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[3 of 5] If Beale Street Could Talk - Part Three - James Baldwin (1974)
Author: James Baldwin
“Part 3 of 5.” If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin, 1974.
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Fonny got me home at seven. He held me in his arms in the almost empty subway all the way uptown. It was Sunday morning. We walked our streets together, hand in hand; not even the church people were up yet; and the people who were still up, the few people, didn’t have eyes for us, didn’t have eyes for anybody, or anything.
We got to my stoop and I thought Fonny would leave me there and I turned to kiss him away, but he took me by the hand and said, “Come on,” and we walked up the stairs. Fonny knocked on the door.
Sis opened it, her hair tied up, wegring an old green bathrobe. She looked as evil as she could be. She looked from me to Fonny and back again. She didn’t exactly want to, but she smiled.
“You’re just in time for coffee,” she said, and moved back from the door, to let us in.
“We-” I started to say; but Fonny said, “Good-morning, Miss Rivers” – and something in his tone made Sis look at him sharply and come full awake – “I’m sorry we coming in so late. Can I speak to Mr. Rivers, please? It’s important!’
He still held me by the hand.
“It might be easier to see him,” Sis said, “if you come inside, out of the hall.”
“We-” I started again, intending to make up God knows what excuse.
“Want to get married,” Fonny said.
“Then you’d really better have some coffee,” Sis said, and closed the door behind us.
Sharon now came into the kitchen, and she was somewhat more together than Sis – that is, she was wearing slacks, and a sweater, and she had knotted her hair in one braid and skewered it to the top of her skull.
“Now, where have you two been,” she began, “till this hour of the morning? Don’t you know better than to be behaving like that? I declare. We was just about to start calling the police.”
But I could see, too, that she was relieved that Fonny was sitting in the kitchen, beside me. That meant something very important, and she knew it. It would have been a very different scene, and she would have been in very different trouble if I had come upstairs alone.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Rivers,” Fonny said. “It’s all my fault. I hadn’t seen Tish for a few weeks and we had a lot to talk about -1 had a lot to talk about – and-” he gestured-“I kept her out.”
“Talking?” Sharon asked.
He did not quite flinch; he did not drop his eyes. “We want to get married,” he said. “That’s how come I kept her out so late.” They watched each other. “I love Tish,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away so long. I even-” he looked briefly at me-“went to see other girls – and – I did all kind of things, to kind of get it out of my mind.” He looked at me again. He looked down. “But I could see I was just fooling myself. I didn’t love nobody else but her. And then I got scared that maybe she’d go away or somebody else would come along and take her away and so I came back.” He tried to grin. “I came running back. And I don’t want to have to go away again.” Then, “She’s always been my girl, you know that. And – I am not a bad boy. You know that. And – you’re the only family I’ve ever had.”
“That,” Sharon grumbled, “is why I can’t figure out why you calling me Mrs. Rivers, all of a sudden.” She looked at me. “Yeah. I hope you realize, Miss, that you ain’t but eighteen years old.”
“That argument,” said Sis, “and a subway token, will get you from here to the comer. If that far!” She poured the coffee. “Actually, it’s the older sister who is expected to marry first. But we have never stood on ceremony in this house.”
“What do you think about all this?” Sharon asked her.
“Me? I’m delighted to be rid of the little brat. I never could stand her. I could never see what all the rest of you saw in her, I swear.” She sat down at the table and grinned. “Take some sugar, Fonny. You are going to need it, believe me, if you intend to tie yourself up with my sweet, sweet little sister.”
Sharon went to the kitchen door, and yelled, “Joe! Come on out here! Lightning’s done struck the poorhouse! Come on, now, I mean it.”
Fonny took my hand.
Joseph came into the kitchen, in slippers, old corduroy pants, and a T-shirt. I began to realize that no one in this house had really been to sleep. Joseph saw me first. He really did not see anyone else. And, since he was both furious and relieved, his tone was very measured. “I’d like you to tell me exactly what you mean, young lady, by walking in here this hour of the morning. If you want to leave home, then you leave home, you hear? But, as long as you in my house, you got to respect it. You hear me?”
Then he saw Fonny, and Fonny let go my hand, and stood up.
