just 15 months, WIDC is one of the world’s tallest modern all-timber structures, standing eight-storeys and 29.5m.
WIDC demonstrates that tall timber buildings can be economical, safe and environmentally superior options for future urban development. It serves to inspire institutions, private sector developers and other architects and engineers to embrace this way of building. Michael Green has been known as the champion of the tall wood building movement for over a decade, and his design of WIDC is an early built example of this global trend.
This project has set many precedents internationally through extensive engineering research and testing to prove the safety and validity of mass timber construction techniques. The work completed and innovations proven have removed hurdles and opened up the market for more tall timber projects to come.
“We are grateful to the vision of so many partners on this project including our client, the Government of BC and the people of BC,” says Michael Green, Principal. “The Wood Innovation Design Centre is more than a building. It is a seed for our forest, our environment, our jobs and our communities. The project is only the beginning of a new way of building here in Canada and around the world. It is a demonstration of how sustainable forestry and sustainable buildings can build jobs across BC and a more beautiful future for our province.”
WIDC has received numerous prestigious awards since its completion, including the RAIC Innovation Award, a Lieutenant-Governor of BC Award in Architecture, the Architectural Institute of BC Innovation Award, as well as several North American Wood Design Awards.
Submissions were adjudicated by an international jury, including Annmarie Adams, FRAIC – William C Macdonald Professor,McGill University School of Architecture, Vanessa Miriam Carlow – Founder, COBE Berlin,
Gary Hack – Dean Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Richard Henriquez, FRAIC – Founding Partner, Henriquez Partners Architects and Todd Saunders – Principal, Saunders Architecture.
The awards will be presented on September 20 in Ottawa. Michael Green and MGA Associates Natalie Telewiak and Mingyuk Chen will travel for the special ceremony with the Governor General at Rideau Hall.
ABOUT MGA | MICHAEL GREEN ARCHITECTURE
MGA is a mid-sized architecture and interior design firm founded to focus on progressive architecture, research, education and innovation. The firm’s passion for diversity has built a depth and breadth of experience that has led to the creation of successful, award-winning buildings around the world. With offices in Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR, MGA’s team of 25 designers deliver inviting buildings that are a pleasure to learn, work, live or play in. MGA and its non-profit research and design school DBR | Design Build Research are dedicated to bringing attention to overwhelming challenges in architecture today such as climate change and the worldwide demand for new affordable homes. Michael Green is known internationally for his leadership in tall wood innovation and carbon-neutral urban building approaches. His 2013 TED talk on Why We Should Build Wooden Skyscrapers has been viewed over a million times.
Kyla Leslie
kyla@mg-architecture.ca
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Myke's Weblog
Questions and Observations about Life
Coyotes Are Hunting
Elementary School Memory
Sandhill Cranes Migrating – Feb 2014
Yellowstone National Park – 1937 Video
Sandhill Cranes Migrating South 11/24/2013
booters on Tom Morello on why Jimi Hendrix was number 1 in Rolling Stone magazine’s 100 Greatest Guitarists
yellowstone lake on Ramona Pierson’s Amazing Comeback
kitten on Missy the Siamese Wolverine as a New Kitten
Terry Pollock on Missy the Siamese Wolverine as a New Kitten
Scott Stone on Missy the Siamese Wolverine as a New Kitten
Scooter the Siamese Cat
Equality, Technology and Spirituality
Google Adwords expert Perry Marshall shares some fascinating thoughts on Christmas relating equality, technology and spirituality. Excerpts below.
Link: Merry Christmas and the Dance of Equality, Technology and Spirituality.
The United States Declaration of Independence makes a world-shattering declaration that transformed the modern world:
"We hold these things to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
In his book "Democracy in America" (1835) Alexis de Tocqueville carefully traces this statement and its idea of equality backward through history and lands at Galatians 3:28, the words of St. Paul:
"In Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. All are equal in Christ Jesus."
Before Paul said this, no one had ever made such a bold and sweeping statement. No one. Not the Babylonians, not the Egyptians, not the Greeks, not the Chinese. The concept of equality came first from Paul.
This idea got planted in western civilization and began to grow and develop, little by little dismantling slave trade, sowing the seeds for democracy and spurring technological and political progress.
If you live in a democracy and you're thankful for the ability to vote, if you're thankful that people generally consider you and themselves to be just as good as anybody else, then thank Paul. And his Rabbi, Jesus.
Because – despite what the Declaration says – equality really is NOT self evident. At least it wasn't to any of the ancient world prior to 2000 years ago. On the surface, we're all different. Some are stronger. Some are smarter. Some have more money. Some are politically connected. Some are more savvy.
But when Paul said this, he was declaring that there is an underlying *spiritual* reality, that yours and my true identity doesn't come from accomplishments or money or power but from our Heavenly Father. That once we know that true identity we're no longer slaves to money and power and accomplishments and the 'natural' order of things.
If you read the history of science over the last 500 years, the only reason science succeeded in the West – after getting started but failing in Greece, Rome, China and in the Arab world – is that Christian theology understood God to have created the universe to operate according to fixed discoverable laws. Theology made that prediction, then people had a philosophical basis for having a scientific method.
In his fascinating book "The Victory of Reason" historian Rodney Stark further explains that the forward march of technology began after the fall of the Roman Empire and has marched steadily forward ever since. Equality implied that slavery was wrong, so people had to develop technology in order to free their slaves and still get the work done. So… part of the inspiration for inventions like water wheels was a belief in dignity and freedom and the rights of the individual.
Technology is supposed to empower people, not enslave them. Because, as Paul said, in Christ, all are equal.
In 1445, Johannes Gutenberg invented the world's first movable type printing press. He didn't know it, but he was unleashing a revolution that continues to this day. Even the mighty Internet in the 21st century is just an extension of Gutenberg's original, revolutionary machine.
The first book he printed was the Bible. And that led to controversy, too, because Luther translated it into German, the people's language, instead of Latin, the lingo of the religious elite.
Suddenly, ordinary folks could not only afford a copy, but they could read it for themselves instead of getting some guy's slanted interpretation. Soon the cat was out of the bag–there were copies scattered all over Europe.
When people started to read it, they were alarmed at what they saw, because between the covers of this book was an amazing story that had seemingly little to do with the politics and shell games they saw in some corners of organized religion.
Luther wrote a list of 95 accusations against the church — priests taking bribes and granting 'indulgences', an institution setting itself up as a 'middleman' between man and God.
He argued that God didn't need a middleman, or a distributor, or an agent, or a bureaucracy. People could go direct to the source.
This little 'schism' in Worms Germany unleashed a firestorm of protest and permanently changed the way people approached education. No longer was a big, faceless institution responsible for your spiritual progress — YOU were. Now that you had the knowledge in your hands, you were accountable before God to do something about it.
Posted on December 25, 2008 Categories Positive ThinkingTags Alexis de Tocqueville, Christmas, Declaration of Independence, Democracy in America, equality, Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther, Perry Marshall, printing press, Rodney Stark, spirituality, St. Paul, technology, The Victory of Reason
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Expo Shows Residents Many Ways to Get Involved in Ferndale
Expo Shows Residents Many Ways to Get Involved in Ferndale (Crystal A. Proxmire, Aug. 1, 2018) Ferndale, MI – “I like being on the board. Being involved we help create the Ferndale that we want,” said John Hardy who sits on the city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Committee. He and fellow board member Emily Obert […]
Affirmations to host first in Michigan: LGBT Job Expo June 21
But even though the legislature has a long way to go, Affirmations Community Center wants people to know that LGBT workers are valued and sought after by companies that do work in the state. Up to twenty such employers are coming together for Michigan’s first LGBT Job Expo at Affirmations on June 21 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Wind: SW at 17mph
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Affiliate Marketing Product Review Site
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (American game show)
Reviews | August 5, 2020
Game show from the United States
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (often informally called Millionaire)[note 1] is an American television game show based on the same-titled British program and developed for the United States by Michael Davies. The show features a quiz competition with contestants attempting to win a top prize of $1,000,000 by answering a series of multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty (although, for a time, most of the questions were of random difficulty). The program endured as one of the longest-running and most successful international variants in the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? franchise, running continuously in some form since 1999.
The original U.S. version premiered on ABC on August 16, 1999, as part of a two-week daily special event hosted by Regis Philbin. After this and a second two-week event aired in November 1999, ABC commissioned a regular series that launched on January 18, 2000, and ran until June 27, 2002. Philbin hosted the entire run of the original network series as well as three additional special event series that aired on ABC in 2004 and 2009.
A daily version of Millionaire produced for syndication began airing on September 16, 2002, and was initially hosted by Meredith Vieira. Cedric the Entertainer took over the show in 2013 following Vieira’s departure, with Terry Crews replacing him in 2014. The syndicated series’ final host was Chris Harrison, who took over from Crews in 2015 and hosted until the show was cancelled, with the finale airing on May 31, 2019.[4] On January 8, 2020, seven months after the cancellation was announced, ABC renewed the show for a twenty-first season (consisting of nine episodes) that would be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, who is also a co-executive producer of the show, and feature celebrity contestants; the twenty-first season premiered on April 8, 2020.[5]
As the first U.S. network game show to offer a million-dollar top prize, the show made television history by becoming one of the highest-rated game shows in the history of U.S. television. The U.S. Millionaire won seven Daytime Emmy Awards, and TV Guide ranked it No. 6 in its 2013 list of the 60 greatest game shows of all time.
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1.1 Core rules
1.2 Format history
1.2.1 Original format (1999–2008; 2020–present)
1.2.2 Clock format (2008–2010)
1.2.3 Shuffle format (2010–2015)
1.2.4 Fourteen-question format (2015–2019)
1.3 Payout structure
1.4 Lifelines
1.5 Top prize winners
2.1 Hosts
2.2 Production staff
3.1 Origins
3.2 Audition process
3.4 Set
4.2 Syndication
4.3 GSN
5 Special editions
5.1 Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire
5.2 10th Anniversary Celebration
5.3 Million Dollar Tournament of Ten
5.4 2020 reboot
7 Other media
7.1 Merchandise
7.2 Album
7.3 Disney Parks attraction
Gameplay[edit]
Core rules[edit]
Screenshot illustrating how question text and answer choices appear on-screen
At its core, the game is a quiz competition in which the goal is to correctly answer a series of fourteen (originally fifteen) consecutive multiple-choice questions. The questions are of increasing difficulty,[6] except in the 2010–15 format overhaul, where the contestants were faced with a round of ten questions of random difficulty, followed by a round of four questions of increasing difficulty.[7] Each question is worth a specific amount of money; the amounts are cumulative in the first round, but not in the second. If at any time the contestant gives a wrong answer, the game is over and the contestant’s winnings are reduced (or increased, in the first two questions) to $1,000 for tier-one questions, $5,000 for tier-two questions, and $50,000 for tier-three questions. However, the contestant may choose to stop playing after being presented with a question, allowing them to keep all the money they have won to that point.[7] With the exception of the shuffle format, upon correctly answering questions five and ten, contestants are guaranteed at least the amount of prize money associated with that level. If the contestant gives an incorrect answer, their winnings drop down to the last milestone achieved. Since 2015, if the contestant answers a question incorrectly before reaching the fifth question, he or she leaves with $1,000, even on the first question that is worth only $500. For celebrities, the minimum guarantee for their nominated charities is $10,000. Prior to the shuffle format, a contestant left with nothing if they answered a question incorrectly before reaching the first milestone. In the shuffle format, contestants who incorrectly answered a question had their winnings reduced to $1,000 in round one and $25,000 in round two.[8]
Format history[edit]
Original format (1999–2008; 2020–present)[edit]
From 1999 to 2002, 10 contestants played a round of Fastest Finger to determine who would play in the hot seat. The participants would be confronted with one question and four answers, and they would have to set the four answers in the correct order (ascending, chronological, etc.) in the fastest time. The competitor who did so correctly in the fastest time would play. If nobody got the correct order, the round was played again, and when a tie occurred, the tied participants answered a second Fastest Finger question. This round was removed when the syndicated version began in 2002, though it returned in 2004 for Super Millionaire and in 2009 for the 10th Anniversary shows. It was removed again in the 2020 reboot. The format remained unchanged, except for changes to the money staircase and the addition of a new lifeline, until 2008.
The guaranteed amounts for correctly answering questions five and ten were $1,000 and $32,000 respectively for the entirety of the original network run, the syndicated version from 2002–2004, and the 2020 reboot. The Super Millionaire specials in 2004 had guarantees of $5,000 and $100,000 respectively. Beginning in 2004 on the syndicated version, the upper guarantee was decreased to $25,000; the 10th Anniversary specials also followed suit.
Clock format (2008–2010)[edit]
In 2008, the format was altered to include a time limit on each question. The amount of time for each question was as follows:
Questions 1–5: 15 seconds
Questions 6–10: 30 seconds
Questions 11–14: 45 seconds
Question 15: 45 seconds, plus the total of all unused time from the previous 14 questions
The timer began to run as soon as the four answer options were revealed, and the contestant had to give a final answer before it reached 0. The timer would temporarily pause if a lifeline was used, only to restart once it had ended. If time ran out, the game ended and the contestant left with whatever money they had won up to that point. However if this happened while the Double Dip lifeline was in effect, the contestant’s winnings were instead reduced to the last safety net they had reached. While the clock format was in use, the contestant was also shown the categories of all 15 questions in the order they would be asked.
For the first season of the clock format, the guarantees for answering questions five and ten were $1,000 and $25,000. For the final season, the lower guarantee was increased to $5,000, commensurate with a change in the money tree.
Shuffle format (2010–2015)[edit]
The format was overhauled in September 2010, splitting the game into two rounds. The first round consisted of 10 questions, each in a different category and worth a different amount from $100 to $25,000. Both the category order and the amounts were randomized at the start of the game, with the latter hidden from the contestant’s view (from 2014, the categories to the questions were no longer presented to the contestant). The difficulty level and value of each question were not tied to one another. The value of each question was revealed only after the contestant answered it correctly or chose to “jump” (skip) it; a correct answer added the money to the contestant’s bank, while a jump put the value out of play. The maximum bank from this round was $68,600. If the contestant missed a question in the first round, they left with $1,000, even if their bank was lower than this total. Choosing to stop allowed the contestant to keep half their bank.
The second round presented four questions of increasing difficulty in the traditional format, each of which augmented the contestant’s total winnings to a set value. A miss in this round reduced their winnings to $25,000, while choosing to stop allowed the contestant to keep all winnings accumulated thus far. Categories for these questions were not given ahead of time.
From 2011–2014, some weeks were “Double Your Money” weeks, in which one first-round question was randomly designated as being worth double its value. The maximum potential bank from this round thus became $93,600.
Fourteen-question format (2015–2019)[edit]
With the hiring of new host Chris Harrison, the format was changed once again to resemble that of the original Millionaire. Each contestant faces 14 general-knowledge questions of increasing difficulty, with no time limit or information about the categories.
The guaranteed amounts for correctly answering questions five and ten were $5,000 and $50,000 respectively. Originally, contestants who failed to clear the first five questions won nothing. However, beginning in 2017, a contestant who missed any of the first five questions left with $1,000, even if the missed question was of a lower value.
Payout structure[edit]
Five different ladders have been used over the course of the series:
The $500,000 and $1,000,000 prizes were initially lump-sum payments, but were changed to annuities in September 2002 when the series moved to syndication. Contestants winning either of these prizes receive $250,000 thirty days after their show broadcasts and the remainder paid in equal annual payments. The $500,000 prize consists of $25,000 per year for 10 years, while the $1,000,000 prize consists of $37,500 per year for 20 years, all less taxes.[7]
From 2017–2019, contestants who answered one of the first five questions incorrectly received a $1,000 consolation prize.[9] On the original primetime version and in earlier seasons of the syndicated version prior to 2010, contestants who missed one of the first five questions left with nothing.
Lifelines[edit]
Forms of assistance known as “lifelines” are available for a contestant to use if a question proves difficult. Multiple lifelines may be used on a single question, but each one can only be used once per game (unless otherwise noted below). Three lifelines are available from the start of the game. Depending on the format of the show, additional lifelines may become available after the contestant correctly answers the fifth or tenth question. In the clock format, usage of lifelines temporarily pauses the clock while the lifelines are played.
+1 (2014–2019): The contestant may invite a friend onstage from the audience to assist with the current question. After the question result, the friend must return to the audience.
50:50 (1999–2008, 2015–2020): Two incorrect answers are eliminated, leaving the contestant with a choice between the correct answer and one remaining incorrect answer.
Ask the Audience (1999–2019): The audience members individually use four-button keypads to register the answer they believe is correct, and the percentage of votes for each answer is then shown to the host, contestant, and home viewer. Beginning in 2004 and ending a few years later, AIM users who added the screen name MillionaireIM to their buddy list and were online were able to receive and register answers they believed to be correct to Ask the Audience questions in real-time; these results were then shown as a separate chart to the contestant.[10]
Ask the Expert (2008–2010): Based on Three Wise Men, the lifeline was earned after answering five questions correctly until 2010, when it was given to the contestant immediately following the removal of Phone a Friend. The contestant was connected to an expert via a video call, and the two could discuss the question with no time limit.
Ask the Host (2020): Introduced during the 2020 season, this lifeline allows the contestant to ask for the host’s advice on the current question and give the best possible answer. If used and the contestant answers, both the contestant and host don’t see the correct answer until the computer reveals it.
Crystal Ball (2012–2015): Used occasionally during the “shuffle” round, this lifeline allowed the contestant to see the value of the current question before either answering or jumping it (if Jump the Question had not yet been used).
Double Dip (2004, 2008–2010): First used during Super Millionaire, this lifeline allowed a contestant to make a second guess at the answer if his/her first one was wrong. The contestant had to invoke the lifeline before making the first guess, and it was removed from play regardless of which guess was correct. In addition, the contestant could not walk away from the question after invoking the lifeline. It was used in the main series from 2008–2010, replacing 50:50.
Jump the Question (2010–2015): This lifeline allowed the contestant to skip the current question, but the money associated with it was removed from play. It could be used twice per game from 2010–2014, but only once from 2014–2015.
Phone a Friend (1999–2010, 2020): The contestant calls a pre-arranged friend and is given 30 seconds to discuss the question with that person. In 2010, this lifeline was dropped due to an increasing use of search engines by home viewers to look up answers. The lifeline returned in 2020, with all friends being monitored by a member of the shows production team.[11]
Switch/Cut the Question (2004–2008): Earned after answering 10 questions, this lifeline allowed a contestant to discard the current question and replace it with one of the same value. It was occasionally used from 2014–19 during ‘Whiz Kids’ week and was available from the outset.
Three Wise Men (2004): Used during Super Millionaire, this lifeline allowed the contestant 30 seconds of advice from a panel of three experts, who were sequestered backstage and saw the question only when their help was requested.
The 2020 season features a lifeline similar to +1, replacing Ask the Audience. This lifeline is offered to the contestant after the tenth question and allows them to consult with their accompanying supporter one time during the final five questions. However, in order to obtain this lifeline, the contestant must exchange one of his or her other remaining lifelines. The contestant has unlimited access to their supporter for the first ten questions.
Top prize winners[edit]
Over the course of the program’s history, out of the thirteen million dollar winners, twelve people answered the final question correctly and walked away with the top prize:
John Carpenter – Became the first winner of the top prize on November 19, 1999.[12][13]
Dan Blonsky – Won on January 18, 2000.[13]
Joe Trela – Won on March 23, 2000.[13]
Bob House – Won on June 13, 2000.[13]
Kim Hunt – Won on July 6, 2000.[13]
David Goodman – Won on July 11, 2000.[13]
Kevin Olmstead – Won the top prize on April 10, 2001; however, because of the jackpot having been set to increase by $10,000 each episode, he won $2,180,000 – making him the biggest winner in television history at the time.[14]
Bernie Cullen – Won the top prize just five days after Olmstead’s win on April 15, 2001.[15]
Ed Toutant – Won on September 7, 2001. Originally appeared on January 31, 2001, when the jackpot was at $1,860,000 when he was ruled out after answering his $16,000 question wrong. However, it was determined that there was an error in the question, so he was invited back and won the jackpot as it was at the time.[16]
Kevin Smith – First syndicated millionaire, winning the top prize on February 18, 2003.[17]
Nancy Christy – Won the million on May 8, 2003. Christy is the only female top prize winner.[17]
Sam Murray – Answered his question correctly during the Million Dollar Tournament of Ten and remained the only contestant to answer his question correctly on November 11, 2009.[18]
Personnel[edit]
Hosts[edit]
Regis Philbin, host of the original network version
The original network version of the U.S. Millionaire and the subsequent primetime specials were hosted by Regis Philbin.[19] When the syndicated version was being developed, the production team felt that it was not feasible for Philbin to continue hosting, as the show recorded four episodes in a single day, and that the team was looking for qualities in a new host: it had to be somebody who would love the contestants and be willing to root for them.[2] Rosie O’Donnell was initially offered a hosting position on this new edition, but declined the opportunity almost immediately.[20] Eventually Meredith Vieira, who had previously competed in a celebrity charity event on the original network version, was named host of the new syndicated edition.[21]
ABC originally offered Vieira hosting duties on the syndicated Millionaire to sweeten one of her re-negotiations for the network’s daytime talk show The View, which she was moderating at the time.[22] When the show was honored by GSN on its Gameshow Hall of Fame special, Vieira herself further explained her motivation for hosting the syndicated version as follows:
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I did the show because I fell in love with the show, and really, first and foremost, as a parent, [I feel that] there aren’t that many shows on television that you can watch as a family. And when Michael Davies approached me and said, “Would you be interested in hosting the syndicated version?”, I said, “Just point me toward the contract! I am so there!”[2]
From 2007 to 2011, when Vieira was concurrently working as a co-host of Today, guest hosts appeared in the second half of each season of the syndicated version. Guest hosts who filled in for Vieira included Philbin,[23] Al Roker,[24] Tom Bergeron,[25] Tim Vincent,[26] Dave Price,[27] Billy Bush,[28] Leeza Gibbons,[28] Cat Deeley,[29] Samantha Harris,[30] Shaun Robinson,[31] Steve Harvey,[32] John Henson,[33] Sherri Shepherd,[34] Tim Gunn,[35] and D. L. Hughley.[36]
On January 10, 2013, Vieira announced that after eleven seasons with the syndicated Millionaire, she would be leaving the show as part of an effort to focus on other projects in her career. She finalized taping of her last episodes with the show in November 2012.[22][37] While Philbin briefly considered a return to the show,[38] Cedric the Entertainer was introduced as her successor when season twelve premiered on September 2, 2013.[39][40] On April 30, 2014, Deadline announced that Cedric had decided to leave the show in order to lighten his workload,[41] resulting in him being succeeded by Terry Crews for the 2014–15 season.[42] Crews was succeeded by Chris Harrison, host of The Bachelor and its spin-offs, when season 14 premiered on September 14, 2015.[43]
On January 8, 2020, a twentieth anniversary revival of the show was announced, with late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel as host.[44]
Production staff[edit]
The original executive producers of the U.S. Millionaire were British television producers Michael Davies and Paul Smith,[45] the latter of whom undertook the responsibility of licensing Millionaire to American airwaves as part of his effort to transform the UK program into a global franchise.[46] Smith served until 2007 and Davies until 2010; additionally, Leigh Hampton (previously co-executive producer in the later days of the network version and in the syndicated version’s first two seasons) served as an executive producer from 2004 to 2010. Rich Sirop, who was previously a supervising producer, became the executive producer in 2010 and held that position until 2014, when he left Millionaire to hold the same position with Vieira’s newly launched syndicated talk show,[47] and was replaced by James Rowley. Vincent Rubino, who had previously been the syndicated Millionaire's supervising producer for its first two seasons,[45] served as that version’s co-executive producer for the 2004–05 season,[48] after which he was succeeded by Vieira herself, who continued to hold the title until her departure in 2013 (sharing her position with Sirop for the 2009–10 season).[45]
Producers of the network version included Hampton, Rubino, Leslie Fuller, Nikki Webber, and Terrence McDonnell. For its first two seasons the syndicated version had Deirdre Cossman for its managing producer, then Dennis F. McMahon became producer for the next two seasons (joined by Dominique Bruballa as his line producer), after which Jennifer Weeks produced the next four seasons of syndicated Millionaire shows, initially accompanied by Amanda Zucker as her line producer, but later joined for the 2008–09 season by Tommy Cody (who became sole producer in the 2009–10 season). The first 65 shuffle format episodes were produced by McPaul Smith, and from 2011 onward, the title of producer was held by Bryan Lasseter. The network version had Ann Miller and Tiffany Trigg for its supervising producers; they were joined by Wendy Roth in the first two seasons, and by Michael Binkow in the third and final season. After Rubino’s promotion to co-executive producer, the syndicated version’s later supervising producers included Sirop (2004–09), Geena Gintzig (2009–10), Brent Burnette (2010–12), Geoff Rosen (2012–14), and Liz Harris (2014–16), who was the show’s last co-executive producer.[45]
The original network version of Millionaire was directed by Mark Gentile, who later served as the syndicated version’s consulting producer for its first two seasons; he went on to serve as the director of Duel (which ran on ABC from December 2007 to July 2008) and Million Dollar Password (which aired on CBS from June 2008 to June 2009). The syndicated version was directed by Matthew Cohen from 2002 to 2010, by Rob George from 2010 to 2013, and by Brian McAloon in the 2013–14 season. Former The Price Is Right director Rich DiPirro (who later directed Mental Samurai) became Millionaire's director in 2014, and was later replaced by Ron de Moraes after the 2016–17 season, who remained as director until the show’s cancellation.[45]
Production[edit]
The U.S. version of Millionaire was a co-production of 2waytraffic, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Valleycrest Productions, a division of The Walt Disney Company. 2waytraffic purchased Millionaire's original production company Celador in 2008,[49][50] while Valleycrest remained throughout the show’s history,[51] and holds the copyright on all U.S. Millionaire episodes to date. The show was distributed by Valleycrest’s corporate sibling Disney-ABC Home Entertainment & Television Distribution (previously known as Buena Vista Television and later known as Disney-ABC Domestic Television).
The U.S. Millionaire was taped at ABC‘s Television Center East studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York from 1999 to 2012. Tapings were moved to NEP Broadcasting‘s Metropolis Studios in East Harlem in 2013,[52] and production moved to studios located in Stamford, Connecticut the following year.[53] For the final three seasons, production relocated to Bally’s Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.[54] Episodes of the syndicated version were produced from June to December.[7] The show originally taped four episodes in a single day,[2] but that number later changed to five.
Origins[edit]
When the U.S. version of Millionaire was first conceived in 1998, Michael Davies was a young television producer who was serving as the head of ABC’s little-noticed reality programming division (at a time when reality television had not yet become a phenomenon in America).[2] At that time, ABC was lingering in third place in the ratings indexes among U.S. broadcast networks, and was on the verge of losing its status as one of the “Big Three” networks.[55] Meanwhile, the popularity of game shows was at an all-time low, and with the exception of The Price Is Right, the genre was absent from networks’ daytime lineups at that point. Having earlier created Debt for Lifetime Television and participated with Al Burton and Donnie Brainard in the creation of Win Ben Stein’s Money for Comedy Central,[2] Davies decided to create a primetime game show that would save the network from collapse and revive interest in game shows.[2]
Davies originally considered reviving CBS‘s long-lost quiz show The $64,000 Question, with a new home on ABC.[56] However, this effort’s development was limited as when the producer heard that the British Millionaire was about to make its debut, he got his friends and family members in the UK to record the show, and subsequently ended up receiving about eight FedEx packages from different family members, each containing a copy of Millionaire’s first episode. Davies was so captivated by everything that he had seen and heard, from host Chris Tarrant‘s intimate involvement with the contestant to the show’s lighting system and music tracks, that he chose to abandon his work on the $64,000 Question revival in favor of introducing Millionaire to American airwaves, convinced that it would become extraordinarily popular.[2]
When Davies presented his ideas for the U.S. Millionaire to ABC, the network’s executives initially rejected them, so he resigned his position there and became an independent producer.[2] Determined to bring his idea for the show to fruition, Davies decided to bet his career on Millionaire's production, and the first move that he made was planning to attach a celebrity host to the show. Along with Philbin, a number of other popular television personalities were considered for hosting positions on the U.S. Millionaire during its development, including Peter Jennings,[2] Bob Costas, Phil Donahue, and Montel Williams,[57] but among those considered, it was Philbin who wanted the job the most, and when he saw an episode of the British Millionaire and was blown away by his content, Davies and his team ultimately settled on having him host the American show.[55] When Davies approached ABC again after having hired Philbin, the network finally agreed to accept the U.S. Millionaire.[2] With production now ready to begin, the team had only five months to finish developing the show and get it launched, with Davies demanding perfection in every element of Millionaire’s production.[2]
Audition process[edit]
With few exceptions, any legal resident of the United States who was 18 years of age or older had the potential of becoming a contestant through Millionaire's audition process. Those ineligible included employees, immediate family or household members, and close acquaintances of SPE, Disney, or any of their respective affiliates or subsidiaries; television stations that broadcast the syndicated version; or any advertising agency or other firm or entity engaged in the production, administration, or judging of the show. Also ineligible were candidates for political office and individuals who had appeared on a different game show outside of cable that had been broadcast within the past year, was intended to be broadcast within the next year, or had played the main game on any of the U.S. or Canadian versions of Millionaire itself.[7]
Potential contestants of the original prime time version had to compete in a telephone contest which had them dial a toll-free number and answer three questions by putting objects or events in order. Callers had ten seconds to enter the order on a keypad, with any incorrect answer ending the game/call. The 10,000 to 20,000 candidates who answered all three questions correctly were selected into a random drawing in which approximately 300 contestants competed for ten spots on the show using the same phone quiz method.[note 2] Accommodations for contestants outside the New York metropolitan area included round trip transportation and hotel accommodations, with airfare being used for contestants who did not hail from the northeastern areas of the country.
The syndicated version’s potential contestants, depending on tryouts, were required to pass an electronically scored test[58] comprising a set of thirty questions which had to be answered within a 10-minute time limit. Contestants who failed the test were eliminated, while those who passed were interviewed for an audition by the production staff,[59] and those who impressed the staff the most were then notified by postal mail that they had been placed into a pool for possible selection as contestants. At the producers’ discretion, contestants from said pool were selected to appear on actual episodes of the syndicated program; these contestants were given a phone call from staff and asked to confirm the information on their initial application form and verify that they met all eligibility requirements. Afterwards, they were given a date to travel to the show’s taping facilities to participate in a scheduled episode of the show.[58] Unlike its ABC counterpart, the syndicated version did not offer transportation or hotel accommodations to contestants at the production company’s expense; that version’s contestants were instead required to provide transportation and accommodations of their own.[7]
The syndicated Millionaire also conducts open casting calls in various locations across the United States to search for potential contestants. These are held in late spring or early summer, with all dates and locations posted on the show’s official website. The producers make no guarantee on how many applicants will be tested at each particular venue;[58] however, the show will not test any more than 2,500 individuals per audition day.[7]
In cases when the show features themed episodes with two people playing as a team, auditions for these episodes’ contestants are announced on the show’s website. Both members of the team must pass the written test and the audition interview successfully in order to be considered for selection. If only one member of the team passes, he or she is placed into the contestant pool alone and must continue the audition process as an individual in order to proceed.[58]
Originally, the U.S. Millionaire carried over the musical score from the British version, composed by father-and-son duo Keith and Matthew Strachan. Unlike older game show musical scores, Millionaire's musical score was created to feature music playing almost throughout the entire show. The Strachans’ main Millionaire theme song took some inspiration from the “Mars” movement of Gustav Holst‘s The Planets,[60] and their question cues from the $2,000 to the $32,000/$25,000 level, and then from the $64,000/$50,000 to $500,000 level, took the pitch up a semitone for each subsequent question, in order to increase tension as the contestant progressed through the game.[60] On GSN’s Gameshow Hall of Fame special, the narrator described the Strachan tracks as “mimicking the sound of a beating heart”, and stated that as the contestant worked their way up the money ladder, the music was “perfectly in tune with their ever-increasing pulse”.[2]
The original Millionaire musical score holds the distinction of being the only game show soundtrack to be acknowledged by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, as the Strachans were honored with numerous ASCAP awards for their work, the earliest of them awarded in 2000.[60] The original music cues were given minor rearrangements for the clock format in 2008; for example, the question cues were synced to the “ticking” sounds of the game clock. Even later, the Strachan score was removed from the U.S. version altogether for the introduction of the shuffle format in 2010, in favor of a new musical score with cues written by Jeff Lippencott and Mark T. Williams, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based company Ah2 Music.[61]
When production resumed in 2020, the original Strachans’ score was used.
Set[edit]
The U.S. Millionaire’s basic set was a direct adaptation of the British version’s set design, which was conceived by Andy Walmsley. Paul Smith’s original licensing agreement for the U.S. Millionaire required that the show’s set design, along with all other elements of the show’s on-air presentation (musical score, lighting system, host’s wardrobe, etc.), adhere faithfully to the way in which they were presented in the British version; this same licensing agreement applied to all other international versions of the show, making Walmsley’s Millionaire set design the most reproduced scenic design in television history.[46] The original version of the U.S. Millionaire’s set cost $200,000 to construct.[2] The U.S. Millionaire’s production design was handled at different times by David Weller, Jim Fenhagen and George Allison.[45]
Unlike older game shows whose sets are or were designed to make the contestant(s) feel at ease, Millionaire’s set was designed to make the contestant feel uncomfortable, so that the program feels more like a movie thriller than a typical quiz show.[2] The floor is made of Plexiglas[46] beneath which lies a huge dish covered in mirror paper.[2] Before the shuffle format was implemented in 2010, the main game had the contestant and host sit in chairs in the center of the stage, known as “Hot Seats”; these measured 3 feet (0.91 m) high, were modeled after chairs typically found in hair salons,[2] and each seat featured a computer monitor directly facing it to display questions and other pertinent information. Shortly after the shuffle format was introduced to Millionaire, Vieira stated in an interview with her Millionaire predecessor on his morning talk show that the Hot Seat was removed because it was decided that the seat, which was originally intended to make the contestant feel nervous, actually ended up having contestants feel so comfortable in it that it did not service the production team any longer.[62]
The lighting system was programmed to darken the set as the contestant progressed further into the game. There were also spotlights situated at the bottom of the set area that zoomed down on the contestant when they answered a major question; to increase the visibility of the light beams emitted by such spotlights, oil was vaporized, creating a haze effect. Media scholar Dr. Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University, stated that the show’s lighting system made the contestant feel as though they were outside of prison when an escape was in progress.[2]
When the shuffle format was introduced, the Hot Seats and corresponding monitors were replaced with a single podium, so that the contestant and host stood throughout the game and were also able to walk around the stage.[62] Also, two video screens were installed–one that displayed the current question in play, and another that displayed the contestant’s cumulative total and progress during the game. In September 2012, the redesigned set was improved with a modernized look and feel, in order to take into account the show’s transition to high-definition broadcasting, which had just come about the previous year. The two video screens were replaced with two larger ones, having twice as many projectors as the previous screens had; the previous contestant podium was replaced with a new one; and light-emitting diode (LED) technology was integrated into the lighting system to give the lights more vivid colors and the set and gameplay experience a more intimate feel.[63]
Broadcast history[edit]
ABC[edit]
The U.S. version of Millionaire was launched by ABC as a half-hour primetime program on August 16, 1999.[64] When it premiered, it became the first U.S. network game show to offer a million-dollar top prize to contestants.[2] After airing thirteen episodes and reaching an audience of 15 million viewers by the end of the show’s first week on the air, the program expanded to an hour-long format when it returned in November.[65] The series, of which episodes were originally shown only a day after their initial taping, was promoted to regular status on January 18, 2000,[66] and, at the height of its popularity, was airing on ABC five nights a week.[67] The show was so popular during its original primetime run that rival networks created or re-incarnated game shows of their own (e.g., Greed, Twenty One, etc.), as well as importing various game shows of British and Australian origin to America (such as Winning Lines, Weakest Link, and It’s Your Chance of a Lifetime).
The nighttime version initially drew in up to 30 million viewers a day three times a week, an unheard-of number in modern network television. In the 1999–2000 season, it averaged No. 1 in the ratings against all other television shows,[citation needed] with 28,848,000 viewers. In the next season (2000–01), three nights out of the five weekly episodes placed in the top 10 and all five ranked in the top 20.[citation needed] However, the show’s ratings began to fall during the 2000–01 season, so that at the start of the 2001–02 season, the ratings were only a fraction of what they had been one year before, and by season’s end, the show was no longer even ranked among the top 20.[citation needed] ABC’s reliance on the show’s popularity led the network to fall quickly from its former spot as the nation’s most watched network.
As ABC’s overexposure of the primetime Millionaire led the public to tire of the show, there was speculation that the show would not survive beyond the 2001–02 season. The staff planned on switching it to a format that would emphasize comedy more than the game and feature a host other than Philbin,[68] but in the end, the primetime show was canceled, with its final episode airing on June 27, 2002.[69]
On May 8, 2003 (the same day that Nancy Christy became the second top-prize winner on the syndicated version), ABC broadcast footage from Charles Ingram‘s run on the British version of Millionaire as a special episode of Primetime; the documentary was originally broadcast in the United Kingdom on April 21, 2003, as an episode of Tonight that was hosted by Martin Bashir. During that program, Ingram was interviewed by Diane Sawyer.[70]
Syndication[edit]
In 2001, Millionaire producers began work on a half-hour daily syndicated version of the show, with producer Buena Vista Television (BVT) serving as distributor. Despite the ratings struggles of the network edition, there was still enough interest in Millionaire as a series that enough stations signed on for a fall 2002 launch; the original idea for the syndicated series to serve as an accompaniment to the network series did not come to fruition, as intended, due to ABC’s decision to cancel Millionaire.[21][69]
On September 16, 2002, nearly three months after the network Millionaire ended its run, the syndicated series premiered. Right away, it found itself having similar ratings issues. Some stations began to look for other options to place in the slots where they had initially plugged Millionaire; this included several larger market stations, especially their largest market affiliate, and thus Millionaire was looking at a second cancellation notice in less than a year. As fate would have it, though, this turn of events happened to coincide with a significant one going on at two of BVT’s corporate siblings.
When BVT initially sold Millionaire into syndication, the largest market station to come on board was WCBS-TV in New York, the flagship of the CBS network. Looking to bolster its offerings in the two hours between the end of CBS’ daytime schedule and its first evening newscast of the day, which had been an ongoing problem for the station for years, Millionaire was one of two major additions to WCBS’ lineup for the 2002–2003 season. The station gave it the 4 pm weekday timeslot that had housed Weakest Link,[71][72] a syndicated version of another network primetime quiz show (in this case, produced by NBC) that had launched in January 2002.
The timeslot, at the time, was a fairly competitive one. WABC-TV had been airing The Oprah Winfrey Show, which had consistently been the most popular daytime talk show, there since December 1986. WNBC at the time carried Judge Judy, which was the second-highest rated program in daytime syndication behind Oprah. Millionaire was unable to cut into the audience for either program, despite having the other major WCBS acquisition, the talk show Dr. Phil, as its lead in. WCBS again decided to switch its lineup.
In April 2003, with the season in its final weeks, WCBS announced its addition of The People’s Court to its lineup for fall 2003 after the revived series had aired since its 1997 debut on WNBC.[73] WCBS announced that The People’s Court would be airing at 4:00 pm once it joined the station’s lineup, which meant that Millionaire would be forced out of the timeslot after one year. BVT tried to negotiate with WCBS for another timeslot but the station had other obligations and thus could not accommodate them. There was not much in the way of open time slots on any of the other New York stations either, as they had other obligations in daytime and nighttime fringe slots, and BVT was in a position that could have seen Millionaire be reduced to airing in a post-midnight period or another non-traditional time that syndicators try to avoid.[73][73]
Meanwhile, ABC was about to shake up its daytime schedule in a move made shortly after Millionaire concluded its season. The network had long programmed a thirty-minute serial at 12:30 pm, and since 1997 that time slot had belonged to Port Charles. In July 2003, however, the network decided that it would be discontinuing the program after its contract to air it expired in October and, once that happened, the timeslot Port Charles had occupied would be given back to the affiliates to program as they wished. BVT decided to go to its parent company’s flagship station and offered Millionaire to WABC as the replacement for Port Charles, and the two sides agreed. Beginning in September 2003, Millionaire joined WABC’s lineup and remained part of the station’s lineup for the rest of its run.[74] ABC was impressed enough with the ratings improvement that the network, with one or two exceptions (WLS-TV in Chicago and KABC-TV in Los Angeles, though the latter would eventually add the series) picked up Millionaire for the other stations it owned.
Following the 2014–15 season, Millionaire was nearly cancelled after a disagreement with BVT’s successor, Disney-ABC Domestic Television, and Sony Pictures Entertainment, the owner of the format rights through its subsidiary 2waytraffic.[75] According to e-mails released in the Sony Pictures Entertainment hack, Millionaire’s declining ratings prompted DADT to demand a dramatically reduced licensing fee for renewal, which SPE was hesitant to accept. The two sides eventually agreed on terms for renewal, which included a return to the original question format (but with fourteen questions) and cuts to the production budget, which resulted in the series leaving New York for Stamford, Connecticut (although this had been done in 2014) and later moving to Las Vegas.[76] Had the show not been renewed, SPE was going to place the show on extended hiatus for three years, after which it would reclaim full rights to the show and be free to shop the revived show to another network or syndicator. DADT, meanwhile, would keep the rights to the format changes made in the late 2000s and early 2010s.[77]
Despite its renewal, many of the stations airing Millionaire, especially the ABC-owned stations, added the talk show FABLife for 2015. When FABlife failed to gain an audience and was cancelled at midseason, Millionaire was able to return to many of its former airing times for 2016; beginning that year, Millionaire and the viral video show RightThisMinute began being sold as a package to ABC stations.
On January 17, 2017, it was announced that Millionaire has been renewed through 2018.[78] Millionaire was subsequently renewed through the 2018–19 season on January 17, 2018.[79]
As the seventeenth season progressed, the future of Millionaire became uncertain. Its strongest group of stations, the ABC-owned stations, had announced that they would be picking up a new talk show hosted by former NBC News anchor and correspondent Tamron Hall for Fall 2019, making no announcement about the future of Millionaire with it; thus, it was speculated that the series would likely be facing its end. On May 17, 2019, the cancellation announcement came down, with Millionaire airing its final first-run episode on May 31, 2019.[80]
After COPS was pulled from local stations by Disney Media Networks in June 2020, reruns of the syndicated version of Millionaire were reinstated to replace weekday and weekend airings of COPS.[81]
GSN[edit]
Game Show Network (GSN) acquired the rerun rights to the U.S. Millionaire in August 2003.[82] The network initially aired only episodes from the three seasons of the original prime-time run; however, additional episodes were later added. These included the Super Millionaire spin-off,[83] which aired on GSN from May 2005 to January 2007, and the first two seasons of the syndicated version, which began airing on November 10, 2008.[84] On December 4, 2017, GSN acquired the rerun rights to the Harrison episodes of Millionaire (seasons fourteen and fifteen), which began airing December 18, 2017.[85][86]
Special editions[edit]
Various special editions and tournaments have been conducted which feature celebrities playing the game and donating winnings to charities of their choice. During celebrity editions on the original ABC version, contestants were allowed to receive help from their fellow contestants during the first ten questions. The most successful celebrity contestants throughout the show’s run have been Drew Carey,[69] Rosie O’Donnell,[69] Norm Macdonald,[69] Chip Esten,[87] Lauren Lapkus,[88] and Anderson Cooper,[89] all of whom won $500,000 for each of their charities. The episode featuring O’Donnell’s $500,000 win averaged 36.1 million viewers, the highest number for a single episode of the show.[90]
There have also been special weeks featuring two or three family members or couples competing as a team, a “Champions Edition” where former big winners returned and split their winnings with their favorite charities, a “Zero Dollar Winner Edition” featuring contestants who previously missed one of the first-tier questions and left with nothing, and a “Tax-Free Edition” in which H&R Block calculated the taxes of winnings to allow contestants to earn stated winnings after taxes, and various theme weeks featuring college students, teachers, brides-to-be, etc. as contestants.[91] Additionally, the syndicated version once featured an annual “Walk In & Win Week” with contestants who were randomly selected from the audience without having to take the audition test.[92]
Special weeks have also included shows featuring questions concerning specific topics, such as professional football, celebrity gossip, movies, and pop culture. During a week of episodes in November 2007, to celebrate the 1,000th episode of the syndicated Millionaire, all contestants that week started with $1,000 so that they could not leave empty-handed, and only had to answer ten questions to win $1,000,000. During that week, twenty home viewers per day also won $1,000 each.[93]
Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire[edit]
In 2004, Philbin returned to host 12 episodes of a spin-off program titled Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire in which contestants could potentially win $10,000,000.[94] ABC aired five episodes of this spin-off during the week of February 22, 2004, and an additional seven episodes later that year in May. As usual, contestants had to answer a series of 15 multiple-choice questions of increasing difficulty, but the dollar values rose substantially. The questions for Super Millionaire were worth $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 (the first safe haven), $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 (the second safe haven), $500,000, $1,000,000, $2,500,000, $5,000,000, and $10,000,000.
Contestants were given the standard three lifelines in place at the time (50:50, Ask the Audience, and Phone-a-Friend) at the beginning of the game. However, after correctly answering the $100,000 question, the contestant earned two additional lifelines: Three Wise Men and Double Dip (see Lifelines).[94]
10th Anniversary Celebration[edit]
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Millionaire's U.S. debut, the show returned to ABC primetime for an eleven-night event hosted by Philbin, which aired from August 9 to 23, 2009.[95] The Academy Award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire and the 2008 economic crisis helped boost interest of renewal of the game show.[69]
The episodes featured game play based on the previous rule set of the syndicated version (including the rule changes implemented in season seven) but used the Fastest Finger round to select contestants. Various celebrities also made special guest appearances at the end of every episode; each guest played one question for a chance at $50,000 for a charity of their choice, being allowed to use any one of the four lifelines in place at the time (Phone-a-Friend, Ask the Audience, Double Dip, and Ask the Expert), but still earned a minimum of $25,000 for the charity if they answered the question incorrectly.[95]
On August 18, 2009, New York City resident Nik Bonaddio appeared on the program, winning $100,000 with the help of the audience and later, Gwen Ifill as his lifelines.[96] Bonaddio then used the proceeds to start the sports analytics firm numberFire,[97] which was sold in September 2015 to FanDuel, a fantasy sports platform.
The finale of the tenth anniversary special, which aired on August 23, 2009, featured Ken Basin, an entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles, California, who went on to become the first contestant to play a $1,000,000 question in the “clock format”. With a time of 4:39 (45 seconds + 3:54 banked time), Basin was given a question involving President Lyndon Baines Johnson‘s fondness for Fresca. Using his one remaining lifeline, Basin asked the audience, which supported his own hunch of Yoo-hoo rather than the correct answer. He decided to answer the question and lost $475,000, becoming the first contestant in the U.S. version to answer a $1,000,000 question incorrectly. After Basin finished his run, Vieira appeared on-camera and announced that all remaining Fastest Finger contestants would play with her on the first week of the syndicated version’s eighth season.[98] After this, the million dollar question was not played again on a standard episode until September 25, 2013,[52] when Josina Reaves became the second U.S. Millionaire contestant to incorrectly answer her $1,000,000 question, but only lost $75,000 as she used her Jump the Question lifelines on her $250,000 and $500,000 questions.[99]
Million Dollar Tournament of Ten[edit]
Although the syndicated Millionaire had produced two millionaires in its first season, Nancy Christy’s May 2003 win was still standing as the most recent when the program began its eighth season in fall of 2009. Deciding that six-plus years had been too long since someone had won the top prize, producers conducted a tournament to find a third million dollar winner.[100] For the first nine weeks of the 2009–10 season, each episode saw contestants attempt to qualify for what was referred to as the “Tournament of Ten”. Contestants were seeded based on how much money they had won, with the biggest winner ranked first and the lowest ranked tenth. Ties were broken based on how much time a contestant had banked when they had walked away from the game.[101]
The tournament began on the episode aired November 9, 2009, and playing in order from the lowest to the highest seed, tournament contestants played one at a time at the end of that episode and the next nine. The rules were exactly the same as they were for a normal million dollar question under the clock format introduced the season before, except here, the contestants had no lifelines at their disposal. Each contestant received a base time of 45 seconds. For each question they had answered before walking away, the contestants received any unused seconds that were left when they gave their answers. The accumulated total of those unused seconds was then added to the base time to give the contestants their final question time limit.[101]
Each contestant had the same decision facing them as before, which was whether to attempt to answer the question or walk away with their pre-tournament total intact. Attempting the question and answering incorrectly incurred the same penalty as in regular play, with a reduction of their pre-tournament winnings to $25,000. If the question was answered correctly, the player that did so became the tournament leader. If another player after him/her answered correctly, that player assumed the lead and the previous leader kept their pre-tournament winnings. The highest remaining seed to have attempted and correctly answered their question at the end of the tournament on November 20, 2009 would be declared the winner and become the syndicated series’ third millionaire.[101]
The first contestant to attempt to answer the million dollar question was Sam Murray, the tournament’s eighth-seeded qualifier. On November 11, Murray was asked approximately how many people had lived on Earth in its history and correctly guessed 100 billion. Murray was still atop the leaderboard entering the November 20 finale as he remained the only contestant to even attempt to answer his or her question. The only person who could defeat him was top seed and $250,000 winner Jehan Shamsid-Deen, who was asked a question regarding the Blorenge, cited as “a rare example of a word that rhymes with orange”. Shamsid-Deen considered taking the risk, believing (correctly) that the name belonged to a mountain in Wales. However, she decided that the potential of losing $225,000 did not justify the risk and elected to walk away from the question, giving Murray the win and the million dollar prize.[18]
2020 reboot[edit]
A 2020 reboot of the show is produced by Kimmel, Davies and Mike Richards. Nine episodes were filmed without an audience in two days mid-March 2020, just before California issued a stay-at-home order due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[102] Partly due to this change, the “Ask the Audience” lifeline was removed. A new lifeline, Ask the Host, was introduced.
On May 21, Deadline reported that the revival was given an order for a second season, to air during the 2020–21 television season.[103]
Since its introduction to the United States, GSN credited Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with not only single-handedly reviving the game show genre, but also breaking new ground for it.[2] The series revolutionized the look and feel of game shows with its unique lighting system, dramatic music cues, and futuristic set. The show also became one of the highest-rated and most popular game shows in U.S. television history, and has been credited with paving the way for the rise of the primetime reality TV phenomenon to prominence throughout the 2000s.[2][65]
The U.S. Millionaire also made catchphrases out of various lines used on the show. In particular, “Is that your final answer?”, asked by Millionaire’s hosts whenever a contestant’s answer needs to be verified, was popularized by Philbin during his tenure as host,[69] and was also included on TV Land‘s special “100 Greatest TV Quotes and Catch Phrases”, which aired in 2006.[104] Meanwhile, during his tenure as host, Cedric signed off shows with a catchphrase of his own, “Watch yo’ wallet!”[41]
The original primetime version of the U.S. Millionaire won two Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Game/Audience Participation Show in 2000 and 2001. Philbin was honored with a Daytime Emmy in the category of Outstanding Game Show Host in 2001, while Vieira received one in 2005, and another in 2009.[105] TV Guide ranked the U.S. Millionaire #7 on its 2001 list of the 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time,[106] and later ranked it #6 on its 2013 “60 Greatest Game Shows” list.[107] GSN ranked Millionaire #5 on its August 2006 list of the 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time,[108] and later honored the show in January 2007 on its only Gameshow Hall of Fame special.[2]
Other media[edit]
Merchandise[edit]
In 2000, Pressman released two board game adaptions of Millionaire[109][110] as well as a junior edition recommended for younger players.[111] Several video games based on the varying gameplay formats of Millionaire have also been released throughout the course of the show’s U.S. history.
Between 1999 and 2001, Jellyvision produced five video game adaptations based upon the original primetime series for personal computers and Sony‘s PlayStation console, all of them featuring Philbin’s likeness and voice. The first of these adaptations was published by Disney Interactive, while the later four were published by Buena Vista Interactive which had just been spun off from DI when it reestablished itself in attempts to diversify its portfolio. Of the five games, three featured general trivia questions,[112][113][114] one was sports-themed,[115] and another was a “Kids Edition” featuring easier questions.[116] In 2007, Imagination Games released a DVD version of the show, based on the 2004–08 format and coming complete with Vieira’s likeness and voice,[117] as well as a quiz book[118] and a 2009 desktop calendar.[119] Additionally, two Millionaire video games were released by Ludia in conjunction with Ubisoft in 2010 and 2011; the first of these was a game for Nintendo‘s Wii console and DS handheld system based on the clock format,[120] while the second, for Microsoft‘s Xbox 360, was based on the shuffle format.[121]
Ludia made a Facebook game based on Millionaire available from 2011 to 2016. This game featured an altered version of the shuffle format, condensing the number of questions to twelve—eight in round one and four in round two. Contestants competed against eight other Millionaire fans in round one, with the top three playing round two alone. There was no “final answer” rule; the contestant’s responses were automatically locked in. Answering a question correctly earned a contestant the value of that question, multiplied by the number of people who responded incorrectly. Contestants were allowed to use two of their Facebook friends as Jump the Question lifelines in round one, and to use the Ask the Audience lifeline in round two to invite up to 50 such friends of theirs to answer a question for a portion of the prize money of the current question.[122]
Album[edit]
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The Album (Celador Records), by Keith Strachan, Matthew Strachan, and various artists, was released August 1, 2000, and features songs based on the show.[123]
Disney Parks attraction[edit]
Main article: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire – Play It!
The building that housed the Californian version, shown here after its 2004 closure
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire – Play It! was an attraction at the Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park (when it was known as Disney-MGM Studios) at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida and at Disney California Adventure Park in Anaheim, California. Both the Florida and California Play It! attractions opened in 2001; the California version closed in 2004,[124] and the Florida version closed in 2006 and was replaced by Toy Story Midway Mania!
The format in the Play It! attraction was very similar to that of the television show that inspired it. When a show started, a Fastest Finger question was given, and the audience was asked to put the four answers in order; the person with the fastest time was the first contestant in the Hot Seat for that show. However, the main game had some differences: for example, contestants competed for points rather than dollars, the questions were set to time limits, and the Phone-a-Friend lifeline became Phone a Complete Stranger which connected the contestant to a Disney cast member outside the attraction’s theater who would find a guest to help. After every level the player completed, he or she was awarded a collectible lapel pin. Additional prizes were awarded after every fifth question they answered correctly. [125]
^ The simplified title is often used by hosts and in promotional materials.
^ To qualify for 2004’s Super Millionaire spin-off, potential contestants were required to answer five questions. Each person who successfully answered all five questions chose one tape date, and the contestants for that tape date were drawn from that pool.
^ a b “CREDITS – Matthew Strachan | Composer & Songwriter”. Retrieved June 23, 2020..mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotes:”””””””‘””‘”}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background-image:url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Lock-green.svg/9px-Lock-green.svg.png”);background-image:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg”);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:9px;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background-image:url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-gray-alt-2.svg.png”);background-image:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg”);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:9px;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background-image:url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg/9px-Lock-red-alt-2.svg.png”);background-image:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg”);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:9px;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration{color:#555}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription span,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration span{border-bottom:1px dotted;cursor:help}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background-image:url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/12px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png”);background-image:linear-gradient(transparent,transparent),url(“//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg”);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-size:12px;background-position:right .1em center}.mw-parser-output code.cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:inherit;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{font-size:100%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#33aa33;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-subscription,.mw-parser-output .cs1-registration,.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right,.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-wl-right{padding-right:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflink{font-weight:inherit}
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^ Shain, Michael (January 11, 2013). “Regis considering return to Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. New York Post. Retrieved October 21, 2017.
^ “Cedric the Entertainer Will Host “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, Replace Meredith Vieira”. The Huffington Post. March 20, 2013. Retrieved September 5, 2014.
^ Andreeva, Nellie (February 7, 2013). “Cedric The Entertainer To Succeed Meredith Vieira As Host Of Syndicated Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on January 2, 2014.
^ a b Andreeva, Nellie (April 30, 2014). “‘Who Wants To Be Millionaire’ Host Cedric The Entertainer To Depart”. Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on May 20, 2014. Retrieved August 6, 2014.
^ Andreeva, Nellie (May 7, 2014). “Terry Crews Named New Host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on June 6, 2014. Retrieved June 4, 2014.
^ Andreeva, Nellie (April 13, 2015). “Chris Harrison Named New Host Of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’, Replacing Terry Crews”. Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
^ Schneider, Michael (January 8, 2020). “Jimmy Kimmel Hosts ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ 20th Anniversary Revival for ABC”. Variety. Retrieved January 8, 2020.
^ a b c d e f End credits lists of appropriate U.S. Millionaire episodes.
^ a b c “Millionaire”. Andy Walmsley, Production Designer. Retrieved September 24, 2013.
^ The Meredith Vieira Show. Season 1. Episode 1. September 8, 2014. Syndication.
^ “‘Switch the Question’ Added as New Lifeline on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'”. August 24, 2004. Retrieved December 16, 2012.
^ “Sony buys Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? parent”. mcvuk.com. March 13, 2008. Archived from the original on July 25, 2014. Retrieved July 16, 2014.
^ Loveday, Samantha (December 1, 2006). “New owners take on Celador International and Millionaire brand”. toynews-online.biz. Retrieved July 16, 2014.
^ “Valleycrest Productions LTD”. PowerProfiles. Archived from the original on December 24, 2013.
^ a b “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has the First Million Dollar Question of the Season!”. Fox 43 Central Pennsylvania. September 24, 2013. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
^ Just, Olivia (July 3, 2014). “Disney moves filming of ‘Millionaire’ to Stamford”. CT Post. Hearst Media Services Connecticut, LLC. Retrieved May 22, 2015.
^ Holloway, Daniel (May 20, 2016). “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Relocates to Las Vegas”. Variety. Penske Media Corporation. Retrieved November 5, 2016.
^ a b Furman, Elina; Furman, Leah (2000). So You’d Like to Win a Million: Facts, Trivia, and Inside Hints on Game Show Success. Macmillan. ISBN 9780312976354.
^ Davies, Michael (2000). Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The Official Book from the Hit TV Show. Hyperion Books. p. 14. ISBN 9780786885770.
^ Tracy, Kathleen (2000). Regis!: The Unauthorized Biography. ECW Press. p. 147. ISBN 9781550224399.
^ a b c d Grosvenor, Carrie. “Be a Contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. about.com. Archived from the original on November 13, 2016. Retrieved August 13, 2014.
^ Perry, Claudia (March 28, 2007). “Who wants to be a game-show contestant?”. The Seattle Times. Retrieved July 16, 2010.
^ a b c Smurthwaite, Nick (March 21, 2005). “Million Pound Notes: Keith Strachan”. The Stage. Archived from the original on June 12, 2011.
^ “Ah2 Music Marks 10th Anniversary”. TrailerMusicVibe. August 21, 2014.
^ a b Disney-ABC Domestic Television (September 15, 2010). “Season 23, Episode 8”. Live! with Regis and Kelly. Syndicated.
^ Nordyke, Kimberly (September 10, 2012). “Anderson Live, Wendy Williams, Rachael Ray Among Syndicated Shows Getting Set Makeovers (Photos)”. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved September 12, 2012.
^ Seidman, Robert (August 9, 2009). “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Returns for its Ten Year Anniversary”. TV By the Numbers. Zap2it. Retrieved August 6, 2014.
^ a b Carter, Bill (August 9, 2009). “Millionaire Far From Its Final Answer”. The New York Times. Retrieved January 20, 2018.
^ Walt Disney Company (February 5, 2001), Disney Factbook 2000 – Year in Review, p. 7
^ Bauder, David (August 4, 2009). “”ABC Hopes “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” Lightning Can Strike Twice””. Huffington Post. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved August 18, 2010.
^ Carter, Bill (November 29, 2001). “ABC’s Millionaire May Not Survive Beyond the Current Season”. The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2014.
^ a b c d e f g Kimball, Trevor (April 22, 2009). “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: ABC Game Show Returning to primetime”. TV Series Finale. Retrieved May 28, 2020.
^ Millionaire’s route to top prize BBC News, 7 April 2003
^ Carter, Bill (June 20, 2001). “TV Notes: Games to Clash on Syndication”. The New York Times. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
^ Pendleton, Jennifer (May 13, 2002). “‘Dr. Phil,’ ‘Millionaire,’ ‘John Walsh’ arrive, but heat factor is lacking”. Advertising Age. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
^ a b c “Millionaire poorer in N.Y.” The Hollywood Reporter. Highbeam Business. December 2, 2002. Archived from the original on August 8, 2014. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
^ “Millionaire nabs key slots in syndication”. The Hollywood Reporter. September 2, 2003. Archived from the original on September 7, 2003.
^ “Local Listings”. Millionaire TV. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
^ Anotado, Cory (June 29, 2015). “Millionaire re-introduces ladder format for 2015 season”. Buzzerblog. Retrieved June 29, 2015.
^ Anotado, Cory (April 17, 2015). “What Millionaire Needed to Stay On The Air”. Buzzerblog. Retrieved April 28, 2015.
^ Lincoln, Ross (January 17, 2017). “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire & RightThisMinute Renewed For Syndication On ABC Stations Through 2018”. Deadline Hollywood. PMC. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
^ Sandberg, Bryn Elise (January 17, 2018). “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Renewed for 17th Season on ABC Stations”. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
^ Calvario, Liz. “‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ Canceled After Nearly 20 Years”. ETOnline.com. CBS Studios, Inc. Retrieved May 18, 2019.
^ Andreeva, Nellie (June 10, 2020). “‘Cops’: Disney In Discussions With Local Stations Dropping The Show About Replacements”. Deadline. Retrieved June 24, 2020.
^ Brennan, Steve (September 23, 2003). “GSN Wins Millionaire Rerun Rights”. The Hollywood Reporter. Prometheus Global Media. Archived from the original on July 14, 2014. Retrieved July 13, 2014.
^ “GSN Renews and Expands Its ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ Inventory and Acquires ‘Super Millionaire’ Series” (Press release). PR Newswire. April 18, 2005. Retrieved June 7, 2014.
^ “Meredith Vieira-Hosted Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Episodes Make Cable Debut Beginning November 10, 2008” (Press release). GSN Corporate. November 10, 2008. Archived from the original on October 10, 2014. Retrieved June 7, 2014.
^ “GSN Adds Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to Daytime Schedule, 12/18”. GSN Corporate (Press release). Broadway World. December 4, 2017. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
^ Avalos, Regina (December 6, 2017). “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Seasons 14 and 15 Coming to GSN”. TV Series Finale. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
^ Moraski, Lauren (May 7, 2014). “Chip Esten on Nashville Finale, Show’s Future”. CBS News. Retrieved July 20, 2014.
^ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (2020). Season 1. Episode 8. May 28, 2020. ABC.
^ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (2020). Season 1. Episode 9. June 4, 2020. ABC.
^ Huff, Richard (May 5, 2000). “Starstruck Millionaire: Celebrity Specials Win Show its Best Ratings Ever”. New York Daily News. Archived from the original on August 13, 2009.
^ “Season Premiere”. Digital Spy. Hearst Magazines UK. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Walk in and Win”. dadt.com. Retrieved July 29, 2014.
^ “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and Host Meredith Vieira, Celebrate 1,000 Episodes by Giving $100,000 Away to Home Viewers!”. Marketwired. October 23, 2007. Retrieved August 17, 2014.
^ a b Levin, Gary (February 24, 2004). “Millionaire could be ABC’s Interim Answer”. USA Today. Gannett Company. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
^ a b “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Returns With A Hollywood Makeover”. AccessHollywood.com. Retrieved April 2, 2017.
^ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: 10th Anniversary Celebration. Episode 6. August 18, 2009. ABC.
^ “numberFire: Moneyball for Fantasy Football Leagues”. FastCompany.com. Retrieved September 3, 2016.
^ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: 10th Anniversary Celebration. Episode 11. August 23, 2009. ABC.
^ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Season 12. Episode 18. September 25, 2013. Syndicated.
^ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Season 8. Episode 1. September 7, 2009. Syndicated.
^ a b c “‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ Tournament of Ten”. about.com. Archived from the original on November 13, 2009. Retrieved July 16, 2014.
^ Schneider, Michael (April 8, 2020). “Jimmy Kimmel and Michael Davies on the Pre-Coronavirus Scramble to Reboot ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire'”. Variety. Retrieved April 25, 2020.
^ White, Peter (May 21, 2020). “ABC Renews 13 Series, Including Freshmen Stumptown & Mixed-ish, For 2020–21 Season”. Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved May 28, 2020.
^ The Star Ledger. December 11, 2006
^ “Meredith Vieira biography”. www.hollywood.com. Archived from the original on March 21, 2008. Retrieved March 11, 2010.
^ “TV Guide Names the 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time”. TV Guide. February 2, 2001.
^ Fretts, Bruce (June 17, 2013). “Eyes on the Prize”. TV Guide. pp. 14–15.
^ The 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time. August 31, 2006. GSN.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”. BoardGameGeek. Retrieved July 17, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (Second Edition)”. BoardGameGeek. Retrieved January 23, 2018.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Junior”. BoardGameGeek. Retrieved July 17, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? [1999]”. IGN. Retrieved July 19, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Second Edition”. IGN. Retrieved July 19, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 3rd Edition”. IGN. Retrieved July 19, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Sports Edition”. IGN. Retrieved July 19, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Kids Edition”. IGN. Retrieved July 19, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: DVD Game”. BoardGameGeek. Retrieved July 17, 2014.
^ “Millionaire: Quiz Book”. Barnes & Noble. Retrieved July 22, 2014.
^ “Millionaire 2009 Desktop Calendar”. Desk Calendar Pad. Archived from the original on July 22, 2014. Retrieved July 22, 2014.
^ “Ubisoft Releases Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Video Game for Wii and DS”. IGN. October 6, 2010. Retrieved July 17, 2014.
^ “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? 2012 Edition”. GameFAQs. Retrieved July 17, 2014.
^ Shaul, Brandy (April 7, 2011). “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire now on Facebook: Compete with others for virtual riches”. AOL. Archived from the original on April 4, 2017. Retrieved April 2, 2017.
^ “Keith Strachan & Matthew Strachan – Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (The Album)”. Discogs. Retrieved May 14, 2019.
^ Shaffer, Joshua C. (2010). Discovering the Magic Kingdom: An Unofficial Disneyland Vacation Guide. Author House. p. 207. ISBN 9781452063133.
^ Marx, Jennifer and Dave (December 29, 2006). “Who Wants to Be a Winner? Passport Tips for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire – Play It!”. PassPorter.com.
Fisher, David; Davies, Michael P. (2000). Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The Official Book from the Hit TV Show. Cader Books. ISBN 0-7868-8577-7.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (US – 1999–2002) on IMDb
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at TV.com
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (US – current) on IMDb
Who Wants to Be a Super Millionaire (US) on IMDb
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Millionaire_(American_game_show)
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Types of e-commerce
Fantasy football (gridiron)
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Trump's Top-10 Triumphs: A Last Look At A Remarkable Presidency – Issues & Insights
This is short and entertaining. I personally don't remember what paprika tastes like, although I am pretty sure that I have had it.
https://youtu.be/gbrPygwexCg
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/20/far-left-activist-calls-for-citizens-to-monitor-and-report-trump-supporters/
This video touched my heart. Let's make 2021 a year of kindness.
https://youtu.be/TSXz5ts4jJY
Trump Releases Farewell Video In Last Day As President
Trump gives a fairly good farewell speech. Not much of it is new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-YNd2Ya2wU
Centralia: The Real-Life Silent Hill | Answers With Joe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDffEbKd6Ko
Japanese Company Wants to Make a Wooden Satellite...But Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJNklI1YAs0
Goodbye, America | The American Spectator
This is interesting. Slightly long, but interesting.
https://spectator.org/free-speech-trump-parler/
Why Won't Media Show Video Evidence of Trump "Inciting" Mob?
https://youtu.be/5Cd7skyUrcw
AOC says Congress needs to 'rein in' media
https://youtu.be/lD8I9XWtZLY
Gaetz Drops NUKE On Dems As They Scream Bloody Murder At Him On Floor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeN3-Ppx36o
A Closer Look at What Happened Last Week
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k-BvJ8D7m8
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Larry Trout <>
Date: Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 1:00 PM
Subject: Ron Paul
Ron Paul was Censored by Big Tech for pointing out Censorship by big Tech
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/bruce-willis-kicked-out-of-pharmacy-for-refusing-to-wear-mask-report/ar-BB1cHnBb?ocid=msedgntp
This recipe looks interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--P6IGVLVZo&feature=emb_logo
The Left Controls Two Monopolies That Are Trying to Merge And We Need to Take Action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg24-652F7c
This Fisher-Price “Gaming Controller” Knows the Konami Code – Review Geek
When Konami accidentally left in a cheat code to one of their games, used by the programmers to debug the game, it became so popular that many videogames began to support the code.
https://www.reviewgeek.com/66925/this-fisher-price-gaming-controller-knows-the-konami-code/
Celebrities We Lost to Coronavirus in 2020
I did not know that we lost Dawn Wells. We also lost David Prowse, Herman Cain, and Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy.
https://people.com/health/celebrity-coronavirus-deaths/
https://nypost.com/2020/12/30/tina-louise-last-gilligans-island-star-on-dawn-wells-death/
Cuomo quote was prescient on June 3
From: Larry Trout
Now too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets: persistent, poisonous inequities and injustice," Cuomo told his viewers. "And please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful. Because I can show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is and led to any major milestone. To be honest, this is not a tranquil time."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnns-chris-cuomo-blasted-for-suggesting-protesters-dont-have-to-be-peaceful
What Really Happened to Jack Ma?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbP__1fmF0U&list=PLQjQKfvegGtkaGNjaL496dx4ttPAA3arF&index=4
Officer PASSES AWAY due to Capitol Hill attack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuSm7PrQIQ
Trump and his supporters have every right to express their political opinion about the legitimacy of this election. This has nothing to do with inciting violence or a mob. That vast majority of Republicans by far do not even remotely condone this kind of behavior. Because a few idiots did some really stupid behavior does not put guilt on those expressing their legitimate political grievances.
We have spent at least 35 years dependent upon Intel microprocessors or equivalent from AMD. A quiet revolution is happening where both hardware and software are switching to ARM Risc processors, giving great performance with lower power consumption and more battery life on portable devices. It is about damn time! There is now more choice in the marketplace, and the software makers aren't forcing you to use just one type of processor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA
The Capitol Was STORMED! - Everything You Need To Know
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH9XWNz0GW4
We Need to Take a Step Back And Break Down What Just Happened And What the Solution Is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlyRvfBKp0g
Over 432,000 Votes Removed From Trump in Pennsylvania, Data Scientists Say
https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-over-432000-votes-removed-from-trump-in-pennsylvania-data-scientists-say_3642202.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkc50_bcaJ4
The contrary view:
https://caucus99percent.com/content/election-fraud-lies-over-432000-votes-removed-trump-pennsylvania-data-scientists-say
The Rush Limbaugh Show From December 23rd
This was Rush Limbaugh's last broadcast of 2020, right before Christmas.
The show was significant in a few big ways. I felt compelled to listen to it about 3 times.
He acknowledged his stage four lung cancer diagnosis, and that he wasn't supposed to live this long. At the end of the program, he mentions that eventually he will be unable to do his program.
He begins and ends the program by expressing his gratitude to the audience and all those who have helped him.
The two main topics of the program were the COVID relief bill and the senate runoff.
A doctor from Sandiego called with his concern about illegal immigrants bringing COVID into the country and spreading it.
One lady called in with a negative perspective feeling that the Democrats have taken over, with fraud, and there was nothing that we could do about it. Rush jokingly referred to her as "Debbie Downer."
In a very candid moment, Rush said that he had spent 30 years telling people about the benefits of freedom and not to vote for liberals, and he felt that ultimately he failed.
An emotional man called in who said that he found Rush's voice comforting because it reminded him of his father. Rush said that he could relate to this because of his relationship with his own father.
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-the-rush-limbaugh-show-57927691/episode/the-rush-limbaugh-show-podcast--75524688/
Most impressive bike tricks ever...
(163) Girl Biker Performs - You Must See - YouTube
China Shocked The World By Planting Billions of Trees...Our Turn!
https://youtu.be/lECxeRzJ2sY
Plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere. All plant material is eventually consumed or decays, which is another form of consumption by bacteria and fungus. This consumption puts the CO2 back into the atmosphere. A small amount of it might be buried. Trees are a reservoir for carbon that can last decades or centuries. This might be useful because according to what I have heard most fossil fuels will run out by the year 2100.
The Best Of The Internet (2020)
Most of this is good, but my favorite parts are at 1:45 and 9:48.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGgtwEQ-BTk
Making a Life-Sized Illusion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBap_Lp-0oc
Fwd: What is Paprika Actually Made Of? | Food Unwr...
Far-Left Activist Calls for Citizens to ‘Monitor’ ...
Trump Releases Farewell Video In Last Day As Presi...
Centralia: The Real-Life Silent Hill | Answers Wit...
Japanese Company Wants to Make a Wooden Satellite....
Why Won't Media Show Video Evidence of Trump "Inci...
Gaetz Drops NUKE On Dems As They Scream Bloody Mur...
Bruce Willis kicked out of pharmacy for refusing t...
The Left Controls Two Monopolies That Are Trying t...
This Fisher-Price “Gaming Controller” Knows the Ko...
The Capitol Was STORMED! - Everything You Need To ...
We Need to Take a Step Back And Break Down What Ju...
Over 432,000 Votes Removed From Trump in Pennsylva...
China Shocked The World By Planting Billions of Tr...
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Gmail for iOSAlthough Google's excellent Gmail service is already a dominant player in the free email game, it may prove even more popular when it can be applied ...
New Call of Duty Black Ops 2The first Call of Duty video game was groundbreaking; it has revolutionized the warfare gaming industry ...
by new.com
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Effective [January, 2012]
Images courtesy of fiskfisk, swanksalot, Johan Larsson, that one doood, highlandhomes, decjr, kk+, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, University of Salford, modern-mami
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Rising Music Artist Ammon Rose Debuts His New Single ‘It’s Over’
Ammon Albert Rose, known as Ammon Rose, released his debut single, It’s Over. The platinum-awarded song, which featured American-rapper Abstract, garnered over 10,500 streams on Spotify alone and reached nearly 80 countries worldwide in 5 months.
He was born on March 20, 1995, and already showed inclination and interest in music when he was still a baby. Ammon Rose would try to copy the noises around him, even the sound of a vacuum or dryer.
He grew up with his dream in a small town of Bountiful, Utah. At the age of eight, he already attempted to write his first song with his close friend and cousin, Andrew Peterson. “I remember trying to write music by reading article after article. I also watched plenty of videos to know how popular artists were able to do it,” Ammon Rose says, as he collected memories of writing music.
Ammon Rose would then go to his piano and daydream about having many songs he had composed. “When I came back to reality, I’d play a couple of chords that sound good together. I realized the difficulty that laid ahead and never thought I’d be able to write a song that everyone would enjoy.”
His passion for making music continued through his elementary and high school years and started with humble beginnings. He participated in various activities that welcomed musicians. He was a tenor in the choir and even played percussion in the band. Ammon Rose decided to self-taught with guitar, ukulele, or anything that he could get his fingers laid on.
“I remember it pretty vividly,” he says, recalling one of his fondest memories as an aspiring musician. “I was asked by a girl that I liked to play guitar for her and her friend, who would be singing a song in front of our choir class!” He admitted that he did not practice that much. As a result, when he strummed the guitar, it only created a noise, knowing that he did not press the strings hard enough. “It was a learning experience. I cringe when I think about it.”
It’s Over singer shared that his debut single was recorded in a living room. This proves that creating greatness does not require fancy places or things. Ammon Rose also shared that he wrote and played all his music, which few of the rising or even popstars can do. He even has a song, which will be released soon; only two chords made that.
“People can always count on my music having meaning, a story or history behind it,” he says. “I create music because it is my passion, and I want the world to make memories that my music can be a part of. That way, when they listen to specific songs, they remember those moments of their life. They can appreciate their past experiences more often, and I would love to help be a part of that through my music.”
Listen to Ammon Rose’s debut song It’s Over on Spotify. For more updates, follow him on his Twitter and Instagram.
Company Name: Ammon Rose
Website: https://ammonrose.com/
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Last Updated: Monday, 31 October 2005, 16:16 GMT
Diouf charged with drink driving
El Hadji Diouf was arrested in Bolton early on Sunday
Premiership striker El Hadji Diouf has been charged with drink driving.
The 24-year-old Bolton Wanderers and Senegal star was stopped by police in Blackburn Road, Bolton, in the early hours of Sunday morning.
He was arrested and breathalysed before being taken to a police station where he was charged and released on bail.
Earlier this year Diouf denied a disorderly conduct charge after a Middlesbrough fan alleged he spat at him during a game last November.
He is due to stand trial on the Section 5 Public Order offence at Teesside Magistrates' Court on 8 December.
Loan spell
A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: "El Hadji Diouf was stopped on Blackburn Road (A666) by an officer at 0420 GMT, who requested he take a breath test.
"He was then arrested and taken to Astley Bridge police station, where he was charged with drink driving."
Diouf is due to appear before Bolton magistrates on 21 November.
He signed for Bolton from Liverpool for an undisclosed fee after a loan spell.
He was initially brought to England by former Liverpool boss Gerard Houllier, who signed him from French club Lens for £10 million in 2002.
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“THE CURRENT POLITICAL DEADLOCK IN SUDAN. HOW DID WE END UP HERE?”
Just before the June 3 attacks against protesters in Khartoum, the leadership of the Sudanese Communist Party published their view of the complicated political situation in Sudan since the takeover of power by the transitional military council (TMC), and the challenges facing the “Forces for the declaration of Freedom and Change” coalition, FDFC. This is a slightly abridged version of the SCP statement.
“When the TMC took over power we immediately recognised the council as the security committee of the previously ousted dictator Omar Al Bashir,” said the SCP. “As such, we refused to sit down with the council to negotiate anything but the immediate handover of all powers to the FDFC, the legitimate leaders and representatives of the millions of Sudanese who led them through five months of non-violent protests to the triumph of defeating one of the world’s most notorious dictators with a horrid record of human rights violations.
“However, shortly afterwards, the party had to submit to the wishes of a majority of its partners at the FDFC and accepted to sit down with the TMC to negotiate a handover of power based on terms of power sharing with the TMC. On our part we saw such a drastic change of position as costly in terms of meeting the aspirations of the millions of our people for a genuine change. Not least we had to endure the apparent and loud discontent of some of our loyal members, friends and sympathisers. However, as we were governed by the terms and rules of FDFC, we chose to move pragmatically and to take the position that ensures the unity of the opposition under the leadership of FDFC.
“Through a lengthy and strenuous process, the FDFC managed to reach a deal with the TMC regarding the duration of the interim government; the composition and terms of reference of both the ministerial and the legislative councils. However, the negotiations collapsed over the composition of the supreme council and who will be the president of the supreme council. Currently, at least officially, the negotiations have not been resumed. In the meantime, we have increasing concerns about the intentions, nature and impartiality of the TMC.
“In the short period of the TMC rule we have witnessed repeated, grave violations of human rights. And while we do not accuse the TMC of directly causing these violations, we certainly hold it responsible for failing to protect the safety and security of the people of Sudan. We also accuse the TMC of deliberately concealing the divide between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the National Armed Forces and the Security Forces of the previous regime, which is still active and operating with apparent impunity. The outcome of this unclear situation of these different armed groups is the creation of a security vacuum whereby crimes and violations against human rights can go by un-accounted for and no one is held responsible…
The TMC has failed in exercising transparency, swiftness and effectiveness in closing the circle around remnants of the previous regime. Security forces loyal to the previous regime are operating freely and terrorising peaceful demonstrators. There has not been any serious clamping down on the financial, or political institutions, or individuals loyal to the previous dictator. In fact, most of Sudan’s embassies and diplomatic personal loyal to the previous regime are operating freely around the globe seeking support and unlawful legitimacy for the TMC from the international community.
“The TMC has single-handedly and through several decrees issued by General Abdul Fatah Burhan, given itself powers including representing the nation internationally. As such, members of the TMC have been travelling in the region, visiting several countries, speaking in the name of our people and entering into shady deals and promises on behalf of the people of Sudan in addition to receiving financial and logistical support from some of these said countries, unlawfully. The TMC has virtually declared itself the legitimate government of Sudan and is acting as one.
“The TMC is actively attempting to break the unity and patience of the people of Sudan and their voluntary leadership, the FDFC, by using several dubious methods including procrastinating the handover process; engaging all parties into lengthy, tedious and tiresome talks; taking shifty and inconsistent negotiations positions, etc.
“The TMC has been threatening the peaceful protesters from practicing their legal rights of going on strike and using civil disobedience to install civilian authority which is their aim.
“The Sudanese Communist Party is also aware of the gross interference of some foreign governments and companies in the internal affairs of Sudan, driven by their own interests that are in direct conflict with those of the people, who dream of a free, civilian, just and democratic Sudan, which respects all its neighbouring countries and the international community based on mutual respect for sovereignty, and for nurturing mutual interests that are in line with peace and justice for our people and for other nations too.
“The Sudanese Communist Party has been receiving confirmed reports about the activities by the RSF and its leader Mohmed Hamdan Dagolo, both inside and outside Sudan. Our reports confirm that RSF have been receiving financial, logistical and perhaps even military support from some foreign governments. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the systematic disarmament and marginalisation of the National Sudanese Armed Forces. We view any plans to reinforce RSF especially at the expense of the National Armed Forces, as a direct threat to our peaceful revolution and as a means of aborting the dream millions of Sudanese young people have of a civilian authority in our country. It is a dangerous and irresponsible move that puts not just the Sudan, but the region as a whole on the verge of total chaos and civil war.
“The RSF are nothing more than militia thugs who have terrorised and murdered thousands of innocent civilians in Darfur and we consider their leader as a war-lord as well as a war criminal.
“Where do we stand now? After repeatedly failing to get the TMC to hand over power to FDFC through direct talks, the SCP called for and supported the general strike on May 28 and 29. We also fully support future strikes, demonstration, civil disobedience and all other forms of non-violent protests to achieve the goals of our people. We call on all our members, friends and sympathisers in Sudan to participate in future strikes, demonstrations, etc. to force the military junta to listen to the wishes of the people. We also call on our friends and the international community abroad to show solidarity and support for our cause and to highlight and showcase our aspirations for Freedom, Peace and Justice.
“We urge the international community to act swiftly to exert maximum diplomatic pressure to try and stop the armament of the militias of the RSF and to push for supporting and recognising the National Armed Forces with its honourable junior rank officers and soldiers who aspire together with the rest of the people of Sudan for freedom, justice and peace under a new civilian and democratic era…”
Political Bureau of the Sudanese Communist Party–Khartoum
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Not the Best Two Years — Never Good Enough
I have never once thought that my mission was the best two years of my life. I served in Norway, which (like all of Scandinavia) is a tough place for missionary work. A Christmas Day article published by a leading Norwegian news outlet proclaimed that "Scandinavia is the most godless corner of the most godless continent in the world" (translated to English from original Norwegian).
I know people that have very good reasons for feeling that they had a horrible experience as a missionary. Not me. The two years I spent serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints were a time of tremendous growth. I had times of incredible joy, far more times of depression, and copious periods of simple mundanity. And cold. It gets cold in Norway. Although summers can be beautiful.
What I did not see much of was success, if by success you mean people joining the Church and staying committed to the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. I climbed into the baptismal font exactly once while in Norway, where I baptized a teenage girl that stopped attending church three weeks after her baptism. But that's not why I returned home feeling unsuccessful.
If I was in Norway to baptize a bunch of people — as the continuous pressure to produce adequate numbers of contacts, lessons, baptismal challenges, and converts plainly suggested — I was a failure as a missionary. Sure, we had missionaries that never baptized anyone in Norway. But there was also one elder that baptized at least one person for every month he was in the country. Compared to him I was an absolute failure.
I knew that I was never good enough as a missionary, although, I served in every leadership position that a young elder could be called to. Pretty much every week of my mission I turned in numbers that fell far below the stated minimum goals in every reporting category. Every motivational tool we used as missionaries became a stick with which I continually beat myself.
I still remember feeling guilty about being such a lousy missionary as I stood to speak in sacrament meeting days after returning home. There were many things I loved about my mission. But I didn't love my mission. How could I? I had never been good enough. I was no slacker, but I had never lived up to what I felt was expected of me as a missionary.
For many years this feeling of guilt represented the chief symbol of my mission in my mind. When others would talk in glowing terms of their missions I would cower inwardly under a sense of self loathing.
Throughout my youth I had repeatedly been exposed to a quote by some church leader where he encouraged missionaries to work hard by saying something to the effect that how hard you worked during the two years of your mission would determine whether it brought you a lifetime of joy or regret. (My internal perception may have paraphrased it more harshly than it was intended.) Although I can't seem to find that quote now, one of my companions had a mini poster of the quote prominently displayed in our apartment.
All I could think of every time I thought of this quote was the part about regret. Having failed to work as hard as I could have as a missionary, I was clearly in for an eternity of regret. I figured, for example, that I was probably called to be an assistant to the president to keep me out of the field because I was such a lousy missionary.
But today, more than three decades after returning from my mission, I feel better about my mission than ever. It's not that the years have caused me to forget the hard times. Rather, having gained some perspective of life, the gospel, the Church, and my own personality, I perceive my mission in a light that I feel is more in line with the way the Lord sees it. I think he counts success differently than we often do in human terms.
It seems that people with my personality type are prone to feeling guilt. Messages intended for slackers can absolutely tear the earnest but guilt-prone apart. While guilt can be a source of motivation, it can also be a trap that stymies progression when incorrectly applied.
The Lord's command for us to forgive everyone extends equally to ourselves (see D&C 64:10). As I look back on my callow 19-21-year-old self, I see a kid struggling through the normal issues of life doing a pretty decent job with the resources God blessed him with.
And if I am completely honest with myself, as I listen to the quiet whisperings of the Holy Spirit, I sense that the Lord is pleased with the service I rendered in Norway. Yes, he's pleased in the way a parent is pleased when their kindergartener brings home a pencil holder made of a spray painted can covered with dried macaroni. But I feel that through the grace of Christ, my missionary service was acceptable to the Lord. And my guilt is swept away (see Enos 1:6).
I will probably never be able to say that my mission was the best two years of my life. But I deeply cherish the time I served as a missionary in Norway. I would never wish to repeat some of the experiences that I have come to cherish. But I rejoice in knowing that I can think about my mission free of guilt and with a sense that in some small way I was able to please my God as a missionary.
Posted by Scott Hinrichs at 1/30/2015 02:08:00 PM No comments:
I Hope For Better Ward Councils
It was the first Sunday that the bishop was away, leaving me in charge of the day's various meetings. I had been called to serve as a counselor to the bishop when our ward's new bishopric had been formed several months earlier.
As our ward council discussed various matters that morning, we hit on a topic that struck a chord with me. After some discussion, I glanced at the clock and then deigned to offer my enlightened counsel. Not only was I the guy in charge, I had a fair amount of experience with the issue.
In my mind's eye I could see myself dispensing incredible profoundness to breathlessly eager listeners. But it didn't quite roll out that way. Almost everything I said seemed to produce loose ends, which I would then try to tie off, only to produce additional loose ends in the process.
These attempts to achieve a coherent thought resulted in me rambling on and on. My message felt like a strong rolling river that eventually peters out into a broad sandy delta covered with a thousand stagnate marshy streams.
I finally glanced at the clock and realized that 8½ minutes had passed since I had last looked at it. Nobody else had said anything. I'm sure that the rest of the people in the room were relieved when I quickly abandoned my attempt to reach a cogent conclusion and weakly wrapped up my desultory monologue. "This" I thought to myself as the meeting ended, "is not how ward councils are supposed to work."
Ward councils are supposed to be collaborative bodies where members work together within their various stewardships to accomplish the entire mission of the Church. Although the bishop ultimately is responsible for the actions of the council, nobody — not even the bishop — is supposed to dominate the council.
Nor are members of the ward council simply errand boys/girls for the bishop/bishopric. Each is called of God to vigorously fulfill a specific stewardship and is entitled to inspiration and revelation in relation to that calling. While the Church has a hierarchical structure with vertical stewardships, no individual is any other individual's underling. Each is accountable to God for their calling.
When any leader sucks all of the air out of the room, members of the ward council tend to clam up and become observers rather than active participants. They feel that their ideas and inspirations are not important to leaders, so they just wait to be told what to do.
An example of this occurred on one ward council of which I was a member. The bishop essentially insisted on making all of the decisions, even on matters that could have been handled by others. It wasn't that he shut down the discussion. But everyone in the room would constantly look at him to see if he was prepared to pontificate his verdict. It was like a game of musical chairs where everyone keeps walking in the same circle until the person in charge stops the music.
I would like to offer some positive examples of how ward councils should work. But quite frankly, I've seen very little of that in any of the various church councils I have attended throughout my life. Many of these meetings have devolved to little more than leaders dumping demands as other council members quietly sit and make notes of what they are supposed to do. I believe that a monumental cultural shift will be required for this to change.
Neylan McBaine's essay on ward councils focuses heavily on enhancing the experience of female members of the council. This is vitally important. But I think that many of her points could be extended to all members of the council. Each needs to be valued in her/his role. Each needs to feel accountable not just for carrying out orders, but for making useful contributions to consequential decisions made by the council. I'd love to see this happen on a broad scale in my lifetime.
Posted by Scott Hinrichs at 1/27/2015 11:10:00 AM No comments:
Responding to Bullying
I discussed bullying and fighting in this recent post, where I promised to discuss the more insidious side of bullying in a later post. This is that later post.
I'm sure that parents, teachers, and leaders were concerned about bullying when I was a kid. But not like they are today. Bullying simply existed. It was something you had to learn to deal with. There were always kids that made you fear them. I mean in a bullying way, not like fearing the girl on whom you had a crush but that had no idea you had a crush on her.
You tried to stay out of situations where you were likely to be bullied. But sometimes those situations just couldn't be avoided. Or they caught you off guard. Like coming around the hallway corner and seeing a bully headed directly toward you right when there were no adults around.
Today anti-bullying resources are everywhere. Some of them are pretty good, such as this video:
Many efforts to prevent bullying are laudable. But sometimes they have a boomerang effect. Instead of stopping bullying, they can drive it further underground where it takes on even more treacherous forms, often in the form of (frequently anonymous) cyber-bullying.
Unlike the schoolyard bullies I dealt with back in my day, cyber-tormentors don't require physical prowess or social status. The bully and the victim don't have to be of the same sex. Girls can bully boys just as well as boys can bully girls.
Of course there are baddies that revel in playing the role of the bully. But many bullies don't realize that they are bullies. Bullying awareness programs are good at emphasizing the victim's point of view where the jerks in those videos obviously look like bullies. One guy in the video above only realizes his bully role after someone close to him is a victim, but many bullies never reach that level of self awareness. The view from the inside looking out is different enough that they don't see their actions in that light.
While we should do what we can to prevent and stop bullying, it is also important to realize that our efforts will fall short. Bullying will happen. This means that efforts are needed to teach kids what to do when they are bullied. Yes, we tell them to report the offense to adults. But we have to realize that sometimes kids will not see reporting as a viable potential solution. In some situations they are bound to think that it will make matters worse.
One of our children was repeatedly bullied in elementary school by this one kid and his homies. The school tried various counseling approaches, including involving the boy's parents. But nothing was effective. The boy's parents were beside themselves and tried various approaches at home, but nothing helped. The bullying continued until that class advanced to the junior high, where our child's path rarely crossed with his former tormentor's. So telling adults about the problem doesn't always help much.
Teaching children about coping with bullies has to go beyond just tattling. Delete Cyberbullying offers some tactics that can be helpful when dealing with online abuse. Stomp Out Bullying has a pretty good discussion about how a victim can respond to bullying, noting that each situation requires a unique approach. I like how Stomp Out Bullying offers a number of possible approaches that could safely be tried before involving an adult. This can help the victim become stronger and more independent, which is something we should encourage.
The key is empowerment. Bullies thrive on making their victims feel powerless. Lashing out increases the bully's power and decreases the victim's power. Responding in kind turns the victim into the same kind of despicable character that he/she loathes. Tattling can also increase the victim's sense of individual powerlessness. We need to do a better job of teaching kids how to restore power in their respective situations.
So, by all means, let's work aggressively on preventing and stopping bullying. But let's also be realistic in realizing that since bullying won't be eradicated, it is important to empower kids to adequately respond when they are bullied.
There Was No Poor Among Them
In a recent post I discussed the topic of Zion, focusing on the first part of Moses 7:18 that discusses unity and righteousness. The third characteristic of Zion mentioned in that verse states, "...and there was no poor among them." I felt that this topic warranted separate treatment; hence, this post.
Many have romanticized about eliminating poverty. Some harbor very puerile ideas about how this is to be achieved, when almost all of their simplistic ideas have been repeatedly tried without substantial success, or else would require conditions that defy incontrovertible laws.
It turns out that poverty is a very complex matter. While common themes can be found, the causes of poverty are varied and exist in endless degrees. Poverty is so deeply entrenched that Jesus said, "For ye have the poor always with you..." (Matt 26:11).
How did Enoch's society and the Nephite society described in 4 Nephi 1:3 manage to get rid of poverty? The scriptural record offers only a few words that can be interpreted in many ways. Some extrapolations promote collectivist certainty that flies in the face of verifiable economic laws that are as inviolable as gravity or other natural laws.
World-renowned expert in the economics of social capital Lindon J. Robison offers a fairly cohesive view in this 2005 article. Robison weaves scriptural principle together with a lifetime of economic scholarship to postulate how poverty can be righteously eliminated without violating economic laws. I find this approach refreshing because it does not require the suspension of evident laws; only a change of heart.
The scriptures seem to suggest that poverty can be eliminated only when people stop focusing on the material/status side of the equation. Except for the requirement to meet everyone's basic needs, the mental distinction of economic class would simply become irrelevant.
One way this can happen is when everyone is poor and there are no prosperous folks with which to compare the relative level of poverty. (How often have you heard someone say they never realized as a child that they were poor. Or that they were happy because they were poor.) However, it seems obvious from the scriptures that it pleases the Lord to help his children prosper economically as well as spiritually. Thus, it appears that a more divine way of eliminating poverty would be through a general increase in prosperity.
Robison notes that economists generally agree that the three essential ingredients for economic prosperity are "specialization, trade, and freedom of choice." He goes on to discuss how in a righteous society these three elements are used to achieve "at-one-ment" among people and with God. He discusses two types of at-one-ment that lead to economic equality:
Complete at-one-ment occurs when hearts are knit together in righteous unity (the subject of my previous post). Members of such a society lose the desire to do evil and want only to do good (see Mosiah 5:2). They love their fellowmen as themselves are are vitally interested in the welfare of their fellow beings (see Luke 10:27).
Equality before the law occurs when people are willing to be governed by just laws, where life and property are protected, and where laws are equitably administered without regard for status.
One might counter that if everyone is knit together in righteous unity there would be no need for laws. But I think this goes too far. Unity in overall matters does not imply complete agreement on every point. People with finite understanding are bound to see some matters differently. But in a righteous society they agree upon necessary just laws and graciously accept their equitable administration. They accept accountability for their own choices.