He said, “Mr. Rivers, please don’t scold Tish. It’s all my fault, sir. I kept her out. I had to talk to her. Please. Mr. Rivers. Please. I asked her to marry me. That’s what we were doing out so long. We want to get married. That’s why I’m here. You’re her father. You love her. And so I know you know – you have to know – that I love her. I’ve loved her all my life.You know that. And if I didn’t love her, I wouldn’t be standing in this room now – would I? I could have left her on the stoop and run away again. I know you might want to beat me up. But I love her. That’s all I can tell you.”
Joseph looked at him.
“I’m twenty-one, sir.”
“You think that’s old enough to get married?”
“I don’t know, sir. But it’s old enough to know who you love.”
Fonny straightened. “I know so.”
“How you going to feed her?”
“How did you?”
We, the women, were out of it now, and we knew it. Ernestine poured Joseph a cup of coffee and pushed it in his direction.
“You got a job?”
“I load moving vans in the daytime and I sculpt at night. I’m a sculptor. We know it won’t be easy. But I’m a real artist. And I’m going to be a very good artist – maybe, even, a great one.” And they stared at each other again.
Joseph picked up his coffee, without looking at it, and sipped it without tasting it.
“Now, let me get this straight. You asked my little girl to marry you, and she said-“
“Yes,” said Fonny.
“And you come here to tell me or to ask my permission?”
“Both, sir,” said Fonny.
“And you ain’t got no kind of-“
“Future,” Fonny said.
Both men, again, then measured each other. Joseph put his coffee down. Fonny had not touched his.
“What would you do in my place?” Joseph asked.
I could feel Fonny trembling. He could not help it – his hand touched my shoulder lightly, then moved away. “I’d ask my daughter. If she tells you she don’t love me, I’ll go away and I won’t never bother you no more.”
Joseph looked hard at Fonny – a long look, in which one watched skepticism surrender to a certain resigned tenderness, a self-recognition. He looked as though he wanted to knock Fonny down; he looked as though he wanted to take him in his arms.
Then Joseph looked at me.
“Do you love him? You want to marry him?”
“Yes.” I had not known my voice could sound so strange. “Yes. Yes.” Then, I said, “I’m very much your daughter, you know, and very much my mother’s daughter. So, you ought to know that I mean no when I say no and I mean yes when I say yes. And Formy came here to ask for your permission, and I love him for that. I very much want your permission because I love you. But I am not going to marry you. I am going to marry Fonny.”
Joseph sat down.
“As soon as we get the bread together,” Fonny said.
Joseph said, ‘You and me, son, we better go into the other room.”
And so they went away. We did not say anything.
There was nothing for us to say. Only, Mama said, after a moment, “You sure you love him, Tish? You’re sure?”
“Mama,” I said, “why do you ask me that?”
“Because she’s been secretly hoping that you’d marry Governor Rockefeller,” Ernestine said.
For a moment Mama looked at her, hard; then she laughed. Ernestine, without knowing it, or meaning to, had come very close to the truth – not the literal truth, but the truth: for the dream of safety dies hard. I said, “You know that dried-up cracker ass-hole is much too old for me.”
Sharon laughed again. “That is not,” she said, “the way he sees himself. But I guess I just would not be able to swallow the way he would see you. So. We can close the subject. You going to marry Fonny. All right. When I really think about it” – and now she paused, and, in a way, she was no longer Sharon, my mother, but someone else; but that someone else was, precisely, my mother, Sharon – “I guess I’m real pleased.” She leaned back, arms folded, looking away, thinking ahead. “Yeah. He’s real. He’s a man.”
“He’s not a man yet,” said Ernestine, “but he’s going to become a man – that’s why you sitting there, fighting them tears. Because that means that your youngest daughter is about to become a woman.”
“Oh, shut up,” Sharon said. “Wish to God you’d get married to somebody, then I’d be able to bug you half to death, instead of the other way around.”
“You’d miss me, too,” said Ernestine, very quietly, “but I don’t think I’m ever going to marry. Some people do, you know – Mama? – and some people don’t.” She stood up and kind of circled the room and sat down again. We could hear Fonny’s voice and Joseph’s voice, in the other room, but we couldn’t hear what they were saying – also, we were trying very hard not to hear. Men are men, and sometimes they must be left alone. Especially if you have the sense to realize that if they’re locked in a room together, where they may not especially want to be, they are locked in because of their responsibility for the women outside.