Robison provides a fascinating discussion of how inhibition of one of more of the three economic principles listed above (specialization, trade, and accountable freedom of choice) fosters various levels of separation and inequality.
Coercive approaches to achieving economic equality are ineffective and take a much too materialistic view. Indeed, "nonmarket methods to force people to live as economic equals have destroyed incentives to work hard and smart and [have been] unsuccessful in producing economic equality or economic prosperity."
Furthermore, "The only successful effort to reduce economic inequality while maintaining economic prosperity appears to be a result of voluntary redistributions that depend on at-one-ment, the same characteristic required for economic prosperity."
In other words, the way to maximize economic prosperity happens to also be the way to eliminate poverty. For both of these things to happen, individual and general righteousness is required.
Given that we live in a society that has different interpretations of what righteousness means and where many use their freedom of choice in unrighteous ways, we aren't going to eliminate poverty anytime soon. (Although some would say that if we weren't constantly revising the meaning of the term poverty upward, we would realize that there are a lower percentage of truly poor on the earth today than at anytime in history.)
This means that for the time being we will have to be satisfied with growing prosperity and reducing poverty on a smaller scale, within our capabilities. Some things we can do include:
Improving our personal righteousness.
Teaching and helping others within the scope of our influence to better pursue righteousness.
Doing what we can individually to help the poor while maximizing their dignity and industry. Consider Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's October 2014 general conference talk titled Are We Not All Beggars? in which he promotes solutions to poverty as diverse as the problem itself.
Properly observing the fast, including donations for the benefit of the poor.
Helping with and properly applying the Church welfare and humanitarian programs. Bishop Dean M. Davies recently counseled that such programs are "intended to support life, not lifestyle."
Doing what we can to protect the rights of specialization, open trade, and freedom of choice coupled with accountability.
This means that we have an individual responsibility. Elder Holland put it this way: "I don’t know exactly how each of you should fulfill your obligation to those who do not or cannot always help themselves. But I know that God knows, and He will help you and guide you in compassionate acts of discipleship if you are conscientiously wanting and praying and looking for ways to keep a commandment He has given us again and again."
On our own we are unlikely to bring about sweeping societal change. But we can be humbly content with our station in life (see Alma 29:3). And as Elder Holland counseled, each of us should "do what we can to deliver any we can from the poverty that holds them captive and destroys so many of their dreams."
We may not see a City of Enoch-like society and an economy free of poverty and class distinctions in our day. But by following righteous principles we can know that our offering to relieve suffering is acceptable to God. Perhaps that should be enough for now.
The Evils That Merit Badge Worksheets Have Wrought
Is it OK to say that I am relieved that my sons are pretty much done with earning Boy Scout merit badges? I started teaching merit badge classes as a teen working at Scout camp and I have been a merit badge counselor for decades. But I'm glad that I no longer have to be a parent helping a son navigate Boy Scout advancement. (Our younger sons are now in the Varsity and Venturing programs.)
I have a love/hate relationship with the Boy Scout advancement program, especially as it is generally applied in LDS Scouting units. In this February 2013 post I discussed some criticisms of LDS Scouting that I heard from Dave Rich, a lifelong passionate Scouter who was President of the BSA's Western Region Area 2 at the time of his death. In my post I wrote:
Dave had specific criticisms for the way the scouting program works in Utah. He noted that we have become very good at getting youth to advance. Youth progress through scouting requirements, ranks, and merit badges at a much faster clip in Utah than anywhere else in the world. Many are very proud of this fact.
The problem, Dave noted, is that scouting is not primarily about ranks and awards; it is about getting youth to learn and internalize the scouting method. Scouting is about helping youth become scouts—infusing the moral and character aims taught by scouting into the essence of their very being. Scouts can achieve ranks and awards without ever internalizing these ideals if the adult volunteers fail to firmly keep these ideals the main focus of the program.
Merit badges and rank advancements have become check boxes to be checked off on the road to getting great Mormon stats. (i.e. The quotable figures people use culturally to show how good of a Mormon they are.) The badge has become the goal when it should simply be a symbol of achieving the goal. One of the symptoms of this defect is the now ubiquitous merit badge worksheet, available from a variety non-official sources.
I remember welcoming these worksheets when they first made their appearance. As a scoutmaster I thought they were a fantastic way for my boys to keep track of requirements and take notes. But over time the worksheets have become the primary way boys in my area pass off merit badges. This has always struck me as wrong.
One of my sons grapples with Aspergers, major depressive disorder, and some related mental/behavioral issues. Although he's quite intelligent and has good handwriting for his age, writing assignments have been difficult for him. I was very frustrated when he was working on one of the Citizenship merit badges with a very experienced man who is a friend of mine. My son was completely capable of discussing a matter with the counselor, as per the requirement. But the counselor insisted that my son write an essay on the merit badge worksheet instead. We ultimately found a different counselor.
I have watched boy after boy for years now complete and pass off merit badges by simply regurgitating in writing on a worksheet words spewed in lecture by merit badge instructors. Many merit badge counselors literally think that the only way to pass off a merit badge is for the boy to fill in everything on a merit badge worksheet. This even happens at Scout camps. The upshot is that many boys are receiving merit badges without learning what the requirements were designed to teach.
The BSA has recently clarified that it discourages (doesn't prohibit) the use of merit badge worksheets. This Scouting Magazine Blog post echoes many of the concerns I have just noted. The post quotes from official BSA policies to explain that merit badge worksheets are only to be used as aids. They "are permitted only for fulfilling requirements where something is to be done in writing."
Merit badge counselors that think that the worksheets are necessary need to read the statements from the BSA that say:
"Merit badge counselors may refuse to accept worksheets but they are not allowed to require their use."
"Scouts must never be required to use worksheets. The decision to use them belongs to the Scout."
"Worksheets must not be accepted in fulfillment of requirements that call for “showing,” “demonstrating,” “discussing,” or whatever else the written word does not fully accomplish."
"Worksheets are a shortcut. They present on paper what should be arrived at through thought and interaction — through asking questions and trial and error. They often tend to create or support an atmosphere of “get the merit badge finished as efficiently and quickly as possible,” when the objective should be a significant learning experience that builds character, citizenship, and physical or mental fitness."
Moreover, the BSA Guide to Advancement clearly states (p. 2) that "No council, committee, district, unit, or individual has the authority to add to, or subtract from, advancement requirements." Thus, no merit badge counselor may diminish, enhance, or alter any requirement. This includes requiring boys to use worksheets.
So go ahead and let the boys use merit badge worksheets to aid them with the requirements, if they wish. But as a counselor you should never need to look at a boy's worksheet unless it contains something that is required to be written. Your merit badge candidates don't need to complete a worksheet; they need to have a constructive adventure.
Scout leaders and parents need to be careful not to streamline the merit badge process too much. It is quite apparent that people in my area think we are doing these boys a great service by providing stake merit badge classes. Maybe not.
A high school in my town offers low-cost merit badge seminars in the summer. Boys can easily gain four merit badges by sitting in a classroom for a few hours before lunchtime each day for a week. I have seen moms giddy about their little boy completing a dozen merit badges over a three-week period. Great, but how much leadership and character did the boy build during that time?
Frankly, many of the merit badge programs at our Boy Scout camps aren't much better. We turn marvelous natural outdoor laboratories into surrogates for four walls of a school room, oblivious to the powerful development experiences that could take place in that space.
A few years ago I was upset when some boys returned to our campsite bragging to their fellows that they had just completed a merit badge in 45 minutes. What do you think they learned from that experience? Too many Scout leaders and parents judge the value of a week at Scout camp by the number of merit badges earned rather than the quality of the character built during that week.
Efficiency can be a good thing. But we have taken it way too far when it comes to Boy Scout advancement. Many boys today can't tell you squat about what they did to earn — or what they learned from — half of the merit badges on their sash. Our check box approach to merit badges is robbing boys of the opportunities inherent in the Scouting program to internalize the characteristics they repeat in the words of Scout Oath and Law.
What would happen if boys had to struggle more to complete merit badges?
Boys would likely earn fewer merit badges. But is that a bad thing? They would learn something significant from each badge they did earn. And they would become greater in the process. Isn't that what we want? It's not the cloth badge that is important; it's what the boy becomes while earning that badge that matters.
Fewer boys would earn the Eagle Scout rank. This is probably true. But we would be far more certain that the boys that did earn that rank would deserve it. The rank would mean more to everyone.
Perhaps we should revise how we define success in Boy Scouts. It's not the number of badges sewn on uniforms and sashes that matter. It's the character development. A badge can symbolize the related inward character development when earning it is challenging. But badges that are too easy to earn don't mean much.
We need to help boys become Eagle Scouts in their souls, not just get the badge. And even when boys don't earn that rank — because the vast majority won't — we need to recognize the greatness and goodness that they have developed through the program.
No, that's not something that's easy to quote on the Mormon stats. But it's infinitely more valuable.
Of Bullies and Fighting
I stammered as I faced the sneering bully. The fear welling up inside of me threatened to completely incapacitate me, given that the bully's two henchmen had cut off my escape routes. Certain annihilation awaited as the bully approached me while calling out demeaning insults designed to destroy any residual self confidence that might have survived his preparations for this moment.
Frankly, my sixth grade mind couldn't understand the whole fighting for pecking order thing. How could beating me up help the bully move up the status ladder, given that I was already far below him?
There's a legend about the second fasted gunslinger in the West who was always looking to move to first place by challenging the fastest guy. Bullies aren't really like that. They're more often like Irving, the 142nd fastest gun in the West, who was always trying to gun down number 143 instead of number 141. (See video below.) That is, they're interested in picking on those that are easy targets.
As far as I knew, I had never done anything to offend this guy other than to simply exist, so it wasn't a matter of schoolyard honor. He had taken to hassling and insulting me for several weeks before unilaterally demanding that I appear after school one day to fight him. Never having agreed to the arrangement, I found reasons to hang around the classroom until I figured that the bully had probably lost interest and had moved onto other pursuits worthy of his nature, like defacing public property or torturing puppies.
But that delay tactic had worked against me. The schoolyard was otherwise deserted when the three thugs leaped out from behind a barrier near the tennis court. On the plus side there would be no one around to witness my cowardly defeat. But neither would anyone be available to come to my rescue.
Fortunately for me, the bully made several mistakes. One was that he held to the unwritten honor code that required fights like this to be one-on-one. His sidekicks wouldn't step in unless I tried to run. I guess I should be thankful that they didn't all just gang up and beat me to a pulp. Another error was that his setup activated my caged animal instincts. Normally docile animals can become quite vicious when cornered and threatened.
My tormentor kept goading me to throw a punch at him. I couldn't see any sense in that. I had never wanted to fight the guy in the first place and I was still hoping to find some safe way out of this mess. Why would I throw the first punch? Finally the bully ran at me and grabbed me around the middle, intending to tackle me. That was yet another mistake.
I grew up in a neighborhood full of boys that liked to play a game crudely titled Smear the Queer, where everyone tried to tackle whoever had the ball. Although I generally detested athletics, I became quite adept at continuing to stand and even move forward while would-be tacklers tried to take me down. Thus, the bully was surprised that I didn't go down.
Although my books and papers had gone flying, one hand still protectively grasped my brother's ukulele, which I regularly toted to and from school for music class. With fear-charged adrenalin coursing through my veins, my arm reacted without conscious thought on my part, bringing the side of the body of the instrument swiftly down on my attacker's head with a resounding crack.
The recipient of my instrumental whack immediately disengaged. He stood up and taunted, "Is that the best you can do? Ha! I barely felt that." Rapping his head with his knuckles, he said, "I've got a hard head." His friends laughed contemptibly, but I noticed tears in my antagonizer's eyes. He hurled more insults but seemed too wary to attack again. I was quite surprised when it dawned on me that I had actually hurt him.
Finally the bully and his toadies stalked off. As I gathered up the stuff I had dropped, I noticed that part of the ukulele back was missing and I figured that I would be in big trouble when I got home. After finding the broken piece nearby, I hurried away from the schoolyard worried about future torment from the bully and his gang as well as the punishment I would get at home for ruining the instrument.
Strangely, I felt badly about having hurt another human being, even if the jerk deserved it. This jumble of emotions was difficult for my 11-year-old mind to handle. Despite the altercation turning out much better than I could have imagined, I felt scared and traumatized as I walked home.
I was frankly surprised that neither of my greatest fears regarding the fight were realized. Dad even voiced support for my actions. Actually, the ukulele worked fine for many years afterward. It took me several weeks of continually looking over my shoulder at school, waiting for the repercussions of the fight to catch up with me before I finally realized that the bully and his cronies were going to leave me alone. They never bothered me again.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the last time I was engaged in a fight at school. But in every single instance the confrontation was instigated by some other persecutor. Each fight was as brief as the one described above. In fact, some of them ended without any scuffling at all, although, I always felt traumatized afterward. In most cases the bully tended to subsequently leave me alone.
I never did understand why anyone would challenge me to a fight. Sure, I could be annoying and stupid, but no more so than the average kid my age. As far as I could tell, I never gave any of my tormentors reason to want to whack me, such as delivering an insult or competing for the affections of a young lady. Rather, I had just exhibited weakness, which made me look like an easy target. Most of the bullies that pursued the matter ultimately discovered me to be somewhat more challenging than they — or I had imagined.
But public physical fighting is probably one of the mildest ways one could be a victim of bullying. Private physical and emotional bullying can be far more damaging. The physical injuries from a fight resolve soon enough, while emotional and psychological scars can cause a lifetime of recurring pain.
I will discuss bullying further in a later post.
Of One Heart and One Mind
The concept of Zion can be difficult to grasp because it's not just one thing. The LDS Bible Dictionary provides a handful of scriptural definitions of Zion that include:
The pure in heart (D&C 97:21).
The City of Enoch (Moses 7:18-19).
The mount where Solomon's Temple was built (1 Kings 8:1).
Jackson County, Missouri (D&C 58:49-50).
The City of the New Jerusalem (D&C 48:66-67).
A cause (D&C 6:6).
The whole of North and South America (HC 6:318-319).
Whole tomes have been written about the meaning of Zion. True to the Faith also says that church members are to build up Zion wherever they live. Thus, Zion could (and should) be anywhere. This Encyclopedia of Mormonism article offers an expanded discussion of Zion.
I have long been fascinated by the wording in Moses 7:18 that lists being "of one heart and one mind" among the characteristics of the people of Zion. Given what I have read throughout the scriptures, I doubt this means that these people had no independent thought. Rather, I believe it means that they were completely united in their overall goals by choice.
While unity appears to be a necessary facet of Zion, it is clearly insufficient of itself. Indeed, unity can be antithetical to righteousness, which is the second feature listed in Moses 7:18. One of the dark sides of unity is called groupthink, a condition where "the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome." Very nasty things can happen when mob mentality takes hold among otherwise rational people.
Even when unity results in relatively positive outcomes, it does not necessarily turn a group of people into Zion. Tremendous unity has been documented in academia, athletic teams, military operations, work groups, volunteer organizations, etc, all without producing much in the way of divine purity. Something greater than group unity is required. The essential Zion feature of righteousness implies unity with deity.
Consider the Savior's great prayer for his followers prior to his crucifixion as recorded in John 17:9-10,20-23. He pleads that his followers will be one with each other and one with him in the same way that he is one with his Heavenly Father. Thus, it is unity with Christ that is the chief hallmark of Zion. Those that have righteous unity with God will naturally have righteous unity with each other.
This sounds like a wonderful state. But real life seldom seems to come close to that ideal. How can we approach divine unity with large numbers of our fellow beings when we give into our human frailties and engage in petty bickering and selfishness with those closest to us even on the best of days?
The lofty goal of Zion seems to remain out of the grasp of all but a very few that have lived on earth. Even when we employ all of our capacities in becoming more heavenly — something we should always do — our best efforts are doomed to fall far short of that goal.
But discouragement is the wrong response to this predicament. Only through the grace offered by Christ's Atonement can any of us become part of Zion (see Mosiah 3:17). And therein lies our hope. Indeed, our only hope. We must be humble enough to allow the Savior to turn us into Zion material.
One more note on Enoch's people. Moses 7:18 says that "the Lord called his people ZION because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness...." (I will cover the rest of this verse in a separate post.)
Enoch and his people didn't decide to call themselves Zion. Rather, Zion was the Lord's definition of these people due to their righteous unity with him and with each other. He called them Zion because their actual identity had become synonymous with Zion.
In the great scheme of things, it is not what we think of ourselves or what our peers think of us that matters. Only God's definition of us truly matters.
The scriptures seem to employ the term Zion only in reference to groups of people and never to a single individual. Regardless of one's relationship with deity, it appears that the only way to achieve Zion is as an active participant in a community of saints all working together to build each other toward a bright eternal goal.
I suppose we start by working to build Zion in our own families and branch out from there. And we must be prepared to be patient. Enoch was ordained at age 25 (D&C 107:48), led his people during wars and turmoil (Moses 7:13-17), and was finally translated at age 365 (Genesis 5:23-24). If it took him and his people nearly three and a half centuries to become Zion, maybe we can be patient when we don't see Zion happening very fast in our own lives.
The Future of Languages: Fewer and Simpler
Language is an interesting thing. Despite various official and unofficial attempts, nobody really designs languages that are used in real life. Language spontaneously results from the way countless people use it in their individual lives. Once popular words fall out of everyday use as new words come into being and as other words take on different meanings. Grammar usage also changes over time.
To get an idea of how the English language has changed over the past three centuries, try reading chapters from the King James Bible. Originally published in the 1600s, the text was last modernized in 1769. With some study and familiarization, the text is understandable to the modern reader. But will that continue to be the case a century or two from now?
It is easy to see that many of the words in the KJB have fallen out of common use. Comedian John Branyan hilariously demonstrates the steady reduction of our daily vocabulary in his retelling of the Three Little Pigs (video below). He notes, for example that while Shakespeare had a working vocabulary of 54,000 words, modern Americans operate with only about 3,000 words.
Linguist John H. McWhorter opines in this WSJ article what the future holds for the languages of the earth. He says that 100 years from now we will find:
English will still be the main language used on the planet. In fact, its use will be more widespread than ever, because it reached the position of global usage first and because it is far more approachable than potential challengers. (We can apparently thank rough spoken Vikings that settled in the British Isles for simplifying English a great deal.)
A sharp reduction in the number of languages in use — from about 6,000 to about 600 — as many non-written (most languages are not written) and/or complex languages die out.
Simplification of the languages used. It seems that our working vocabulary will decrease further as technology and common experience continue to render some words less useful. We can also expect increasing simplification of grammar. (Consider Megan Garber's take on the death of word "whom" in this Atlantic article.)
Many bilingual homes, where an oral language is spoken in the home and in tight communities, while English is used in public and in writing.
Although Mr. Peabody claims that Mandarin Chinese is the language of the future, it is worth considering McWhorter's discussion of why he believes that assumption to be false. He notes that "the tones of Chinese are extremely difficult to learn beyond childhood, and truly mastering the writing system virtually requires having been born to it."
McWhorter suggests that much of the linguistic "streamlining" that will occur over the next century will come via the children of urban dwelling immigrants. These children often develop simplified hybrids of the official language of the area and the choppy way that language is spoken by their parents. This process "nibbles away at such arbitrary features as irregular verbs and gendered objects." Some of the resulting simplified structures snake their way into common usage over time.
Far from being a cause for worry, McWhorter sees a future that retains "a goodly amount of ... diversity" as well as "ever more mutual comprehension." More people will be able to communicate usefully with each other than ever before, even while many will keep the option of communicating more intimately with others that share their base oral tradition.
Of course, only time will tell whether McWhorter's forecasts prove to be prophetic. There is little personal cost in foretelling a future when you won't be around to be held accountable for what you said. Still, McWhorter provides valuable fodder for thought. Unlike some, I'm not fond of constantly living in fear of societal changes. I like the hopeful vision McWhorter paints.
Posted by Scott Hinrichs at 1/05/2015 02:14:00 PM 1 comment:
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South Sudan Population: 10,204,581
British explorer Samuel BAKER established the colony of Equatoria in 1870, in the name of the Ottoman Khedive of Egypt who claimed the territory. Headquartered in Gondokoro (near modern day Juba), Equatoria in theory composed most of what is now South Sudan. After being cut off from colonial administration during the Mahdist War from 1885-1898, Equatoria was made a state under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium in 1899. It was largely left to itself over the following decades, but Christian missionaries converted much of the population and facilitated the spread of English, rather than Arabic. Equatoria was ruled by British colonial administrators separately from what is now Sudan until the two colonies were combined at the 1947 Juba Conference, as part of British plans to prepare the region for independence. When Sudan gained its independence in 1956, it was with the understanding that the southerners would be able to participate fully in the political system. When the Arab Khartoum government reneged on its promises, a mutiny began that led to two prolonged periods of conflict (1955-1972 and 1983-2005) in which perhaps 2.5 million people died - mostly civilians - due to starvation and drought. Ongoing peace talks finally resulted in a Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in January 2005. As part of this agreement, the south was granted a six-year period of autonomy to be followed by a referendum on final status. The result of this referendum, held in January 2011, was a vote of 98% in favor of secession. Since independence on 9 July 2011, South Sudan has struggled with good governance and nation building and has attempted to control opposition forces operating in its territory. Economic conditions have deteriorated since January 2012 when the government decided to shut down oil production following bilateral disagreements with Sudan. In December 2013, conflict between government and opposition forces killed tens of thousands and led to a dire humanitarian crisis with millions of South Sudanese displaced and food insecure. The warring parties signed a peace agreement in August 2015 that created a transitional government of national unity in April 2016. However, in July 2016, fighting broke out in Juba between the two principal signatories, plunging the country back into conflict. A "revitalized" peace agreement signed in September 2018 is currently in the process of being implemented.
Landlocked; The Sudd is a vast swamp in the north central region of South Sudan, formed by the White Nile, its size is variable but can reach some 15% of the country's total area during the rainy season; it is one of the world's largest wetlands
Location: East-Central Africa; south of Sudan, north of Uganda and Kenya, west of Ethiopia
Geographic coordinates: 8 00 N, 30 00 E
Area: total: 644,329 sq km
land: n/a
water: n/a
Size comparison: more than four times the size of Georgia; slightly smaller than Texas
Land Boundaries: total: 6,018 km border countries (6): Central African Republic 1055 km, Democratic Republic of the Congo 714 km, Ethiopia 1299 km, Kenya 317 km, Sudan 2158 km, Uganda 475 km note: South Sudan-Sudan boundary represents 1 January 1956 alignment; final alignment pending negotiations and demarcation; final sovereignty status of Abyei Area pending negotiations between South Sudan and Sudan
Coastline: 0 km (landlocked)
Maritime claims: none (landlocked)
Climate: hot with seasonal rainfall influenced by the annual shift of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone; rainfall heaviest in upland areas of the south and diminishes to the north
Terrain: plains in the north and center rise to southern highlands along the border with Uganda and Kenya; the White Nile, flowing north out of the uplands of Central Africa, is the major geographic feature of the country; The Sudd (a name derived from floating vegetation that hinders navigation) is a large swampy area of more than 100,000 sq km fed by the waters of the White Nile that dominates the center of the country
Natural resources: hydropower, fertile agricultural land, gold, diamonds, petroleum, hardwoods, limestone, iron ore, copper, chromium ore, zinc, tungsten, mica, silver
Land use: agricultural land: 100% arable land: 0%
permanent crops: 0% permanent pasture: 100% forest: 0%
other: 0%
Irrigated land: 1,000 sq km (2012)
Current Environment Issues: water pollution; inadequate supplies of potable water; wildlife conservation and loss of biodiversity; deforestation; soil erosion; desertification; periodic drought
Nationality: noun: South Sudanese (singular and plural)
adjective: South Sudanese
Ethnic groups: Dinka (Jieng) 35.8%, Nuer (Naath) 15.6%, Shilluk (Chollo), Azande, Bari, Kakwa, Kuku, Murle, Mandari, Didinga, Ndogo, Bviri, Lndi, Anuak, Bongo, Lango, Dungotona, Acholi, Baka, Fertit (2011 est.)
Languages: English (official), Arabic (includes Juba and Sudanese variants), regional languages include Dinka, Nuer, Bari, Zande, Shilluk
Religions: animist, Christian, Muslim
Population: 10,204,581 (July 2018 est.)
Age structure: 0-14 years: 42.3% (male 2,194,952 /female 2,121,990)
15-24 years: 20.94% (male 1,113,008 /female 1,023,954)
55-64 years: 3.82% (male 215,247 /female 174,078)
65 years and over: 2.49% (male 145,812 /female 107,856) (2018 est.)
Population growth rate: -1.16% (2018 est.)
Death rate: 19.3 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.)
Net migration rate: -29.2 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2018 est.)
Major urban areas - population: 369,000 JUBA (capital) (2018)
Infant mortality rate: total: 90.4 deaths/1,000 live births male: 97.1 deaths/1,000 live births
Contraceptive prevalence rate: 4% (2010)
rural: 4.5% of population (2015 est.)
HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS: 150,000 (2017 est.)
HIV/AIDS - deaths: 12,000 (2017 est.)
Obesity - adult prevalence rate: 6.6% (2014)
Children under the age of 5 years underweight: 29.1% (2010)
Education expenditures: 1% of GDP (2017)
female: 16% (2009 est.) Unemployment, youth ages 15-24: total: 38.6% male: 39.5% female: 37.4% (2017 est.)
Country name: conventional long form: Republic of South Sudan
conventional short form: South Sudan
etymology: self-descriptive name from the country's former position within Sudan prior to independence; the name "Sudan" derives from the Arabic "bilad-as-sudan" meaning "Land of the Black [peoples]"
Government type: presidential republic
Capital: name: Juba
Administrative divisions: 10 states; Central Equatoria, Eastern Equatoria, Jonglei, Lakes, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Unity, Upper Nile, Warrap, Western Bahr el Ghazal, Western Equatoria; note - in 2015, the creation of 28 new states was announced and in 2017 four additional, but these 32 states have not yet been vetted by the US Board on Geographic Names
Independence: 9 July 2011 (from Sudan)
National holiday: Independence Day, 9 July (2011)
Constitution: history: previous 2005 (preindependence); latest signed 7 July 2011, effective 9 July 2011 (Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan, 2011) amendments: proposed by the National Legislature or by the president of the republic; passage requires submission of the proposal to the Legislature at least one month prior to consideration, approval by at least two-thirds majority vote in both houses of the Legislature, and assent by the president; amended 2013, 2015, 2018 (2018)
Executive branch: chief of state: President Salva KIIR Mayardit (since 9 July 2011); First Vice President Taban Deng GAI (since 26 July 2016); Second Vice President James Wani IGGA (since 26 April 2016); note - the president is both chief of state and head of government
head of government: President Salva KIIR Mayardit (since 9 July 2011); First Vice President Taban Deng GAI (since 26 July 2016); Second Vice President James Wani IGGA (since 26 April 2016)
cabinet: National Council of Ministers appointed by the president, approved by the Transitional National Legislative Assembly elections/appointments: president directly elected by simple majority popular vote for a 4-year term (eligible for a second term); election last held on 11-15 April 2010 (next election scheduled for 2015 postponed to 2018 and again to 2021)
election results: Salva KIIR Mayardit elected president; percent of vote - Salva KIIR Mayardit (SPLM) 93%, Lam AKOL (SPLM-DC) 7%
Legislative branch: description: bicameral National Legislature consists of: Council of States, established by presidential decree in August 2011 (50 seats; 20 former members of the Council of States and 30 appointed representatives) Transitional National Legislative Assembly, established on 4 August 2016, in accordance with the August 2015 Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (400 seats; 170 members elected in April 2010, 96 members of the former National Assembly, 66 members appointed after independence, and 68 members added as a result of the 2016 Agreement); the TNLA will be expanded to 550 members after the transitional government forms
elections: Council of States - established and members appointed 1 August 2011 National Legislative Assembly - last held 11-15 April 2010 but did not take office until July 2011; current parliamentary term extended until 2021)
election results: Council of States - percent of vote by party - NA; seats by party - SPLM 20, unknown 30; composition - men 44, women 6, percent of women 12% National Legislative Assembly - percent of vote by party - NA; seats by party - SPLM 251, DCP 10, independent 6, unknown 133; composition - men 291, women 109, percent of women 27.3%; note - total National Legislature percent of women 25.6%
Judicial branch: highest courts: Supreme Court of South Sudan (consists of the chief and deputy chief justices, 9 other justices and normally organized into panels of 3 justices, except when sitting as a Constitutional panel of all 9 justices chaired by the chief justice) judge selection and term of office: justices appointed by the president upon proposal of the Judicial Service Council, a 9-member judicial and administrative body; justice tenure set by the National Legislature
subordinate courts: national level - Courts of Appeal; High Courts; County Courts; state level - High Courts; County Courts; customary courts; other specialized courts and tribunals
Political parties and leaders: Democratic Change or DC [Onyoti Adigo NYIKWEC] (formerly Sudan People's Liberation Movement-Democratic Movement or SPLM-DC) Sudan People's Liberation Movement or SPLM [Salva KIIR Mayardit] Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-In Opposition or SPLM-IO [Riek MACHAR Teny Dhurgon]
International organization participation: AU, FAO, G-77, IBRD, ICAO, ICRM, IDA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, ILO, IMF, Interpol, IOM, IPU, ITU, MIGA, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UPU, WCO, WHO, WMO
National symbol(s): African fish eagle;
national colors: red, green, blue, yellow, black, white
National anthem: name: South Sudan Oyee! (Hooray!)
lyrics/music: collective of 49 poets/Juba University students and teachers
note: adopted 2011; anthem selected in a national contest
Diplomatic representation in the US: chief of mission: Ambassador Philip Jada NATANA (since 17 September 2018)
chancery: 1015 31st St., NW, Third Floor, Washington, DC, 20007
Diplomatic representation from the US: chief of mission: Ambassador Thomas HUSHEK (since 5 June 2018)
embassy: Kololo Road adjacent to the EU's compound, Juba
telephone: [211] 912-105-188
Industry and infrastructure in landlocked South Sudan are severely underdeveloped and poverty is widespread, following several decades of civil war with Sudan. Continued fighting within the new nation is disrupting what remains of the economy. The vast majority of the population is dependent on subsistence agriculture and humanitarian assistance. Property rights are insecure and price signals are weak, because markets are not well-organized. South Sudan has little infrastructure – about 10,000 kilometers of roads, but just 2% of them paved. Electricity is produced mostly by costly diesel generators, and indoor plumbing and potable water are scarce, so less than 2% of the population has access to electricity. About 90% of consumed goods, capital, and services are imported from neighboring countries – mainly Uganda, Kenya and Sudan. Chinese investment plays a growing role in the infrastructure and energy sectors. Nevertheless, South Sudan does have abundant natural resources. South Sudan holds one of the richest agricultural areas in Africa, with fertile soils and abundant water supplies. Currently the region supports 10-20 million head of cattle. At independence in 2011, South Sudan produced nearly three-fourths of former Sudan's total oil output of nearly a half million barrels per day. The Government of South Sudan relies on oil for the vast majority of its budget revenues, although oil production has fallen sharply since independence. South Sudan is one of the most oil-dependent countries in the world, with 98% of the government’s annual operating budget and 80% of its gross domestic product (GDP) derived from oil. Oil is exported through a pipeline that runs to refineries and shipping facilities at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. The economy of South Sudan will remain linked to Sudan for some time, given the existing oil infrastructure. The outbreak of conflict in December 2013, combined with falling crude oil production and prices, meant that GDP fell significantly between 2014 and 2017. Since the second half of 2017 oil production has risen, and is currently about 130,000 barrels per day. Poverty and food insecurity has risen due to displacement of people caused by the conflict. With famine spreading, 66% of the population in South Sudan is living on less than about $2 a day, up from 50.6% in 2009, according to the World Bank. About 80% of the population lives in rural areas, with agriculture, forestry and fishing providing the livelihood for a majority of the households. Much of rural sector activity is focused on low-input, low-output subsistence agriculture. South Sudan is burdened by considerable debt because of increased military spending and high levels of government corruption. Economic mismanagement is prevalent. Civil servants, including police and the military, are not paid on time, creating incentives to engage in looting and banditry. South Sudan has received more than $11 billion in foreign aid since 2005, largely from the US, the UK, and the EU. Inflation peaked at over 800% per year in October 2016 but dropped to 118% in 2017. The government has funded its expenditures by borrowing from the central bank and foreign sources, using forward sales of oil as collateral. The central bank’s decision to adopt a managed floating exchange rate regime in December 2015 triggered a 97% depreciation of the currency and spawned a growing black market. Long-term challenges include rooting out public sector corruption, improving agricultural productivity, alleviating poverty and unemployment, improving fiscal transparency - particularly in regard to oil revenues, taming inflation, improving government revenues, and creating a rules-based business environment.
GDP (purchasing power parity): $20.01 billion (2017 est.) $21.1 billion (2016 est.) $24.52 billion (2015 est.)
GDP (official exchange rate): $3.06 billion (2017 est.)
GDP - real growth rate: -5.2% (2017 est.) -13.9% (2016 est.) -0.2% (2015 est.)
Gross national saving: 3.6% of GDP (2017 est.) 18.7% of GDP (2016 est.) 7.4% of GDP (2015 est.) GDP - composition, by end use: household consumption: 34.9% (2011 est.) government consumption: 17.1% (2011 est.) investment in fixed capital: 10.4% (2011 est.) exports of goods and services: 64.9% (2011 est.) imports of goods and services: -27.2% (2011 est.)
Agriculture - products: sorghum, maize, rice, millet, wheat, gum arabic, sugarcane, mangoes, papayas, bananas, sweet potatoes, sunflower seeds, cotton, sesame seeds, cassava (manioc, tapioca), beans, peanuts; cattle, sheep
Population below poverty line: 66% (2015 est.)
Distribution of family income - Gini index: 46 (2010 est.)
Budget: revenues: 259.6 million (FY2017/18 est.)
expenditures: 298.6 million (FY2017/18 est.)
Taxes and other revenues: 8.5% (of GDP) (FY2017/18 est.) Budget surplus (+) or deficit (-): -1.3% (of GDP) (FY2017/18 est.)
Inflation rate (consumer prices): 187.9% (2017 est.) 379.8% (2016 est.)
Current account balance: -$154 million (2017 est.) $39 million (2016 est.)
Exports: $1.13 billion (2016 est.)
Imports: $3.795 billion (2016 est.) $3.795 billion (2016 est.)
Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: $73 million (31 December 2016 est.)
Exchange rates: South Sudanese pounds (SSP) per US dollar - 0.885 (2017 est.) 0.903 (2016 est.) 0.9214 (2015 est.) 0.885 (2014 est.) 0.7634 (2013 est.)
Electricity - production: 412.8 million kWh (2016 est.)
Electricity - consumption: 391.8 million kWh (2016 est.)
Crude oil - production: 150,200 bbl/day (2017 est.)
Crude oil - proved reserves: 3.75 billion bbl (1 January 2017 est.)
Natural gas - proved reserves: 63.71 billion cu m (1 January 2016 est.)
Carbon dioxide emissions from consumption of energy: 1.224 million Mt (2017 est.)
Telephone system: general assessment: one of the least developed telecommunications and Internet systems in the world; domestic mobile providers are waiting for a political settlement and the return of social stability in order to expand their networks; the few carriers in the market have reduced the areas in which they offer service, not expanded them; the government shut down the largest cellphone carrier, Vivacell, in March 2018, stranding 1.4 million customers over a disputed service fee arrangement (2018)
domestic: fixed-line 0 total subscriptions, mobile-cellular 12 per 100 persons (2018)
international: country code - 211 (2017)
Broadcast media: a single TV channel and a radio station are controlled by the government; several community and commercial FM stations are operational, mostly sponsored by outside aid donors; some foreign radio broadcasts are available (2019)
Internet country code: .ss
Airports: 85 (2013)
Airports (unpaved runways): total 82
1,524 to 2,437 m: 12 (2013)
914 to 1,523 m: 35 (2013)
under 914 m: 34 (2013)
Railways: total 248 km
note: a narrow gauge, single-track railroad between Babonosa (Sudan) and Wau, the only existing rail system, was repaired in 2010 with $250 million in UN funds, but is not currently operational
note: most of the road network is unpaved and much of it is in disrepair; a 192-km paved road between the capital, Juba, and Nimule on the Ugandan border was constructed with USAID funds in 2012
Waterways: see entry for Sudan
Military branches: South Sudan Defense Force (SSDF): ground force, navy, air force and air defense units (2017)
Military service age and obligation: 18 is the legal minimum age for compulsory and voluntary military service; the Government of South Sudan signed agreements in March 2012 and August 2015 that included the demobilization of all child soldiers within the armed forces and opposition, but the recruitment of child soldiers by the warring parties continues; as of the end of 2018, UNICEF estimates that more than 19,000 child soldiers had been used in the country's civil war since it began in December 2013 (2018)
Military expenditures: 10.93% of GDP (2015) 9.77% of GDP (2014) 7.41% of GDP (2013) 9.53% of GDP (2012) 5.91% of GDP (2011)
Disputes - International: South Sudan-Sudan boundary represents 1 January 1956 alignment, final alignment pending negotiations and demarcation; final sovereignty status of Abyei Area pending negotiations between South Sudan and Sudan; periodic violent skirmishes with South Sudanese residents over water and grazing rights persist among related pastoral populations along the border with the Central African Republic; the boundary that separates Kenya and South Sudan's sovereignty is unclear in the "Ilemi Triangle," which Kenya has administered since colonial times
Refugees and internally displaced persons: refugees (country of origin): 275,165 (Sudan) (refugees and asylum seekers), 15,568 (Democratic Republic of the Congo) (refugees and asylum seekers) (2019) IDPs: 1.83 million (alleged coup attempt and ethnic conflict beginning in December 2013; information is lacking on those displaced in earlier years by: fighting in Abyei between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in May 2011; clashes between the SPLA and dissident militia groups in South Sudan; inter-ethnic conflicts over resources and cattle; attacks from the Lord's Resistance Army; floods and drought) (2019)
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Sao Tome and Principe Population: 204,454
Discovered and claimed by Portugal in the late 15th century, the islands' sugar-based economy gave way to coffee and cocoa in the 19th century - all grown with African plantation slave labor, a form of which lingered into the 20th century. While independence was achieved in 1975, democratic reforms were not instituted until the late 1980s. The country held its first free elections in 1991, but frequent internal wrangling between the various political parties precipitated repeated changes in leadership and four failed, non-violent coup attempts in 1995, 1998, 2003, and 2009. In 2012, three opposition parties combined in a no confidence vote to bring down the majority government of former Prime Minister Patrice TROVOADA, but in 2014, legislative elections returned him to the office. President Evaristo CARVALHO, of the same political party as Prime Minister TROVOADA, was elected in September 2016, marking a rare instance in which the positions of president and prime minister are held by the same party. Prime Minister TROVOADA resigned at the end of 2018 and was replaced by Jorge BOM JESUS. New oil discoveries in the Gulf of Guinea may attract increased attention to the small island nation.
The second-smallest African country (after the Seychelles); the two main islands form part of a chain of extinct volcanoes and both are mountainous
Location: Central Africa, islands in the Gulf of Guinea, just north of the Equator, west of Gabon
Geographic coordinates: 1 00 N, 7 00 E
Area: total: 964 sq km
Size comparison: more than five times the size of Washington, DC
Land Boundaries: 0 km
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm measured from claimed archipelagic baselines
Climate: tropical; hot, humid; one rainy season (October to May)
Terrain: volcanic, mountainous
Natural resources: fish, hydropower
Land use: agricultural land: 50.7% (2011 est.) arable land: 9.1% (2011 est.)
permanent crops: 40.6% (2011 est.) permanent pasture: 1% (2011 est.) forest: 28.1% (2011 est.)
Natural hazards: flooding
Current Environment Issues: deforestation and illegal logging; soil erosion and exhaustion; inadequate sewage treatment in cities; biodiversity preservation
International Environment Agreements: party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Wetlands
Nationality: noun: Sao Tomean(s)
adjective: Sao Tomean
Ethnic groups: mestico, angolares (descendants of Angolan slaves), forros (descendants of freed slaves), servicais (contract laborers from Angola, Mozambique, and Cabo Verde), tongas (children of servicais born on the islands), Europeans (primarily Portuguese), Asians (mostly Chinese)
Languages: Portuguese 98.4% (official), Forro 36.2%, Cabo Verdian 8.5%, French 6.8%, Angolar 6.6%, English 4.9%, Lunguie 1%, other (including sign language) 2.4% (2012 est.) note: shares sum to more than 100% because some respondents gave more than one answer on the census
Religions: Catholic 55.7%, Adventist 4.1%, Assembly of God 3.4%, New Apostolic 2.9%, Mana 2.3%, Universal Kingdom of God 2%, Jehovah's Witness 1.2%, other 6.2%, none 21.2%, unspecified 1% (2012 est.)
Population: 204,454 (July 2018 est.)
Age structure: 0-14 years: 41.2% (male 42,825 /female 41,403)
15-24 years: 21.01% (male 21,767 /female 21,188)
55-64 years: 3.93% (male 3,708 /female 4,332)
65 years and over: 2.83% (male 2,545 /female 3,239) (2018 est.)
Major urban areas - population: 80,000 SAO TOME (capital) (2018)
total population: 1 male(s)/female (2018 est.)
Mother's mean age at first birth: 19.4 years (2008/09 est.) note: median age at first birth among women 25-29
Infant mortality rate: total: 44.1 deaths/1,000 live births male: 46 deaths/1,000 live births
Contraceptive prevalence rate: 40.6% (2014)
Hospital bed density: 2.9 beds/1,000 population (2011)
urban: 1.1% of population
rural: 6.4% of population
HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate: n/a
HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS: n/a
HIV/AIDS - deaths: n/a
Children under the age of 5 years underweight: 8.8% (2014)
Education expenditures: 4.9% of GDP (2017)
total population: 74.9%
Unemployment, youth ages 15-24: total: 20.8% male: n/a female: n/a (2012 est.)
Country name: conventional long form: Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe
conventional short form: Sao Tome and Principe
local long form: Republica Democratica de Sao Tome e Principe
local short form: Sao Tome e Principe
etymology: Sao Tome was named after Saint THOMAS the Apostle by the Portuguese who discovered the island on 21 December 1470 (or 1471), the saint's feast day; Principe is a shortening of the original Portuguese name of "Ilha do Principe" (Isle of the Prince) referring to the Prince of Portugal to whom duties on the island's sugar crop were paid
Government type: semi-presidential republic
Capital: name: Sao Tome
time difference: UTC 0 (5 hours ahead of Washington, DC, during Standard Time)
etymology: named after Saint Thomas the Apostle
Administrative divisions: 6 districts (distritos, singular - distrito), 1 autonomous region* (regiao autonoma); Agua Grande, Cantagalo, Caue, Lemba, Lobata, Me-Zochi, Principe*
Independence: 12 July 1975 (from Portugal)
National holiday: Independence Day, 12 July (1975)
Constitution: history: approved 5 November 1975 amendments: proposed by the National Assembly; passage requires two-thirds majority vote by the Assembly; the Assembly can propose to the president of the republic that an amendment be submitted to a referendum; revised several times, last in 2006 (2017)
Legal system: mixed legal system of civil law based on the Portuguese model and customary law
Executive branch: chief of state: President Evaristo CARVALHO (since 3 September 2016)
head of government: Prime Minister Jorge Bom JESUS (since 3 December 2018)
cabinet: Council of Ministers proposed by the prime minister, appointed by the president elections/appointments: president directly elected by absolute majority popular vote in 2 rounds if needed for a 5-year term (eligible for a second term); election last held on 7 July 2016 and 7 August 2016 (next to be held in July 2021); prime minister chosen by the National Assembly and approved by the president
election results: Evaristo CARVALHO elected president; percent of vote - Evaristo CARVALHO (ADI) 49.8%, Manuel Pinto DA COSTA (independent) 24.8%, Maria DAS NEVES (MLSTP-PSD) 24.1%; note - first round results for CARVALHO were revised downward from just over 50%, prompting the 7 August runoff; however, on 1 August 2016 DA COSTA withdrew from the runoff, citing voting irregularities, and CARVALHO was declared the winner
Legislative branch: description: unicameral National Assembly or Assembleia Nacional (55 seats; members directly elected in multi-seat constituencies by closed party-list proportional representation vote to serve 4-year terms)
elections: last held on 7 October 2018 (next to be held in October 2022)
election results: percent of vote by party - ADI 41.8%, MLSTP/PSD 40.3%, PCD-GR 9.5%, MCISTP 2.1%, other 6.3%; seats by party - ADI 25, MLSTP-PSD 23, PCD-MDFM-UDD 5, MCISTP 2; composition - men 45, women 10, percent of women 18.2%
Judicial branch: highest courts: Supreme Court or Supremo Tribunal Justica (consists of 5 judges); Constitutional Court or Tribunal Constitucional (consists of 5 judges, 3 of whom are from the Supreme Court) judge selection and term of office: Supreme Court judges appointed by the National Assembly; judge tenure NA; Constitutional Court judges nominated by the president and elected by the National Assembly for 5-year terms
subordinate courts: Court of First Instance; Audit Court
Political parties and leaders: Force for Democratic Change Movement or MDFM [Fradique Bandeira Melo DE MENEZES] Independent Democratic Action or ADI [vacant] Movement for the Liberation of Sao Tome and Principe-Social Democratic Party or MLSTP-PSD [Aurelio MARTINS] Party for Democratic Convergence-Reflection Group or PCD-GR [Leonel Mario D'ALVA] other small parties
International organization participation: ACP, AfDB, AOSIS, AU, CD, CEMAC, CPLP, EITI (candidate country), FAO, G-77, IBRD, ICAO, ICRM, IDA, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, IOC, IOM (observer), IPU, ITU, ITUC (NGOs), MIGA, NAM, OIF, OPCW, PCA, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, Union Latina, UNWTO, UPU, WCO, WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO (observer)
National symbol(s): palm tree;
national colors: green, yellow, red, black
National anthem: name: "Independencia total" (Total Independence)
lyrics/music: Alda Neves DA GRACA do Espirito Santo/Manuel dos Santos Barreto de Sousa e ALMEIDA
Diplomatic representation in the US: chief of mission: Ambassador Carlos Filomeno Azevedo Agostinho das NEVES (since 3 December 2013)
chancery: 675 Third Avenue, Suite 1807, New York, NY 10017
Diplomatic representation from the US: the US does not have an embassy in Sao Tome and Principe; the US Ambassador to Gabon is accredited to Sao Tome and Principe on a nonresident basis
The economy of São Tomé and Príncipe is small, based mainly on agricultural production, and, since independence in 1975, increasingly dependent on the export of cocoa beans. Cocoa production has substantially declined in recent years because of drought and mismanagement. Sao Tome depends heavily on imports of food, fuels, most manufactured goods, and consumer goods, and changes in commodity prices affect the country’s inflation rate. Maintaining control of inflation, fiscal discipline, and increasing flows of foreign direct investment into the nascent oil sector are major economic problems facing the country. In recent years the government has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies. In 2017, several business-related laws were enacted that aim to improve the business climate. São Tomé and Príncipe has had difficulty servicing its external debt and has relied heavily on concessional aid and debt rescheduling. In April 2011, the country completed a Threshold Country Program with The Millennium Challenge Corporation to help increase tax revenues, reform customs, and improve the business environment. In 2016, Sao Tome and Portugal signed a five-year cooperation agreement worth approximately $64 million, some of which will be provided as loans. In 2017, China and São Tomé signed a mutual cooperation agreement in areas such as infrastructure, health, and agriculture worth approximately $146 million over five years. Considerable potential exists for development of tourism, and the government has taken steps to expand tourist facilities in recent years. Potential also exists for the development of petroleum resources in São Tomé and Príncipe's territorial waters in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea, some of which are being jointly developed in a 60-40 split with Nigeria, but production is at least several years off. Volatile aid and investment inflows have limited growth, and poverty remains high. Restricteded capacity at the main port increases the periodic risk of shortages of consumer goods. Contract enforcement in the country’s judicial system is difficult. The IMF in late 2016 expressed concern about vulnerabilities in the country’s banking sector, although the country plans some austerity measures in line with IMF recommendations under their three year extended credit facility. Deforestation, coastal erosion, poor waste management, and misuse of natural resources also are challenging issues.
GDP (purchasing power parity): $686 million (2017 est.) $660.4 million (2016 est.) $633.9 million (2015 est.)
GDP (official exchange rate): $393 million (2017 est.)
GDP - real growth rate: 3.9% (2017 est.) 4.2% (2016 est.) 3.8% (2015 est.)
Gross national saving: 18.7% of GDP (2017 est.) 21% of GDP (2016 est.) 19.3% of GDP (2015 est.) GDP - composition, by end use: household consumption: 81.4% (2017 est.) government consumption: 17.6% (2017 est.) investment in fixed capital: 33.4% (2017 est.) investment in inventories: 0% (2017 est.) exports of goods and services: 7.9% (2017 est.) imports of goods and services: -40.4% (2017 est.) GDP - composition, by sector of origin: agriculture: 11.8% (2017 est.) industry: 14.8% (2017 est.) services: 73.4% (2017 est.)
Agriculture - products: cocoa, coconuts, palm kernels, copra, cinnamon, pepper, coffee, bananas, papayas, beans; poultry; fish
Industries: light construction, textiles, soap, beer, fish processing, timber
Industrial production growth rate: 5% (2017 est.)
Labor force: 72,600 (2017 est.)
Labor force - by occupation: agriculture: 26.1%
Unemployment rate: 12.2% (2017 est.) 12.6% (2016 est.)
Population below poverty line: 66.2% (2009 est.)
Distribution of family income - Gini index: 30.8 (2010 est.) 32.1 (2000 est.)
Budget: revenues: 103 million (2017 est.)
expenditures: 112.4 million (2017 est.)
Taxes and other revenues: 26.2% (of GDP) (2017 est.) Budget surplus (+) or deficit (-): -2.4% (of GDP) (2017 est.)
Fiscal year: calendar year
Current account balance: -$32 million (2017 est.) -$23 million (2016 est.)
Exports: $15.6 million (2017 est.) $9.31 million (2016 est.)
Exports - commodities: cocoa 68%, copra, coffee, palm oil (2010 est.)
Exports - partners: Guyana 43.7%, Germany 23.6%, Portugal 6%, Netherlands 5.5%, Poland 4.4% (2017)
Imports: $127.7 million (2017 est.) $119.1 million (2016 est.)
Imports - commodities: machinery and electrical equipment, food products, petroleum products
Imports - partners: Portugal 54.7%, Angola 16.5%, China 5.6% (2017)
Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: $58.95 million (31 December 2017 est.) $61.5 million (31 December 2016 est.)
Debt - external: $292.9 million (31 December 2017 est.) $308.5 million (31 December 2016 est.)
Stock of direct foreign investment - at home: $469.5 million (31 December 2017 est.) $430.3 million (31 December 2016 est.)
Stock of direct foreign investment - abroad: $3.98 million (31 December 2017 est.) $2.2 million (31 December 2016 est.)
Market value of publicly traded shares: n/a
Exchange rates: dobras (STD) per US dollar - 22,689 (2017 est.) 21,797 (2016 est.) 22,149 (2015 est.) 22,091 (2014 est.) 18,466 (2013 est.)
Electricity - production: 66 million kWh (2016 est.)
Electricity - consumption: 61.38 million kWh (2016 est.)
Electricity - exports: 0 kWh (2016)
Electricity - from fossil fuels: 88% of total installed capacity (2016 est.)
Electricity - from hydroelectric plants: 11% of total installed capacity (2017 est.)
Crude oil - production: 0 bbl/day (2017 est.)
Crude oil - exports: 0 bbl/day (2015 est.)
Crude oil - proved reserves: 0 bbl (1 January 2018)
Natural gas - proved reserves: 0 cu m (1 January 2014 est.)
Carbon dioxide emissions from consumption of energy: 148,100 Mt (2017 est.)
Cellular Phones in use: total subscriptions: 173,646
Telephone system: general assessment: local telephone network of adequate quality with most lines connected to digital switches; mobile cellular superior choice to landland; dial-up quality low; broadband expensive (2018)
domestic: fixed-line 3 per 100 and mobile-cellular teledensity 86 telephones per 100 persons (2018)
international: country code - 239; satellite earth station - 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) (2017)
Broadcast media: 1 government-owned TV station; 1 government-owned radio station; 3 independent local radio stations authorized in 2005 with 2 operating at the end of 2006; transmissions of multiple international broadcasters are available
Internet country code: .st
Internet users: total: 50,000
Roadways:
Merchant marine: total 15
by type: general cargo 12, other 3 (2018)
Ports and terminals: major seaport(s): Sao Tome
Sao Tome and Principe's army is a tiny force with almost no resources at its disposal and would be wholly ineffective operating unilaterally; infantry equipment is considered simple to operate and maintain but may require refurbishment or replacement after 25 years in tropical climates; poor pay, working conditions, and alleged nepotism in the promotion of officers have been problems in the past, as reflected in the 1995 and 2003 coups; these issues are being addressed with foreign assistance aimed at improving the army and its focus on realistic security concerns; command is exercised from the president, through the Minister of Defense, to the Chief of the Armed Forces (infantry, technical issues) and the Chief of the General Staff (logistics, administration, finances) (2012)
Military branches: Armed Forces of Sao Tome and Principe (Forcas Armadas de Sao Tome e Principe, FASTP): Army, Coast Guard of Sao Tome e Principe (Guarda Costeira de Sao Tome e Principe, GCSTP; also called "Navy"), Presidential Guard, National Guard (2015)
Military service age and obligation: 18 is the legal minimum age for compulsory military service; 17 is the legal minimum age for voluntary service (2012)
Disputes - International: none
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Nicaragua Flag Meaning & Details
Nicaragua Flag
three equal horizontal bands of blue (top), white, and blue with the national coat of arms centered in the white band
the coat of arms features a triangle encircled by the words REPUBLICA DE NICARAGUA on the top and AMERICA CENTRAL on the bottom
the banner is based on the former blue-white-blue flag of the Federal Republic of Central America
the blue bands symbolize the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, while the white band represents the land between the two bodies of water
note: similar to the flag of El Salvador, which features a round emblem encircled by the words REPUBLICA DE EL SALVADOR EN LA AMERICA CENTRAL centered in the white band
also similar to the flag of Honduras, which has five blue stars arranged in an X pattern centered in the white band
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General officer Carl Adolf Maximilian "Max" Hoffmann (1869–1927) from Homberg an der Efze, Upper Hesse, was possibly Germany's most brilliant military mind on the general staff during the Great War. He would be the dominant figure for the Central Powers during the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. Although tall, he did not have the look of prototypical German officer. As one his early comrades described him: "He was almost the worst athlete, horseman and swordsman of them all...[but] he exceeded them in his terrifying appetite." His career break came when he was sent to Russia to study its language and the tsar's army. He evolved into the German Army's leading expert on Russian affairs and, as a result, he spent the entire First World War on the Eastern Front.
As a lieutenant colonel at war's outbreak, Max Hoffmann served as the Eighth Army's chief operations officer, helping plan the Tannenberg encirclement and the Battle of Masurian Lakes. He was promoted to Colonel in 1916 and served as Germany's Eastern Forces Chief of General Staff. Playing a key role in halting the 1916 Brusilov and the 1917 Kerensky Offensives, he was promoted to major general in 1917, by which time he was de facto commander of the Eastern Front Army under the figurehead Prince Leopold von Bayern. He was thus positioned to play a central role at Brest-Litovsk.
Nicknamed "der Lange" (he was 6'4"), Hoffmann has been recognized by many (including himself) as the unaccredited genius behind the Hindenburg/Ludendorff duo, and he sharply criticized both famous commanders in his postwar memoir, The War of Lost Opportunities. He died on 8 July 1927 in Bad Reichenhall, Oberbayern.
Sources: The Prussian Machine, WikiCommons
Bryan Alexander January 20, 2018 at 10:28 AM
Google translates "der Lange" as "the long."
Thank you for another useful post on the eastern front.
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Remembering a Veteran: Lt. Béla Lugosi, 43rd Royal Hungarian Infantry, K.u.K.
In Uniform
Born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos, Banat, Austria-Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), the man we remember as Bela Lugosi (1882–1956), was the youngest of four children of a banker. Just after the turn of the century, he started his career on the stage in mostly secondary roles in Hungary. When World War I broke out, he became an infantry and ski-patrol officer on the Carpathian Front for the Austro-Hungarian Army. Bela was wounded three times and decorated for his service on the Russian front.
He also lost his first wife during the war. In 1919, after finding himself on the losing side of the Hungarian Revolution, he moved to Germany to perform in postwar German cinema. Following the death of his second wife, he emigrated to the U.S. Between acting gigs, while working as a laborer, Bela was spotted for the lead in a stage version of Dracula. His memorable career as a film icon soon followed. I found an interesting video archive of of interviews he conducted over the years HERE.
How the United States Paid for Its War Effort
When the First World War began in 1914, the U.S. economy was in recession. But a 44-month economic boom ensued from 1914 to 1918, first as Europeans began purchasing U.S. goods for the war and later as the United States itself joined the battle. "The long period of U.S. neutrality made the ultimate conversion of the economy to a wartime basis easier than it otherwise would have been," writes economic researcher Hugh Rockoff. "Real plant and equipment were added, and because they were added in response to demands from other countries already at war, they were added precisely in those sectors where they would be needed once the U.S. entered the war."
Entry into the war in 1917 unleashed massive U.S. federal spending which shifted national production from civilian to war goods. Between 1914 and 1918, [over] three million people were added to the military and half a million to the government. Overall, unemployment declined from 7.9 percent to 1.4 percent in this period, in part because workers were drawn into new manufacturing jobs and because the military draft removed many young men from the civilian labor force.
Rockoff estimates the total cost of World War I to the United States at approximately $32 billion, or 52 percent of gross national product at the time. He breaks down the financing of the U.S. war effort as follows: 22 percent in taxes, 58 percent through borrowings from the public, and 20 percent in money creation. The War Revenue Act of 1917 taxed "excess profits"—profits exceeding an amount determined by the rate of return on capital in a base period—by some 20 to 60 percent, and the tax rate on income starting at $50,000 rose from 1.5 percent in 1913–15 to more than 18 percent in 1918. The prevalence of patriotic themes created social pressure to purchase the "Liberty Bonds" (and, after the Armistice, the "Victory Bonds"), but in practice the new bondholders did not make a tangible personal sacrifice in buying war bonds, since the yields on the debt instruments were comparable to those on standard municipal bonds at the time.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Research
WWI Crusaders: A band of Yanks in German-occupied Belgium help save millions from starvation as civilians resist the harsh German rule.
by Jeffrey B. Miller
Milbrown Press, 2018
Jolie Velazquez, Reviewer
Meals at a CRB Canteen
Looking at this one-and-a-half-inch thick book, ostensibly about another dreary aspect of the Great War, one would be hard pressed to realize that therein lies a fascinating adventure story as well as a detailed history of the largest humanitarian effort of its day.
The author spent years gathering details about Herbert Hoover, his creation of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, and the hundreds of people whom he relied upon or who tried to thwart him. The author was fortunate enough to have inherited a trove of materials from his grandparents (letters, journals, and photos) of the many colorful people in the CRB saga. Readers are lucky that Mr. Miller's love of historical fiction also taught him how to write an engrossing story. The narrative progresses like an action thriller at times and a lesson by an engaging history teacher at others.
CRB Distribution Site
Miller's chronicle comes to life by focusing on the people, lots of them, who helped the beleaguered Belgians and the antagonists who tried to stop them. We meet royals, politicians, generals, philanthropists, college students, patriotic civilians, and shopkeepers. We learn about the fabulous volunteer Bunge sisters and Eugene Van Doren, publisher of the underground newspaper that the Germans were never able to put out of business. Every time a new person is introduced we get to know them with biographical details which led them to this wartime moment. (One small irritation about this method is that the reader gets interested in many people who sometimes leave the scene much too soon. Miller has included an epilogue "What happened to them?" if it is nagging at the reader to find out.)
By sticking to the timeline as events occur, Miller keeps up the tension in his narrative. Aside from the monetary and structural complications of feeding millions of people in a war zone, Miller makes clear the political situation for all parties (especially in Belgium and northern France) and the resistance efforts carried on by civilians who often unwittingly endangered the process. One could easily recommend WWI Crusaders simply for the details about occupied Belgium and the German Army's treatment of occupied countries. There are elements of danger even for the Americans when they are treated like spies by German soldiers and petty bureaucrats.
The book ends when the Americans enter the war in 1917 and the CRB passes on its duties to another neutral country to administer. Of course, that was not really the end of the CRB, which continued to work in other countries as an American organization. Many of the CRB personnel went on to create permanent organizations dedicated to humanitarian relief, some into the modern era. A new title, The Big Show in Bololand by Bernard Patenaude, has just been published and covers Hoover and his veterans of the CRB providing aid to the starving Russians after the revolution and war. (I am looking forward to reading that one too.)
Jolie Velazquez
Worst Year of the War? 1917
Print by British Soldier-Artist-Poet David Jones
The year 1917 was the most important, the most historically influential, and the most horrible of the Great War. It's well understood that 1917 was a pile-up of disasters and miscalculations, from Germany's decision to implement unrestricted U-boat warfare in January to the Bolsheviks' triumph in the autumn, and with the ill-fated Nivelle, Kerensky, and Passchendaele offensives, plus the Italian collapse at Caporetto strung out in between. These events were the subjects of our issues earlier this year. But how, you might ask, can it be argued that 1917 was worse than other years of the war, some of which had higher death tolls? Or, to focus on one comparison as an example, how was Passchendaele (244,000 British casualties) worse than 1916's Battle of the Somme (416,000 British casualties)?
The answer to this has two dimensions: one physical, one of morale. That popular and highly quotable military philosopher, Sun Tzu, addressed the first of these: "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." By the end of 1917 every one of the war's original belligerents had suffered horrendous casualties and had made debilitating expenditures of their nation's wealth. Anxiety over this was building on everyone's home front as shortages were experienced in factories and at dinner tables. On the battlefields, all the generals were growing deeply concerned about the fighting spirit and discipline of the men and about how they would replace the massive losses.
Accumulated physical losses were the lesser factor, however, in what happened in 1917. As another military authority, Napoleon Bonaparte, reminds us—[in war] "Morale is to the physical as three to one." In 1917, the morale of heads-of-state, citizens, and soldiers bottomed out. Futility, mindlessness, and tragedy started to be the defining aspects and heritage of the First World War, even while the fighting carried on. This burden of morale in the war is still with us. Something less tangible, in the area of mass psychology, lasting and open-ended, started coming into play during 1917, and it stayed around to shape the next century. Defeats like Caporetto, and failed, costly endeavors like the Allies launched on the Chemin des Dames, in Flanders, and Galicia, were felt no longer as mere setbacks but as national humiliations discrediting the governing classes and—for the troops—defining the war as purposeless, futile betrayals. MH
Originally presented in the December 2017 issue of OVER THE TOP.
A World War One Love Story in the 21st Century
The Courtland Jindra and Melissa Angert love story is one for the ages and one tied intimately to the Great War. It begins at a World War I monument situated on the top of a hill in Elysian Park, Los Angeles.
Newly Engaged Courtland and Melissa at Armistice Centennial at the American Legion Hollywood Post 43
Courtland, an avid World War I amateur historian and co-director of California's World War I Centennial Task Force, began corresponding online with Melissa just after Christmas in 2015. He shared his World War I interest with her almost immediately, (as they wrote each other he was reviewing a book, The Fall of the Ottomans, for Roads to the Great War), and after their first meeting on New Year’s Eve in downtown Los Angeles to ring in the new year, they decided to meet up again two days later, in a small area within Elysian Park called Victory Memorial Grove. Courtland was searching for a monument and plaque he discovered referenced in old Los Angeles Times articles, as he was particularly interested in documenting WWI monuments and memorials in Los Angeles County. Melissa was up for an adventure and a chance to discover something lost, as well as an opportunity to get to know this new guy a little better. They ultimately found the tablet, which turned out to be a large granite stone with an entirely different plaque affixed than the one mentioned in the Times. This raised more questions about the history of the site. Also, the park, they discovered, had been neglected, and the monument itself was covered in over 40 layers of paint and graffiti.
Melissa and Courtland spent the next three-plus years not just falling deeply in love but also adopting the park and monument as a special restoration project. Enlisting the help of the Department of Recreation and Parks, their City Councilman’s Office, and citizens' groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, and the Citizens' Committee to Save Elysian Park, they worked hard to improve the depressed state of the grove. For beautification, they planted trees, shrubs, and flowers and held park cleanups. Eventually city gardeners were assigned to take greater care of the grove, and they—specifically James Tye, a military veteran—took a liking to the park and dedicated much of their time to keeping it beautiful.
After the Re-dedication of the WWI Monument at
Victory Memorial Grove, 14 June 2017
The monument (as well as the historic flagpole) was professionally restored and protected with anti-graffiti coating. These efforts were honored by the National World War One Centennial Commission and the Pritzker Miltary Museum and Library’s 100 Cities–100 Memorials Program. Courtland and Melissa also began holding commemorative events there to honor the centennial period, such as on Flag Day and Veterans Day.
They continued to research and learn more about the site and share their knowledge with others. This resulted in many delightful experiences. For example, they became acquainted with the granddaughter of Captain Walter Brinkop, who had planted memorial trees back in the 1920s in honor of the men who had fought and died under his command in the war. The community as a whole took greater interest in the grove, and today it is on the way to looking as magnificent as it was originally intended to be.
Courtship on the Western Front
At the U.S. Blanc Mont Memorial, October 1918
Victory Memorial Grove became so special to them that Courtland decided to propose to Melissa there on 3 October 2018. As they stood at the top of the hill near the granite stone, with butterflies flitting through the air around them as they enjoyed the flowers that had been planted, Courtland pulled out the ring and asked Melissa to be his wife. She said yes, and the next day they flew to France for a trip to visit, you guessed it, the U.S. WWI cemeteries and memorials "Over There."
Wedding Ceremony at Victory Memorial Grove 3 October 2019
A year later to the day, they returned to Victory Memorial Grove to exchange vows of matrimony. They had planned a small, intimate ceremony with a dozen close friends and family members. It was filled with subtle tributes to WWI. They stood behind the great granite memorial stone, which Melissa topped with cascading white and purple flowers, to say their “I Dos.” Their wedding officiant made mention of the place as a WWI memorial and talked of its significance to the couple during the short ceremony.
The day before the wedding, one of the bride’s aunts had gifted them a special wedding present—an Infant Jesus of Prague pocket shrine, which was inherited from one of three ancestors in the family who had served during the Great War. The bride wrapped the pocket shrine in lace and tied it into her bouquet of flowers as her “something old” during the ceremony. Afterward, the bride and groom walked for photographs to a live oak tree they had sponsored for planting the year before, to replace a tree that had been planted in the 1920s for Coxswain Charles P. Stauffer. Instead of throwing rice, everyone in attendance threw a handful of poppy seeds.
Honeymooning at the National World War One
Museum and Memorial, Kansas City, 8 October 2019
And for their honeymoon? Well, it had to be World War One-themed. Since they just visited the Western Front, they traveled to Kansas City, MO, to visit the National World War One Museum and General Pershing’s boyhood home in Laclede. A Jindra honeymoon wouldn’t be right any other way.
Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Courtland Jindra!
Remembering a Veteran: General Horace Smith-Dorrien
General Sir Horace Lockwood Smith-Dorrien (1858–1930) was born in Haresfoot, England. A veteran of the 1879 battle of Isandlwana and the Boer War, he assumed command of the II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force from August 1914 and the Second Army from December 1914 to April 1915. Well liked by his troops, he handled them with sympathy but, like his fellow corps commander Sir Douglas Haig (I Corps), he had little respect for the abilities of his commander-in-chief, Sir John French. This bad feeling was heartily reciprocated and would ultimately result in Smith-Dorrien's dismissal.
Fighting along with the rest of the BEF against overwhelming odds in August 1914, Smith-Dorrien managed his command ably in defensive battles at Mons and Le Cateau. In the latter engagement, Smith-Dorrien was forced into the unenviable decision to fight with exhausted troops and open flanks against a numerically superior enemy force. To retreat, though not contrary to orders, would probably have turned the British withdrawal into a rout, possibly resulting in the destruction of the BEF. Heavy fighting in unprepared positions against three German divisions of von Kluck's corps resulted in over 8,000 British casualties but delayed the enemy advance long enough to permit resumption of the withdrawal.
After participating in First Ypres in October 1914, the II Corps was taken out of the line, and, in the reorganization of the BEF that followed, Smith-Dorrien was appointed to command the Second Army. He again led his troops well during the German attack at Second Ypres in April 1915. Repeatedly ordered into costly and seemingly senseless counterattacks, Smith-Dorrien halted the attacks on his own initiative and recommended the partial abandonment of badly exposed sectors of the Ypres salient.
Sir John French, however, perhaps motivated by political considerations (Ypres had come to mean much the same to the British as would Verdun to the French a year later), and bearing little affection for his subordinate, relieved Smith-Dorrien. His capable replacement, General Sir Herbert Plumer, assessed the situation in much the same manner as had his predecessor; French was thus forced ultimately to accept most of what Smith-Dorrien had originally proposed. Smith-Dorrien himself, however, was never again to command in the field.
At Retirement
He retired in September 1923, living in Portugal and then England. He devoted much his time to the welfare and remembrance of Great War soldiers.
Reference: Smithers, A.J. Smithers, The Man Who Disobeyed: Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien and His Enemies. London: Leo Cooper, 1970.
Source: The World War I Document Archive
Don't Miss the October 2019 ST. MIHIEL TRIP-WIRE
This month we present our usual dozen articles in our monthly newsletter, plus all our usual features. In our September issue we concentrate on the war in Flanders, especially the process of reclaiming the battlefield for normal, civilian life.
Maori Pioneers Building a Plank Road on the Western Front
Commentary: Meeting King Baudouin
The Homefront: Flanders After War
Gas Warfare in Flanders
A War Never Ends
This Month's WWI Classic Film Recommendation
Then and Now Feature: Hotel-de-Ville, Audenarde, Belgium
Authors Ralph Mottram and Henry Williamson on Returning to Flanders
Looking at the Iron Harvest: Nine Valuable Online Sources
Coming Events and Battlefield Tours
British gas barrage on Le Bizet Hamlet south of Ploegsteert
on 7 September 1918
Restoring the Cloth Hall at Ypres
The Maori Memorial at Zonnebeke, Belgium
HMS Furious: From Battlecruiser to Aircraft Carrier
100 Years Ago: President Wilson's Stroke
Visit the Full Issue Here:
http://www.worldwar1.com/tripwire/smtw.htm
Meet World War One Centennial Commissioner Monique Seefried, PhD, Part II
Commissioner Monique Seefried
Yesterday, we discussed how she became so deeply interested in the First World War with U.S. Centennial Commissioner Monique Seefried. That portion of the interview can be accessed HERE. In this issue of Roads to the Great War, we are going to discuss her work as a commissioner with Monique. MH
Interview Part II
Monique Seefried on Her Work with the United States World War One Centennial Commission
A. MH: Your leadership of the Croix Rouge Memorial project, and its highly visible success, marked you as someone who combined a high level of interest in the war with an ability to get things done both stateside and "over there" in France where the fighting took place and where much of the commemorative events would take place during the Centennial. Could you tell us how you were nominated or recruited for the Centennial Commission, and also, why you chose to accept the position of commissioner?
MS: The work Rod Frazer and I did at Croix Rouge Farm, included inaugurating a WWI memorial to an American Division in France. It was especially noticed by French and American authorities as the inauguration took place on the day after President Sarkozy announced, on November 11, 2011 the launching of the French WWI Centennial. Jerry Hester, who had chaired the U.S. commemorations of the 70th anniversary and helped us connect with the U.S. Army before the inauguration of the Rainbow Division Memorial at Croix Rouge Farm, was instrumental in presenting my name to the office of the Speaker of the House when a seat became vacant on the newly created WWI Centennial Commission (WWICC). I was appointed to the commission in June 2014.
Commissioners of the WWICC Break Ground for the National World War I Memorial
(Monique S. Second from Left)
I accepted the position as a high honor, one that would allow me to remember all those young Americans who came to save my country of origin twice in the 20th century. I was raised with an immense sense of gratitude for what Americans did in WWI and WWII, with a great respect for service in the military. Knowing men like General de Gaulle, who fought in WWI before becoming heroes in WWII, or someone like my godfather, General Louis Dio, who was the first French officer to rally to General Leclerc de Hautecloque in August 1940 in Chad, had definitely an enormous influence on me. My own father was in the Resistance, General de Gaulle’s deputy chief of cabinet from 1944 to 1946 and again his chief of cabinet from 1959 to 1961. Service to one’s country was essential in my upbringing, not only at home but also at school. I had the extraordinary good fortune to be taught 20th-century history by Lucie Aubrac, one of the greatest heroines of the French Resistance. With this service on the WWICC, I was given an extraordinary opportunity to serve my country of adoption and express my gratitude towards it.
I am extremely humbled to have been asked to serve the memory of those Americans who, 100 years ago, gave so much more than I can ever give them back. They deserve to be remembered, thanked and honored.
B. MH: I've met most of the commissioners and each seems to have a niche, such as working on the National Memorial, remembering the aviation effort of the AEF, networking with veterans groups, and so forth. How would you describe your scope of work as a commissioner? I'll be surprised if it did not turn out to be much broader than you were thinking when you were first appointed in 2014.
MS: Without the slightest doubt. I had not realized that it would become, especially in the past two years, an all-consuming activity on both sides of the Atlantic. When I came on the commission, I was asked to coordinate international affairs and represent the commission abroad, mostly in France. I also worked with Belgium and Italy and to a lesser degree with England as other commissioners didn’t have a language barrier there. I was very fortunate to have the support of the American Battle Monuments Commission and receive help from U.S. embassies in these different countries. I also worked with local villages and towns eager to honor the Americans who had liberated them 100 years ago.
This is where my ability to communicate in French, and all the contacts I had in France, where most of the AEF fighting took place, became essential. I did spend much more time in France than I had expected and represented the WWICC on multiple occasions. These events were wide ranging, from commemorations in cemeteries, battlefields or memorials, to music festivals, recitals, exhibitions, and school activities. Most of these events were organized by the French to honor Americans who served in the military or volunteered to help the local population, and it was therefore extremely meaningful to the organizers to have the United States represented. I had to give or translate multiple speeches, and I was always glad to be able to give a voice to those men and women who couldn’t speak for themselves anymore.
I was also a representative of the national WWICC in some of the southern states, especially Georgia and Alabama, where I worked with their respective WWI commemorative bodies.
Veterans Day, Atlanta, GA, 2017
And I enjoyed immensely the education role that accompanied all these activities, as well as the work I did with my fellow commissioner, Libby O’Connell, who lead the commission educational activities. We collaborated extremely actively with the National WWI Museum and Memorial, produced a newsletter, and organized a wide range of activities.
C. MH: I know you consider yourself an educator and that you participated in many educational events over the last five years. What thoughts do you have on the general point of reversing the modernist trend of attempting to erase our historical heritage and eliminate the study of history in our schools? And specifically—using World War One as a case study—how can we reach young people and convince them of the importance of learning and connecting with their heritage?
MS: You can well imagine that the elimination of history in our curriculum would be totally antithetical to all I stand for. I strongly believe only those who have a good knowledge of history will be able to shape the future. So many geopolitical mistakes have been made in the past by people who ignored history. Studying history is one of the best tools in education to learn critical thinking skills.
This is also why I don’t believe that each generation should rewrite history according to the beliefs of the time, and I disagree, for example, with the destruction of Confederate statues. They should stay and their context explained, or they should be moved to a location where one can still learn from them. New generations would be much better served by being told what they represent and the history surrounding them than to have them disappear and their history be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.
Humanity is never far from repeating the same mistakes. I applaud and find so important all the schools’ visits of concentration camps like Mauthausen in Austria or Auschwitz in Poland so that young people never forget the horrors they represent. Authoritarian regimes have generally either stopped teaching history to cut people from their past and allegiances or taught a distorted version of history to manipulate people. History rigorously taught by trained historians is key to informed citizenship, especially in a time of fake news and unsubstantiated information available on the Internet.
In the case of WWI, the teaching of its history is extremely important, not only to understand most of the conflicts our country is still engaged in but also to learn about geography, science, economics, as well as about the impact the war had on new technologies, the arts, the role of women and many other aspects of our 20th-century history, not least the fact that its participation in WWI brought the United States to the world stage and started the American century.
WWICC Commissioner Monique Seefried, PhD, was designated an honorary member of the 16th Infantry Regiment by an order of the Secretary of the Army for her work to memorialize the 16th Infantry and the 1st Division in World War I
D. MH: Please share with our readers your favorite moments as one of the 12 U.S. World War One Centennial Commissioners.
MS: Over the past five years, I have attended many events ranging from lectures, conferences and reunions of veterans associations to school presentations, plays, concerts, and movies as well as dedications of memorials and commemoration ceremonies, in Europe as well as in the United States. They have all been occasions to remember the men and women who participated, served or died in the Great War. All were very moving in one form or another, but I have to say that the events I remember with the most emotion are the ones including the participation of young people. My goal as a commissioner was always to pass on the legacy of the WWI generation to new generations so that they, in their turn, would not forget their sacrifices, as well as the causes and the consequences of this First World War.
A few events remain etched for ever in my memory, like the commemoration in May 2016 of the battle of Verdun with French and German students arriving from the woods, standing among the crosses in the cemetery of Douaumont, flanked on each side by a Jewish and a Muslim Memorial or commemoration of Soldiers of All Colors Walking on the Path of Peace. It was a two-day commemoration, in September 2018, including students from schools in France (Aisne), Morocco (Casablanca), and the United States (Chicago Military Academy and Martin Luther King High School, also in Chicago) who participated in concerts in Soissons and Laon, and ceremonies in Vauxaillon. I will never forget the beautiful concert in the Cathedral of Laon performed by these American and French students in collaboration with the French Air Force band. These two days were all about our common humanity. Descendants of German soldiers were also present.
I will also always remember some of the many commemorations involving the planting of trees. Two stand out particularly in my memory. One was when descendants of soldiers of the Rainbow Division planted a tree by the Rainbow Memorial at Croix Rouge Farm in Fère-en-Tardenois on the 100th anniversary of the battle of the Ourcq. The other was when 1st Division young soldiers sang the Army song standing by some of 1700 young trees, planted in the shape of the coat of arms of their division. These trees remember the 1700 1st Division soldiers who died in the Argonne 100 years earlier, in October 1918. This was organized by the French National Office of Forestry.
Receiving the Secretary of Defense Medal for
Outstanding Public Service
Finally, being able to share some of these commemorations with my grandchildren was also very special. With their Austrian, German, French, and American heritage, I felt very moved to have some of them by my side during the commemorations of the Battles of Belleau Wood and of St. Mihiel. I will also never forget receiving at the Pentagon the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service in front of my oldest grandson. He was 9 at the time. He will always remember it and never let his siblings and his cousins forget it.
My greatest pleasure in serving the commission has indeed been to pass on the legacy of the Great War to younger generations: soldiers, university students, and schoolchildren as well as my children and their own children.
E. MH: What does the future hold for you, both specifically on American history and the First World War, and other projects you might be involved in?
MS: As I answer you, I have just finished attending a two-and-a-half-day workshop on the new International Baccalaureate Organization (IB) Career Program at CASIE, the organization I founded in 1999 in Atlanta. I fully expect continuing to serve the WWICC until we build the National WWI Memorial in Washington, but I will be going back to the world of education, and the training of educators to serve new generations of American and international students and give them the critical thinking and rigorous learning tools as well as the global perspective they need for this 21st century. The lessons of WWI will never be far away from my mind.
Thanks again, Commissioner Seefried, for taking time to join with us for this interview and for your invaluable contributions to America's World War One Centennial Commemoration.
Meet World War One Centennial Commissioner Monique Seefried, PhD, Part I
Monique Seefried on a 2008 C-Span Presentation
Over the next two days, I would like to introduce our readers to someone who has been a dynamic and effective leader of America’s commemoration of our nation's effort and sacrifices in the First World War. World War One Centennial Commissioner Monique Seefried, PhD, was born a French citizen in Tunisia. Her father was highly active with the French Resistance in the Second World War and with Charles de Gaulle's government after the Liberation. Monique's godfather was the first officer to join in 1940 the Free French Forces of General Leclerc in Africa. As a child, she met General de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace several times and sat next to him when he visited her parents' Paris apartment for dinner. Monique studied history at the Sorbonne and has received many international honors as an educator. She has taught ancient archaeology and Islamic art, as well as serving a museum curator, at Emory University in Atlanta. She became a U.S. citizen in 1985 and eventually developed a deep interest in America's role in the First World War. For her work in honoring the service and sacrifice of her adopted land in the Great War Monique Seefried has been decorated as a Chevalier of France's Legion d'Honneur and is a recipient of the U.S. Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.
In this issue of Roads to the Great War, we are going to ask her how she came to be so focused on the events of 1914–1918. Tomorrow, we will discuss her work as a Centennial Commissioner with Monique. MH
Interview Part I,
Monique Seefried's Own Road to the Great War
A. MH: Thank you for agreeing to this interview Commissioner Seefried. With your broad ranging background and scholarship, how did you come to focus your interest in the First World War and America's part in it?
MS: Indeed, my original interest in history didn’t focus on WWI. Born in Carthage (Tunisia) and raised in Rome (Italy), I decided very early on that I would become an archaeologist. And this I did, specializing in ancient Mediterranean archaeology and completing my PhD in history at the University of Paris Sorbonne before moving to Atlanta with my Austrian husband in 1977. We settled permanently in the United States, our three children were born there, and we became U.S. citizens. My passion for archaeology was unabated and quickly found a raison d’être in Atlanta when I discovered a museum at Emory University with a wonderful Near Eastern collection brought back to the university after WWI. The museum was probably one of the most creepy museums in the country, so much so that John Huston had chosen it to film the movie Wise Blood from the Flannery O’Connor novel. I had come home telling my husband that I couldn’t raise my children in a city where such great archaeological treasures were so little appreciated and that I wanted to return to Europe. His reaction, typical of the entrepreneur he is, was, “Instead of complaining, why don’t you try to change it.” I undertook to do so and was fortunate enough to be able to participate actively in the transformation of this museum into one of the best university museums in the country, known today as the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University. The core of its collections goes back to the American Scientific Mission to the Near East, when William A. Shelton, a professor of theology at Emory University accompanied the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (the founder of the Oriental Institute in Chicago) to Egypt and the Near East in 1920 and brought back the collection of Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities that formed the core of the collection of the Emory Museum.
Curator Monique Seefried Discussing an Assyrian Relief for the
Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, Atlanta
Apart from what I learned in school and college about 20th-,century history, my knowledge of WWI was the knowledge of an average French person, growing up in a family with relatives who fought, were wounded or died in WWI and seeing WWI memorials on the main square of every French village or town. My Austrian husband’s family was also very much touched by WWI, and the memory of WWI is still very present in many aspects of Austrian life.
Upon arriving in the U.S. and cataloging the Near Eastern collections of the Emory Museum, I felt like going back to the aftermath of WWI while looking at photographs and reading letters and travel diaries from American archaeologists traveling through the Near East in late 1918 and 1919. Dust and Ashes from Empires, from W.E. Shelton, the founder of the museum, depicted the insecurity that reigned in the region at the time. It was utterly fascinating for me to be reading firsthand descriptions by Americans of sites I had studied in French and British excavations reports, but this was the first time I read about the impact of WWI on these places. It made me feel as if I was traveling in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia.
In the following years, as president of the board of the International Baccalaureate Organization (IB), many of my speeches on education and the creation of the IB would go back to WWI, as it is a school curriculum born out of educators who, after having seen generations of men decimated by WWI, wanted to create an education that would promote peace and international understanding.
Nimrod Frazer and Monique Seefried at a World War I Event
B. MH: My first awareness of you was with your collaboration with Mr. Nimrod Frazer on his history of the Alabama (167th) Regiment of the Rainbow (42nd) Division and the subsequent project of building a memorial to the unit on the site of their first major action at Croix Rouge Farm north of the Marne river. Tell us how you came to work with him and how the decision was made to proceed with creating and installing a major monument that was essentially a private affair.
MS: Amazingly enough, I met Rod Frazer through my curatorial work at the Carlos Museum. In that capacity, I was asked to serve on the board of the Albright Institute, one of the branches of the American School of Oriental Research. Like many not-for-profit boards, it had scholars but also philanthropists interested in its mission to contribute to American archaeological studies in the Middle East. Some of the board members traveled to Syria, Jordan, and Israel. During this trip, in 1995, Rod told me about his childhood with an alcoholic father but also added that his father had been wounded in WWI. I was well aware of the traumas suffered by the men who fought in this terrible conflict and helped Rod realize the impact WWI may have had on his father’s addiction. Later, I was to learn that Rod himself was a decorated veteran of the Korean War.
Subsequently, he asked me to help him find the place where his father had been wounded. Digging out information was an easy task for an archaeologist! After going over books and maps, I told him I had found the battle site of the Croix Rouge Farm. And as only an American would do, he wanted to buy this historical battlefield.
C. MH: What was your role in completing the Croix Rouge project and what were your biggest challenges?
Dedication of the Croix Rouge Memorial
MS: My role was in fact all encompassing except for what we call in French “le nerf de la guerre”, literally the nerve of war, the financial means needed to create this memorial. Rod provided the incentive and the funds to purchase the property and to commission the sculpture. Challenges were many, the first one was to find the three owners of the property and then to convince them to sell. This took several years, especially for one of the owners, who lives in Tripoli, Lebanon, and who only agreed to sell his parcel to an American when I told him it was to honor his father.
The second step was to find a sculptor, and finally Rod settled on the second artist I introduced him to, the first being Calyxte Campe, a young sculptor who is great nephew of the famous French sculptor Camille Claudel, a pupil and the mistress of Rodin. Rod’s choice settled on James Butler, a member of the British Royal Academy, today its oldest serving member. Rod and Jim were of the same generations and each had a military background. Rod has served in combat and earned a Silver Star in Korea, while Jim served two years in the Royal Signals of the British Army.
From the start, their bond was visible and it gave birth to incredible works of art, one which is still in the making, a sculpture to be inaugurated in Montgomery, AL, on 11 November 2020, entitled The Return from the Argonne, which will complete both men’s relationship as artist and patron. My own role will have been to chair the Croix Rouge Farm Battle Memorial Foundation, and to navigate the practical hurdles such projects entail, from the various contractors, to obtaining permits and getting the necessary endorsements from a variety of political and administrative bodies: military, local, and national. I can only here briefly recognize the extraordinary support I received from the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), the French authorities, from the elected local level to the French national administration and army, as well as the Federal and State (Alabama) governments. I want to insist on how supportive France and the United States were in this journey to honor the men of the Rainbow Division in France during WWI. One example should suffice—the French regional authority in charge of building and maintaining roads erected and sponsored more than 30 road signs to indicate the direction to the U.S. 42nd division Memorial for visitors to the region.
D. MH: My understanding is that the sculptor of the Croix Rouge statue, James Butler, has created another version of the statue that stands now in front of Union Station in Montgomery and that another will be dedicated in Alabama soon. Please tell us about that.
MS: On the hundredth anniversary of the departure of 3677 Alabama National Guard soldiers from Montgomery on 28 August 1917, a second casting of the Rainbow Division Memorial standing in France on the Croix Rouge Farm battlefield since November 2011 was inaugurated. It stands in front of Union Station, from where they boarded trains for training at Camp Mills, NJ, and combat in France.
A few months earlier, on 6 Apri 2017, another sculpture by James Butler, the Daedalus, had been inaugurated at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, to commemorate the role of the air service in WWI.
Artist James Butler with Daedalus at Maxwell AFB
A new sculpture by James Butler, honoring the Rainbow Division but also the state of Alabama service in WWI, will be erected in front of Union Station. It will feature a dead man, picked up from the battlefield after the capture of the Côte de Châtillon in the Argonne by Alabama and Iowa soldiers of the 84th Brigade. They were under the leadership of Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, gaining a strong point on the Hindenburg line, a decisive victory of the AEF and the Rainbow Division.
E. MH: I understand you now have a continuing role in remembering the Rainbow Division. More than any other American formation it had a cross-section of America, almost uniquely including units that had fought on both sides of the Civil War.
MS: Yes, I have been honored by the Rainbow Division and have become an honorary member of the division. I plan to continue to serve this division in any way I can. It has undergone several iterations since it was created in 1917. Now the New York National Guard, the 42nd “Rainbow” division was made up during WWI of National Guard units from 26 states and the District of Columbia, and there was originally indeed a certain amount of tension between the children of Alabama Confederates and New York Union soldiers. As Father Duffy, the chaplain of the New Yorkers, wrote, they soon learned to rely on each other and to become first and foremost Americans and members of the Rainbow.
Monique Seefried (foreground) at a 42nd "Rainbow" Division Commemoration
Held at Croix Rouge Farm
In WWII, the division served in Europe and was also made up of units from all over the United States. After 9/11, the Rainbow Division was one of the first responders, and several of its units have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the following years, with other National Guard units from different states serving under Rainbow command. The Rainbow will again be deployed overseas in 2020 and stationed in the Emirates.
Part II of this interview, on Monique Seefried's work as Commissioner for America's Commemoration of the Great War, will be presented tomorrow, 24 October 2019. Part II can be read HERE.
A Golden Cross to Bear: A Story of the 33rd Division in World War 1
By Kane Farabaugh & Jon Kassell
Kanestar Productions, 2018
Michael Hanlon, Reviewer
For those of you–like me–who felt shortchanged on the military part of America's experience in the First World War after watching last year's PBS Great War extravaganza, a team based in the Chicago area has produced a nearly perfect curative. A Golden Cross to Bear: A Story of the 33rd Division in World War I is not only endorsed by the National Centennial Commission and California's Centennial Committee but also won several awards including a TV Emmy after its showing on WTVP-TV, the PBS station serving Central Illinois.
Roger Amm Begins Learning About the 33rd Division and the AEF
The five-part documentary's driving narrative is the effort by local man named Roger Amm to uncover the story of how his grandfather Gustave managed to get himself gassed during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Gustave was a replacement rifleman in the 131st Infantry of the 33rd Division of the AEF, which was mostly composed of National Guardsmen from Illinois. He missed the division's earlier service with the British in the Somme sector but arrived just in time to participate in, arguably, the largest and costliest battle America ever fought. And he turned out to be part of that cost.
In the opening sequences, we meet grandson Roger, who needs to tap into our community of World War I researchers, historians, genealogists, and collectors, to gain knowledge about the experiences of individual Doughboys, like his grandfather, their units, and how the great battle was fought. I particularly enjoyed a lighthearted sequence in which a collector of WWI vehicles lets Roger drive some of them around his farm. Also, since Gustave was gassed, there is a strong focus on gas warfare. The 33rd Division, because of its vulnerability fighting uphill on the Meuse Heights in the last stages of its fighting, was one of the most gassed formations of the AEF.
Roger at Butte de Vauquois
A Golden Cross to Bear really takes off when Roger moves to France to walk in the steps of Gustave. Battlefield guides first take him to some of the best-preserved trenches and mining sites so he can get the feel of the front. Next, the superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery briefs him on the battle and shows him where many of the men of the 131st Infantry are buried and how they are still honored and cared for. In the next episode, as happened with the division 100 years earlier, everyone crosses over to the east side of the Meuse River, where the 33rd Division fought its final action in October 1918. There on the heights overlooking the river, guide Randy Gaulke, current president of the World War One Historical Association, does a wonderful job of bringing Roger to the site where Gustave was wounded. To commemorate the visit, there's a ceremonial planting of red poppy seeds that wraps up Roger's quest perfectly.
Just a few more things to mention. The whole series is beautifully photographed. As a stand-in for everyone who had a relative who served in the war and wants to learn about and honor their service, Roger Amm is a perfect representative—curious, respectful, and very well spoken.
The Complete Set of DVDs Including Extra Features
Can Be Ordered HERE for $20.00
A Special Thanks to Courtland Jindra of the California Centennial Committee for championing A Golden Cross to Bear.
A Virtual Anzac Day at Gallipoli
Readers of Roads to the Great War probably know that the Gallipoli Peninsula is pretty rugged terrain. Usually when you visit the battlefields there, though, you have the luxury of being driven to the highest elevations. That is not, however, the case every 25 April, the day of the annual Anzac Day Commemoration. The roads to the heights are all shut down for the day. Here is what you would be in for, step-by-step, if you are ever able to visit the site on some April 25th in the future and attend all the major events.
Sunrise Ceremony at North Beach, Anzac Cove
(0530-0615 hrs)
The first event of the day honors the predawn landing of 25 April 1915. Tour buses are not allowed within 1 km of Anzac Cove. This will be your last motorized trip of the day until you depart the peninsula. After this initial event you need to start your hike for Lone Pine. Pack rations and lots of water.
Lone Pine Commemoration (1000-1045 hrs)
Site of a ferocious attack during the August 1915 Allied offensive, Lone Pine is the most hallowed of locations at Gallipoli for Australians. It is reached by a 3 km uphill walk about half of which is unpaved and very steep. Don't dawdle afterward, though—you, have another 1.2 km uphill march ahead of you and you will have to skedaddle to catch the the next event, the most important Turkish memorial of the day.
Turkish 57th Regiment Ceremony (1115-1200 hrs)
The 57th Regiment was the unit Turkish hero Mustafa Kemal ordered to die guarding the heights above Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915. The unit was annihilated that day but held the heights, and they are honored with each Anzac day with their own ceremony. Afterward , you have one remaining 2.3 km stretch uphill to the peak known as Chunuk Bair to manage, and you have a full 30 minutes to do it.
Mustafa Kemal and New Zealand Memorials at Chunuk Bair
(New Zealand Commemoration 1230-1315)
Congratulations! You have climbed vertically about 860 feet since daylight and have made it as far as the entire Allied Expeditionary Force did in 1915. New Zealanders captured this high ground at Chunuk Bair, but their replacements could not resist the onslaught organized by the man of the hour, Mustafa Kemal, when he arrived on the scene. Kemal is the great hero of Gallipoli, personally directing the defeat of three Allied operations during the campaign and is remembered at this location and many other places around the battlefield. After the ceremony, however, your day is not quite done. Now you just need to walk back down to the beach the way you came to meet your bus.
Building a Narrow Gauge Rail Line at the Front
The French Adrian Helmet
James Patton
Our Friend Olivier Pierrard in Authentic Kit,
Including the Adrian Helmet
In the early months of WWI all of the combatants were wearing headgear better suited for parade grounds rather than in artillery barrages. French soldiers wore a cloth cap, called the képi, which was actually a frenchized spelling of the German word kappe.
It soon became clear that falling shrapnel and shell fragments from air-bursting indirect artillery fire were causing a large number of head wounds, even to soldiers in good defensive positions. The French were the first to respond to this crisis by issuing a steel skullcap called the calotte métallique, cervelière, to be worn under the képi, which was soon supplanted by a true helmet.
Adrian Helmets Under Production
Medical concerns were subordinated to the determination to make the helmet look "military," so visors, a badge plate, and a Roman-like crest were added, the latter feature made the helmet somewhat resemble a German Pickelhaube (sans the spike). The holes necessary for mounting the crest made the helmet less strong.