‘Well I can understand that,” said Sharon – very steadily, and without moving.
“The only trouble,” Ernestine said, “is that sometimes you would like to belong to somebody.”
“But,” I said – I had not known I was going to say it – “it’s very frightening to belong to somebody.”
And perhaps until the moment I heard myself say this, I had not realized that this is true.
“Six in one,” said Ernestine, and smiled, “half dozen in the other.”
Joseph and Fonny came back from the other room.
“Both of you are crazy,” Joseph said, “but there’s nothing I can do about that.” He watched Fonny. He smiled – a smile both sweet and reluctant. Then, he looked at me. “But – Fonny’s right – somebody was bound to come along some day and take you away. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon. But – like Fonny says, and it’s true – you’ve always been together, from childhood on. And you ain’t children no more.” He took Fonny by the hand and led Fonny to me, and he took me by the hand and he pulled me to my feet. He put my hand in Fonny’s hand. “Take care of each other,” he said. “You going to find out that it’s more than a notion.”
Tears were standing in Fonny’s eyes. He kissed my father. He let go my hand. He moved to the door. “I’ve got to get home,” he said, “and tell my Daddy.” His face changed, he looked at me, he kissed me across the space dividing us. “He’ll be mighty happy,” he said. He opened the door. He said to Joseph, “We be back here around six this evening, okay?”
“Okay,” said Joseph, and now he was smiling all over his face.
Fonny went on out the door. Two or three days later, Tuesday or Wednesday, we went downtown together again and started seriously looking around for our loft. And that was going to turn out to be a trip and a half.
Mr. Hayward was in his office on the Monday, just as he had said he would be. I got there about seven fifteen, and Mama was with me.
Mr. Hayward is about thirty-seven, I would guess, with gentle brown eyes and thinning brown hair. He’s very, very tall, and he’s big; and he’s nice enough, or he seems nice enough, but I’m just not comfortable with him. I don’t know if it’s fair to blame him for this. I’m not really comfortable with anybody these days, and I guess I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable with a lawyer.
He stood up as we came in, and put Mama in the big chair and me in the smaller one and sat down again behind his desk.
“How are you ladies today? Mrs. Rivers? And how are you, Tish? Did you see Fonny?”
“Yes. At six o’clock.”
“And how is he?”
That always seemed a foolish question to me. How is a man if he’s fighting to get out of prison? But then, too, I had to force myself to see, from another point of view, that it was an important question. For one thing, it was the question I was living with; and, for another, knowing “how” Fonny was might make a very important difference for Mr. Hayward, and help him with his case. But I also resented having to tell Mr. Hayward anything at all about Fonny. There was so much that I felt he should already have known. But maybe I’m being unfair about that, too.
“Well, let’s put it this way, Mr. Hayward. He hates being in there, but he’s trying not to let it break him.”
“When we going to get him out?” asked Mama.
Mr. Hayward looked from Mama to me, and smiled – a painful smile, as though he had just been kicked in the balls. He said, “Well, as you ladies know, this is a very difficult case.”
“That’s why my sister hired you,” I said.
“And you are beginning to feel now that her confidence was misplaced?” He was still smiling. He lit a cigar.
“No,” I said, “I wouldn’t say that.”
I wouldn’t have dared to say that – not yet, anyway – because I was afraid of having to look for another lawyer, who might easily be worse.
“We liked having Fonny around,” Mama said, “and we just kind of miss him.”
“I can certainly understand that,” he said, “and I’m doing all I can to get him back to you, just as fast as I can. But, as you ladies know, the very greatest difficulty has been caused by the refusal of Mrs. Rogers to reconsider her testimony. And now she has disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” I shouted, “how can she just disappear?”
“Tish,” he said, “this is a very big city, a very big country – even, for that matter, a very big world. People do disappear. I don’t think that she has gone very far – they certainly do not have the means for a long journey. But her family may have returned her to Puerto Rico. In any case, in order to find her, I will need special investigators, and-“
“That means money,” Mama said.
“Alas,” said Mr. Hayward. He stared at me from behind his cigar, an odd, expectant, surprisingly sorrowful look.