Industry weighed in on this, too, wanting a design that was easy and inexpensive to make, so the helmet was made from mild steel and was of a lighter gauge than the foreign counterparts, weighing only 1.1 pounds. Eventually the helmet came with a cover to reduce reflectivity (soldiers had been coating their helmets with mud to address this problem), but it was then found that bits of the cover were infecting head wounds, so the reflectivity problem was addressed by using a rough finish instead. The helmet got the name Casque Adrian from General August-Louis Adrian, who was the officer in charge of the program, and was designated the M15.
The burning question is: How effective were these helmets? An answer: Data collected by the British showed a dramatic decline in the incidence of head wounds.
An Adrian Helmet for Sale in Bulgaria
The Adrian pattern was the first protective helmet to be widely released, with deliveries beginning in mid-1915, and well over three million were produced. In addition to France, other combatant nations that used the Adrian were Belgium, Greece, Italy, Japan, Romania, Serbia, Siam, and in limited quantities Russia and the U.S. [The four U.S. segregated regiments assigned to the French Army wore the Adrian helmet.] In the postwar years at least ten other countries also bought Adrian helmets.
In 1926 France produced an updated model, the M26, which remained their standard until 1942, when the Free French forces adopted the U.S. helmet M-1941.
Originally Presented at the KANSAS WW1 Website, 24 February 2018
Map Series #10: The 5th Division, AEF, Crosses the Meuse
Very Early and Just-Completed Monument to the 5th Division's Meuse River Crossing
Note Meuse Heights in Distance
As part of the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive—launched 1 November 1918—the III Corps of the AEF's First Army, composed of the 90th and 5th Divisions, was given the objective of crossing the Meuse River and seizing the Meuse River Heights to the east. One of the most advantageous points for exploiting the initial crossing and moving promptly upland was at the river town of Dun-sur-Meuse. The town was in the zone of the 5th Division.
The above map is from the Official History of the 5th Division. It shows the advance of the division from its starting point on 1 November and pivoting up to the river, where it arrived on 4 November. Note that the map does not clearly depict that there is both the river and a parallel canal running below the town.
This is a photograph taken by a U.S. Air Service reconnaissance aircraft on 2 November 1918 of the area around Dun-sur-Meuse. The 5th Division successfully forced a crossing of the river and canal at this location over the 4th and 5th of November. Sometime after the action, Cartographer Sergeant Major Willard B. Prince of the 5th Division Intelligence Section made the annotations on the photograph. The Library of Congress holds Prince's World War I collection.
Sources: Maps of the First World War: An Illustrated Essay and List of Select Maps in the Library of Congress; Official History of the Fifth Division, AEF; and the Michelin Meuse-Argonne Battlefield Guide.
Inside Germany, 1914–1918
One of the most insightful accounts of life inside Germany, 1914–1918, was a paper with that title read to the Chicago Literary Club in April 1941 by law and political science professor Max Rheinstein of the University of Chicago. He had lived in Germany throughout the war, served in uniform in its last stages, and had emigrated to the United States in 1933. His paper can be downloaded HERE, but perhaps before reading his account here's a little information from Wikipedia on Rheinstein's interesting career.
Professor Rheinstein
Max Rheinstein was born on 5 July 1899, in Bad Kreuznach, the only son of wine merchant Ferdinand Rheinstein (1842–1904) and Rosalie Bernheim (1858–1928). He fought in the German Army in World War I and subsequently studied law at the University of Munich. In the spring of 1919 Rheinstein participated in the overthrow of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Becoming an assistant of Ernst Rabel, Rheinstein received his doctorate in law in 1924. He subsequently followed Rabel to Berlin as a research lecturer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Foreign and International Private Law, where he supervised the institute library. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1928.
Unlike other SPD members and Jews, Rheinstein was not dismissed from his position after the Nazi seizure of power, due to the fact that he had fought the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. In February 1933, he received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and emigrated to the United States, where he began working at Columbia Law School. In 1936 he was appointed Max Pam Professor of American and Foreign Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago Law School, a position he held until his retirement in 1968. Rheinstein became an American citizen in 1940. After World War II, Rheinstein returned to Germany, where he was a member of the Legal Division of the Office of Military Government and served in a division of the Allied Control Council in Berlin.
In 1953, Rheinstein was awarded the Ordre des Palmes académiques and the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954. Until 1968 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Rheinstein moved to Palo Alto, California, in 1976 for health reasons. He died in Bad Gastein, Austria on 9 July 1977.
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Kuwait Population: 2,916,467
Kuwait has been ruled by the AL-SABAH dynasty since the 18th century. The threat of Ottoman invasion in 1899 prompted Amir Mubarak AL-SABAH to seek protection from Britain, ceding foreign and defense responsibility to Britain until 1961, when the country attained its independence. Kuwait was attacked and overrun by Iraq in August 1990. Following several weeks of aerial bombardment, a US-led UN coalition began a ground assault in February 1991 that liberated Kuwait in four days. In 1992, the Amir reconstituted the parliament that he had dissolved in 1986. Amid the 2010-11 uprisings and protests across the Arab world, stateless Arabs, known as Bidoon, staged small protests in early 2011 demanding citizenship, jobs, and other benefits available to Kuwaiti nationals. Other demographic groups, notably Islamists and Kuwaitis from tribal backgrounds, soon joined the growing protest movements, which culminated in late 2011 with the resignation of the prime minister amidst allegations of corruption. Demonstrations renewed in late 2012 in response to an amiri decree amending the electoral law that lessened the voting power of the tribal blocs. An opposition coalition of Sunni Islamists, tribal populists, and some liberals, largely boycotted legislative elections in 2012 and 2013, which ushered in a legislature more amenable to the government's agenda. Faced with the prospect of painful subsidy cuts, oppositionists and independents actively participated in the November 2016 election, winning nearly half of the seats but a cohesive opposition alliance largely ceased to exist with the 2016 election and the opposition became increasingly factionalized. Since coming to power in 2006, the Amir has dissolved the National Assembly on seven occasions (the Constitutional Court annulled the Assembly elections in June 2012 and again in June 2013) and shuffled the cabinet over a dozen times, usually citing political stagnation and gridlock between the legislature and the government.
Strategic location at head of Persian Gulf
Location: Middle East, bordering the Persian Gulf, between Iraq and Saudi Arabia
Area: total: 17,818 sq km
land: 17,818 sq km
Size comparison: slightly smaller than New Jersey
Land Boundaries: total: 475 km border countries (2): Iraq 254 km, Saudi Arabia 221 km
Climate: dry desert; intensely hot summers; short, cool winters
Terrain: flat to slightly undulating desert plain
Natural resources: petroleum, fish, shrimp, natural gas
Land use: agricultural land: 8.5% (2011 est.) arable land: 0.6% (2011 est.)
permanent crops: 0.3% (2011 est.) permanent pasture: 7.6% (2011 est.) forest: 0.4% (2011 est.)
Natural hazards: sudden cloudbursts are common from October to April and bring heavy rain, which can damage roads and houses; sandstorms and dust storms occur throughout the year but are most common between March and August
Current Environment Issues: limited natural freshwater resources; some of world's largest and most sophisticated desalination facilities provide much of the water; air and water pollution; desertification; loss of biodiversity
International Environment Agreements: party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection
signed, but not ratified: Marine Dumping
Nationality: noun: Kuwaiti(s)
adjective: Kuwaiti
Ethnic groups: Kuwaiti 30.4%, other Arab 27.4%, Asian 40.3%, African 1%, other .9% (includes European, North American, South American, and Australian) (2018 est.)
Languages: Arabic (official), English widely spoken
Religions: Muslim (official) 74.6%, Christian 18.2%, other and unspecified 7.2% (2013 est.)
note: data represent the total population; about 69% of the population consists of immigrants
Population: 2,916,467 (July 2017 est.) (July 2018 est.) note: Kuwait's Public Authority for Civil Information estimates the country's total population to be 4,437,590 for 2017, with immigrants accounting for more than 69.5%
Age structure: 0-14 years: 24.81% (male 376,652 /female 347,019)
15-24 years: 15.04% (male 240,638 /female 197,946)
25-54 years: 52.3% (male 961,205 /female 563,979)
55-64 years: 5.2% (male 85,146 /female 66,373)
65 years and over: 2.66% (male 35,117 /female 42,392) (2018 est.)
Urbanization: urban population: 100% of total population (2018)
Major urban areas - population: 2.989 million KUWAIT (capital) (2018)
25-54 years: 1.7 male(s)/female
total population: 1.4 male(s)/female (2018 est.)
Maternal mortality rate: 4 deaths/100,000 live births (2015 est.)
Infant mortality rate: total: 6.8 deaths/1,000 live births male: 6.6 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 7 deaths/1,000 live births (2018 est.)
Physicians density: 2.58 physicians/1,000 population (2015)
Hospital bed density: 2 beds/1,000 population (2014)
total: 1% of population (2015 est.)
urban: 100% of population (2015 est.)
rural: 100% of population (2015 est.)
total: 100% of population (2015 est.)
urban: 0% of population (2015 est.)
rural: 0% of population (2015 est.)
HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate: <.1% (2017 est.)
HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS: <1000 (2017 est.)
HIV/AIDS - deaths: <100 (2017 est.)
Children under the age of 5 years underweight: 3% (2014)
Education expenditures: n/a
Unemployment, youth ages 15-24: total: 15.4% male: 9.4% N/A female: 30% N/A (2016 est.)
Country name: conventional long form: State of Kuwait
conventional short form: Kuwait
local long form: Dawlat al Kuwayt
local short form: Al Kuwayt
etymology: the name derives from the capital city, which is from Arabic "al-Kuwayt" a diminutive of "kut" meaning "fortress," possibly a reference to a small castle built on the current location of Kuwait City by the Beni Khaled tribe in the 17th century
Government type: constitutional monarchy (emirate)
Capital: name: Kuwait City
etymology: the name derives from Arabic "al-Kuwayt" a diminutive of "kut" meaning "fortress," possibly a reference to a small castle built on the current location of Kuwait City by the Beni Khaled tribe in the 17th century
Administrative divisions: 6 governorates (muhafazat, singular - muhafazah); Al Ahmadi, Al 'Asimah, Al Farwaniyah, Al Jahra', Hawalli, Mubarak al Kabir
Independence: 19 June 1961 (from the UK)
National holiday: National Day, 25 February (1950)
Constitution: history: approved and promulgated 11 November 1962 amendments: proposed by the amir or supported by at least one-third of the National Assembly; passage requires two-thirds consent by the Assembly membership and promulgation by the amir; constitutional articles on the initiation, approval, and promulgation of general legislation cannot be amended (2016)
Legal system: mixed legal system consisting of English common law, French civil law, and Islamic sharia law
Suffrage: 21 years of age and at least 20-year citizenship
Executive branch: chief of state: Amir SABAH al-Ahmad al-Jabir al-Sabah (since 29 January 2006); Crown Prince NAWAF al-Ahmad al-Jabir al-Sabah
head of government: Prime Minister JABIR AL-MUBARAK al-Hamad al-Sabah (since 30 November 2011); First Deputy Prime Minister NASIR Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah (since 11 December 2017); Deputy Prime Ministers SABAH KHALID al-Hamid al-Sabah (since 13 December 2011), KHALID al-Jarrah al-Sabah (since 4 August 2013), Anas Khalid al-SALEH (since 4 August 2013)
cabinet: Council of Ministers appointed by the prime minister, approved by the amir elections/appointments: amir chosen from within the ruling family, confirmed by the National Assembly; prime minister and deputy prime ministers appointed by the amir; crown prince appointed by the amir and approved by the National Assembly
Legislative branch: description: unicameral National Assembly or Majlis al-Umma (65 seats; 50 members directly elected from 5 multi-seat constituencies by simple majority vote and 15 ex-officio members (cabinet ministers) appointed by the amir; members serve 4-year terms)
elections: last held on 26 November 2016 (next to be held in 2020)
election results: seats won - oppositionists and independents, including populists, Islamists, and liberals 26, pro-government loyalists 24; composition for elected members only - men 49, women 1, percent of women 1.5% note: seats as of May 2019 - oppositionists and independents, including populists, Islamists, and liberals 25, pro-government loyalists 25; composition as of May 2019 for elected members only - men 49, women 1, percent of women 2%
Judicial branch: highest courts: Constitutional Court (consists of 5 judges); Supreme Court or Court of Cassation (organized into several circuits, each with 5 judges) judge selection and term of office: all Kuwaiti judges appointed by the Amir upon recommendation of the Supreme Judicial Council, a consultative body comprised of Kuwaiti judges and Ministry of Justice officials
subordinate courts: High Court of Appeal; Court of First Instance; Summary Court
Political parties and leaders: none; the government does not recognize any political parties or allow their formation, although no formal law bans political parties
International organization participation: ABEDA, AfDB (nonregional member), AFESD, AMF, BDEAC, CAEU, CD, FAO, G-77, GCC, IAEA, IBRD, ICAO, ICC (national committees), ICRM, IDA, IDB, IFAD, IFC, IFRCS, IHO, ILO, IMF, IMO, IMSO, Interpol, IOC, IPU, ISO, ITSO, ITU, ITUC (NGOs), LAS, MIGA, NAM, OAPEC, OIC, OPCW, OPEC, Paris Club (associate), PCA, UN, UNCTAD, UNESCO, UNIDO, UNRWA, UN Security Council (temporary), UNWTO, UPU, WCO, WFTU (NGOs), WHO, WIPO, WMO, WTO
National symbol(s): golden falcon;
national colors: green, white, red, black
National anthem: name: "Al-Nasheed Al-Watani" (National Anthem)
lyrics/music: Ahmad MUSHARI al-Adwani/Ibrahim Nasir al-SOULA
note: adopted 1978; the anthem is only used on formal occasions
Diplomatic representation in the US: chief of mission: Ambassador SALIM al-Abdallah al-Jabir al-Sabah (since 10 October 2001)
chancery: 2940 Tilden Street NW, Washington, DC 20008
consulate(s) general: New York City consulate(s): Lost Angeles
Diplomatic representation from the US: chief of mission: Ambassador Lawrence R. SILVERMAN (since 5 October 2016)
embassy: P.O. Box 77, Safat 13001
mailing address: P. O. Box 77 Safat 13001 Kuwait; or PSC 1280 APO AE 09880-9000
telephone: [965] 2259-1001
FAX: [965] 2538-6562
Kuwait has a geographically small, but wealthy, relatively open economy with crude oil reserves of about 102 billion barrels - more than 6% of world reserves. Kuwaiti officials plan to increase production to 4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day by 2020. Petroleum accounts for over half of GDP, 92% of export revenues, and 90% of government income. With world oil prices declining, Kuwait realized a budget deficit in 2015 for the first time more than a decade; in 2016, the deficit grew to 16.5% of GDP. Kuwaiti authorities announced cuts to fuel subsidies in August 2016, provoking outrage among the public and National Assembly, and the Amir dissolved the government for the seventh time in ten years. In 2017 the deficit was reduced to 7.2% of GDP, and the government raised $8 billion by issuing international bonds. Despite Kuwait’s dependence on oil, the government has cushioned itself against the impact of lower oil prices, by saving annually at least 10% of government revenue in the Fund for Future Generations. Kuwait has failed to diversify its economy or bolster the private sector, because of a poor business climate, a large public sector that employs about 74% of citizens, and an acrimonious relationship between the National Assembly and the executive branch that has stymied most economic reforms. The Kuwaiti Government has made little progress on its long-term economic development plan first passed in 2010. While the government planned to spend up to $104 billion over four years to diversify the economy, attract more investment, and boost private sector participation in the economy, many of the projects did not materialize because of an uncertain political situation or delays in awarding contracts. To increase non-oil revenues, the Kuwaiti Government in August 2017 approved draft bills supporting a Gulf Cooperation Council-wide value added tax scheduled to take effect in 2018.
GDP (purchasing power parity): $289.7 billion (2017 est.) $299.7 billion (2016 est.) $293.2 billion (2015 est.)
GDP (official exchange rate): $120.7 billion (2017 est.)
GDP - real growth rate: -3.3% (2017 est.) 2.2% (2016 est.) -1% (2015 est.)
GDP - per capita (PPP): $65,800 (2017 est.) $69,900 (2016 est.) $69,200 (2015 est.)
Gross national saving: 35.4% of GDP (2017 est.) 32.9% of GDP (2016 est.) 37.1% of GDP (2015 est.) GDP - composition, by end use: household consumption: 43.1% (2017 est.) government consumption: 24.5% (2017 est.) investment in fixed capital: 26.5% (2017 est.) investment in inventories: 3.5% (2017 est.) exports of goods and services: 49.4% (2017 est.) imports of goods and services: -47% (2017 est.) GDP - composition, by sector of origin: agriculture: 0.4% (2017 est.) industry: 58.7% (2017 est.) services: 40.9% (2017 est.)
Agriculture - products: fish
Industries: petroleum, petrochemicals, cement, shipbuilding and repair, water desalination, food processing, construction materials
Industrial production growth rate: 2.8% (2017 est.)
Labor force: 2.695 million (2017 est.) note: non-Kuwaitis represent about 60% of the labor force
Labor force - by occupation: agriculture: n/a
industry: n/a
Unemployment rate: 1.1% (2017 est.) 1.1% (2016 est.)
Population below poverty line: n/a
Budget: revenues: 50.5 billion (2017 est.)
expenditures: 62.6 billion (2017 est.)
Taxes and other revenues: 41.8% (of GDP) (2017 est.) Budget surplus (+) or deficit (-): -10% (of GDP) (2017 est.)
Public debt: 20.6% of GDP (2017 est.) 9.9% of GDP (2016 est.)
Fiscal year: 1 April - 31 March
Current account balance: $7.127 billion (2017 est.) -$5.056 billion (2016 est.)
Exports: $55.17 billion (2017 est.) $46.26 billion (2016 est.)
Exports - commodities: oil and refined products, fertilizers
Exports - partners: South Korea 18.3%, China 17.4%, Japan 11.5%, India 11.2%, Singapore 6.3%, US 5.7% (2017)
Imports: $29.53 billion (2017 est.) $26.56 billion (2016 est.)
Imports - commodities: food, construction materials, vehicles and parts, clothing
Imports - partners: China 13.5%, US 13.3%, UAE 9.5%, Saudi Arabia 5.8%, Germany 5.4%, Japan 5%, India 4.7%, Italy 4.5% (2017)
Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: $33.7 billion (31 December 2017 est.) $31.13 billion (31 December 2016 est.)
Debt - external: $47.24 billion (31 December 2017 est.) $38.34 billion (31 December 2016 est.)
Stock of direct foreign investment - at home: $12.9 billion (31 December 2017 est.) $12.62 billion (31 December 2016 est.)
Stock of direct foreign investment - abroad: $82.35 billion (31 December 2017 est.) $74.13 billion (31 December 2016 est.)
Market value of publicly traded shares: $81.78 billion (31 December 2016 est.) $83.13 billion (31 December 2015 est.) $99.77 billion (31 December 2014 est.)
Exchange rates: Kuwaiti dinars (KD) per US dollar - 0.3041 (2017 est.) 0.3022 (2016 est.) 0.3022 (2015 est.) 0.3009 (2014 est.) 0.2845 (2013 est.)
Electricity - production: 65.95 billion kWh (2016 est.)
Electricity - consumption: 57.78 billion kWh (2016 est.)
Electricity - installed generating capacity: 18.89 million kW (2016 est.)
Crude oil - production: 2.753 million bbl/day (2017 est.)
Crude oil - proved reserves: 101.5 billion bbl (1 January 2018 est.)
Refined petroleum products - production: 915,800 bbl/day (2015 est.)
Refined petroleum products - consumption: 446,000 bbl/day (2016 est.)
Refined petroleum products - exports: 705,500 bbl/day (2015 est.)
Refined petroleum products - imports: 0 bbl/day (2015 est.)
Natural gas - production: 17.1 billion cu m (2017 est.)
Natural gas - consumption: 21.72 billion cu m (2017 est.)
Natural gas - imports: 5.125 billion cu m (2017 est.)
Natural gas - proved reserves: 1.784 trillion cu m (1 January 2018 est.)
Carbon dioxide emissions from consumption of energy: 106.5 million Mt (2017 est.)
subscriptions per 100 inhabitants: 179 (2017 est.)
Telephone system: general assessment: the quality of service is excellent; new telephone exchanges provide a large capacity for new subscribers; trunk traffic is carried by microwave radio relay, coaxial cable, and open-wire and fiber-optic cable; a 4G LTE mobile-cellular telephone system operates throughout Kuwai; Internet access is available via 4G LTE connections for fixed and mobile users; high ownership of smart phone in Kuwait; one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world (2018)
domestic: fixed-line subscriptions are 19 per 100 and mobile-cellular stands at 179 per 100 subscriptions (2018)
international: country code - 965; linked to Bahrain, Qatar, UAE via the Fiber-Optic Gulf (FOG) cable; coaxial cable and microwave radio relay to Saudi Arabia; satellite earth stations - 6 (3 Intelsat - 1 Atlantic Ocean and 2 Indian Ocean, 1 Inmarsat - Atlantic Ocean, and 2 Arabsat)
Broadcast media: state-owned TV broadcaster operates 4 networks and a satellite channel; several private TV broadcasters have emerged; satellite TV available and pan-Arab TV stations are especially popular; state-owned Radio Kuwait broadcasts on a number of channels in Arabic and English; first private radio station emerged in 2005; transmissions of at least 2 international radio broadcasters are available (2019)
Internet country code: .kw
Internet users: total: 2,219,972
(2017) over 3,047 m: 1 (2017)
Airports (unpaved runways): total 3
under 914 m: 2 (2013)
Pipelines: 261 km gas, 540 km oil, 57 km refined products (2013)
(2018) paved: 4,887 km (2018)
unpaved: 862 km (2018)
Merchant marine: total 158
by type: general cargo 18, oil tanker 26, other 114 (2018)
Ports and terminals: major seaport(s): Ash Shu'aybah, Ash Shuwaykh, Az Zawr (Mina' Sa'ud), Mina' 'Abd Allah, Mina' al Ahmadi
Military branches: Kuwaiti Land Forces (KLF), Kuwaiti Navy, Kuwaiti Air Force (Al-Quwwat al-Jawwiya al-Kuwaitiya; includes Kuwaiti Air Defense Force, KADF), Kuwaiti National Guard (KNG) (2013)
Military service age and obligation: 17-21 years of age for voluntary military service; conscription suspended (2012)
Military expenditures: 4.83% of GDP (2015) 3.65% of GDP (2014) 3.27% of GDP (2013) 3.41% of GDP (2012) 3.5% of GDP (2011)
Disputes - International: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia continue negotiating a joint maritime boundary with Iran; no maritime boundary exists with Iraq in the Persian Gulf
Refugees and internally displaced persons:
stateless persons: 92,000 (2018); note - Kuwait's 1959 Nationality Law defined citizens as persons who settled in the country before 1920 and who had maintained normal residence since then; one-third of the population, descendants of Bedouin tribes, missed the window of opportunity to register for nationality rights after Kuwait became independent in 1961 and were classified as bidun (meaning "without"); since the 1980s Kuwait's bidun have progressively lost their rights, including opportunities for employment and education, amid official claims that they are nationals of other countries who have destroyed their identification documents in hopes of gaining Kuwaiti citizenship; Kuwaiti authorities have delayed processing citizenship applications and labeled biduns as "illegal residents," denying them access to civil documentation, such as birth and marriage certificates
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Count To 10 Baby Ben v1.0
By jimmystrings1. Updated February 24, 2015
"Count To 10 With Baby Ben" is a children's learning app that helps early learners count to 10 with colorful pictures, animations, bold letters and numbers.
Help your child count to 10 using Baby Ben and his toys and possessions. Watch out for more "Adventures with Baby Ben" children's apps.
Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Bengali (Bangladesh), Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English (United Kingdom), English (India), Spanish, Spanish (United States), Estonian (Estonia), Basque (Spain), Persian, Finnish, French, French (Canada), Galician (Spain), Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Armenian (Armenia), Indonesian (legacy in code), Icelandic (Iceland), Italian, Hebrew (legacy iw locale), Japanese, Georgian (Georgia), Khmer (Cambodia), Kannada (India), Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian (Macedonia), Malayalam (India), Marathi (India), Malay (Malaysia), Burmese (Myanmar [Burma]), Norwegian Bokmål, Nepali (Nepal), Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Swahili, Tamil (India), Telugu (India), Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu (Pakistan), Vietnamese, Chinese (China), Chinese (Hong Kong SAR China), Chinese (Taiwan), Zulu
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Learning numbers for kidsFree Android 3.0+ app
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Follow @tellychakkar
Kareena Kapoor (pronounced ; born 21 September 1980), also known as Kareena Kapoor Khan, is an Indian actress who appears in Bollywood films. She is the daughter of actors Randhir Kapoor and Babita, and the younger sister of actress Karisma Kapoor. Noted for playing a variety of characters in a range of film genres—from contemporary romantic comedies to crime dramas—Kapoor has received six Filmfare Awards, and has established herself as one of Bollywood's highest-paid actresses.
Apsara Film & Television Producers Guild Awards The Apsara Film & Television Producers Guild Award is presented by the Bollywood film industry to honour and recognize the professional excellence of their peers. Khan has received one award out of four nom
2000 Refugee 2001 Mujhe Kucch Kehna Hai 2001 Yaadein 2001 Ajnabee 2001 A?oka 2001 Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... 2002 Mujhse Dosti Karoge! 2002 Jeena Sirf Merre Liye 2003 Talaash: The Hunt Begins... 2003 Khushi Khushi Singh 2003 Main
Kareena Kapoor (pronounced ; born 21 September 1980), also known as Kareena Kapoor Khan, is an Indian actress who appears in Bollywood films. She is the daughter of actors Randhir Kapoor and Babita, and the younger sister of actress Karisma Kapoor. Noted for playing a variety of characters in a range of film genres—from contemporary romantic comedies to crime dramas—Kapoor has received six Filmfare Awards, and has established herself as one of Bollywood's highest-paid actresses. 1980-09-21 00:00:00 female
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Star Plus Aur Aap
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Star aur Aap
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[friday, september 10, 2010]
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Executive Producer Victor Nelli JR.
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Co-Star Rizwan Manji
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Co-Star Sacha Dhawan
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Co-Star Pippa Black
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Co-Star Parvesh Cheena
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Co-Star Diedrich Bader
Live at the Paley Center: A Few Minutes With... "Outsourced" Co-Star Ben Rappaport
Video: New Promos for "Glee," "Lone Star," "Raising Hope" & "Running Wilde"
Check out the latest promos for FOX's fall lineup.
Video: New "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" Season 3 Trailer!
The series returns with a one-hour event on Friday, September 17 at 9:00/8:00c.
Video: New Clip Packages for FOX's "Lone Star," "Raising Hope" & "Running Wilde"
Each was shown prior to its panel at the TCA Summer Press Tour today.
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... the Complete Index
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Glee" Executive Producers Ryan Murphy & Dante Di Loreto
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Glee" Co-Stars Naya Rivera & Heather Morris
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Glee" Co-Stars Jenna Ushkowitz & Kevin Mchale
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Glee" Co-Star Chris Colfer
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Castle" Co-Star Tamala Jones
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Castle" Star Stana Katic
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Castle" Star Nathan Fillion
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Castle" Co-Stars Jon Huertas & Seamus Dever
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Castle" Creator Andrew W. Marlowe
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Supernatural" Co-Star Misha Collins
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Supernatural" Co-Star Jim Beaver
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Supernatural" Co-Star Jared Padalecki
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Sons of Anarchy" Creator Kurt Sutter
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Sons of Anarchy" Co-Star Ron Perlman
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Sons of Anarchy" Co-Star Katey Sagal
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Smallville" Star Tom Welling
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Smallville" Co-Star John Schneider
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Smallville" Co-Star Erica Durance
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Smallville" Executive Producer Brian Peterson
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Event" Executive Producer Jeffrey Reiner
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Event" Co-Star Laura Innes
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Event" Co-Star Sarah Roemer
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Event" Co-Star Blair Underwood
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Big Bang Theory" Co-Stars Kunal Nayyar, Simon Helberg & Jim Parsons
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Big Bang Theory" Co-Stars Johnny Galecki & Kaley Cuoco
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Big Bang Theory" Co-Creators Bill Prady & Chuck Lorre
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Big Bang Theory" Executive Producer Lee Aronsohn & Co-Executive Producer Steven Molaro
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Nikita" Star Maggie Q
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "Nikita" Co-Star Lyndsy Fonseca
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Vampire Diaries" Co-Star Paul Wesley
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Vampire Diaries" Co-Star Nina Dobrev
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Vampire Diaries" Co-Star Steven R. Mcqueen
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Vampire Diaries" Co-Star Michael Trevino
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Vampire Diaries" Co-Star Matthew Davis
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "The Vampire Diaries" Executive Producer Kevin Williamson
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "V" Executive Producer Scott Rosenbaum
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "V" Co-Star Scott Wolf
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "V" Co-Star Morris Chestnut
Live at the San Diego Comic-Con: A Few Minutes With... "V" Co-Star Laura Vandervoort
[september 2010]
most recent video | view all posts
Video: "Nadiya Bakes" - Official Trailer - Netflix
Delightful cakes and heavenly breads pop from the oven as Nadiya Hussain returns to baking, her happy place, and spotlights creative kindred spirits.
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The collection of 10 mini shorts features characters from Pixar favorites like "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," "Cars" and "The Incredibles" in all-new, bite-size stories created by Pixar Animation Studios' talented animators.
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Known for delivering news, coverage, and insight with a distinctive brand of smart brevity, "Axios" on HBO helps viewers better understand the big trends reshaping America and the world through exclusive interviews, profiles, and breaking news content.
Video: "Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready" Season 2 - Official Trailer - Netflix
Tiffany Haddish returns to share the spotlight with a new batch of comedians who bring wildly funny and authentic takes on life in this stand-up series.
Video: "The Luminaries" Official Trailer - Starz
Murder. Mystics. Destiny. Will their journeys be a matter of fortune or fate?
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The new season is available on Netflix on Tuesday, February 2.
Video: "Fate: The Winx Saga" - Official Trailer - Netflix
Determined to master their enchanting powers, a group of teens navigate rivalry, romance and supernatural studies at Alfea, a magical boarding school.
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Chasing after space debris and faraway dreams in year 2092, four misfits unearth explosive secrets during the attempted trade of a wide-eyed humanoid.
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Emmy winner Wayne Brady is set to host and executive produce the program, due in March.
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The show's latest installment bows Thursday, January 21 on the streaming service.
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All six episodes of the first season will premiere on Prime Video January 22 while season two will premiere at a later date in 2021.
Video: Apple TV+ Unveils Out of This World Trailer for Season Two of Epic Space Drama "For All Mankind"
The first episode of the 10-episode second season will debut globally on Friday, February 19, followed by one new episode weekly, every Friday, exclusively on Apple TV+.
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Life in the garage swerves off track for a NASCAR crew chief and his tight-knit racing team when a new boss steps in and shakes things up.
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In an effort to reclaim their bodies and lives, a group of women explore the intersections of movement and meaning in a powerful pole dancing program.
more video >>
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Why Aren’t the Lowest 99% of Income Earners Marching in the Streets?
Dave Schuler September 28, 2010
Following up on his series in Slate on income inequality Timothy Noah complains that the lower 99% of income earners aren’t ready to start manning the barricades because they’re too stupid:
Americans’ ignorance about wealth (and, probably, income) distribution is encouraging in the sense that it offers hope that most voters might opt for government policies more conducive to equality if only they knew how unequal things were. But it’s dismaying in the sense that people who occupy a position of relative privilege seem to go out of their way to avoid acknowledging it.
I’d like to propose another explanation. The difference between storming the nearest office of Goldman Sachs and switching the channel to American Idol is the difference between desperation and pique. Let’s consider the dichotomy Mr. Noah presents:
In the first installment, I noted that in 1915, when the richest 1 percent accounted for about 18 percent of the nation’s income, the prospect of class warfare was imminent. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington’s mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election.
through the prism of my own own family’s experience. In 1915 my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Flanagan Schneider, was 45 years old and in many ways typical of the urban poor. She was the mother of six children. While the oldest, 16 year old Annunziata (the Schneiders were poor in worldly possessions but rich in names), my grandmother, took care of the younger children she worked for meager wages as a cook.
Her husband, August, had been a butcher but was unable to hold a job because of alcoholism. She was ultimately to divorce him, a great scandal at that time.
They lived in a one room houseboat on the banks of the Mississippi, in sight of where the St. Louis arch now stands in the most humble of circumstances. There was no running water. What water they needed they pulled from the Mississippi in a bucket (!).
One of the children died of tuberculosis in her late teens. One starved to death. Another died of epilepsy at 13. Yet another died at 28 under circumstances I haven’t been able to discover. The children were in and out of orphanages depending on whether Mary Jane was able to support them or not. There was no public assistance of any kind. There was no unemployment assistance. There was no disability assistance or aid for dependent children or anything of the sort.
Very, very few women had any education and there were very few decent jobs available to women who had no education. Cook was about as good as it got. How did Mary Jane Schneider keep a family of six on a cook’s wages? Mostly she couldn’t.
Fast forward to the present day. Almost 50% of the poor own their own homes. Three quarters of the poor have air conditioning. Few live in overcrowded circumstances. Three quarters own a car. Nearly all own a color television set and nearly half own two. Three quarters have a VCR or DVD player, two-thirds have cable.
Is it ignorance or the lack of the genuine deprivation of the truly poor that keeps 99% of Americans from marching in the streets?
Having less than the top 1% of income earners bothers the folks on the next rung down a lot more than it does “the poor”. That’s why they’re whining about it.
Rich Horton Link
Gee Dave, aren’t you a little tough on Timmy? After all he is only a journalist, and not a very good one at that.
(Seriously, this was great.)
Steve Verdon Link
As I’ve noted before it isn’t income that is at issue but welfare–i.e. how do people compare in regards to welfare. Your argument is that while incomes might be less equal the welfare gains for even the lowest income households has gone up dramatically thus reducing the chances of some sort of revolution or rioting.
The problem is Noah’s monomaniacal focus on income to the exclusion of other factors. Pretty stupid when you think about it.
Pretty much. One of the biggest whiners was (still is?) Kevin Drum, but there is no way in Hell that guy could be counted as poor.
Sam Link
There was some talk a while back about a new way to measure poverty where the value of social benefits was added. Your post really illustrates the need for that.
I think the bigger problem of income inequality these days is a tendency toward over-leveraging to keep up a lifestyle that a stagnant income cannot support, finally resulting in spectacular financial crises.
We have a much improved social safety net compared with the early 1900s. Without that, I suspect we might be facing major civil unrest.
Talked with any “poor” lately? You have decided, apparently, that there is no problem with extreme income inequality. You have also decided to doubt the sincerity with which some have suggested that this might be a problem. That requires ignoring a lot of evidence that suggests otherwise. Let’s hope you are right and extreme income inequality right before financial collapses is just a coincidence. Maybe the wealthy don’t use their wealth improperly, so there is nothing to worry about.
Steve, I hear very few proposals for helping the poor, i.e. taxing Party A to give to Party B (the poor). What I hear a lot of are proposals to tax Party A to give to Party B (the not-so-poor) on behalf of Party C (the poor). It’s unclear to me how this will materially improve whatever problems income inequality actually causes.
And, yes, I talk to people who would probably be considered poor nearly every day. And we’re not in the top 1% of income earners. We’re not even in the top 10% of income earners.
As I have said here repeatedly I have no objection to being taxed to help people who are genuinely in want. I do have an objection to being taxed so somebody who makes $1,000 less than I do can get HBO. And I have an even greater objection to being taxed so that somebody who makes more than I do and nominally works on behalf of the poor can get a raise.
In specific policy terms I always opposed the Bush tax cuts and I support their lapsing now. I thought they were the wrong tax cuts and I think they’ve been continued too long. If there are concerns about raising taxes during an economic downturn, letting the cuts lapse should be offset by permanent reductions in business taxes. And, as I’ve said before, I’d prefer a more egalitarian society. I’m not sure how we’re going to get there while importing millions of uneducated unskilled workers or as many people drop out of high school as continue to do so.
I’ve also said repeatedly that I’d support Pigouvian taxes to strip away the incomes of those who’ve realized significant income increases specifically as the result of policies. That’s probably not going to affect the top .1% so much as it does the top .9 to 5%.
I have yet to see anybody’s evidence of actual problems being caused by income inequality per se. I see lots of evidence that there’s income inequality and lots of fears that it will cause problems.
Having all of your income defined as capital gains, and taxed at 15% seems like a good policy if you are wealthy. Buying up and controlling the media seems like a good thing to do if you are wealthy. Who gets more access to politicians? Policies that make it possible to gamble using MBS’s as collateral, then never have to pay for the losses, actually recording record profits a few months later. Think that happens for a bunch folks in the 95%-99% group?
Without an alternate universe, you can set the bar high enough to never have proof. There is plenty of indirect evidence. Income inequality is prevalent in weak economies, whether as cause or symptom. You see people making more money off of hedge funds than starting and running a new business. You see lobbyists writing the regulations that restrict competition so that wealthy do not face competition. On principle, anyone who believes in markets should be concerned about concentrating decision making among very few people. Definite proof? Nope, but you will never have that.
Ritholtz has some further ideas.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/you-vs-corporations/
I wrote that I’m not opposed to the idea that income inequality is potentially bad when Dave first started this series. I still am not opposed to it. What I’d like to see is something a bit more than” its bad”. I think Dave’s thinking is similar to mine. He’s open to the idea, might even been leaning in favor of it, but just hasn’t seen anything that will make him jump on board.
In reading your Ritholz link I think this is potentially interesting,
Where there is massive concentrations of wealth and influence, there will be abuse of power.
However, I’d argue that what is critical is the word ‘and’ in there. If we lived in a country where the government’s ability to interfere in the market place was far less than today concentrations of wealth would be less of an issue. Sure you could buy your Senator or Representative, but so what they can’t do much. Perhaps the concentration of wealth coupled with an interventionist state is where things can really go wrong. It is like rent seeking with a feedback loop. The end result can be a corporatist type of government.
And here is the bad news…you aren’t going to solve the problem by making government stronger or granting it more power. You will simply end up giving more power to those who have the money in our system. The solution is to cut government power. Seriously try reading Robert Higgs’ research on the Great Depression and WWII. He notes that with the rise in government power you also had a rise in corporate power and at that time it was what has now become known as the defense industry. Back then the guys who were brought in to run FDRs massive rearmament were….wait for it….guys from the defense industry. Clicking over to Ritholz,
Many of the regulations that govern energy and banking sector were written by Corporations;
A bit late there Barry boy, but welcome to the party none-the-less. And the deals the defense industry got were simply amazing. Sometimes they’d get an entire plant for a meager $1/year with an option to buy at the end of the hostilities. What a deal, no actual initial capital investment by the corporation yet at the end IF the plant is still beneficial to the corporation they get to keep it. This is one of the first instances of private profits/public risks or losses.
Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing . . .
Yes, we are losing. We are losing because individuals are diffuse, have different view points and overall…Americans don’t really value freedom. Sure as an abstract concept it sounds great, but the reality is its also kinda scary. As Crispin Sartwell wrote,
We want the government to guarantee our health, deflect hurricanes, educate our children and license us to drive; we want to be told what to eat, what to smoke and whom to marry. We are justly proud of the fact that no enduring society has ever incarcerated more of its people. Noting that the policeman has a pistol, a club, a stun gun, a can of pepper spray and a database that includes us, we feel happy and secure.
Our submission is absolute: We want to be operated like puppets and provided for like pets.
The terrorists hate our freedom. But we should be comfortable with that. We hate our freedom, too.
It is similar to the type of despostism democracies have to fear that de Tocqueville wrote about.
By the way, I’d also argue that based on that post Ritholz has to think Obama is a bad president just as Bush was a bad President. Consider this part of Ritholz post,
How about government spending? The past two presidents are regarded as representative of the Left Right paradigm – yet they each spent excessively, sponsored unfunded tax cuts, plowed money into military adventures and ran enormous deficits. Does Left Right really make a difference when it comes to deficits and fiscal responsibility? (Apparently not).
What does it mean when we can no longer distinguish between the actions of the left and the right? If that dynamic no longer accurately distinguishes what occurs, why are so many of our policy debates framed in Left/Right terms?
“Taxation Is Theft” Watch
Question for Illinois Lawyers
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Tadashi Moriyama’s Singularity Vision
July 9, 2017 253 Views Tracy Jones
“Zettabyte,” Acrylic and ink on panel, 18″ x 24″,
I met artist Tadashi Moriyama at Art Fair in 2015. I interviewed him through email. This was around the time that Kantra started walking and her life force was beaming. Haruki and I were exhausted, grappling with this new human among us. “Where did you come from?” Haruki asks her. “Do you remember?” I dropped the ball on this (and a few others). If you’re reading this Moriyama, my apologies.
The first time I saw Tadashi Moriyama’s work was at 2011’s annual Art Fair Tokyo. His paintings were mirrors of the private apocalypse plaguing us all, our brains morphing into rectangles with round corners to reflect our silicone masters. “Zettabyte” is like a still of the actual moment when our souls get zapped into algorithms. A salary man’s head explodes with fragments of tendrils, buildings, and segmented boxes. Enlightened and enslaved, his brain is a city of ruins fading into a barren skyline. He’s high functioning, multi-tasking, touch-and-go. Intimacy are strobe lights, too fleeting to internalize, too mesmerizing to pass up capturing. We are pointy pixels on an exaggerated screen, perfectly tethered and unscathed, unified in our segregation and mechanicalism.
“Gray O-daikan Sama in My Head (2009)”
Acrylic and ink on canvas, 12 x 16 inches.
The drama compacted into them wants to explode out of the frame. They felt bigger than they were when I leaned into their worlds. It was like looking at a disease. He said he was influenced by Indian miniature paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “I took a graduate course one summer and I was just immersed into them. They were extremely detailed, and some lines were drawn by a single hair,” he said over email. Though his work varies in scale, they go from silent pandemics to on coming asteroids.
Moriyama approached me when I was visiting his gallery’s (Dowling Walsh) booth. I was taking a picture of one of his illustrations. I was excited to meet him, but he probably sensed my awkwardness, “How do you like Japan?” he excitedly asked me. Hearing the sincerity in his voice, I wanted to jump out of my mouth, so I opened it and just stared at him. “Oh,” he said. I told him that I liked his work. When asked about the natives’ response, he said they focus on the craftsmanship, not the idea. Japan’s art world is kind of cagey. Despite producing famously influential visuals, it’s as if Japan doesn’t know how much talent it actually has. Moriyama is a contemporary artist, which means that he has to blow up overseas before Japanese art lovers show genuine interest. May be that’s changed, but in the six years that I’ve been here, I’ve learned that change in Japan is like a dial-up connection. Mise well go nigh night while waiting, or test your head’s density against a bolder. But in the Art Fair Tokyo context, where traditional art is known to dominate modern perspectives, it was cool to discover work that actually struck me.
“Yin Yang Town (Solar and Lunar Spectra) (2009)” Acrylic and ink on paper, 24 x 18 inches.
Born in Tokyo, Moriyama first came to the states at 16 as an exchange student. Living in Eugene, Oregon, the town “had this peaceful hippie atmosphere, where people were smoking weed in parks. It was surprising for me who came from a country where you can go to jail for five years for possession of marijuana,” he said. Having lived in the states for the past 12 years, he’s lived on both coasts. Currently, he’s settled in California with his family. When I asked him about living in the U.S. compared to Japan, he said, “I felt eased in the states. It would be more difficult to get used to Japanese society for foreigners because there is so much rules and customs, which are often vague and nonsensical.”
Like a lot of your favorite Japanese artist, Moriyama’s work was birthed from Japanese comics or manga. It’s regular -to see manga street signs, park rules, subway warnings. Comics are everywhere. Japanimation, like Black Jack, Akira, Nausicaa, Draemon, and Ghost In The Shell, were some of his favorite. The heroes in those stories “going through journeys in unknown places excited me very much,” he said.
“Accelerating Sphere (2012)” Acrylic and ink on paper, 12 inch diameter
As a foreigner, I couldn’t escape how his work reflected his native land. It parallels this concept of what’s presented and what’s underneath that appearance, and how those two things are in direct conflict with one another. “Accelerating Sphere” is made of a garden of square structures rooted in twisted wires that look like multi-colored vines, unnatural and claustrophobic. “Japan is called a homogenous society, but the country has much diversity. People have different kinds of ideas and opinions,” he said. “On the other hand…” he weighs the benefits of technology. The ability “to copy and paste everything” erases the boundaries of the virtual world and the physical. “I started to make this cityscape of waffle-like buildings after I saw condo buildings popping up everywhere in between brick buildings in East coast cities. In Japan, there is also a large cluster of apartment buildings of a particular style and design. They’re everywhere in Tokyo. They’re convenient to make and I do celebrate the technology that allows us to make more comfortable places for people to live. At the same time, there is this fear that everything will become the same.”
“Nice to meet you…again.”
On Peter Adamyan’s “Blackface Barbie Minstrel Show”
The work and life of Jamel Shabazz The Street Photographer-video
August 3, 2013 Tracy Jones
My first cover story, Tokyo Weekender, Photographer Lukasz Palka
December 9, 2017 Tracy Jones
Sign Painters -trailer
May 15, 2014 Tracy Jones
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Trump's South Asia Strategy and Afghanistan's Political Stalemate: A Way Forward
By Ata Mohammad Noor
In the days and months leading up to the 2014 presidential election in Afghanistan, uncertainty abounded about the future of Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy and the gains made in different spheres with the support of our international partners. Despite the national feeling of doom and gloom, the people of Afghanistan defied security threats, turned up in great numbers, and voted in the elections for their candidates of choice. It was a spectacular manifestation of the popular desire among the Afghan people to exercise their democratic rights to vote and choose a new leader for the country.
To the dismay of millions of people who defied the odds to vote, the presidential election was tainted with massive rigging and electoral fraud in favor of presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani, which provoked unprecedented waves of civil protests in Kabul and the provinces. Ghani, a former academic and World Bank professional, who returned to Afghanistan after the collapse of Taliban, lacked a political base in the country with limited knowledge and understanding about the realities of the society. Despite his claim to have been educated and lived in the West for quite a long time, he still resorted to stoking ethnic tensions and polarization — pitting one ethnic group against another to get votes in the election.
Although the 2014 presidential election presented a unique opportunity to strengthen democratic institutions through the holding of a fair and free election, the opportunity was squandered and the election became an anathema for Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy. For the first time in more than a decade following the fall the Taliban and the formation of the new state, intergroup tensions had simmered to a boiling point and a ruinous civil conflict was once again looming large over Afghanistan.
In the wake of the rigged election and after weeks of shuttle diplomacy, a historic compromise, brokered by the former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was reached between Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Jamiat-e Islami’s candidate for the presidential election in 2014, and Ghani to form a national unity government (NUG) to prevent Afghanistan from plunging into a civil conflict, preserve the progress and gains made with enormous amount of blood and treasure, and, most importantly, secure Afghanistan’s long-term future. During the NUG negotiations, our emphasis was consistently on a comprehensive package of reforms which included changing the highly centralized political system, overhaul of the electoral bodies, strengthening the foundation of the post-Taliban democratic polity, fighting the chronic corruption and poverty and reaching a inclusive political settlement with the reconcilable elements of the Taliban.
Ghani started to act as the constitutional president following the NUG’s inauguration, while in actual fact he is the head of the unity government, deriving his legitimacy from a power sharing agreement. It did not take long for him to renege on the NUG agreement beginning with the agreed composition of the cabinet resulting in partial shutdown of the government. In this space of time, Ghani formed 12 high level commissions at the office of the president that not only duplicate the functions of the ministries, but also overshadow it leading to undermine the constitutionally mandated institutions. He has aggressively consolidated power in three institutions namely the office of the president, the national security advisor’s office, and the ministry of finance, headed by himself and his close trusted aides.
Moreover, Ghani has cunningly used delaying tactics to postpone the undertaking of major political reforms that underpin the NUG agreement. He played divide and rule, exacerbating the ethnic tensions in an attempt to drive an edge for himself to manipulate the events to his advantage. He blatantly pressed on with the purge of the civil administration and ANDSF and appointed his own protégés in important positions of power that negatively impacted the security, economic growth and social cohesion in Afghanistan.
Despite his growing claims against patronage and patrimonialism, he manipulated the selection process for the electoral commissioners, which has attested the suspicion about Ghani’s intentions to install people who he could influence and engineer the results of the next parliamentary and presidential elections. It is widely seen as the final nail in the coffin of nascent democracy and a peaceful transition of power in 2019. So far the calls for meaningful reforms of electoral institutions have fallen on deaf ears.
Ghani has also brutally suppressed civil protests — namely the “Tabassum,” “Enlightenment” and “Uprising for Change” movements. He even authorized an order to fire on protesters last year, which took the lives of four protesters. He has restricted civil liberties, detaining journalists and civil activists, and slapped politicians who criticized his policies with travel bans, with the most recent victim being the former head of the NDS Rahmatullah Nabil. This bitter truth about Ghani’s rule was reflected in the Economist’s Democracy Index 2017, with Afghanistan ranked as one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world.
After U.S. President Donald J. Trump unveiled his strategy for South Asia in August 2017, it was hoped that Ghani would embark on a path toward more inclusive politics by shaping a broad-based consensus to prepare the grounds for the success of the new U.S. strategy. However, an emboldened Ghani resorted to politics of exclusion. In December last year, Ghani attempted to dismiss me as Balkh governor, triggering a political standoff within the NUG. The buck, however, did not stop with me. He recently fired the provincial governor for Samangan, Abdul Karim Khaddam, another senior Jamiat-e Islami leader. Despite the fierce opposition, he also decided to launch the distribution of electronic-National Identity Card based on a disputed and controversial presidential decree that deepens the ethnic tensions at a time when we need hope and unity.
President Trump’s new strategy takes a comprehensive stock of the military shortcomings in the last 16 years. However, it discounts the complexities of political realities in Afghanistan, which are as important for the success of the war as the United States shifts resources from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan to defeat the menace of ISIS and Taliban. Let me, however, reiterate that we do not only acknowledge, but also commend Vice President Pence’s clear stance regarding the ongoing standoff over Balkh governorship.
To reciprocate it in good faith, we, in Jamiat-e Islami, always kept the doors for dialogue open and presented a 12-point comprehensive political reform agenda as stipulated in the NUG agreement to resolve the crisis as quickly as possible. The reforms we proposed will restore the balance of power that could contribute towards lasting peace and stability and the success of President Trump’s strategy for South Asia in Afghanistan. They are particularly aimed at the following:
Fix the dysfunctional political and administrative system and create a system of checks and balances to improve good governance and rule of law.
Reform of the electoral institutions to make sure elections are free and fair, with results acceptable to the people that guarantee peaceful transition of power.
Decentralize the system to empower the people, increase administrative efficiency, and lower the stakes so that a presidential election is no longer a race for everything versus nothing.
Create local ownership with people having a stake in development, governance and security through their voices and the accountability of authorities.
Invest in democratic institutions, which last and reinvent themselves beyond the tenure of a specific leader or President.
We fought side by side with U.S. men and women in uniform against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and are grateful for U.S. support in defeating the terrorism in Afghanistan. We urge our international partners, particularly the United States, to support Afghanistan by backing the reforms that our people want rather than an individual or a small clique with narrow interests.
Unless we reform, democratize, and fix the dysfunctional and wasteful political system, neither the Afghan people nor our international partners can succeed in building a secure and peaceful country, which can bring prosperity to our people, and prevent our soil from becoming a sanctuary for international terrorism once again.
Ata Mohammad Noor is the governor of Balkh province and is chief executive of Jamiat-e Islami Afghanistan.
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Active filter: Service: Sunday Morning (x)
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Acts 20:17-24 (Part of the Miscellaneous series).
Preached by Dusty Desimone on November 26, 2017 (Sunday Morning).
Are You Thankful?
Psalm 100:1-5 (Part of the Thanksgiving series).
Matthew 5:13-16 (Part of the Miscellaneous series).
Blessed are the Persecuted #1
Matthew 5:1-11 (Part of the Beatitudes series).
Preached by Dusty Desimone on November 5, 2017 (Sunday Morning).
Preached by Dusty Desimone on October 29, 2017 (Sunday Morning).
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Preached by Dusty Desimone on October 8, 2017 (Sunday Morning).
Blessed are the Meek
Preached by Dusty Desimone on September 24, 2017 (Sunday Morning).
Blessed are the Mourning
Setting A Standard
Psalm 78:1-11 (Part of the Grandparents Day series).
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Jefferson Lecture
Awarded for
Distinguished intellectual achievement in humanities
First awarded
neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture
The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities is an honorary lecture series established in 1972 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). According to the NEH, the Lecture is "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities."[1]
1 History of the Jefferson Lecture
2 Publications based on Jefferson Lectures
3 List of Jefferson Lecturers
History of the Jefferson Lecture
The Jefferson Lecturer is selected each year by the National Council on the Humanities, the 26-member citizen advisory board of the NEH. The honoree delivers a lecture in Washington, D.C., generally in conjunction with the spring meeting of the Council, and receives an honorarium of $10,000. The stated purpose of the honor is to recognize "an individual who has made significant scholarly contributions in the humanities and who has the ability to communicate the knowledge and wisdom of the humanities in a broadly appealing way."[1]
The first Jefferson Lecturer, in 1972, was Lionel Trilling. He spoke on "Mind in the Modern World." Among other things, Trilling suggested that humanism had become the basis for social improvement, rather than science and the scientific method as has been predicted by Thomas Jefferson, the Lectures' namesake.[2] Ten years later, Gerald Holton, the first scientist invited to deliver the lecture, drew attention for responding to Trilling, proposing that Jefferson's vision of science as a force for social improvement was still viable, opining that there had been a "relocation of the center of gravity" of scientific inquiry toward solving society's important problems,[2] and cautioning that science education had to be improved dramatically or only a small "technological elite" would be equipped to take part in self-government.[3]
The selection of the 2000 Jefferson Lecturer led to a spate of controversy. The initial selection was President Bill Clinton. William R. Ferris, chairman of the NEH, said that his intent was to establish a new tradition for every President to deliver a Jefferson Lecture during his or her presidency, and that this was consistent with the NEH's broader effort to increase public awareness of the humanities. However, some scholars and political opponents objected that the choice of Clinton represented an inappropriate and unprecedented politicization of the NEH. The heads of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Humanities Alliance expressed concerns about introducing political considerations into the selection, while William J. Bennett, a conservative Republican and former chairman of the NEH under President Ronald Reagan, charged that the proposal was an example of how Clinton had "corrupted all of those around him."[4] In the wake of the controversy, President Clinton declined the honor; a White House spokesperson said the President "didn't want the work of the National Endowment for the Humanities to be called into question."[5]
Ultimately the 2000 honor went to historian James M. McPherson, whose lecture turned out to be very popular. Subsequently, the NEH revised the criteria for the award to place more emphasis on speaking skills and public appeal.[6]
The next Jefferson Lecture, by playwright Arthur Miller, again led to attacks from conservatives[7] such as Jay Nordlinger, who called it "a disgrace,"[8] and George Will, who did not like the political content of Miller's lecture and argued that Miller was not legitimately a "scholar."[9]
Recent Jefferson Lecturers have included journalist/author Tom Wolfe;[10] Straussian conservative political philosopher Harvey Mansfield;[11] and novelist John Updike, who, in a nod to the NEH's Picturing America arts initiative, devoted his 2008 lecture to the subject of American art.[12][13] In his 2009 lecture, bioethicist and self-described "humanist" Leon Kass expressed his view that science has become separated from its humanistic origins, and the humanities have lost their connection to metaphysical and theological concerns.[14]
In 2013 the NEH went in a different direction, selecting film director Martin Scorsese. He was the first filmmaker chosen for the honor, and he spoke on "the evolution of his films, the art of storytelling, and the inspiration he draws from the humanities".[15] In 2014 the Jefferson Lecturer was author Walter Isaacson,[16] and the 2015 honoree was playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith.[17] As part of the NEH's celebration of its fiftieth anniversary in 2016, it selected documentarian Ken Burns to deliver the lecture.[18] The 2017 lecturer is University of Chicago philosophy and law professor Martha Nussbaum, who delivered her lecture, entitled "Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame", on May 1, 2017.[19]
Publications based on Jefferson Lectures
A number of the Jefferson Lectures have led to books, including Holton's The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens,[20] John Hope Franklin's Racial Equality in America,[21] Henry Louis Gates' The Trials of Phillis Wheatley[22] and Jaroslav Pelikan's The Vindication of Tradition.[23] Updike's 2008 lecture was included in his posthumous 2012 collection Always Looking.[24]
Bernard Lewis' 1990 lecture on "Western Civilization: A View from the East" was revised and reprinted in The Atlantic Monthly under the title "The Roots of Muslim Rage".[25] According to one source, Lewis' lecture (and the subsequent article) first introduced the term "Islamic fundamentalism" to North America.[26]
List of Jefferson Lecturers
The following table lists the Jefferson Lecturers and the titles of their lectures.[1]
Lecture Title
1972 Lionel Trilling "Mind in the Modern World"
1973 Erik Erikson "Dimensions of a New Identity"
1974 Robert Penn Warren "Poetry and Democracy"
1975 Paul A. Freund "Liberty: The Great Disorder of Speech"[27]
1976 John Hope Franklin "Racial Equality in America"[28]
1977 Saul Bellow "The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over"[29]
1978 C. Vann Woodward "The European Vision of America"
1979 Edward Shils "Render Unto Caesar: Government, Society, and Universities in their Reciprocal Rights and Duties"[30]
1980 Barbara Tuchman "Mankind's Better Moments"[31][32]
1981 Gerald Holton "Where is Science Taking Us?"
1982 Emily Vermeule "Greeks and Barbarians: The Classical Experience in the Larger World"
1983 Jaroslav Pelikan "The Vindication of Tradition"
1984 Sidney Hook "Education in Defense of a Free Society"[33]
1985 Cleanth Brooks "Literature and Technology"[34]
1986 Leszek Kołakowski "The Idolatry of Politics"[35]
1987 Forrest McDonald "The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers"[36]
1988 Robert Nisbet "The Present Age"[37]
1989 Walker Percy "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind"[38][39][40][41][42]
1990 Bernard Lewis "Western Civilization: A View from the East"[43]
1991 Gertrude Himmelfarb "Of Heroes, Villains and Valets"[44]
1992 Bernard Knox "The Oldest Dead White European Males"[45]
1993 Robert Conquest "History, Humanity and Truth"[46]
1994 Gwendolyn Brooks "Family Pictures"[47]
1995 Vincent Scully "The Architecture of Community"[48]
1996 Toni Morrison "The Future of Time"[49]
1997 Stephen Toulmin "A Dissenter's Story"[50]
1998 Bernard Bailyn "To Begin the World Anew: Politics and the Creative Imagination"
1999 Caroline Walker Bynum "Shape and Story: Some Thoughts About Werewolves"[51]
2000 James M. McPherson "'For a Vast Future Also': Lincoln and the Millennium"[52][53]
2001 Arthur Miller "On Politics and the Art of Acting"[54][55][56][57]
2002 Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Mr. Jefferson and the Trials of Phillis Wheatley"[58][59]
2003 David McCullough "The Course of Human Events"[60][61][62]
2004 Helen Vendler "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar"[63][64]
2005 Donald Kagan "In Defense of History"[65][66][67][68][69][70]
2006 Tom Wolfe "The Human Beast"[71][72][73]
2007 Harvey Mansfield "How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science"[74][75]
2008 John Updike "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art"[76][77][78]
2009 Leon Kass "'Looking for an Honest Man': Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist"[79][80]
2010 Jonathan Spence "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century"[81][82]
2011 Drew Gilpin Faust "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian"[83][84][85][86][87]
2012 Wendell Berry "It All Turns on Affection" [88][89][90][91]
2013 Martin Scorsese "Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema"[92][93][94][95]
2014 Walter Isaacson "The Intersection of the Humanities and the Sciences"[16][96][97][98]
2015 Anna Deavere Smith "On the Road: A Search for American Character"[17][99][100]
2016 Ken Burns Race in America (subject; no title announced)[18][101][102]
2017 Martha Nussbaum "Powerlessness and the Politics of Blame"[19][103][104]
2018 Rita Charon "To See the Suffering: The Humanities Have What Medicine Needs"[105][106][107]
2019 Columba Stewart "Cultural Heritage Present and Future: A Benedictine Monk's Long View"[108][109]
^ a b c Jefferson Lecture at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009).
^ a b Alvin Krebs and Robert McG. Thomas, "Notes on People; Jeffersonian Theory Gets New Lease on Life," The New York Times, May 12, 1981.
^ "Holton, in Jefferson Lecture, Criticizes Science Education," Harvard Crimson, May 15, 1981.
^ Irvin Molotsky, "Choice of Clinton to Give Humanities Lecture Meets Resistance," The New York Times, September 21, 1999.
^ "National News Briefs; Clinton Declines Offer To Give Scholarly Talk," The New York Times, September 22, 1999.
^ Ron Southwick, "NEH Wants Jefferson Lectures to Have More Public Appeal," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 6, 2000.
^ Bruce Craig, "Arthur Miller's Jefferson Lecture Stirs Controversy," in "Capital Commentary" Archived 2008-11-22 at the Wayback Machine, OAH Newsletter [published by Organization of American Historians], May 2001.
^ Jay Nordlinger, "Back to Plessy, Easter with Fidel, Miller's new tale, &c." National Review, April 22, 2002.
^ George Will, "Enduring Arthur Miller: Oh, the Humanities!" Jewish World Review, April 10, 2001.
^ David Epstein, "A Speech in Full," Inside Higher Ed, May 11, 2006.
^ Philip Kennicott, "A Strauss Primer, With Glossy Mansfield Finish," The Washington Post, May 9, 2007.
^ Jennifer Howard, "In Jefferson Lecture, Updike Says American Art Is Known by Its Insecurity," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2008.
^ Jay Tolson,"John Updike on American Art," U.S. News & World Report, May 23, 2008.
^ Serena Golden, "Tough Love for the Humanities", Inside Higher Ed, May 22, 2009 (retrieved May 22, 2009).
^ Dave Itzkoff, "He's Talking to You: Scorsese to Give Jefferson Lecture for National Endowment for the Humanities", The New York Times, February 19, 2013.
^ a b Chris Waddington, "Best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson will deliver prestigious Jefferson Lecture in 2014", Times-Picayune, January 28, 2014.
^ a b Jennifer Schuessler, "Anna Deavere Smith to Deliver Jefferson Lecture", The New York Times, February 19, 2015.
^ a b Lorne Manly, "Ken Burns to Discuss Race in Jefferson Lecture", The New York Times, January 18, 2016.
^ a b "Martha Nussbaum Named Jefferson Lecturer", Inside Higher Ed, January 19, 2017.
^ Gerald Holton, The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press 1986), ISBN 0-521-27243-2.
^ John Hope Franklin, Racial Equality in America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), ISBN 0-8262-0912-2 .
^ Henry Louis Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), ISBN 0-465-02729-6
^ Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), ISBN 0-300-03638-8.
^ Carl Dixon, "A critic keeping it surreal", Irish Examiner, January 11, 2013.
^ Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage," The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990.
^ Amber Haque, "Islamophobia in North America: Confronting the Menace," in Barry van Driel, ed., Confronting Islamophobia in Educational Practice (Trentham Books, 2004), ISBN 1-85856-340-2, p.6, excerpt available online at Google Books.
^ Freund, Paul A. (1975-04-30). "The Great Disorder of Speech". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Franklin, John Hope (1976). "Racial Equality in America". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Bellow, Saul (1977). "The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Shils, Edward (1979). "Government and the Universities in the United States". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ A Closer Mirror Barbara Tuchman - NEH Digital Repository
^ Tuchman, Barbara W. (September 1980). "Mankind's Better Moments". American Scholar. Phi Beta Kappa Society. 49 (4): 449–463. ISSN 0003-0937. JSTOR 40256002. Autumn 1980
^ Hook, Sidney (1984). "Education in Defense of a Free Society". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Brooks, Cleanth (1985-05-18). "Literature in a Technological Age". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Kolakowski, Leszek (1986-05-07). "The Idolatry of Politics". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ McDonald, Forrest (1987-05-06). "The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Nisbet, Robert (1988-05-23). "The Present Age and the State of Community". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind | C-SPAN.org". www.c-span.org. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Walker Percy, "The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind", C-Span Video, Jefferson Lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2010-04-01.
^ "Patrick Samway, SJ overviews Percy's lifelong concern with science" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Rob Chodat (Boston University) (2011-10-14). "The American Evasion of Pragmatism: Souls, Science, and The Case of Walker Percy". nonsite.org. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "amended transcript of the lecture" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Lewis, Bernard (1990). "Western Civilization: A View from the East". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1991). "Of Heroes, Villians [sic], and Valets". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "1992 Jefferson Lecture with Bernard Knox scrapbook". National Endowment for the Humanities. 1992. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Conquest, Robert (1993). "History, Humanity, and Truth". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Photographs from Twenty-third Jefferson Lecture with Gwendolyn Brooks". National Endowment for the Humanities. May 1994. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Scully, Vincent (1995-05-15). "The Architecture of Community". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Morrison, Toni (1996-03-25). "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Toulmin, Stephen (1997-04-24). "A Dissenter's Story". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ Bynum, Caroline Walker (1999-01-04). "Shape and Story: Some Thoughts About Werewolves". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "James McPherson". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2000-03-27. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ McPherson, James M. (2000-03-27). "For a Vast Future Also, Lincoln and the New Millenium". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Arthur Miller". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2001-03-26. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ ""On Politics and the Art of Acting" by Arthur Miller (@ 2001 Arthur Miller) The 30th Jefferson Lecture in the Humaniti" (PDF). 2020-04-19. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-04-19. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ On politics and the art of acting (Book, 2001). [WorldCat.org]. OCLC 47665409.
^ Miller, Arthur (2001-03-26). "On Politics and the Art of Acting". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Henry Louis Gates, Jr". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Mister Jefferson and the Trials of Phillis Wheatley". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "David McCullough". National Endowment for the Humanities. 1944-08-18. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ David McCullough (2009-12-01). The Course of Human Events: The 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781439190012. Retrieved 2020-04-19 – via Google Books.
^ "The Course of Human Events". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Helen Vendler". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2004-04-18. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Donald Kagan". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Yale Historian Donald Kagan, Mixing the Old And the Neo". The Washington Post. 2005-05-13. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Donald Kagan: In Defense of History". History News Network. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Kagan, Donald (2004-05-18). "In Defense of History". Jefferson Lecture. Retrieved 2020-04-19 – via National Endowment for the Humanities. Lecture text with footnotes
^ "Ephemera from Twenty-fourth Jefferson Lecture with Donald Kagan". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2005-05-12. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Photographs from Twenty-fourth Jefferson Lecture with Donald Kagan". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2005-05-12. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Tom Wolfe". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Invitation to Thirty-fifth Jefferson Lecture with Tom Wolfe". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2006-05-10. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "The Human Beast". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Harvey Mansfield". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "John Updike". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Updike, John (2008-05-22). "The Clarity of Things: What is American about American Art?". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "American Art | C-SPAN.org". www.c-span.org. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Leon Kass". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Kass, Leon R. (2009-05-22). "Looking for an Honest Man: Reflections of an Unlicensed Humanist". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Jonathan Spence". National Endowment for the Humanities. 1936-08-11. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Spence, Jonathan (2010-05-20). "When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Drew Gilpin Faust named 40th Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities", National Endowment for the Humanities, March 21, 2011.
^ Jacqueline Trescott, "Drew Gilpin Faust, the prize-winning historian and Harvard president, will deliver annual Jefferson Lecture", The Washington Post, March 21, 2011.
^ "Drew Gilpin Faust". National Endowment for the Humanities. 1947-09-18. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities with Drew Gilpin Faust". YouTube. 2011-05-11. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "2012 Jefferson Lecture with Wendell Berry", NEH.gov, April 25, 2012.
^ Christopher Orlet, "The Affections of Wendell Berry", The American Spectator, May 3, 2012.
^ "Wendell E. Berry". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Berry, Wendell E. (2012-04-23). "It All Turns on Affection". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Scorsese Talks 'The Language Of Cinema'", NPR, May 7, 2013.
^ "Martin Scorsese". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2016-06-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Martin Scorsese's 2013 Jefferson Lecture at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts". YouTube. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ Scorsese, Martin (2013-04-01). "Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Walter Isaacson". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "JeffLec2014 final web". YouTube. 2014-07-01. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Created Equal reception invitation". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2014-02-20. Retrieved 2020-04-19. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ "Anna Deavere Smith". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "2015 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities: Anna Deavere Smith". YouTube. 2019-10-10. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Ken Burns". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "2016 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities with Ken Burns". YouTube. 2019-08-28. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Martha C. Nussbaum". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "2017 Jefferson Lecture: NEH Chairman William Adams Interviews Martha Nussbaum". YouTube. 2017-03-21. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Dr. Rita Charon Named the 2018 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities". National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Retrieved 2018-10-16.
^ "Dr. Rita Charon". National Endowment for the Humanities. 2018-09-04. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "2018 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities with Dr. Rita Charon". YouTube. 2018-10-18. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
^ "Father Columba Stewart Named the 2019 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities", NEH, July 18, 2019.
^ "2019 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities with Father Columba Stewart". YouTube. 2019-11-25. Retrieved 2020-04-19.
"Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities". National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Trinity 1997
GAA: .94 GpG: 3.19 MoV: 2.25
NCAA Second Round
The 1997 Bantams opened with a shutout and over the first four games outscored their opponents 14-1, notching three clean sheets along the way. A stretch of four games saw Trinity win three of them in extra time, but the streak was still alive at 8-0. After an 8-0 shutout in their next game, the Bantams allowed only one goal in each of their next five games to finish the regular season at 14-0, allowing only 11 goals. Trinity advanced to the NCAAs as the only undefeated team in the nation. They defeated NESCAC rival Bowdoin 3-1 in the first round before falling to Cortland 3-2 in a game that lasted over two days, marking the first time the Bantams lost all season long. Camilla Love and Kate Leonard earned All-American honors for Trinity.
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Alex Roddie
What I’m up to now
Pinnacle Editorial
Magazines I work with
© 2021 Alex Roddie
Words of wisdom from Professor James Forbes
Post categories In Notes
Professor James Forbes (1809 – 1868) was, in many ways, the first British explorer of the European Alps. Many other British climbers had scaled Mont Blanc, or journeyed throughout the Alps and climbed various mountains here and there–but none of them, until this remarkable man came along, ever made a methodic and scientific study of the mountains on anything like this scale.
Forbes first visited the Alps in an age of ignorance, superstition, and astoundingly inaccurate maps. By the time he published his book “Travels Amongst the Alps of Savoy” in 1843, he had toured every mountain chain in the Alps many times, established his own system for safely traversing glaciers and climbing mountains, solved the mysteries of how glaciers function, and taken the first steps towards accurately mapping the region. Together with less scientific efforts from the likes of Albert Smith, he opened the flood gates and allowed the legendary golden age of Alpine exploration to begin. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that, if it wasn’t for the almost unbelievable deeds of Forbes, mountaineering as we know it today would not exist.
His book is a marvel of writing, occupying the neutral ground between a scientific document and an adventure story. I have visited the Alps several times over the last few years but his writings really opened my eyes to the remarkable early history of the region, and proved what an alien world the Alps of 1842 are to the modern reader.
Some quotes that I particularly enjoyed:
“Happy the traveller who, content to leave to others the glory of counting the thousands of leagues of earth and ocean they have left behind them, established in some mountain shelter with his books, starts on his first day’s walk amongst the Alps in the tranquil morning of a long July day, brushing the early dew before him, and, armed with his staff, makes for the hill-top–begirt with ice or rock, as the case may be–whence he sees the field of his summer’s campaign spread out before him, its wonders, its beauties, and its difficulties, to be explained, to be admired, and to be overcome.”
“… thought is without fatigue when each passing event gives a varied tone to it and when each step furnishes a new subject for its exercise, and we read the axioms of her philosophy indelibly engraven on the eternal hills.”
“… we turned and surveyed, with a stronger sense of sublimity than before, the desolation by which we were surrounded, and became still more sensible of our isolation from human dwellings, human help, and human sumpathy–our loneliness with nature, and, as it were, the more immediate presence of God. At such moments all refinements of sentiment are forgotten; religion or superstition may tinge the reflections of one or another, but, at the bottom, all think and feel alike. We are men, and we stand in the chamber of death.”
Tags Alpine Dawn, research
By Alex Roddie
Award-winning outdoor and nature writer, editor, author, and photographer.
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Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
Fact Box
Virginia Beach, VA- Cape Charles, VA
Opened 1964
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel (CBBT) is a 23-mile (37 km) fixed link crossing at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay in the U.S. state of Virginia. It connects the Delmarva Peninsula withVirginia Beach and the Hampton Roads metropolitan area.
The bridge–tunnel originally combined 12 miles (19 km) of trestle, two 1-mile-long (1.6 km) tunnels, four artificial islands, four high-level bridges, approximately 2 miles (3.2 km) of causeway, and 5.5 miles (8.9 km) of approach roads—crossing the Chesapeake Bay and preserving traffic on the Thimble Shoals and Chesapeake shipping channels. It replaced vehicle ferry services which operated from South Hampton Roads and from the Virginia Peninsula from the 1930s until completion of the bridge–tunnel in 1964. The system remains one of only ten bridge–tunnel systems in the world, three of which are located in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
Since it opened, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel has been crossed by more than 100 million vehicles. The CBBT complex carries U.S. Route 13, the main north–south highway on Virginia's Eastern Shore, and, as part of the East Coast's longstanding Ocean Highway, provides the only direct link between the Eastern Shore and South Hampton Roads regions, as well as an alternate route to link the Northeast and points in between with Norfolk and the Carolinas. The bridge–tunnel saves motorists 95 miles (153 km) and 1½ hours on a trip between Virginia Beach/Norfolk and points north and east of the Delaware Valley without going through the traffic congestion in the Baltimore–Washington Metropolitan Area. The $15 toll is partially offset by some savings of tolls in Maryland and Delaware on I-95.
Financed by toll revenue bonds, the bridge–tunnel was opened on April 15, 1964. It was officially named the Lucius J. Kellam Jr. Bridge–Tunnel in August 1987 after one of the civic leaders who had long worked for its development and operation. However, it continues to be best known as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel. From 1995 to 1999, at a cost of almost $200 million, the capacity of the above-water portion was increased to four lanes. An upgrade of the two-lane tunnels was proposed but has not been carried out.
The CBBT was built by and is operated by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel District, a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia governed by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel Commission. The CBBT's costs are recovered through toll collections. In 2002, a Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) study commissioned by the Virginia General Assembly concluded that "given the inability of the state to fund future capital requirements of the CBBT, the District and Commission should be retained to operate and maintain the Bridge–Tunnel as a toll facility in perpetuity."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_Bridge%E2%80%93Tunnel
All Amerifo-created content is in the public domain. Non-Amerifo-created content is used in accordance with our content policy. 2011-2017 Amerifo Reference Services.
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What the think tanks are thinking
Search in All Fields Title Author Subject for
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You searched for: Content Type Journal Article Remove constraint Content Type: Journal Article Political Geography Iraq Remove constraint Political Geography: Iraq Journal The Objective Standard Remove constraint Journal: The Objective Standard Topic War Remove constraint Topic: War
1. Interview with Historian John David Lewis about U.S. Foreign Policy and the Middle East
Author: Craig Biddle
Publication Date: 06-2011
Content Type: Journal Article
Journal: The Objective Standard
Institution: The Objective Standard
Abstract: I recently spoke with Dr. John David Lewis about American foreign policy, the uprisings in the Muslim world, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the light that history can shed on such matters. Dr. Lewis is visiting associate professor in the philosophy, politics, and economics program at Duke University and he's the author, most recently, of Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History. —Craig Biddle Craig Biddle: Thank you for joining me, John. John David Lewis: I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me. CB: Before we dive into some questions about U.S. foreign policy and the situation in the Middle East, would you say a few words about your work at Duke? What courses do you teach and how do they relate to foreign policy and the history of war? JL: The courses I teach all bring the thought of the ancients into the modern day and always dive to the moral level. For example, I teach freshman seminars on ancient political thought. I also teach a course on the justice of market exchange in which I draw upon the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etcetera, and approach the question from a moral perspective. In regard to foreign policy and the history of war, I just finished a graduate course at Duke University on Thucydides and the Realist tradition in international relations. International relations studies have been dominated by a school of thought called Realism. This course explores the ideas of Thucydides and how they've translated through history into modern international relations studies and ultimately into the formulation of foreign policy in the modern day. I also teach courses at the University of North Carolina on the moral foundations of capitalism, which use Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged as its core text. I've been involved in speaking to Duke University medical students on health care where, again, I approach the issue from a moral perspective, namely, from the principle of individual rights. CB: That's quite an array of courses, and I know you speak at various conferences and events across the country as well, not to mention your book projects. Your productivity is inspiring. Let's turn your historical lights to some recent events. On the second of May, U.S. SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. This is certainly worthy of celebration, but it's also almost ten years after he and his Islamist cohorts murdered nearly three thousand Americans on American soil. In the meantime, America has gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than five thousand additional American soldiers have been killed, and now we're at war in Libya as well. In all of this, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has so much as touched the regimes that everyone knows are the main sponsors of terrorism, those in Iran and Saudi Arabia. What's more, neither administration has identified the enemy as Islamists and the states that sponsor them. Bush called the enemy “terror” and “evildoers,” and Obama, uncomfortable with such “clarity,” speaks instead of “man-caused disasters” and calls for “overseas contingency operations.” Are there historical precedents for such massive evasions, and whether there are or aren't, what has led America to this level of lunacy? JL: That's a very interesting question, with many levels of answers. . . .
Topic: Foreign Policy, War
Political Geography: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, America, Middle East
2. Winning the Unwinnable War: America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism
Author: Grant W. Jones
Abstract: In Winning the Unwinnable War, editor Elan Journo and fellow contributors Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein consider the ideas and events that led to 9/11 and analyze America's response. Arguing that our nation has been made progressively less secure by policies based on "subordinating military victory to perverse, allegedly moral constraints" (p. ix), they offer an alternative: grounding American foreign policy on "the moral ideal of rational self-interest" (p. 188). This they accomplish in the space of seven chapters, divided into three sections: "Part One. The Enemy," "Part Two. America's Self-Crippled Response to 9/11," and "Part Three. From Here, Where Do We Go?" In Part One, in a chapter titled "What Motivates the Jihad on America," Journo considers the nature of the enemy that attacked America on 9/11. With refreshing honesty, Journo dispenses with the whitewashing that often accompanies discussions of Islam and Jihad, pointing out that the meaning of "Islam" is "submission to Allah" and that its nature "demands the sacrifice of not only the mind, but also of self" (p. 33). Says Journo, the Jihadists seek to impose Allah's will-Islamic Law-just as Islamic teaching would have it: by means of the sword. "Islamic totalitarians consciously try to model themselves on the religion's founder and the figure who is held to exemplify its virtues, Muhammad. He waged wars to impose, and expand, the dominion of Islam" (p. 35). In "The Road to 9/11," Journo summarizes thirty years of unanswered Jihadist aggression, beginning with the Iranian takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. Throughout, Journo criticizes the idea that influenced the actions of America's leaders during this time-"realism"-which he describes as eschewing "[m]oral ideals and other broad principles" in favor of achieving narrow, short-range goals by sheer expediency (p. 20). Because of the nature of their own ideas, says Journo, realists are incapable of understanding the Jihadists and thus incapable of understanding how to act with respect to them. "The operating assumption for realist policymakers is that (like them) no one would put an abstract, far off ideal ahead of collecting some concrete, immediate advantage (money, honor, influence). So for realists, an enemy that is dedicated to a long-term goal-and thus cannot be bought off with bribes-is an enemy that must remain incomprehensible" (p. 21). Journo indicates how realism was applied to the Islamist threat in the years leading up to 9/11: Facing the Islamist onslaught, our policymakers aimed, at most, to manage crises with range-of-the-moment remedies-heedless of the genesis of a given crisis and the future consequences of today's solution. Running through the varying policy responses of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton there is an unvarying motif. . . . Our leaders failed to recognize that war had been launched against us and that the enemy is Islamic totalitarianism. This cognitive failure rendered Washington impotent to defeat the enemy. Owing to myopic policy responses, our leaders managed only to appease and encourage the enemy's aggression (p. 6). After 9/11, President George W. Bush shied away from the realist policy of passively reacting to the ever-escalating Islamist threat-and instead adopted the foreign policy favored by neoconservatives. "In place of 'realism,' neoconservatives advocated a policy often called 'interventionism,' one component of which calls for America to work assertively to overthrow threatening regimes and to replace them with peaceful 'democracies'" (p. 118). Two chapters of Winning the Unwinnable War are devoted to dissecting this policy, "The 'Forward Strategy' of Failure" by Brook and Journo (first published in TOS, Spring 2007) and "Neoconservative Foreign Policy: An Autopsy" by Brook and Epstein (first published in TOS, Summer 2007). In the first of these chapters, Brook and Journo consider Bush's interventionist plan, the "forward strategy of freedom." On the premise that democracies do not wage wars of aggression, Bush launched two campaigns of democratic state building in the Middle East-in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2003, Bush exclaimed, "Iraqi democracy will succeed-and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran-that freedom can be the future of every nation" (p. 54). But neither Iraqi freedom nor American security was achieved by Bush's "forward strategy" of enabling Iraqis and Afghanis to vote. Because of democratic elections, Iraq "is [now] dominated by a Shiite alliance led by the Islamic Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)" (p. 54), and a "further effect of the elections in the region has been the invigoration of Islamists in Afghanistan" (p. 57). . . .
Topic: War
Political Geography: Afghanistan, Africa, Iraq, America
3. Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions
Author: Elan Journo
Abstract: The measure of success in the Iraq war has undergone a curious progression. Early on, the Bush administration held up the vision of a peaceful, prosperous, pro-Western Iraq as its benchmark. But the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein were replaced by the horrors of a sadistic sectarian war and a fierce insurgency that consumed thousands of American lives. And the post-invasion Iraqi regime, it turns out, is led by Islamist parties allied with religious militias and intimately tied to the belligerent Iranian regime. The benchmark, if we can call it that, then shrank to the somewhat lesser vision of an Iraqi government that can stand up on its own, so that America can stand down. But that did not materialize, either. So we heard that if only the fractious Sunni and Shiite factions in the Iraqi government could have breathing space to reconcile their differences, and if only we could do more to blunt the force of the insurgency, that would be progress. To that end, in early 2007, the administration ordered a "surge" of tens of thousands more American forces to rein in the chaos in Iraq. Today, we hear John McCain and legions of conservatives braying that we are, in fact, winning (some go so far as to say we have already won). Why? Because the "surge" has reduced the number of attacks on U.S. troops to the levels seen a few years ago (when the insurgency was raging wildly) and the number of Iraqis slaughtering their fellow countrymen has taken a momentary dip. Victory, apparently, requires only clearing out insurgents (for a while) from their perches in some neighborhoods, even though Teheran's influence in the country grows and Islamists carve out Taliban-like fiefdoms in Iraq. The goals in Iraq "have visibly been getting smaller," observes John Agresto, a once keen but now disillusioned supporter of the campaign (p. 172). Iraq, he argues contra his fellow conservatives, has been a fiasco. "If we call it 'success,' it's only because we've lowered the benchmark to near zero" (p. 191). . . .
Political Geography: Iraq, America
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Update On Accessing Newham Council's Accounts
On 19 July, I reported that Newham council has broken the law by failing to publish details of the period when local people have the right to inspect its draft accounts. This failure included both details on its website and a notice in the local newspaper at least 14 working days before the start of public inspection. An e-mail I have seen, from the council's Chief Accountant Barry Stratfull, explains that "following a technicality", meaning a lack of forethought that no-one managed to catch when it happened last year, "we will be reissuing the required public notice detailing when the accounts will be available for inspection".
The council has now managed to post the correct notice online and an advertisement is tucked away on the bottom of page 44 of this week's Newham Recorder. Residents will be able to inspect any and all contracts, invoices, receipts and bills and make copies from 9 August to 7 September 2012.
This remains one of the most powerful rights available to citizens in the UK to uncover the details of how local councils are spending public money. Therefore, if there are burning questions that residents and local campaigners have wanted answers to, from expenditure on the council's headquarters, its payments to consultants or indeed, how exactly the Preventing Violent Extremism budget has been spent, now is the time to pop along to Newham Town Hall on Barking Road, between 10am and 4pm, to try and find out.
The draft Statement of Accounts for 2011-12 can be found here. Happy hunting!
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Labels: Freedom of Information, Newham
Newham Council Bans Legal Observers From Stratford Park
Photo: Simon Shaw
It may come as little surprise to many that Newham council looks upon local people with deep suspicion, but with the huge Olympic policing and security operation now under way in Stratford, its decisions are quickly becoming a microcosm of the excesses that many predicted. Not only are council security guards searching people hoping to watch Games events at open-air screenings, but now the borough's officers have placed a ban on legal observers handing out civil rights information in public parks.
The council's "Newham Live" events take place in Central Park and Stratford Park, offering the chance, the council says, "to watch all the live action from the Olympic and Paralympic Games on two giant screens". It claims that "all events are free and open entry" but those attending are searched before they enter and there have been complaints this weekend that there are no female security staff at Stratford Park. Notices outside also say that by entering the park, the public agree to be photographed, ostensibly for Newham council's publicity but implying the systematic recording of all those who are attending. Then today, Newham Monitoring Project (NMP) reported that its volunteer Community Legal Observers were banned from entering Stratford Park because the community group's stop and search rights cards are "making it easy for criminals and giving them tips".
The idea that providing people with information about their rights is in any way a threat to public order or likely to cause criminality is, of course, utterly ludicrous. It is also deeply insulting to local people, whom the council's security evidently look upon with immense distrust, a crowd ready to explode if it discovers that there is no need to provide their names and addresses if they are stopped by the police.
It seems that even the council recognises how ludicrous this is. After NMP made a complaint, the council's Sue Meiners, Head of Events & Sponsorship, Communications Team Policy, Partnerships & Communications (what a job title!) fell back on the catch-all excuse for banning things: anti-social behaviour. She claimed that the rights cards were causing "litter". Bearing in mind that NMP has very limited funds for its work during the Olympics and its volunteers have been asked to hand out rights cards sparingly to those who actually want them, this seems very unlikely. But when NMP's Community Legal Observers generously offered to stop handing out any further cards, they were still asked to leave the park.
There are legitimate reasons for monitoring the police this summer and the role of legal observers is simply to record what they see, not to intervene. One of NMP's aims is that the very presence of legal observers and the scrutiny they provide may help to moderate potentially excessive policing. People who are prepared to give up their spare time in defence of civil liberties should be applauded for their public-spiritedness - dare I say it, their 'resilience' - not barred from entering a public space by Newham's security guards.
The council has yet to respond to the complaint it has received.from NMP. If it wants to avoid the 'Olympic brand' of the council that tried to ban civil rights protection during this summer's Games, it needs to overturn this mean-spirited decision and let NMP's volunteers get on with their important work.
To find out more about Newham Monitoring Project's Community Legal Observer programme, click here.
Labels: Activism, Newham, Olympics, Policing
Mission Improbable - Photographing The Olympic Park
Over the next few weeks, there will be tens of thousands of photographs taken inside the Olympic Park, so there will be nothing remarkable about mine. Nevertheless, I bought a day pass to the park some months ago and wanted to take a look at the architecture, half-glimpsed over the last year as the construction carried on behind the high security fences (see results on Flickr). I also wanted to see what had happened to the River Lea, which I used to cycle by before construction on the site started.
So in spite of a longstanding scepticism about the Olympics dating back to 2004, this morning I headed over to Stratford and, following the advice of a friend who is an Olympic volunteer, I made my way into the secure zone via the Greenway entrance on Stratford High Street. She had been right: there was no queues and I pass through screening, carried out by soldiers drafted in as replacements for G4S, in under ten minutes.
Inside, the park was very much as expected, although little of the River Lea that I remember was familiar (see photos from today). Prominent reminders of the corporate sponsors were everywhere, with exuberant Coca Cola staff adopting a particularly American style of true-believer perkiness. There were more volunteers, the Games Makers, than was probably necessary at this stage (although the park will become busier when the athletics starts next Friday), armed police (right) on patrol and very few G4S staff. I think I spotted two all day.This being the 'Khaki Games', there was also a very significant military presence.
Mercifully, 'attractions' provided by the likes of BP seemed unappealing to the majority of visitors but queues for the London 2012 Megastore and the world's largest branch of McDonalds were long. It is clear that, like other modern mega-venues, the park is designed to encourage people to shop as much as enjoy the events. I'm glad I took advice, however, to bring in an empty water bottle (a full one won't pass security) and my own food, as everything is incredibly expensive.
Around one, the ominous black clouds over the stadium turned into a thunderstorm and it absolutely chucked it down. For some reason, the park's designers have offered little (non-retail) shelter in the event of rain in a British summer, which meant that people had to improvise. Hundreds huddled under the bridges crossing the River Lea, an example of crowd behaviour that I don't think the planners ever expected. It was so packed (see below) that, had the park been busier, I can imagine someone tumbling off the river bank.
At around 3pm, by now thoroughly exhausted, I finally met up with my friend at the end of her shift and was able to fulfil the arrangement we'd made beforehand. It was a proud moment (below) as I became the first person to be photographed inside the Olympic Park wearing one of the Space Hijackers' Official Protester™ t-shirts. I guess this explains the extremely cheesy grin - but I also guess it may now be more difficult gaining entry in the future... One for the National Domestic Extremism Unit database I suspect.
Labels: Olympics, Personal, Photography
Yesterday's Counter Olympics Protest
This morning I'm off to the Olympic Park to take a look around, meet up with a friend who is an Official Olympic™ Games™ Maker™ and maybe take a few photos. This time I may think about sun screen: I'm still recovering form yesterday's small (at most 700 people) but vocal Counter Olympic Network march in Tower Hamlets.
Unlike the massive over-reaction by the police towards Friday evening's Critical Mass cycle ride - which resulted in 182 arrests - yesterday saw on only one incident, a pointless use of police powers that led to a rapid de-arrest as the crowd gathered around and refused to move on. This reflects the relaxed party atmosphere of what inevitably was a largely symbolic expression of opposition to the corporate nature of the Games, one that attracted little UK media coverage. Here a few photos - there are more on Flickr.
Labels: Olympics
Policing and Protest Stories During The Olympics
In an attempt to try and keep on top of what may be a very busy period from today until the end of the Olympics, I have set up two Storify timelines - one on policing during the Olympics and one on Olympics protests.
If anyone has any suggestions for items to include in either timeline, please e-mail me or contact me on Twitter at @copwatcher.
Labels: Activism, Media, Olympics, Policing
NMP Launches Olympics Community Legal Observers
This evening, some of the 100+ volunteers who will patrol during this summer's Olympics as Community Legal Observers (CLOs) met up at Theatre Square in Stratford for a photo-call to launch the initiative, organised by Newham Monitoring Project. They also distributed NMP's new stop & search rights cards outside Stratford station, which received an incredibly positive response from the public: people asked for copies to give to their friends.
Teams of CLOs will be out on the streets in their distinctive red bibs from tomorrow, gathering evidence of the misuse of police powers and providing legal rights information in both the north and south of the borough throughout the next six weeks. Here are a few photos from this evening - inevitably, there are more available on Flickr.
New Report Highlights Clampdown On Protest Freedoms
In the piece I wrote on Monday reflecting on the verdict in the trial of PC Harwood, I mentioned the imminent publication of new research by the Network for Police Monitoring, which provides evidence of how the 'window of opportunity' for change after the G20 protests in 2009 has closed remarkably quickly. That report has now been published and is available from here [PDF, 10.2 Mb].
The report, funded by the Andrew Wainwright Reform Trust, covers a fourteen month period from late 2010 to the end of 2011, beginning with mass student protests in London that grabbed the headlines and left lawyers grappling with the legality of holding school-age children using the tactic of containment known as ‘kettling’ for hours on end in freezing conditions.
However, many other protests took place in London and around the country during 2011, many of them raising additional concerns about the proportionality of protest policing. As well as kettling, NetPol's reserach documents the use of solid steel barriers to restrict the movement of protesters; intrusive and excessive use of stop & search and data gathering; and the pre-emptive arrests of people who have committed no crime. These tactics have combined to enable an effective clamp-down on almost all forms of popular street-level dissent.
One of the most disturbing developments has been the use of pre-emptive arrests in advance of last year's royal wedding, which only last week was ruled lawful after an unsuccessful judicial review at the Royal Courts of Justice. Ten people on their way to a republican party and a small group of people dressed as zombies were detained while drinking coffee in Starbucks. At the same time, another man was arrested, simply because he was a ‘known anarchist’.There is more information on these cases on the Pageantry and Pre-Crime website.
The report also highlights the use of ‘section 60’ stop and searches, which require no ‘reasonable suspicion’ and have been disproportionately targeted at young people taking part in protests. In some cases under eighteen year olds have been threatened with being taken into ‘police protection’ if they participated in demonstrations. NetPol is also critical of the invasive but routine use of police data gathering tactics, which oblige protesters to stand and pose in front of police camera teams and to provide their personal details. Evidence suggests an increasing misuse of anti-social behaviour legislation to force protesters to provide a name and address under threat of arrest.
Val Swain, commenting on the report’s launch on behalf of NetPol, said:
“The evidence we have gathered has been published just as news emerges of further pre-emptive arrests and other restrictions on the freedom to protest taking place in advance of this summer’s London Olympics. With an apparent willingness by the courts to defend any actions by the police against protesters, we fear that dissenting voices face an even harsher clamp-down in the weeks to come.”
Labels: Activism, Policing
Boris Johnson's Olympic Welcome
This really should be screened in every park in Newham over the summer - Cassetteboy bring us fluff-headed loon Boris Johnson welcoming the world to the London Olympics.
Labels: Media, Olympics
If Not PC Harwood, Then Who? If Not Now, Then When?
The Tomlinson family in 2011 lay flowers at the spot where Ian died on Cornhill in the City of London
Last week I spend part of my break from work in an airless room on the second floor of Southwark Crown Court with the Tomlinson family, nervously awaiting the jury's verdict in the trial of Metropolitan Police constable Simon Harwood. Newham Monitoring Project has been providing behind-the-scenes practical support to Ian Tomlinson's family since not long after his death and, having been involved in discussions about how to best respond to the eventual trial verdict, I went along to show some solidarity.
I therefore know that the trial's outcome when it finally arrived was particularly crushing. We had foolishly convinced ourselves that the delays meant at worst a hung jury and a mistrial, even those of us already deeply sceptical about the chances of the legal system holding individual officers to account. That Harwood would eventually walk free after four days of delibersation by jury members was just devastating.
Reflecting on the reprecussions of the trial and its outcome, I've been thinking about the scarcity of 'windows of opportunity': those periods, often very brief, when Britain's secretive, hermetic police forces are dragged towards some kind of change by events beyond their control. The most notable was the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report in 1999, which was followed by a window of opportunity to create lasting reform that lasted for perhaps three years before eventually closing.
A decade later, the aftermath of the London G20 protests in 2009 and the intense scrutiny of public order policing after Ian Tomlinson's death led to the opening of another window. In the months that followed, senior officers were forced to demonstrate that they were actually 'learning lessons' instead of just repeatedly talking about doing so. This was driven by public disgust at video images of the beating of protesters and, most importantly, by footage of the casual brutality by PC Simon Harwood towards one passer-by, a newspaper seller trapped in thw wrong place by police lines who subsequently collapsed and died after he had been assaulted.
There is little doubt too that popular revulsion about Ian's death was intensified by the subsequent appearance that the police had been caught trying to cover up their actions. Had it not been for the Guardian's release of video captured by American investment manager Christopher La Jaunie, it is likely that Ian's death would have even been investigated at all.
The result was a period of almost eighteen months when the police in public order situations seemed to go out of their way to be friendly to protesters. However, this policy of 'adapting to protest' (the name of a July 2009 report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary) started to disappear with the police response to student demonstrations of November 2010 and, as new piece of research by the Network for Police Monitoring that appears this Wednesday will show, the window of opportunity had closed completely with the appointment in September 2011 of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the advocate of a more intolerant 'total policing' stance towards protesters.
Looking back on the months that followed the outcry over the policing of the G20 protests, it seemed at the time that the ability of citizens to film police misconduct and violence might provide a new way to outflank the systemic failures of police accountability and complaints investigation. We all now had the tools to become evidence-gatherers and the power of captured images, graphically showing the extent of police violence against demonstrators, might lead to a greater wariness amongst police officers that might in turn lead to a moderation of their behaviour.
Furthermore, it appeared that the specific evidence of the events that led to Ian Tomlinson's death might finally break the incomprehensible statistic that, after 950 deaths in police custody since 1990, nine that had led inquest juries to record verdicts of 'unlawful killing', no officer had ever been successfully prosecuted.
Whilst there remain compelling reasons to continue gathering as much evidence of police misconduct as possible, we now know that video, no matter how graphic, is simply not enough. We know too that families still have to battle against an institutional unwillingness to see the death of their loved ones as a crime and that there are other obstacles, such as an apparent casual disregard for forensic evidence when an investigation involves the conduct of a police officer.
Now we have the verdict in the trial of Simon Harwood and my worry is that this, alongside the closure of the window of opportunity after G20 and the growing antipathy within the police towards any form of public dissent, sends a clear message. It says that officers have little to fear from either public scrutiny or the courts and that the culture of impunity that exists within their ranks can and will remain unchanged. Far from moderating behaviour, it gives a green light to an even more violent, confrontation interpretation of the new 'total policing' strategy.
Even if Harwood is eventually disciplined and thrown out of the Metropolian Police, I still think the injustice suffered by the Tomlinsons is a huge setback of this sort of proportion. After all, I know from conversations I've had over the last few days that campaigners on the issues of deaths in police custody and of misconduct, violence and abuse by police officers, in my case for almost twenty years, have been repeatedly asking ourselves the same questions over the weekend.
If not PC Simon Harwood, then who? If not now, then when?
Inside Fortress Wanstead Flats
It has been a particularly fraight week, part of it spent in a witness room with the Tomlinson family at Southwark Crown Court, awaiting the verdict of the trial of Metropolitan Police constable Simon Harwood for the manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson. I still haven't managed to find the words to describe the extent of my anger and disgust at his acquittal - or what impact I believe the decision is likely to have on the future policing of protest - but I plan to try and write something over the weekend.
Meanwhile, today was the rather poorly-publicised 'public open day' for Fortress Wanstead Flats, which I ventured into with some friends and some trepidation this morning. This was the one opportunity to see inside the Olympics operations base that local people have campaigned so vociferously against and fortunately, there were none of the expected restrictions on photography. What we had confirmed is that up to 3500 police will use the base over the busiest days of the Games and what we discovered was that vehicles will leave via the entrance on the busy Centre Road - effectively cutting off another way out of Newham. Here are a few of my photos: as ever, there are more to be found on Flickr.
Labels: Olympics, Wanstead Flats
Alternative Torch Relay Arrives At Wanstead Flats This Saturday
As part of the build-up to the ‘Whose Games? Whose City?’ protest against the Corporate Olympics taking place on 28 July, this Saturday sees a team of runners from the Counter Olympics Network carrying the Vancouver Poverty Olympics Torch on an alternative torch relay from Stratford, through Leytonstone and finishing at the Metropolitan Police's newly constructed Olympic operations base on Wanstead Flats.
Leaving at 2pm, runners plan to arrive just as a 'public open day' at the base, starting at 11am and aimed at placating some of the intense opposition by local residents to its construction, closes its eleven-foot high gates at 3pm. A further leg of the relay takes place on Friday 27 July, leaving Clissold Park in Hackney and travelling to the unsightly basketball training facility at Leyton Marsh. The Save Leyton Marsh campaign will hold a welcome party for the torch.
The Poverty Olympics Torch was handed over to London at a ceremony at the Olympic Cauldron in Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver in 2010, visited Glasgow in March 2012 and was received by the Counter Olympics Network at the Bishopsgate Institute in April 2012.
Julian Cheyne of the Counter Olympics Network said in a press release:
“This is a milestone in Olympic protest – the first time, to our knowledge, that a protest torch has been handed from one host city to another. We hope this will be a feature of protest in future host cities.”
Labels: Newham, Olympics, Wanstead Flats
For Second Year, Newham Council Breaks The Law on Citizens' Inspection Rights
For the second year running, Newham council has broken the law by failing to publish on its website the details of the period when the local electorate has the right to inspect its draft accounts under the Audit Commission Act 1988.
Every year, for around 20 days, local people have the right to see detailed contracts, invoices, receipts, and bills, make copies and raise points of interest with the district auditor. Since October 2010, this has included the right to examine local authority contracts, including those relating to Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contractors. There are many local campaigners who would find this last requirement extremely useful.
From March 2011, every local council has been required under Regulation 10 of the Act to place a copy of the statutory newspaper notice, the one that is usually buried in an obscure corner of the Newham Recorder, on the authority's own website, at least 14 days before the public may examine the documents and files. As I pointed out last year, Richmond-upon-Thames council was forced to revise its inspection period because the original was illegal, as it had failed to comply with this (then) new regulation.
Inspecting the real detail of council spending is one of the few powerful tools available to us as citizens, so we can find out how public bodies are spending public money. But guess what – transparency-averse Newham council, who failed to comply last year, has failed all over again in 2012.
Apparently Newham's period of inspection opened on 2 July and continues until 30 July. However, I have checked and as the screen shots taken this morning show, there is no record of the legal requirement for a statutory notice on its website, which may explain why so few people will even know about their rights.
If anyone wishes to inspect the council's original documents – and PFI contracts will be fascinating to examine – then they are currently able to visit between 10am and 4pm at Newham Town Hall on Barking Road. If you want to inspect particular documents, arrange that in advance by calling 020 3373 0694 or emailing chief.accountant@newham.gov.uk
Meanwhile, would someone from the London Borough of Newham care to explain why it has failed to understand the new regulations, why it has failed to publicise an important citizens' rights on its website – and whether, when facing the possibility of a judicial review, it plans to now comply with Regulation 10 and restart the inspection period from a future date?
Not only has Newham council failed to publish a notice on its website at least 14 working days before the start of public inspection, but it didn't even manage to get a notice onto page 11 of the Newham Recorder until 20 June - only 8 working days beforehand. Anyone want to guess how much of a council priority it is to publicise the public's right to access?
Olympic Organisers Try to Ban Derogatory Linking To Its Crappy Website
There have been many times over the last year when the BBC award-winning comedy "Twenty Twelve", a mockumentary about the organisation of this summer's Olympics, has seemed closer to reality than the writers can ever have expected. But the latest nonsense, highlighted by Index on Censorship, seems just like the work of Jessica Hynes' brilliant character, Head of Brand Siobhan Sharpe (see above). In an apparent failure to understand anything about either the Internet or freedom of expression, LOCOG has included the following clause in its website's terms of use:
Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner. [my emphasis] The use of our logo or any other Olympic or London 2012 Mark(s) as a link to the Site is not permitted. View our guidelines on Use of the Games’ Marks.
What this means is that, according to the London organisers, I cannot use their web address in a link to the gathering of staggering control-freakery, deranged sponsor-driven boosterism and tacky souvenirs that passes for their principal web presence.
You see what I did there? Well, it's just an opinion. It's a free country, allegedly. Now consider this: how on earth can LOCOG possibly police the expression of personal opinions on hundreds of blogs and websites? Am I to expect a solicitor's letter over the next week, or are the London organisers likely to find that they're too busy trying to fix the monumental cock-up that global security company G4S has dropped in their lap?
Counter Olympics Protestors To Defy Demo Ban on 28 July
I was unable to attend the Counter Olympics Network activists meeting on Wednesday due to work commitments, but I'm told it was packed and agreed that the march on Saturday 28 July, in protest at the corporate takeover of the Games, will “defy an attempt by Transport for London to ban the demo”.
The planned march in two week's time will assemble at Mile End Park at noon and end with a ‘People’s Games for All’ rally and festival at Wennington Green, near Victoria Park. However, when organisers met representatives of the Metropolitan police, Tower Hamlets council and Transport for London (TfL) on 9 July, TfL said it would not sanction a march along Bow Road, claiming it is part of the ‘Alternative Olympic Route Network’ (AORN). This is an alternative route for use during the Games period if the main Olympic Route Network (ORN) should become blocked for any reason.
Counter Olympics Network (CON) spokesperson Julian Cheyne has said:
“The ORN will be used exclusively by the IOC, Olympic officials, sponsors, media, and athletes. Even ambulances are barred. The IOC are getting luxury accommodation in the West End and will ride around in chauffeur-driven BMWs at public expense. They will have priority over all other road users.
Everyone else will be herded onto congested roads and overloaded public transport. The ORN will be a 35-mile ribbon of class privilege running across London for the duration of the Games. It will cause six weeks of blocked roads, traffic congestion, and closed bus routes, cycle lanes, and pedestrian crossings.
But the AORN isn’t even part of this. It will only come into operation if the ORN suffers some kind of breakdown. The idea that you ban free speech and shut down democracy to ensure that the rich have an alternative priority highway is an outrage."
There has been considerable speculation about the prospects for protest during the Olympics and what obstacles the state might impose if protest organisers decided to engage in negotiations. The Counter Olympics Network appears to have gone out of its way to accommodate the authorities by giving early notice of the intention to march, avoiding both the ORN network and the immediate vicinity of the Olympic Park and agreeing to use the parks proposed by the local council. Quite frankly, the fact that the largest protest against the Olympics is barred from anywhere near Stratford is already an enormous concession.
It is therefore understandable that CON spokesperson Albert Beale has confirmed that marchers will defy restrictions and has said:
“We won’t be denied our right to protest, so we will be marching down Bow Road and if we are restricted to the pavement, the stupidity of the resulting congestion and delay will be the responsibility of Transport for London”.
There is an obvious conclusion that others may draw from the experience that CON have been through: perhaps it is better avoid negotiations completely, as they are obviously designed to severely restrict the right to freedom of speech and assembly and banish any protest to the margins. This fits in completely with the state's desire for a sterile, controlled, “Perfect Games”. No wonder so few people have offered to meet with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner and national Olympic security co-ordinator, Chris Allison.
In these circumstances, I hope the march on 28 July involves a massive turnout, as the number of people attending will influence events on the ground. But it also seems that the case for affinity-group, DIY protest that may make an even greater impact has just received a tremendous boost.
Labels: Campaigns, Olympics, Policing
Who Is The Tow Path Spotter?
PHOTO: Diamond Geezer
On Saturday, around fifty users of the Lea towpath from Homerton to Bow braved the terrible weather to hold a protest and picnic at the point where the path along the canal near Eastway has been fenced off as a so-called “security” measure for the Olympics. Both police and soldiers in uniform were enforcing the towpath access restriction on Saturday, This was 23 days before the Games even begins and closure has s forced cyclists onto busy roads and denied local residents access to recreational space
It was a good-natured demonstration, as this report makes clear, but on the arrival of the protesters, the soldiers hurried for cover under their orange tarp. Then, as people were leaving, this bloke (right) on a police-style mountain bike was spotted on his radio and moments later, the soldiers were back out and chatting to the line of police.
So who is the Towpath Spotter? And what on earth were the fearless security so worried about?
Labels: Olympics, Policing
Clive Stafford Smith Joins Newham Bookshop To Raise Funds For Reprieve
An advance notice for your diaries: on Sunday 30 September, the founder and Director of Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith, will sign copies of his new book at Newham Bookshop's stall at Goldsmiths Row Book Market. The event aims to help raise funds for Reprieve, the campaigning charity that provides legal support for prisoners accused of the most extreme crimes, such as acts of murder or terrorism, which are exactly the kind of cases where human rights are most likely to be jettisoned or eroded.
"Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America" tells the story of Kris Maharaj, a British businessman living in Miami, who was arrested in 1986 for the brutal murder of two ex-business associates. His lawyer did not present a strong alibi; Kris was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair.
Since Clive Stafford Smith took on his case, strong evidence has began to emerge that the state of Florida had got the wrong man on Death Row. However, as Stafford Smith argues, the American justice system is actually designed to ignore innocence. Twenty-six years later, Maharaj is still in jail. The book, which I've heard reads like a detective novel, untangles the Maharaj case and the system that makes injustices like this inevitable.
For those who haven't made it down to Goldmsiths Row Book Market, it's well worth a visit. It started only recently and is situated at the end of Goldsmith Row that meets Hackney Road. Sellers include Pages of Hackney, Brick Lane Books, Newham Books and 20 other traders.
Sunday 30 September 2012, 1pm at Newham Bookshop Stall, Goldmith's Row Book Market, London E2 8QA
Labels: Books, Campaigns, Newham
Bosnians Call For Renaming of ArcelorMittal Orbit As 'Omarska Memorial in Exile'
At a press conference this afternoon, which I was fortunate enough to attend, survivors of a Bosnian concentration camp called for the renaming of the ArcelorMittal Orbit – the Olympic Park's twisted Meccano structure, sometimes known as The Tower of Piffle – as a 'memorial in exile' to Bosniaks and Croats from Prijedor who suffered and died at the camp at the Omarska mining complex.
Omarska was one of many camps set up in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces, in an area that the Dayton Agreement later declared as part of Republika Srpska (the details of this Agreement I know very well: it was the subject of my Masters thesis). During the spring and summer of 1992, approximately 3334 non-Serb inmates were held in appalling and brutal conditions, tortured and killed. In the region, 2916 men, 262 women and 11 children are still missing. In early August 1992, reporters Ed Vulliamy, Ian Williams and ITN's Penny Marshall (shaking hands, above, with Bosnian Muslim prisoner Fikret Alic at the Trnopolje concentration camp) gained access to Omarska and their coverage helped to force the United Nations to investigate war crimes committed in the conflict. Following international condemnation, the camp was closed less than a month later.
In 2004, the complex was taken over by the India steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal and the resumption of mining operations halted exhumations of mass graves by forensic investigators, who had unearthed hundreds of remains of war crimes victims from mass grave sites in the area. On 1 December 2005, the company announced at a press conference in Banja Luka that it would build and finance a Memorial Centre at the site. However, in the seven years that have followed, ArcelorMittal has failed to deliver that promise. In February 2006 it said that it is ‘temporarily suspending’ the Omarska memorial project and until May 2011, war crimes victims were denied access to the site – restrictions that returned in 2012. In a press release in May this year, the company appeared to relent on access but added that “the question of a memorial needs to be decided in consensus with all parties” and that it is “not taking sides in this debate”. Such consensus in the face of genocide seems impossible when the current Mayor of Prijedor, Marko Pavic, says any memorial in Omarska would undermine relations between different ethnic groups and continues to deny that the camp was anything other than an "investigation centre."
A year ago ArcelorMittal proudly announced that the 2200 tonnes of steel used in the construction of the Orbit would contain “symbolic quantities from every continent in the world where the Company has operations, reflecting the spirit of the Olympic Games”. Strangely, its operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was completely missing from its press release. However, in April this year the Director of ArcelorMittal Prijedor, Mladen Jelača, confirmed to Professor Eyal Weizman of Goldsmiths, University of London and artist Milica Tomic of the Monument Group, Belgrade, that iron ore mined at Omarska had been used in the Obrit's fabrication.
For this reason, the war crimes survivors who spoke movingly at today's press conference – Satko Mujagic, Rezak Hukanovic and Kemal Pervanic – argue that in the absence of their promised memorial, London’s ArcelorMittal Orbit is tragically intertwined with the history of war crimes in Bosnia, as the bones of more victims are mixed in with the iron ore. It must therefore be reclaimed: no longer called the Orbit but the 'Omarska Memorial in Exile'.
Susan Schuppli of Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture said at today's event:
As the largest steel producer in the world, ArcelorMittal can surely use their considerable influence to overturn the local politics of denial and actively participate in healing the fractured communities out of which their very fortunes are generated. Yet they insist on not taking sides. Not taking sides in an area where persecution and injustice continue – is not neutrality but taking a political position by default.
By doing to, ArcelorMittal is colluding in the covering up of war crimes. As an Indian multi-national (albeit one registered in Luxembourg) and one of the emerging global capitalist players, the company has attracted less criticism than many of its Western counterparts, despite accusations that it created a "state within a state" in Liberia and condemnation of its environmental record. However, those who spoke today described the public art it has sponsored in the Olympic Park this summer as “a monument of shame, not a monument to the Olympic spirit”. They continue to call on ArcelorMittal to preserve structures like the infamous 'White House' (below), where detainees received particularly savage treatment at the mining complex, and to resume its memorial project at Omarska. Until then, the Orbit will remain a 'memorial in exile', the only public commemoration to the people from Prijedor who died in the worst genocide in Europe since 1945.
The infamous 'White House' at Omarska
For more information on today's campaign launch, see A Memorial in Exile
Labels: Activism, Olympics, Politics
A Trip On The New Thames Dangleway
On the way home yesterday, I decided on an impulse to check out the new Thames cable car, which opened on 28 June. Officially its the Emirates Air Line but the blogger Diamond Geezer has already christened it the ArabFly Dangleway. The queue was massive, which I should have expected on the opening weekend, but moved pretty quickly: the 'gondolas' move continuously and passengers have to jump on (not as bad as it sounds). They are also pretty small, holding around eight people, but it is possible to get a great view of the Dome and the river. However, as Londonist points out:
What it is not is a major part of east London’s transport infrastructure, despite what TfL says. As we discussed earlier this month, the pricing (adult fares are £3.20 for Oyster users, £4.30 cash) puts it, at a pence-per-minute scale, on the London Eye end of things, i.e. a tourist attraction. Transport chiefs have suggested that it might alleviate the Tube in the event of (not infrequent) Jubilee line breakdowns, but at 2,500 passengers per hour it has nowhere near the capacity of its subterranean sibling.
The Dangleway is fun but essentially one of Mayor Boris Johnson's vanity projects and an expensive one at that: Boris promised it would cost London taxpayers nothing, but Transport for London will need to find £18.6m to cover the project’s £62.6m costs after the sponsorship by Emirates and European regeneration funds are deducted. Moreover, with a single journey time lasting only 7 minutes, it's never likely to compete with the London Eye as a tourist attraction.
What it quite clearly is, above all, is a tourist-friendly way of getting from one Olympic venue (the O2 Arena, where the gymnastics will be held) to another (the Excel Centre, where the martial arts, fencing and other indoor events take place). Perhaps that was the point after all - just another part of this summer's massive circus performance, dressed up as a way of regenerating east London but with a financially uncertain future.
Anyway, there are more pictures of the Dangleway, both prior to its opening and from yesterday, that I've posted up on Flickr.
A view back towards the Dome
Looking down towards the Thames Barrier
Labels: Personal, Photography
Brompton: The Victorian Way Of Death
I like Victorian cemeteries: I think it may be because I used to work near the one in Tower Hamlets and regularly walked through it (once, memorably, after dark) between different offices of the local branch of the mental health charity Mind. There is something about the Gothic splendour of the headstones and family mausolea that is incredibly atmospheric- and, for me at least, perfect for photographing.
In September 2009 I spent a day looking around Highgate Cemetery and at some point I'd like to visit all of the Magnificent Seven, so when I found out this morning that Brompton Cemetery, near Chelsea FC's ground in west London, was holding its annual Open Day, the one day a year when it is possible to visit its catacombs, I had to pop along.
Some people may recognise the cemetery from the first of the Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey Junior Sherlock Holmes films, but it is most famous as the final resting place of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Here are a few photos: as ever, there are more on Flickr.
Grave of Emmeline Pankhurst
About Random Blowe
Random Blowe is the personal and political blog of Kevin Blowe, a campaigner based in Newham in east London.
Original articles on Random Blowe are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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Calgary Sexaholics Anonymous
12 Traditions
Meetings & Contact
What is a Sexaholic?
Notice: Due to COVID-19; effective immediately, all in person meetings are cancelled until further notice. Online and/or Phone meetings will still take place. Please email info@calgarysa.org for details.
Welcome to the Calgary Sexaholics Anonymous website. Our fellowship is a mix of men and women who are committed to overcoming sex & lust addiction.
Sex addiction is often a challenging subject to discuss, and bring out in to the open. We understand the painful nature of this disease, and how difficult it is to accept the destruction it has caused in our lives. Very often we felt that we were the only ones struggling with this problem, that we were alone. We used sex, lust and fantasy to cope with stress, escape pain, create excitement, avoid feelings, and a whole host of other issues. However there is a solution and it has worked for countless individuals.
Our fellowship was established on the principles and traditions founded in the 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Through a lot of hard work and persistence, Sexaholics Anonymous began in the early 80's and has grown through the strength, hope and experience of recovering addicts world-wide.
If you are seeking freedom from the pain that brought you here, we believe you've come to the right place. Feel free to browse around the site, or head to the Meetings & Contact page to get in touch with our fellowship.
Please be assured that all contact with us is kept strictly confidential and that your anonymity will remain protected.
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Difference between Dell XPS 10 and Nexus 7
Key Difference: The Dell XPS 10 is a 10.1-inch tablet that comes with a keyboard Dock to make it into a laptop. The screen is an HD Display capacitive multi-touch screen, with 1366 x 768 pixels and an approximately 155 ppi pixel density. The Nexus 7 is a tablet computer running Android 4.1 (also named Jelly Bean) operating system. It was developed in collaboration with Asus.
Dell is a popular company that is well-known for its customizable computers. It allowed people to build laptops and desktops from scratch, adding only components they need and paying only for those components. It has become a popular name in laptops, but has yet to launch itself in the tablet market. In response to the growing market for tablets the company has launched Dell Streak, which did not manage to garner much positive response for the company. Dell announced in August that is launching its newest table the Dell XPS 10 in October 2012.
The Dell XPS 10 is a 10.1-inch tablet that comes with a keyboard Dock to make it into a laptop. The tablet serves the purpose of fulfilling the need for the tablet on the go and a laptop for some serious professional work. The company has launched the tablet on the Windows RT OS, which have not been able to draw in many customers. According to every review website, the company has not been doing that well in sales of tablets due to the Windows OS. However, the design of this tablet and its features should bring in loyal Dell fans to the product. The screen is an HD Display capacitive multi-touch screen, with 1366 x 768 pixels and an approximately 155 ppi pixel density, which is not the best resolution available on the tablets, but it wasn’t that bad when viewing the tablet. The sleek tablet has a metal chassis and has a rubber back for better gripping. The tablet itself is quite sleek and lightweight making it easier to carry. The screen is small though because of the black bezel on the screen. The screen is made using Asahi Dragontrail high strength glass for durability.
The device has a SIM card slot for optional 2G, 3G and 4G capability, if required. The tablet comes with 32/64 GB Flash Storage and also has a microSD slot that allows users to upgrade the internal storage capacity by 64 GB. The system is powered by a 1.5GHz Dual-core processor and has a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 GPU. The device provides a 2GB RAM, which allows serious multi-tasking capabilities. The tablet provides Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and USB capability. The dock (keyboard), when attached provides two extra USB 2.0 slots on either side. The keyboard is also sleek and thin with dedicated Windows soft keys and trackpad. Both the tablet and the keyboard have a charging port. This is because when docked, the charging port on the bottom of the device gets covered by the keyboard and the user can still charge using the secondary port. The tablet has a 5MP rear camera with autofocus ability, but it lacks a flash. This results in distorted images in dark lighting. The camera also has weak video performance and the sharpness must be constantly updated during recording. The device also houses a 2MP secondary camera that is decent for snapshots and video conferencing.
The device houses a non-removable 28Wh 2-cell lithium-ion battery that provides 10 hours, 30 minutes of multimedia time, while the dock has an additional 27 Wh battery that extends battery life to 18 hours, 18 minutes. The device also fared decently during gaming tests. All of the devices are available Office Home & Student 2013 RT that can be changed and customized on the company’s website before shipping. The Windows OS only allows downloading apps from the Windows Stores, which does not have that many choices in apps. The tablet has been designed to be used as a personal tablet as well as a professional laptop, eliminating the need for spending on both.
Among the number of various companies launching phones based on Google’s Android, Google has also launched its own line of smartphones based on Android, called the Google Nexus. Each device in the Nexus line is produced via collaboration between Google and a leading original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partner. The Nexus devices in general have an advantage over other devices in that the Android in the Nexus devices is pure. I.e. the Android does not have any manufacturer or wireless carrier modifications to it, such as a custom graphical user interface. The Android also has an unlockable bootloader to allow further development and end-user modification, all of which is usually blocked on other Android smartphones.
The Nexus 7 is a 7-inch tablet computer running Android 4.1 (named Jelly Bean) operating system. It was developed in collaboration with Asus. It was the first tablet in the Google Nexus series and features a 7-inch (180 mm) display, an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core chip, 1 GB of RAM, and 8, 16 or 32 GB of internal storage. The 8 and 16 GB models were Wi-Fi only, and the 8 GB was eventually discontinued. The 32 GB models are both Wi-Fi and 3G compatible. The Nexus 7 was marketed effectively as an entertainment device. The tablet has been designed with gaming purpose in mind and has received high resolution display and various sensors to make it the ultimate gaming tablet. The tablets has dropped the rear primary cameras in the tablet and instead focus on place a 1-2 MP front-facing camera for video chatting purposes. The company has also eliminated the Camera app, so users will have to download an app from third-party developers from Google Play. According to Techradar, the images from the camera were a little grainy, but video calling was seamless, with no lag during calls. The low price of the Nexus 7 makes it a good and cheap companion. The 32 GB is available for USD 199 from the website.
The information for the detailed table about the two phones has been taken from the Dell website, trustedreviews.com, notebookcheck.net, Google website and GSMArena.com.
Dell XPS 10 Tablet
Google; designed in collaboration with and manufactured by Asus.
Tab: 9.2 x 274.7 x 177.3mm
Tab + Dock: 23.91 (hinge end) x 274.7 x 177.3mm
198.5 x 120 x 10.5 mm (7.81 x 4.72 x 0.41 in)
10.1" HD Display capacitive multi-touch screen
7.0 inches LED-backlit IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
1366x768 pixels (~155 ppi pixel density)
800 x 1280 pixels, (~216 ppi pixel density)
Edge-to-edge Asahi Dragontrail high strength glass
Corning Glass
Tab: Wi-Fi: 635 grams
Tab: LTE: 645 grams
Tab + Dock: 1310 grams
340g (11.99 oz)
GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 (optional)
GSM : 850/900/1800/1900
HSDPA (optional)
WCDMA :
LTE (optional)
Pure Android
1.5GHz Dual-Core processor
ULP GeForce
Android OS, v4.1 (Jelly Bean), upgradable to v4.2.1 (Jelly Bean)
Qualcomm® Snapdragon S4
Micro-SIM for 3G model
32/64 GB Flash Storage
16/32 GB storage
Accel, gyro, compass, AGPS (with LTE configurations), ALS, sensor fusion
G-Sensor, Light Sensor, Gyroscope,
E-compass, GPS, NFC, Hall Sensor
USB, HDMI, Bluetooth (optional 2G, 3G and 4G network)
NFC (Android Beam)
32GB + Mobile data version only: Unlocked GSM/UMTS/HSPA+
32GB + Mobile data version only: GSM/EDGE/GPRS (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
32GB + Mobile data version only: 3G (850, 900, 1700, 1900, 2100 MHz)
32GB + Mobile data version only: HSPA+ 21 Mbps
USB, HDMI, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, with optional mobile connectivity.
WiFi, NFC, USB
GPRS, EDGE for 32GB + Mobile data version only
1510.0 MHz HSPA+/LTE (optional)
HSPA+ 21 Mbps
Dual-band Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n)
Video-calling
Audio supported formats
MP3/WAV/eAAC+ player
MP3/WAV/eAAC+/WMA player
Video supported formats
MP4/H.264/H.263 player
MP4/H.264 player
Tab: Non-removable 28Wh 2-Cell Lithium Ion battery
Tab: 10 hours, 30 minutes
Dock: 18 hours, 18 minutes
Black/Steel
Email, Push Email, IM
Email, Push Email, IM, RSS
GPS with A-GPS support (with LTE/HSPA+ configs)
Firmware TPM
BitLocker encryption technology
SecureBoot
integrated VPN client functionality
EAS policies and remote wipe
Image viewer/editor
Document editor
Bing Search, Maps, SkyDrive
Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean)
Image/video editor
Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa
Voice memo
Predictive text input (Swype)
Image Courtesy: dell.com, androidheadlines.com
Inotropic
Service Charge
SBLC
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#821. The Piano Teacher (2001)
Directed By: Michael Haneke
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoît Magimel
Trivia: The character of the mother is based on author Elfriede Jelinek's real life mother
With its stark depiction of repressed emotions and sexual deviancy, director Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher gnaws at you, wearing you down until you’re completely immersed in (and simultaneously repelled by) its story of a woman standing on the precipice of self-destruction.
Erica Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is a middle-aged piano teacher who lives at home with her domineering mother (Annie Girardot). As an instructor, Erica is very strict, and often verbally abuses her pupils whenever they make a mistake. She is also sexually frustrated, and spends a great deal of time visiting porn shops, or spying on teens at the drive-In theater as they explore their budding sexuality. So severe is her mental anguish that it sometimes drives her to acts of self-mutilation. Then, at a recital, Erica meets Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), an amateur musician who quickly becomes infatuated with her. At first distant, Erica soon succumbs to Walter’s charms, and the two share a rather intimate encounter in an auditorium restroom. She eventually writes Walter a letter, revealing her deepest desire is to be tied up and beaten while her mother, unaware, sits in the next room. Repulsed, Walter abruptly ends the relationship, but Erica continues to pursue him, anxious to rekindle an affair that has come to mean the world to her.
With The Piano Teacher, director Michael Haneke turns his back on what many would consider “normal” behavior (sexual or otherwise) to present a portrait of human suffering that is often difficult to stomach. Erica’s repressed rage manifests itself in different ways throughout the movie, including an authoritarian approach to her work. But her harsh treatment of her students has its roots in selfishness more than anything else, designed to shatter their dreams in much the same way hers have been destroyed (in one scene, she intentionally injures her most promising protégé right before an important recital). Obviously, her conduct hinders any emotional connection between Erica and the audience, but then, such a bond isn’t essential. Together, Haneke and Huppert have constructed a central character we may not like, and one we certainly won’t understand, yet they still manage to keep our attention throughout, building interest to the point that we’re eager to see where Erica’s fate will guide her.
The Piano Teacher is, at times, cold and dispassionate, yet it is also never exploitive, and, considering the material Haneke was working with, that alone is something of a minor miracle
#808. Grease (1978)
#809. After Hours (1985)
#810. The Mummy's Tomb (1942)
#811. Radio Days (1987)
#812. Good Morning (1959)
#813. Street Fighter (1994)
#814. The Lion King (1994)
#815. The Films of Georges Méliès
#816. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
#817. A Hard Day's Night (1964)
#818. Solaris (1972)
#819. The Mummy's Ghost (1944)
#820. One Hour Photo (2002)
#822. Demons (1985)
#823. The Burning (1981)
#824. Auto Focus (2002)
#825. Chicago (2002)
#826. Sunshine State (2002)
#827. Evil Aliens (2005)
#828. Gator Bait (1974)
#829. Contempt (1963)
#830. Quiz Show (1994)
#831. Henry V (1944)
#832. Treasure Planet (2002)
#833. The Killing Fields (1984)
#834. The Stunt Man (1980)
#835. The Man in the Moon (1991)
#836. The Wild Thornberrys Movie (2002)
#837. The Eye (2002)
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November 11 Kindle Daily Deals including Free eBooks
A Terminal Agenda
When the only form of justice that counts is your own. DCI Nick Severance investigates murders, a rare occurrence in the City of London. When a man dies violently one morning, only yards from the police station, the motive eludes him. The victim had recently been in India, looking for an ancient tomb that could contain something priceless. Was that reason enough to kill him? What seems to be a crime motivated by money, becomes something far more sinister. As the chief suspects continue to elude Nick, another agenda reveals itself, one that will bring death and destruction on a far larger scale. And anyone who compromises that agenda will be eliminated. As events unfold and the stakes get higher, Nick must confront the prospect of losing everything he holds dear, and taking a course of action that will change his life in ways he never imagined.
Thirteen years ago, Vivi LeBrun was sketching a rooster and eating Oreos when she first met—and fell for—her friend’s brother, David St. James. Since then, her love for David has only intensified thanks to years of friendship with his family, who rescued her from a lonely, tumultuous childhood. As she travels to Block Island to vacation with the St. James siblings, Vivi daydreams about reuniting with David, hoping he’ll finally see her as his soul mate. After his mother’s death, David distanced himself from his siblings, determined to hide a devastating family secret. Now, he’s brought a new girlfriend along to his homecoming—one who’s pushing for a serious commitment. The last thing he needs on his growing list of problems is his budding attraction to Vivi. With tensions running high, David’s behavior triggers a series of events that might cost him the love he’s always taken for granted and Vivi the only real family she’s ever known.
Forged by Flames
Ever since dragons invaded Earth, Bailey Monzac and other survivors have had to adjust to a new world order. But a new threat is emerging that could destroy everything they've been struggling to rebuild—for both man and beast. There's an artifact out there that can control dragons, and many would seek to possess it for dark purposes. It's going to be up to Bailey, her dragon shape-shifter ally Aidan, and their friends to embark on a long and arduous quest to recover the relic before it falls into the wrong hands. Relationships within the group will be tested in incredible ways that could mean the difference between success and failure. For they must work together—forging the tightest bonds—if they wish to survive this journey.
Life Means Life
Among a U.K. prison population of close to 100,000, fewer than 40 men and women have been told they will end their days in a prison cell. Collected here are the stories of those most depraved killers whose crimes outraged society and demanded the harshest penalty available in British court. From men who crossed continents to slay youngsters to contract killers who relished their grizzly calling, the court cases of Britain’s lifers are covered in graphic and harrowing detail. Never-before-published information about these extraordinary offenders is provided, and interviews with police, lawyers, and the relatives of the victims and killers describe how the truth behind these awful crimes was pieced together. Gripping and alarming, these are the stories of the 37 killers deemed beyond redemption.
Young Willie Beech is evacuated to the country as Britain stands on the brink of the Second World War. A sad, deprived child, he slowly begins to flourish under the care of old Tom Oakley - but his new-found happiness is shattered by a summons from his mother back in London . . .
Last to Die
For the second time in his short life, Teddy Clock has survived a massacre. Two years ago, he barely escaped when his entire family was slaughtered. Now, at fourteen, in a hideous echo of the past, Teddy is the lone survivor of his foster family’s mass murder. Orphaned once more, the traumatized teenager has nowhere to turn—until the Boston PD puts detective Jane Rizzoli on the case. Determined to protect this young man, Jane discovers that what seemed like a coincidence is instead just one horrifying part of a relentless killer’s merciless mission.
Labels: Biography & True Accounts, Children's eBooks, Contemporary, crime, Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction, romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, suspense, Thriller & Mystery, Women's Fiction
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Concert 1987-04-24 Oswego
Friday, April 24, 1987 << Prev • 1987 • Next >> Almost Alone Tour
Oswego, NY, State University Of New York, Laker Hall
01. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes
02. Suit Of Lights
03. Green Shirt
04. Brilliant Mistake
05. Heathen Town - including Fire
06. Uncomplicated / Not Fade Away - with beatbox
07. Inch By Inch
08. Shipbuilding
09. New Amsterdam / You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
10. American Without Tears
11. American Without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version)
12. Radio Sweetheart / Jackie Wilson Said - including Shake Your Hips
13. I Want You - including I Say A Little Prayer
14. Long Distance Love
15. Put Your Big Toe In The Milk Of Human Kindness
16. (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding? - with Nick Lowe
Spinning Songbook
17. Alison
18. Watching The Detectives - with beatbox
19. You're Still On My Mind / Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down / The Last Town I Painted
20. Clubland / The Long Honeymoon - with beatbox
21. Accidents Will Happen
22. Twist And Shout - with audience member Rachel on drums
23. Pump It Up - with beatbox - including Subterranean Homesick Blues, The Message and Sign 'O' The Times
Also featuring
Xavier Valentine
Auburn Citizen
Oswego Palladium
Oswego Shopper
Syracuse Post-Standard
SUNY Oswego Oswegonian
Photo from Oswegonian by Nique Dietrich.
Memorabilia Tickets, stage setlist, posters, programs, etc.
Advertisement from SUNY Oswego Oswegonian.
Official releases:
Audience recordings:
An audience recording exists.
Gigography1969-1974 • 1975 • 1976 • 1977 • 1978 • 1979 • 1980 • 1981 • 1982 • 1983 • 1984 • 1985 • 1986 • 1987 • 1988 • 1989 • 1990 • 1991 • 1992 • 1993 • 1994 • 1995 • 1996 • 1997
1998 • 1999 • 2000 • 2001 • 2002 • 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011 • 2012 • 2013 • 2014 • 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 • 2020 • 2021
oswego.edu
Wikipedia: State University of New York at Oswego
Retrieved from "http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php?title=Concert_1987-04-24_Oswego&oldid=17396356"
Almost Alone Tour
Audience member on drums
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Aero-Space
Balloons and Airships
Between the Wars
Early Flying Machines
Grumman Aircraft Collection
Magnificent Men and their Flying Machines
Pioneers of Flight
Secret Nazi X-Planes
Weird Aircraft
World War I-Allies
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MyModels Folder
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P-26 Peashooter - $$5.50
The American Boeing P-26, nicknamed the "Peashooter", was the first all-metal production fighter aircraft and the first pursuit monoplane used by the United States Army Air Corps. The prototype first flew in 1932, and were used by the Air Corps as late as 1941 in the Philippines.
Boeing P-26 Peashooter Downloadable Cardmodel
This Fantastic Boeing P-26 Peashooter.
Known affectionately as the Peashooter, the Boeing P-26 single-seat fighter was one of the most distinctive monoplane designs of the 1930s, combining several forward looking features with others that, in retrospect, seem outmoded by comparison. It retained a well streamlined but nonetheless drag-creating fixed landing gear, yet at the time of its design (1931) Boeing was installing retractable gear in its B-9 bomber. At the same time, its low-wing monoplane layout and all-metal construction were truly modem features, even though the wings were somewhat extensively braced. It was, in fact, the first all-metal monoplane production American fighter.
The P-26, Boeing's last production fighter, originated with three private-venture prototypes, known as the Boeing Model 248, designed and equipped with minimal assistance from the USAAC. Two of these aircraft were in due course evaluated in 1932 by the Army which in January 1933 ordered 111 examples of an improved version under the designation P-26A. An originally built, ailerons were the P-26As only wing control surfaces, but all aircraft in service later had flaps fitted. The first P-26A began to be delivered in December 1933, and they soon became standard pursuit squadron equipment in Hawaii and the Panama Canal area. A subsequent contract was placed for a further 25 fighters, two of these (designated P-26B and delivered in June 1935) having fuel injection engines. The remainder were delivered from February 1936 initially as P-26Cs, having the name power plant as the A model and minor control system changes, but later many were converted to B standard.
This toy-like airplane just barely made it to the World War II by fighting in the very first Japanese air attacks in China. If you only make Fiddlers Green model, you just gotta do this one! It's not the easiest model but it's well worth the bit of extra trouble. I ran a little straw up the center of the fuselage and use it as a real peashooter blasting unsuspecting friends as they come and look closer at the cute little model clenched in my teeth. A zillion laughs!
Bamboo tip (and photos) from Bob Lutz
One day, I split one of those "curl on the end" bamboo toothpicks because I needed a thinner gage. I thought "Wow, that was easy...let's see how far I can split this?" Answer: down to a human hair! So, I got out my 12" long ke-bab bamboo skewers and started splitting them. Result is bamboo reeds that are the gage of thread, but much easier to apply for rigging. They are straight, stable, resilient and easy to paint with Sharpies. I did the P-26 rigging in bamboo slivers in 20% of the time needle and thread would have taken, and with no holes poked anywhere. I like the result, too.
Boeing P-26
Between the late 1920s and the late 1930s the world's aircraft constructors and air forces made a technical transition greater than any that has happened before or since. From simple fabric-covered machines identical in form to those that fought World War I, designers moved on to all-metal monoplanes which eventually had stressed skins instead of bracing wires and Struts' and incorporated such new features as retractable landing gears, flaps and variable-pitch propellers. Of all the fighters which appeared while this great change was taking place, none exerted a greater influence than the Boeing P-26.
This was Only to be expected, because the dominant characteristic of Boeing aircraft has be that they are technical leaders. The company first began to stride purposefully ahead of its rivals in the final months of the 1920s, when it designed a cantilever monoplane mailplane, the Monomail. Then followed the impressive B-9 twin-engine bomber, and the last of the trio was the Model 247 transport.
Each broke an exceptional amount of new ground, though as far as production orders were concerned, Boeing sometimes lost out to rivals who, seeing what Boeing had done, jumped in a few months later with something even better. Without the example of the B-9 it is unlikely that Martin would have designed the B-b which beat the Boeing and secured large production contracts.
Without the spur of the 247, which was an outstandingly advanced machine for its day, it is doubtful whether Douglas would have created such a machine as the DC-1, flown a few months later and sire of all the famed "DC' transports. But with the next model, the 248, Boeing had no immediate competitor. The 248 was the P-26. popularly called the 'Peashooter' and one of the classic combat machines of the inter-war period. Unlike the Monomail, B-9 and 247, the P-26 was not conceived entirely as a private venture by the Boeing Airplane Company, as it then was styled.
Since the earliest involvement in World War I. Boeing had worked closely with the US military establishment, and it is one of the minor puzzles of aviation history that such progressive designs as the Models 214 and 215, which became the B-9 family after evaluation by the Army Air Corps, should have had to go ahead on company funds only. Clairmont L. Egtvedt, who then held the posts of vice-president and general manager and was later company chairman, simply stated that in 1930 military money was almost non-existent. In his view it was even more remarkable that, in building the new fighter in 1931, Boeing should have been able to get any financial support from the Army Air Corps at all.In the case of the P-26, the Army's assistance was confined to the gratuitous supply of a Wasp engine, some instruments and equipment, and a very small sum-probably in the order of $1,000-to cover the cost of some static test programs.
Thus, though the Army did offer some practical help and sat around a table from the start of the Model 248 concept, the whole project was virtually a company venture. The Army never ordered anything at this stage, and it may be that it was just happy to let Boeing go ahead. Had the company declined, the introduction of better (monoplane) fighters would probably have been considerably delayed. Design of the Model 248 occupied most of 1931. The aircraft was an interesting compromise. It naturally had an all-metal monocoque (single-shell) fuselage, and this was of pleasant and rather rotund form with a smooth exterior skin. But in most other respects, and very strongly held back by their conservative customer, Boeing did not make all the advances they could have done.
The wing was not a cantilever, as it was in the Monomail, 247 and B-9, but was braced by multiple wires, most of them in pairs. The landing gear was fixed, with distinctive spats and linked into the system of wing bracing wires. The 522hp Pratt & Whitney SR-1340E engine was cowled by a simple short-chord NACA ring, and drove a Hamilton metal propeller with no pitch-change mechanism. The cockpit was open, and the armament was almost retrograde, comprising a single 030in machine gun with provision for a second. Provision was made for light bombs under the tubby fuselage. Boeing constructed three prototypes, two for flight development and the third for static testing.
The first flight prototype flew on 20 March 1932. Handling was extremely satisfactory, and level speed was remarkable, the highest maximum, reached at about 6,000 ft being over 230mph, an improvement of more than 40mph over the biplane fighters with the same engine. Later in 1932 the Army Air Corps tested the two flight prototypes with the designation of XP-936, the 900 series style showing it to be a civil aircraft in Army hands.
The results were so good that all three prototypes were purchased, receiving the Army designation XP-26. Later this was changed to YP-26 at the service test stage. In January 1933 the Army ordered 111 Boeing Model 266 fighters with the designation P-26A. These differed mainly in equipment and constructional details which had already been tested on the prototypes, such as an improved exhaust system and a slightly taller pilot's headrest fairing.
Dangerous landings Boeing soon filled the Seattle plant with the new monoplane pursuits, which were delivered between 10 January and late June 1934. Meanwhile work went ahead on a company prototype, without Army influence, The Model 264 was a more advanced pursuit that embodied Boeing's own thinking, in having a stressed-skin wing without external bracing wires, a retractable landing gear, more powerful Wasp engine with long-chord NACA cowling. and an enclosed cockpit. It was slightly larger than the P-26. and appreciably heavier, but had a speed raised to at least 250mph and range extended from 550 to 800 miles.
Another prototype, the Model 273, was a quite different pursuit for the Navy. Eventually the Army Air Corps bought three Model 264s, with designations YP-29, YP-29A and YP-29B, but after trying to eliminate the controversial new features-such as the NACA cowling and cockpit canopy- plans to adopt the P-29 were abandoned. Likewise the Navy decided against the Model 273, though it tested it as the XF7B-1. This was an even more advanced machine, with flaps and a two-position bracket-type Hamilton propeller, but the Navy decided to continue buying biplanes from Curtiss and Grumman.One of the chief factors that bothered both the Army and Navy was that the new monoplanes landed faster than the biplanes. The P-26A landed at about 73mph, which in 1934 was considered dangerous and a severe operational shortcoming.
There were virtually no airfields with runways, and the rough grass airfields tended to overturn the 'Peashooter' unless the pilot was exceptionally skilled. For this reason the P-26A was used mainly at bases with long strips of sun-baked earth in the southern and western United States, Hawaii and the Canal Zone. In service the headrest was again deepened, and the aircraft were fitted with flotation gear and, for the first time in an operational Army pursuit, two-way radio. Most important of all, the aircraft were recycled back through the Boeing factory to be fitted with flaps. These were of the split type, operated hydraulically by a pump on the engine or energized by a manual pump lever in the cockpit. They were quite powerful, though primitive, and significantly lowered the landing speed. All these modifications were completed during 1934. In 1934 Boeing received an order for a further 25 pursuits, two of which were delivered with SR-1340-33 fuel-injection engines with the designation P-26B. while the rest had the standard engine but minor systems changes,, especially to the fuel system, and were called P-26C. All were later fitted with the -33 engine, though still called P-26C. The nippy Boeing monoplanes were not reckoned to be easy aircraft for a novice to handle, but they were well-liked and certainly exciting performers.
Into combat, Boeing also secured an export order for 11 Model 281 pursuits, similar to the P-26A apart from military equipment, from China. A 12th aircraft was sold to Spain, apparently before the start of the Civil War in 1936. All these Model 281 export aircraft were fitted with flaps before delivery. In 1935 the 11 Boeings were the most formidable element in China's defensive air power, and most of them were in action against Japanese aircraft at the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937.
As for the US Army Air Corps machines, these were gradually replaced from 1936 by the Seversky P-35 and Curtiss P-36, which were considerably more powerful and more costly. After service with the US Army the surviving 'Peashooters' found a ready market among other air forces. Those of the squadron serving at Albrook Air Force Base, in the Canal Zone, were sold to the Republic of Panama. Those in the Hawaiian Islands and Philippines were passed on to the Philippine Army Air Corps, and several were in combat with Japanese aircraft in December 1941.
Of course, by World War II the little Boeing monoplane was obsolescent, and it was no match for a 'Zero'. Even so, many of these famed little fighters did eventually go into action against Japanese aircraft, over both China and the Philippines, though records of how they stood up to their more modern adversaries are sparse; apparently very few Peashooters' lasted far into 1942.
The P-26 in Guatemala, The last country to use the P-26 operationally was Guatemala. It bought a few direct from the US Army Air Corps in 1937 and also purchased the surviving aircraft from Panama during World War II, and several were still in service with the Guatemalan Air Force as late as 1953. Even as late as 1957 a few were still to be seen on the Guatemalan military airfields of Puerto Barrios and San Jose, but it is doubtful that they were flyable. Today two 'Peashooters' from the original P-26A production batch are being preserved in museums. One, formerly serialled 33-123, is in California at the Planes of Fame museum at Buena Park, Los Angeles. The other, 33-135, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
The P-26 served with USAAC pursuit and attack squadrons at home and overseas, but by 1940 had been replaced the Curtiss P-36s and Seversky P-35s and relegated to training. The P-26 had a high landing speed - alleviated by flaps -. and poor soft-field landing characteristics, and was mainly used at bases with hard earth airfields in the south-western mainland and Hawaii. Many P-26As based overseas were sold to the Philippines and Panama; Guatemala purchased two, arid others later from Panama. Boeing built only 12 of aft export version, the Model 281, which differed only in details from the P-26A (Model 226A), also having flaps added. Between 1934 and 1936 11 were exported to the Chinese Air Force which used them successfully against Japanese raiders. One was exported to Spain.
Specifications for the Boeing P-26 Peashooter
Wingspan: 28 ft
Height: 10 ft
Empty weight: 2,196 lb
Loaded weight: 3,360 lb
Powerplant: 1× Pratt & Whitney
R-1340-7 "Wasp" radial
engine, 600 hp
Maximum speed: 234 mph
at 6,000 ft
Combat radius: 360 mi
Ferry range: 635 mi
Service ceiling: 27,400
Guns:
2× .30 in (7.62 mm) M1919
Browning machine guns
Bombs:
1× 200 lb bomb
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A most excellent interview: The team behind Bill and Ted Fac
Time travel becomes a family affair in Bill and Ted Face the Music, the long-awaited third film in the popular Bill and Ted comedy franchise (Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu). Fans won't be disappointed: the film is most excellent, capturing that same breezy, chaotic, let's-just-have-fun-with-this madcap magic of its predecessors. That's due to a winning script by co-creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson and the skillful direction of Dean Parisot of Galaxy Quest fame.
“We were trying to pay some homage to the original two [films] while making it feel like it was contemporary," Parisot told Ars about how he approached bringing the Bill and Ted franchise into the 21st century. "The sense of humor might be a little drier and more absurd, but that’s about it.”
(Some spoilers below.)
In the original Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are high school students in danger of flunking history. If that happens, Ted's father will ship him off to a military academy, thus breaking up their band, Wyld Stallyns. But the band is destined to usher in a future utopia, which is now threatened. With the help of a time machine in the form of a phone booth—provided by Rufus (played by the late George Carlin), a messenger from the year 2688—the pair travels through history, meeting Socrates, Billy the Kid, Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, and Abraham Lincoln, among others.
Further ReadingBill and Ted Face the Music drops final trailer with a new release date
In the sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991), the boys must defeat their evil robot doubles from the future to preserve the utopian society based on their ideals. Among the highlights: Bill and Ted must play a game (Battleship, Clue, and Twister) against Death (William Sadler) in order to escape from hell and return to Earth to win the Battle of the Bands. The Grim Reaper turns out to be a hell of a bass player, joining Wyld Stallyns until a falling-out over his fondness for 40-minute bass solos.
Bill and Ted Face the Music revisits the BFFs as middle-aged men, still living in San Dimas, California. They have music-loving daughters—Wilhelmina/Billie "Little Bill" Logan (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Theodora/Thea "Little Ted" Preston (Samara Weaving)—and frustrated wives, Princess Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Princess Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes), who insist on couples counseling. Per the official premise:
The stakes are higher than ever for the time-traveling exploits of William "Bill" S. Preston Esq. and Theodore "Ted" Logan. Yet to fulfill their rock and roll destiny, the now middle aged best friends set out on a new adventure when a visitor from the future warns them that only their song can save life as we know it. Along the way, they will be helped by their daughters, a new batch of historical figures, and a few music legends to seek the song that will set their world right and bring harmony in the universe.
“You still have Bill and Ted, but they’re now middle-aged. They’re not teenagers, but you retain the essential qualities of them—this good-hearted ludicrous optimism," said Parisot. "They’ve been best friends for years. They think alike, they act alike, they never doubt their friendship for a second. If those qualities came through, then you would have a Bill and Ted movie."
Bill and Ted's mid-life crisis Ted Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill Preston (Alex Winter) are still besties after all these years. Orion Pictures Princess Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Princess Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes) seek marital counseling. Orion Pictures Bill and Ted's daughters, Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) share their love of music. Orion Pictures Kristen Schaal plays Kelly, a messenger from the future. Orion Pictures Back in their trusty old phone booth. Orion Pictures Kid Cudi (playing himself) joins the ladies on their mission to assemble the greatest band in history. Orion Pictures The band is coming along nicely with the addition of Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft) and Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still). Orion Pictures
Writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, who created the characters all those years ago, had long wanted to revisit Bill and Ted. They came up with the plot and basic structure for Face the Music, but then faced the daunting task of trying to write characters they hadn't inhabited for decades. Matheson admitted he wasn't sure it would work. "Are they going to make sense to us?" he recalls wondering. In the end, "I wouldn't say it was effortless, but it was like riding a bike," he told Ars. "They somehow still live on, and they do make sense to us."
One thing that helped during the writing, according to Solomon, was not re-watching the first two movies in preparation. "I'm glad in retrospect that we didn't, because we would have been trying to copy them too much," he told Ars. "We just said, where would these characters be now? Let's just feel them that way and write from that place. So the movie has its own sensibility, and I'm proud of that."
Longtime fans might be surprised to find that Bill and Ted have daughters in Face the Music. At the end of Bogus Journey, we see Bill and Ted playing live with their infant children, "Little Bill" and "Little Ted," strapped to their backs. The assumption was always that the duo had fathered sons, but when Matheson and Solomon were writing Face the Music, they quickly realized that wasn't going to work. If the sons were ignorant, they were too much like their dads, and if they were cool, it wasn't funny. "It just felt like no matter what path we took with them having sons, it felt unfresh," said Solomon. "As soon as we made them girls, it opened up the whole movie, allowing us to break some patterns that we had created inadvertently."
“We wanted them to be different than Bill and Ted but to have the qualities of Bill and Ted," said Parisot. "Brigette and Samara created their characters by watching Alex and Keanu play Bill and Ted, but they worked hard to create unique characters.” While the daughters also love music, their knowledge of music is encyclopedic. "They know the roots of the music that the musicians they meet with don't even know," said Solomon.
"There's nothing more fun than writing that character who just has this deep need to be loved even though he's a terrible villain."
Billie and Thea are the only guests dancing enthusiastically when Bill breaks into some Tuvan throat singing at the third wedding of Bill (and later Ted's) sexy stepmother, Missy (Amy Stoch), grooving to the sounds their dads are laying down. So naturally when they're putting the ultimate band together, they recruit not just Kid Cudi (playing himself as an amateur theoretical physicist), Mozart (Daniel Dorr), Jimi Hendrix (DazMann Still), and Louis Armstrong (Jeremiah Craft), but also the (gender-swapped) Chinese musical legend Ling Lun (Sharon Gee), and a cave woman drummer known only as Grom (Patty Anne Miller).
The movie does bring the old band back together, so to speak. In addition to Stoch, Sadler returns as the Grim Reaper (aka the Duke of Spook, the Doc of Shock, the Man With No Tan), and Hal Landon Jr. returns as Ted's dad. Parisot had wanted to posthumously include Carlin via archival footage enhanced with CGI, but budgetary constraints ultimately nixed that plan. Instead, a hologram of Carlin briefly appears.
While Sadler's Grim Reaper was the standout comic relief in Bogus Journey, an oddly ingratiating killer robot sent from the future named Dennis Caleb McCoy (Anthony Carrigan) is the breakout character in Face the Music. He started out as a plot point and ultimately took on a life of his own, bolstered by Carrigan's fantastic (occasionally ad-libbed) performance. "We needed somebody to kill everybody," said Matheson. "And then, Ed and I just love, love, love insecure villains who are doing terrible things but feel really bad about it and have no confidence."
"There's nothing more fun than writing that character who just has this deep need to be loved even though he's a terrible villain," Solomon agreed.
A song to unite the world Bill and Ted meet their future selves. Orion Pictures A killer robot from the future named Dennis Caleb McCoy (Anthony Carrigan) is hunting Bill and Ted. Orion Pictures Fathers and daughters (and other band members) reunite in hell. Orion Pictures Death aka the Grim Reaper (William Sadler) is still one heck of a bass player. Orion Pictures Mending a rift, Orion Pictures The band is in the zone. Orion Pictures Thea and Billie rock out to the music. Orion Pictures
Tonally, this is very much a Dean Parisot film; like Galaxy Quest, it's a comedy that embraces silliness but also plays it somewhat straight and exudes a deep love for its main characters. It's no small feat to strike that perfect balance; for Parisot, it's in line with his personal aesthetic. “We all have a point of view on the world," he said. "I love ludicrous characters dealing with a tragic circumstance, which feels like my life. I like people who are conflicted, maybe damaged in some ways, because I think we all have that. I like to watch them work through it. I want to like all my characters because I understand them, because I understand how they got to where they are."
Audiences love these characters, too. So what is it about Bill and Ted that makes them so enduringly lovable? "The first thing is their friendship, which is never in question," said Parisot. "The second thing is their enthusiasm for trying to solve their problems. They’re sort of universally like children, but those aspects of children that we love. They’re naïve, they’re hopeful, they’re absolutely invested in doing something good. That’s why the last couple of lines of the movie resonate with me: it wasn’t the song so much as everybody playing it together [that saved the world].”
"I think it's very easy to see the world through dark lenses—anger, fear, anxiety, resentment, pain—and I'm very much inclined to do that," said Matheson. "These guys don't. They see the good in things, and they're not trying to be anyone else. Accessing that—which must bizarrely somehow exist within me, too—feels incredible."
"A lot of writers write characters that embody their darker selves, and they get to watch those characters do some of the darker deeds that only exist in the deeper recesses of our own minds and imaginations," Solomon concurred. With Bill and Ted, "We get to watch these characters move through the world with the kind of beneficence that I don't think we do in life as much. It's such an interesting flip. I think a lot of comedy is written from a place of cynicism, or snark, or meanness, and to write comedy that's rooted in characters that don't have a bad thing to say about anybody is refreshing."
That's one reason Solomon and Matheson struggled to get Face the Music made ten years ago, when the trends in American comedy were darker and more cynical. "It wasn't vulgar, or pushing the edge, or dark and cynical," said Solomon of the film. "Amazingly, we ended up at a time that seems to be a little more open to humor that isn't punching up or down. It's not punching at all. It just opens its arms a little wider."
Bill and Ted Face the Music is now playing in select theaters and is also available on demand.
Weezer - Beginning of the End (Wyld Stallyns Edit) (Official Video) from Bill and Ted Face the Music.
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How Many Countries Recognise The Palestinian Statehood? You Will be Alarmed by the Numbers.
December 17, 2014 Conflict, Culture, Worldpalestine, state
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The United Nations’ (UN) International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is annually observed on November 29. The day is also known as Solidarity Day.
First observed in 1977, Palestinian solidarity day falls on November 29 each year, as, on that day in 1947, the General Assembly adopted of the ’Partition Resolution’, which provided for the establishment in Palestine of a ‘Jewish State’ and an ‘Arab State’.
On the occasion of International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, PLO Executive Committee member, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi in a statement expressed gratitude to everyone who supported the Palestinian statehood recognition.
“We thank those states that have recognized the State of Palestine and the parliaments and people around the world who have voted for recognition. We also appreciate the religious leaders, trade unions, artists, and civil society organizations worldwide that have stood on the right side of justice and supported the Palestinian people in their attempts to seek a just peace,” she added.
European Recognition of Palestine
The French and Irish parliaments have become the latest in Europe to call on their governments to recognise an independent state of Palestine, confirming a trend, alarming for Israel, that reflects changing public opinion across the continent.
In Paris on Thursday the senate ratified an earlier decision by the national assembly, while MPs in Denmark were holding the first reading of a motion urging the government to recognise Palestine as a state alongside Israel within its 1967 borders.
Wednesday’s vote by Irish MPs drew criticism from Israel, which argues that recognition prejudices the outcome of peace negotiations. The Israeli foreign ministry accused the Irish parliament of giving voice to “statements of hatred and antisemitism directed at Israel in a way which we have not heard before”.
Sweden has formally recognised the state of Palestine in October, the Swedish foreign minister said, less than a month after Stockholm announced its intention to make the controversial move, becoming the most prominent European country to do so and just the second after Iceland. All that official recognition means, really, is that it’s the official position of the Swedish government that Palestine is a country.
“Today the government takes the decision to recognise the state of Palestine,” Margot Wallström said in a statement published in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper on Thursday.
“It is an important step that confirms the Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” the foreign minister said. “We hope that this will show the way for others.”
Sweden’s new prime minister, Stefan Löfven, announced in his inaugural address to parliament in early October that his country would become the first EU member in western Europe to recognise a Palestinian state.
That means a lot in a situation this politically fraught. “The purpose of Sweden’s recognition is to contribute to a future in which Israel and Palestine can live side by side in peace and security,” Sweden’s minister for foreign affairs explained in a press release that also touts “a five-year aid strategy including substantially increased support to Palestinian state-building.”
Top Israeli and Swedish diplomats engaged in a heated spat following Sweden’s decision. Ambassadors were scolded and withdrawn, and pointed barbs were flung in both directions.
“The Swedish government needs to understand that relations in the Middle East are more complicated than a piece of furniture from Ikea that you assemble at home,” said Israel’s hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
But Lieberman’s Swedish counterpart was ready with a riposte.
“I will be happy to send Israel FM Lieberman an IKEA flat pack to assemble,” said Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom. “He’ll see it requires a partner, cooperation and a good manual.”
The exchange got picked up on social media. Karl Sharro, a London-based Lebanese blogger known for his biting political wit, made the following intervention on Twitter.
Israeli FM: Swedish govt needs to understand that relations in MidEast are more complicated than furniture from IKEA. pic.twitter.com/TYNY3T42yF
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) October 30, 2014
The satirical map, done in the form of the Swedish furniture manufacturer’s cartoonish guides, offers a critical take of current Israeli actions that’s being echoed in the international community.
Elsewhere in Europe, the parliaments of Britain, Ireland and Spain have all passed resolutions urging their governments to recognise a Palestinian state.
The British parliament in October voted in favor of recognising Palestine as an official state, answering impassioned pleas by pro-Palestinian ministers and activists. While the measure was approved 274-12, the vote is largely symbolic, however, as it does not mandate the government to change its policies regarding the long-disputed territory. RT’s Manila Chan has more details.
This all reflects widespread European frustration with Israel’s continued expansion of settlements into the West Bank and East Jersualem, which the Palestinians and the international community regard as the future capital of an independent Palestine. Talks between Israel and its Palestinian interlocutors have collapsed. Tensions between Arabs and Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem have reached a boiling point.
Europe is behind the curve here. The bulk of U.N. member states already recognize Palestine, including the majority of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. These things have a way of gathering momentum. Most of the countries in South America flipped positions to recognize Palestine in rapid succession in 2011. For now, the European votes, with the exception of Sweden, have all been nonbinding parliamentary measures, but if a large European power decides to recognize, the others could follow suit quickly.
The majority of countries worldwide might recognize Palestine, but non-recognition is still the mainstream position among rich Western countries.
President Abdulla Yameen has reiterated the Maldives’ support for the establishment of a Palestinian State on November 29th’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
“Acknowledgment and recognition alone are powerful gestures which can facilitate an international norm,” said Yameen.
“The Maldives welcomes all efforts towards this goal, during the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. We hope to see a future where Palestine emerges as a State with full recognition from the United Nations.”
Arab League foreign ministers have resolved to back the Palestinian bid for statehood in front of the United Nations Security Council by presenting a draft resolution determining a timeframe for creating the State of Palestine and “end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories” within the coming days, according to a statement by the Arab League two weeks ago.
The Council of Foreign Ministers assembled Saturday in Cairo to discuss the current situation in Palestine. The meeting was attended by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Map: The countries that recognize Palestine as a state
As you can see in the map, most of the other nations that have not officially recognized Palestine are in the E.U. or are U.S. partners who wouldn’t want to ruffle Washington’s feathers. These include South Pacific island nations like Kiribati and Nauru.
Even then, it’s quite likely that the U.S. will find itself on this map within a steadily shrinking patch of gray in the months and years to come.
What does all this mean in real terms?
The violence still continues daily, new settlements are being announced and all the while Palestinians are on the receiving end of all this.
Israel’s most recent transgression of International Law had seen Al-Aqsa mosque targeted and the unprecedented closure of Al-Aqsa mosque to all worshippers.
This is a hostile, disproportionate, and blanket deprivation of fundamental freedoms (including right of association, religious practice, a place of worship, and historic landmarks) targeted at a specific people classed by their creed, religion, or ethnicity- thus fulfilling the criteria for a variation of recognised atrocities.
How much longer will one state be allowed to undermine the legitimacy and supremacy of an international legal system which is respected by, and applied to every other state?
Time will tell, but support for an Independent state of Palestine is growing day by day from the International Community and countries all over the world.
Rebuilding Gaza. How Much You Think Has Been Pledged? Hint. Not Enough
September 16, 2014 Cultureceasfire, gaza, hope, palestine, rebuilding
A Mosque Minaret toppled over, the mosque destroyed in the fighting.
It’s been a little under three weeks since the Gaza – Israel ceasefire. Children have gone back to school in a sombre mood and back to broken classrooms, schools that have been destroyed partially or in total and many families have gone back to homes that are just rubble, with many more hospitals, mosques and other buildings destroyed.
At least 65,000 people in the Gaza Strip are homeless after the recent seven-week conflict. Infrastructure ranging from water desalination centres to power plants lies in ruins.
The seven-year blockade on the Gaza Strip must end to enable reconstruction and a political solution must be found to resolve the conflict, a UN official said on Saturday.
“Huge swathes of Gaza have been levelled. We cannot rebuild it with our hands tied behind our backs,” said Chris Gunness, spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
The Palestinian Authority said on Thursday that the process of rebuilding whole neighbourhoods and vital infrastructure would take “five years if Israel removed its blockade over Gaza entirely“.
“The attack on Gaza this time had no precedent, Gaza has been hit with a catastrophe and it needs immediate help,” Palestinian economist, Mohammed Shtayyeh, told the Reuters.
An international organisation involved in assessing post-conflict reconstruction says it will take 20 years for Gaza’s battered and neglected housing stock to be rebuilt following the war.
The assessment by Shelter Cluster, co-chaired by the U.N. refugee agency and the Red Cross, underscores the complexities involved in an overall reconstruction program for the Gaza Strip, which some Palestinian officials have estimated could cost almost $8 billion.
Any effort to rebuild Gaza will be hindered by a blockade imposed by Egypt and Israel.
Shelter Cluster’s 20-year assessment is based on the assumption that construction materials will be allowed into Gaza, as promised in the ceasefire. So far, locals say supplies have yet to arrive.
The below from a report produced by OCHA Occupied Palestinian Territories in collaboration with humanitarian partners.
Cost Of Rebuilding
Rebuilding Gaza will cost $7.8 billion (£4.7 billion), the Palestinian Authority said on Thursday, in the most comprehensive assessment yet of damage from the seven-week war with Israel. The ground incursion and bombing from the land, air and sea caused huge destruction in Gaza, during which whole neighbourhoods and vital infrastructure were flattened.
Rebuilding Gaza would depend heavily on foreign aid and would require an end to Palestinian rivalry and Israel opening its border crossings, said Mr Shtayyeh, who heads the Palestinian Economic Council for Research and Development (PECDAR)
The cost of rebuilding 17,000 Gazan homes razed by Israeli bombings would be $2.5 billion, the Authority said, and the energy sector needed $250 million after the Strip’s only power plant was destroyed by two Israeli missiles.
UN agencies and the Palestinian Authority are now working on a reconstruction plan which includes rebuilding water, sewerage facilities and electricity supplies.
We can get an idea of the severity of the destruction in Gaza from the video below by Media Town which shows aerial drone footage of Gaza before and after the 7 week assault – this really shows the level of destruction that the worst affected areas now face.
Media Town is a documentary film production and Media services Provider Company, based in Palestine.
The below clip shows the destruction in the Beit Hanoun area.
Progress since Ceasefire
In the 3 weeks since an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire took hold on August 26, little progress has been made in getting the rebuilding under way or settling the bitter political rifts around Gaza.
“If you want aid materials to be permitted to enter, they will almost inevitably come from Israeli sources,” an EU official said. “I don’t think you’ll find it written down anywhere in official policy, but when you get to negotiate with the Israelis, this is what happens. It increases construction and transaction costs, and is a political problem that has to be dealt with.”
As well as Israel’s security restrictions on aid, “it can be very difficult to export materials to Gaza,” the official said. “A lot of goods for a Gaza private sector reconstruction project we had, ended up being held in Ashdod port for very lengthy periods of time – months if not years – so there was de facto no alternative but to use Israeli sources.”
The source added that the policy had benefited Israel’s economy to the tune of millions of euros and was, in his view, deliberate.
Building materials such as steel and cement, necessary for the reconstruction of Gaza, have been designated by Israel as ‘dual use’ items – adaptable for munitions – that may only be imported to Gaza by the UN and aid agencies under Israeli supervision.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime ministers’ office, denied claims that Israel’s entry policy to Gaza prevented non-Israeli-made reconstruction materials from entering the Strip.
“I know that policy, and it is not true,” he told EurActiv over the phone from Jerusalem. He was unable though to give examples of non-Israeli reconstruction materials allowed into Gaza, referring inquiries on to Cogat.
Israel eased restrictions on imports of food and construction materials in 2010 following an international outcry over a botched Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla which was trying break the blockade, killing 10 Turks.
Chart showing the amount of building materials allowed into Gaza
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHAOPT) has just released a report detailing what the 50 day war has cost Gaza so far, including the death toll. The full 37 page report, published on the 27th August, can be found here – Gaza Initial Rapid Assessment.
Life in Gaza after the destruction
Palestinian women bake bread in front of the remains of their house in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Source: ©Reuters/I. Abu Mustafa
“It is enough. We are tired,” said Nasser Mohammed Al-Najjar, 62. “I lost my wife in the war. I lost my cousins and our homes have been turned into sand.”
It took years for Al-Najjar to build his home and now he, and six family members, are homeless, temporarily sleeping in a UN school. Al-Najjar used to work in Israel, but since 2000 when he was laid off from work, he has tried to live off his land, which was also damaged when bulldozers break into his neighbourhood, east of Khan Younis.
“No one cares about us,” he said.
In another UN school shelter in Khan Younis sits 42-year-old Rasem Abu-Zaed, 42. He had been living in Jordan for more than 15 years and working as a taxi driver which gave him enough money to feed his wife and four children. Then, Abu-Zaed decided to return to Gaza.
In Gaza, he said he has found freedom to express his views, but he has not found stability, nor security. Yet despite the knowledge that it could be 20 years before his family home is rebuilt – and that his one-year-old son, Musbah, will then be an adult – he said he does not want to return to Jordan.
“I felt something fishy the moment ceasefire was announced,” he said. “I asked myself, ‘Why would this work when Israel has the position of power to violate ceasefires?'”
Abu-Zaed said he and his family had heard the news from international bodies that it will take 20 years to rebuild Gaza.
“But we never heard of what they will do to challenge that,” he said.
“The aggression on Gaza has not yet ended. I still feel like I am in a war zone, as the armed drones are still roaming Gaza skies every single second. Nothing actually has improved or changed in our miserable daily life in Gaza. We have 12 hours of electricity outages every day and the borders are shut down. We had great hope that our life will get better soon after an immense loss of our people and infrastructures in the latest Gaza attack. However, there is not even a prospect of improvements in the near future for us.” (The mother of Ayman Qwaider, a Palestinian from Gaza now living in Australia)
Rubble Bucket Challenge
“I can only think of this ceasefire as a pillow that was squeezed against the face of an-already-dying patient to suffocate his/her screams so that he/she dies quickly and quietly.” (Maysam Yusef, a 25-year-old Palestinian in Gaza now studying for a bachelor’s degree in media and politics,
After the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS went viral, Gaza activist Maysam Yusef, 24, started the Rubble Bucket campaign the day before the ceasefire was announced with the Facebook page Rubble Bucket Challenge to raise awareness.
“The whole point is to gain attention,” Yusef said, “because Gaza doesn’t need money, it needs someone to stop this.”
The campaign invites social media users to douse themselves in sand, gravel, and other materials from buildings that have been destroyed during Israel’s seven-week military offensive. The choice of materials was both deliberate and necessary: they couldn’t use ice water, participants say, due to deteriorating conditions on the ground.
The Challenge has reached Jordan, Morroco and even the US, with Pro-Palestinian Activists in Washington taking the challenge as can be seen in the International Business Times UK report above.
The Conflict by Numbers
The 50 days of war in Gaza resulted in damage that the UN said is “Unprecedented since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967.” Here’s a closer look at the conflict by the numbers by AJ+.
Gaza – Israel Conflict: Numbers Behind The Destruction In Gaza
Pledges of reconstruction aid abound—$93 million from the United Arab Emirates, $10 million from Kuwait, $5 million from Bahrain. But Palestinians say the pace of rebuilding will depend on what goods Egypt and Israel let through their borders.
However, the biggest loss is the loss of human life, the livelihoods of Gazan’s, the children who are suffering from post traumatic stress.
And an amount cannot be put on this. Gazan’s continue to strive and will carry on rebuilding, just as they have done after previous conflicts – they have no other choice but to continue living and trying to live life as best they can.
What, If Anything, Has Changed On The Ground For Either Side As A Result Of The War?
August 31, 2014 Conflictceasfire, gaza, hamas, israel, palestine
On Tuesday, after almost 7 weeks of conflict, Palestinian and Israel leaders agreed an open ended ceasefire brokered by the Egyptians
Rocket fire and air strikes had continued until the last moments right up to the 4pm deadline
Just minutes after the cease fire agreement was announced, thousands of Palestinians poured onto the streets of Gaza City to celebrate what was being touted as a victory. Mosques announced the victory over the loudspeakers.
Night of Joy and Happiness
Denny Cormier, an American who has been living in Gaza for the past few months, talks about the scenes of joy and happiness in Gaza on Tuesday night in a Facebook status. He says it was “a night when thousands and thousands came to celebrate” and “the prayers filled Gaza and were the first reactions to the cease fire”
Post by Denny Cormier.
Rina Andolini, an International Aid Worker in Gaza throughout the conflict, posted pictures of a party held for the children of Gaza.
Post by Rina Andolini.
“We have mixed feelings. We are in pain for the losses but we are also proud we fought this war alone and we were not broken,” said Gaza teacher Ahmed Awf, 55, as he held his two-year-old son in his arms and joined in the street festivities.
Whatever tomorrow may bring; tonight was a time to rejoice as Gaza’s people celebrated the end of hostilities and the lifting of the 7 year siege.
The Telegraph posted this album showing the celebrations taking place: Gaza ceasefire in pictures: Palestinians celebrate truce between Hamas and Israel
The cease fire brokered by the Egyptians is currently holding – an interim agreement in exchange for a period of calm.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, also confirmed that a ceasefire had been reached, saying that it was time to rebuild Gaza.
“An end to the killing will come at the same time as the entry of humanitarian, medical and building materials,” Abbas said.
The United States and United Nations urged both sides to comply with the terms of the agreement.
“We are all aware that this is an opportunity, not a certainty,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry. “We have been down this road before and we are all aware of the challenges ahead.”
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also welcomed the truce. But in a statement via his spokesman, Mr Ban warned that “any peace effort that does not tackle the root causes of the crisis will do little more than set the stage for the next cycle of violence”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced strong criticism in Israel over a costly conflict with Palestinian fighters in which no clear victor emerged
However, Hamas, though badly battered, is still claiming this as a “victory for the resistance” as they remain in control of Gaza.
At a press conference at the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “Hamas is grateful to the people of Gaza who sacrificed their homes, children and money. We announce the victory today after achieving our goals.”
He added: “[Israeli prime minister Binyamin] Netanyahu has failed to force Gaza to surrender. Yes, we defeated them by our standing and our resistance. We will stand by our people and we won’t leave them.”
The terms of the deal – brokered by the Egyptian government, and reached on the 50th day of the conflict – appeared to be almost identical to those agreed at the end of the previous war 21 months ago.
Under the terms that ended more than a week of fighting in 2012, Israel promised to ease restrictions gradually, while Hamas promised to halt rocket fire from Gaza at Israel.
The truce held, but Gaza’s border blockade remained largely intact.
Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade in 2007.
Under the restrictions, virtually all of Gaza’s 1.8 million people cannot trade or travel, and only a few thousand are able to leave the coastal territory every month.
Deputy Head of Hamas’s Political Bureau Musa Abu Marzouk [Pictured above] explained the terms of the current ceasefire deal agreed between the Palestinian Resistance and the Israeli occupation.
He said the deal fully ended the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, halting all Israeli, American and EU restrictions on money transfers, included holding an international conference on the reconstruction of the Strip and stopping Israel’s tracking and assassination of Palestinian resistance fighters.
Abu Marzouk added that the deal is based on the understandings that ended the Israeli war against the Gaza Strip in 2012.
But this time, the Israeli occupation is to stick to opening the crossings for the entrance of humanitarian and relief aid, as well as all reconstruction materials.
Abu Marzouk added that the deal is based on the understandings that ended the Israeli war against the Gaza Strip in 2012. But this time, the Israeli occupation is to stick to opening the crossings for the entrance of humanitarian and relief aid, as well as all reconstruction materials.
The conditions of the truce
Both sides agreed to address more complex issues later with talks agreed to start in a month. Factions will discuss the construction of a seaport and airport in Gaza and the freeing of about 100 prisoners.
A US state department spokeswoman said: “We call on all parties to fully and completely comply with its terms, and hope very much that the ceasefire will prove to be durable and sustainable. We view this as an opportunity, not a certainty. There is a long road ahead and we’re aware of that, and we’re going into this eyes wide open.”
The deal follows at least eight temporary ceasefires during the course of the conflict.
Following are the immediate terms of what is in this Interim Gaza Peace deal between Israel & Hamas.
Both sides to end military action
Gaza Crossings – Only two out of the five Gaza crossings are presently functioning. The deal stipulates Israel’s commitment to opening the other three crossings. Regarding the Rafah Crossing, Abu Marzouk said there would be a Palestinian-Egyptian meeting to specify the demands for its full re-opening and called for this meeting to happen as soon as possible. Israel agrees to open more border crossings with Gaza to allow the easier flow of goods
Egypt to open its border with Gaza at Rafah
The Palestinian Authority (PA), which is headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, will take over operation of Gaza’s borders from Hamas – a bid to reduce weapons smuggling
The PA will lead the internationally funded reconstruction effort in Gaza
Israel to narrow the security buffer along the inside of the Gaza border, to allow Palestinians more access to farm land
Fishing and buffer zone – Israel will extend fishing limits off Gaza’s coast. The fishing zone is to be expanded to six nautical miles and to be gradually expanded to 12 miles at a later date, but before the end of this year.
Money transfers and Gaza employees – Israeli, American and European restrictions on money transfers into the Strip were lifted and the ball is now in the court of the Palestinian unity government to pay Gaza employees’ salaries.
Reconstruction of Gaza – Abu Marzouk explained that the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip would be discussed at a conference slated to be held next month in Egypt. Preparations for this conference are to start after inviting all the related parties to take part in the reconstruction process. The Palestinian unity government is to run the reconstruction dossier.
The Hamas official, who participated in the Palestinian delegation to the indirect talks in Cairo, said Egypt is the only guarantor for the deal, and that a new round of talks are to start within a month to discuss the other issues, like prisoners, the seaport and airport.
He said that the Israeli occupation would stop targeting senior Hamas commanders, and would allow them free movement throughout the Gaza Strip, stressing that this is the point that had postponed reaching a deal at an earlier stage.
Now for the inevitable question: What, if anything, has changed on the ground for either side as a result of the war?
In Gaza, the war exacted a devastating price.
After 50 days of fighting, residents face billions of dollars of damage in Gaza.
Source: NBC News
It is impossible to find a Palestinian there who was untouched by the conflict. Families lost loved ones. Neighborhoods were completely destroyed. More than 100,000 people were displaced, according to the United Nations. Businesses, factories, shops and warehouses were demolished by Israeli bombs.
Gaza’s economy is in ruins.
More than 2,200 people have been killed – the vast majority of them Palestinian, more than 11,000 wounded and some 100,000 left homeless with some entire neighbourhoods destroyed.
Aid workers warn that mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress, will haunt a generation of Palestinian children, some of whom have now lived through three wars in six years.
So an easing of the blockade will allow humanitarian aid and construction materials to be drip-fed into the Strip. It will most likely not revive the economy or restore livelihoods of families who lost everything.
Denny Cormier posted this on his Facebook timeline on Friday “As an outside observer – and on the ground supporter – let me observe that things are worse now than they were earlier in 2014 – certainly worse than just before the war.
Although we are still celebrating victory, the good people of Gaza are suffering.”
Seven weeks after the war started, the conflict stands where it began, except that now thousands of lives are in ruins.
While, each side claims to be the victor: The countdown until the next round of violence is already ticking.
Gaza is the New Warsaw Ghetto – these comparison images prove it
August 21, 2014 Conflictgaza, holocaust, palestine
Today, in the Holy Land, the Zionist government, with the support of the majority of Israel’s population are themselves perpetuating a holocaust against the Palestinian people.
The Israeli government repeatedly denies that its treatment of the Palestinians is anything like the treatment suffered by the Jews under the Nazi regime. But the Nazis too denied that they were engaging in genocide and war crimes.
It may be a different conflict but there are striking similarities between the historical Jewish Holocaust and the current Palestinian Holocaust, which has been going on since the inception of the State of Israel.
The Palestinian Holocaust has the all the hallmarks of the Jewish Holocaust;
the long-term use of state terror including the dispossession of 90% of the land
forcing of over four million Palestinians into ghettos with a Nazi style encirclement
ethnic segregation and ethnic cleansing forcing some five million Palestinians to live in exile
the geographically constrained movement of Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank
the continuous expansion of Jewish only settlements in the West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian homes by Jews
the Jewish only roads and plethora of military check points and starving the people of Gaza.
Israel’s ultimate aim, is the “systematic destruction” of the Palestinians as a national group and no doubt is quite deliberate.
What we are witnessing today is a living holocaust, that is being carried out under the eyes of the United Nations, European, Arab and Western World Governments. Some would say that their silence is deafening.
Martin Luther King said “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
The Israeli regime uses similar methods as the Nazi oppressors did, which included practises of collective punishment, racially based legislation, legalised mass torture and ethnic cleansing (distinguished human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights calls this the “Gaza Doctrine”). All are unequivocally illegal but unfortunately all too real in the Occupied Territories.
Israel has imprisoned the 1.8 million people of Gaza by surrounding them with a 7-9 metre wall over 360 square kilometres of land where they cannot escape the bombardments – referred to by many as the “largest concentration camp in the world”. This makes the former East German, Berlin “Wall of Shame” seem mediocre in comparison to the Israeli “Wall of Terror”.
The situation in Gaza is not unlike that faced by Europe’s Jews under Hitler. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. It was established in the Polish capital between October and November 16, 1940, in the territory of the General Government of German-occupied Poland, with over 400,000 Jews from the vicinity residing in an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi)
The Israeli government has converted the Gaza territory into the world’s largest concentration camp, sealed off and subjected to periodic and murderous bombardment. For the people of Gaza, there is no place to shelter their children; no friendly countryside that could provide refuge.
And if this mass imprisonment and torture of the Palestinians was not enough, Israel has become even more despicable through its economic blockade where it has rationed food supplies and calculated the calories allowable per person in Gaza to survive – exactly like what the German civilian authorities do to the inhabitants of Warsaw the Ghetto. Food allotments rationed to the people were not sufficient to sustain life. In 1941 the average Jew in the ghetto subsisted on 1,125 calories a day and tens of thousands died of starvation.
The only word that can describe this inhumane suffering and terror faced on a daily basis by the Palestinian people is HOLOCAUST.
The word “holocaust” was used in English to denote “great massacres”. In 1943 it was the lawyer Raphael Lemkin who invented the term “genocide,” by combining “genos” (race, people) and “cide” (to kill). He campaigned for a legal definition which is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, where genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group”. But since the 1960s, the term holocaust came to be used and abused by scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews in Europe during the 2nd World War.
It was reported last week, that almost 250 Jewish Survivors and Descendents of Survivors of Nazi Genocide Condemn the Massacre on Gaza and are calling for an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people. They urged people who are survivors of the genocide or a descendent of survivors, to add their name to the letter.
The tragedy is that although the Palestinians were not part of the anti-Semitism of Europe and the West they are the final victims of Hitler’s Holocaust.
The following juxtaposed images show Jewish life in Germany and Poland over 70 years ago and Palestinian life today in the occupied territories.
And these pictures speak more than words ever could.
Warning – Disturbing and graphic images
Building walls and fences to imprison people
Military checkpoints to prevent freedom of movement to civilians
Arrests and Harassments
Destroying Homes and Livelihoods
The Murder of the Young and the Innocent
Companies Boycotting Israel Gathering Pace. It Is Beginning To Bite. See Which Big Co’s Are Involved
August 18, 2014 Conflictbds, boycott, divestment, gaza, israel, palestine, sanction
Introducing the BDS Movement
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), was launched in 2005 and is now a global Movement to get individuals and institutions to withdraw their money and support from Israel with the aim to pressure Israel to end its illegal occupation, settlement building and attacks on Palestinians.
BDS is a strategy that allows people, companies and institutions of conscience to play an effective role in the Palestinian struggle for justice.
2014 has been a strong year for BDS and the support has been growing especially in the US, who are seen as Israel’s closest and most important ally.
Andrew Hammond, a Middle East analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations said “The whole movement is picking up not so much because the BDS movement is so powerful, but because people want Israel to come to a peace agreement.”
Bill Gates Foundations G4S
The Gates Foundation Asset Trust, which manages investments for the $40bn Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said in June that it sold its stake in the UK security services firm G4S, one of the companies targeted by BDS.
Scandinavian Companies
In January this year, Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund decided to ban Africa Israel Investments (AFI Group) and its subsidiary Danya Cebus from its portfolio because of their involvement in building settlements in the West Bank.
Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, has blacklisted Israeli Bank Hapoalim because it finances construction of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.
Citing its corporate accountability rules, the bank said that Bank Hapoalim was acting against the rules of international law.
The Danish bank had already withdrawn its investments from Africa Israel Investments Limited and Danya Cebus for the same reasons.
Swedens Nordea bank, the largest in Scandinavia followed in the footsteps of the Danish bank and has taken steps against Israeli banks involved in construction in the settlements.
We also witnessed the withdrawal by Dutch pension fund PGGM of tens of millions of euros from Israeli banks. Dutch pension fund PGGM pulled its investment from five Israeli banks in January over concerns that they are financing illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. The settlements contravene several human rights treaties.
Co Op UK / Europe
The largest Co-operative in Europe, the Co-Operative Group which is the 5th largest supermarket chain in the UK, introduced a policy to end trade with companies that source products from Israel’s illegal settlements, following a determined campaign by Co-Op members. Campaigners are working to pressure other supermarkets to adopt a similarly comprehensive position. Many supermarkets across Europe already claim not to sell produce from illegal settlements.
Unite in UK and Ireland
Unite, the biggest union in the UK and Ireland, issued a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people, on Friday 11 July:
“Unite unreservedly condemns the continuing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and calls for the military strikes and the military build up to be halted immediately.
“Unite further calls on the UK government to demand the Israeli government halt its military action and to make it clear that should it fail to do so then a move for international sanctions will be launched within the United Nations Security Council and the European Union.
U.S. Presbyterian Church, with 12-million members worldwide, divested an estimated $21 million from HP, Motorola Solutions and Caterpillar.
The Presbyterian Church on in June became the most prominent religious group in the US to endorse divestment as a protest against Israeli policies toward Palestinians.
The Group voted 310-303 to sell stock in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions – three companies whose products Israel uses in the occupied territories.
Russell Brand calls for Boycott
Russell Brand in his Trews E122 13th August urged banks, pension funds and other big businesses to sever investment ties with Israel, or any deals that “facilitate the oppression of people in Gaza”.
Brand citing Barlcays bank as an example, stated they manage “the portfolios of an Israeli defence company called Elbit, which makes the drones that bomb Gaza.”
“The message they give us is the exact opposite of the reality, they’re acting like they’re part of our community,” he said during his new episode of The Trews, which you can watch below.
“But if we’re aware of the reality of what they do, then we have the power to influence them.
Which Companies Invest In Gaza Violence? Russell Brand The Trews (E122)
Individuals as well as companies
Individuals with MONEY are also taking action – Soros Fund Management – billionaire investor George Soros recently sold 24.3 million dollars in shares of Sodastream.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) – the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society that has been leading the global BDS movement, called for a boycott of the Soros Fund Management back in May saying “George Soros funds and foundationsmust be held accountable for investments in Israeli violations of international law”
The BNC went on to say “George Soros’s alleged respect for human rights and the Open Society Foundation’s actual support for various educational, human rights and cultural projects in the occupied Palestinian territory and the region are incompatible with his investment in companies, like Teva and SodaStream, that consistently violate human rights and international law and profit from the Israeli occupation and colonization.
17 EU members take action against corporate complicity with Israeli crimes
Currently, 17 European governments have published online guidance warning their citizens and businesses about risks involved in trade and other economic links with illegal Israeli settlements
Rafeef Ziadah, a spokesperson for the Palestinian BNC said: “European governments are starting to respond to civil society lobbying and public opinion by taking welcome steps to end corporate complicity with Israel’s settlement regime.”
Fears for Israel
Israel fears that the growing support for BDS actions and measures in South Africa, which encompass academic, cultural as well as economic boycott, may have a domino effect internationally, given what is seen by many as South Africa’s moral leadership on the world stage.
Most crucially, Israel is alarmed that the boycott is spreading in Israel’s second largest export market, the European Union.
Last month, Israel’s finance minister also acknowledged the impact that a European-wide boycott could have on the country. The economy could lose a potential $5.7billion and put almost 10,000 people out of work immediately. The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also acknowledged the threat posed by BDS. In a March speech in the US, Mr Netanyahu launched an attack on the movement, branding them as racists.
The british security firm G4S in June announced that it does not intend to renew its contract with the Israeli Prison Service when it expires in 2017.
This follows more than 2 years of campaigning that has seen the company lose millions of dollars of contracts and mainstream investors such as the Bill Gates Foundation and the US United Methodist Church – an example of the BDS movement taking effect.
The Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in an exclusive article for Haaretz on 14th August, calls for a global boycott of Israel and urges Israelis and Palestinians to look beyond their leaders for a sustainable solution to the crisis in the Holy Land.
The BDS movement ultimately seeks to emulate the South Africa boycott in the economic, academic, sports and cultural fields, ostracising Israel—and its complicit institutions—until it fully complies with its obligations under international law by ending its occupation, apartheid and denial of the right of Palestinian refugees (69% of the total Palestinian population) to return to their homes of origin from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba.
The movement for BDS against Israel until it complies with international law is proving to be a truly effective form of action in support of Palestinian rights.
As we can clearly see, BDS is a movement that is gathering pace and it seems it is beginning to bite.
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Israeli Civil Rights Violations in Occupied Palestine
@ 2016 iinclude.com
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Roger Federer Will Be a Long Shot to Set Up Clash vs. Rafael Nadal in Australia
By Patrick Clarke
After failing to reach a Grand Slam final in 2013 for the first time in more than a decade, four-time Australian Open champion Roger Federer enters the season's first major as a rare underdog.
But while the 32-year-old superstar will be favored to reach the quarterfinals Down Under for the 11th straight year, he'll be a long shot to force a highly anticipated semifinal showdown with archrival Rafael Nadal in the second week.
With the two legends on opposite ends of their half of the draw, it's safe to say that a 33rd meeting will have to be put on hold.
Sure, Federer has reached the semifinals at every Australian Open dating back to 2004. But keep in mind that the 17-time major winner has bowed out before the semis in each of his past three Slam appearances, even snapping his remarkable streak of 36 consecutive Slam quarterfinal berths at Wimbledon last summer.
He followed that disappointing loss up with a fourth-round exit at the 2013 U.S. Open, his earliest since 2003.
As Arlene on Twitter points out, times have changed:
With Federer struggling against the game's elite players like never before and suffering head-scratching defeats on the big stage, his focus has shifted as of late, per The Independent's Paul Newman:
I really feel like I'm on the way back. Who knows? Maybe I'll play my best in March or April. That's my feeling, but I still feel there's a lot that's possible right now. Maybe that's why I haven't set particular, special goals. I just want to get back to a good level and then, hopefully, I can start winning tournaments again.
Although the first few rounds in Melbourne project to go Federer's way, he could potentially run into trouble as soon as the fourth round, where 2008 Australian Open finalist and No. 10 seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga could be waiting for him.
Tsonga pushed Federer to five sets in the quarterfinal...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Tennis
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Home ISP iAsiaWorks Prunes Staff by Nearly 50 Percent
iAsiaWorks Prunes Staff by Nearly 50 Percent
By internetnews.com Staff | June 22, 2001
Silicon Valley -based hosting services provider iAsiaWorks Friday slashed its staff by nearly 50 percent in an effort to conserve cash while it explores alternative sources of funding.
The company, which specializes in providing Internet data center and hosting services in the Asia-Pacific region, cut its staff by 127 workers, reducing the number of employees from 288 to 161. Fifty of the positions were cut from the company's Burlingame, Calif. headquarters, while 77 came from its Hong Kong operations. The company maintains data centers in Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan, and provides a range of advanced hosting services through strategic partners in Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and the U.S.
iAsiaWorks said it will take a $700,000 charge in the second quarter as a result of the restructuring, but it also expects to save $9 million per year in operating expenses.
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The Struggle and Triumph of America’s First Black Doctors
The Struggle and Triumph of America’s First Black Doctors African American physicians have dealt with distrust and misperceptions for more than a century.
Nigerian church collapses, 160 dead, says hospital director – The Washington Post
Karen Jordan | The Atlantic
Around 1906, a young boy in Atlanta was stricken with a condition that cut off the circulation in his legs. His family feared it was life-threatening.
His father, an African American minister named Briny Jordan, took him to the closest doctor he could find in the city. The doctor was white, so Briny had reservations. But out of necessity, he went.
After examining Briny’s son, the doctor said he’d have to amputate one of the boy’s legs. Briny may not have been a learned man, but he was no dummy. He aimed to get a second opinion, and he knew just which doctor to call on: his brother.
John Henry Jordan, Briny’s brother, was the first African American doctor in Coweta County, Georgia…
CONTINUE READING | The Atlantic
Morgan Jerkins On Her New Book, Writing Through Fear, And The Power Of Black Memory | HuffPost
The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience In Georgia | Donald Lee Grant
The Way It Was in the South is the only book-length treatment of the African American presence in a single state. From the legalization of slavery in the Georgia Colony in 1751 through debates that preceded the Confederate emblem’s removal from the state’s now defunct flag, it chronicles the stunning record of black Georgians’ innovation, persistence, and triumph in the face of adversity and oppression. (Goodreads)
KOLUMN Magazine Staff December 14, 2016
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