I had stood up; now I sat down. “That filthy bitch,” I said, “that filthy bitch.”
“How much money?” Mama asked.
“I am trying to keep it as low as possible,” said Mr. Hayward, with a shy, boyish smile, “but special investigators are – special, I’m afraid, and they know it. If we’re lucky, we’ll locate Mrs. Rogers in a matter of days, or weeks. If not” – he shrugged – “well, for the moment, let’s just assume we’ll be lucky.” And he smiled again.
“Puerto Rico,” Mama said heavily.
“We don’t know that she has returned there,” Mr. Hayward said, “but it is a very vivid possibility. Anyway, she and her husband disappeared some days ago from the apartment on Orchard Street, leaving no forwarding address. We have not been able to contact the other relatives, the aunts and uncles, who, anyway, as you know, have never been very cooperative.”
“But doesn’t it make it look bad for her story,” I asked, “to just disappear like that? She’s the key witness in this case.”
“Yes. But she is a distraught, ignorant, Puerto Rican woman, suffering from the aftereffects of rape. So her behavior is not incomprehensible. You see what I mean?” He looked at me hard, and his voice changed. “And she is only one of the key witnesses in this case. You have forgotten the testimony of Officer Bell – his was the really authoritative identification of the rapist. It is Bell who swears that he saw Fonny running away from the scene of the crime. And I have always been of the opinion – you will remember that we discussed this – that it is his testimony which Mrs. Rogers continually repeats-“
“If he saw Fonny at the scene of the crime, then why did he have to wait and come and get him out of the house?’
“Tish,” Mama said. “Tish.” Then, “You mean – let me get you straight now – that it’s that Officer Bell who tells her what to say? You mean that?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Hayward.
I looked at Hayward. I looked around the room. We were way downtown, near Broadway, not far from Trinity Church. The office was of dark wood, very smooth and polished. The desk was wide, with two telephones, a button kept flashing. Hayward ignored it, watching me. There were trophies and diplomas on the walls, and a large photograph of Hayward, Senior. On the desk, framed, were two photographs, one of his wife, smiling, and one of his two small boys. There was no connection between this room, and me.
Yet, here I was.
“You’re saying,” I said, “that there’s no way of getting at the truth in this case?”
“No. I am not saying that.” He re-lit his cigar. “The truth of a case doesn’t matter. What matters is – who wins.”
Cigar smoke filled the room. “I don’t mean,” he said, carefully, “that I doubt the truth. If I didn’t believe in Fonny’s innocence, I would never have taken the case. I know something about Officer Bell, who is a racist and a liar – I have told him that to his face, so you can feel perfectly free to quote me, to anyone, at any time you wish – and I know something about the D.A. in charge of this case, who is worse. Now. You and Fonny insist that you were together, in the room on Bank Street, along with an old friend, Daniel Carty. Your testimony, as you can imagine, counts for nothing, and Daniel Carty has just been arrested by the D.A.’s office and is being held incommunicado. I have not been allowed to see him.” Now, he rose and paced to the window. “What they are doing is really against the law – but – Daniel has a record, as you know. They, obviously, intend to make him change his testimony. And – I do not know this, but I am willing to bet – that that is how and why Mrs. Rogers has disappeared.” He paced back to his desk, and sat down. “So. You see.” He looked up at me. “I will make it as easy as I can. But it will still be very hard.”
“How soon do you need the money?” Mama asked.
“I have begun the operation already,” he said, “of tracing the lady. I will need the money as soon as you can get it. I will also force the D.A.’s office to allow me to see Daniel Carty, but they will throw every conceivable obstacle in my way-“
“So we’re trying,” Mama said, “to buy time.”
Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church. Fonny was doing: time. In six months time, our baby would be here. Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met: somewhere, in time, we had loved; somewhere, no longer in time, but, now, totally, at time’s mercy, we loved.
Somewhere in time, Fonny paced a prison cell, his hair growing – nappier and nappier. Somewhere, in time, he stroked his chin, itching for a shave, somewhere, in time, he scratched his armpits, aching for a bath. Somewhere in time he looked about him, knowing that he was being lied to, in time, with the connivance of time. In another time, he had feared life: now, he feared death – somewhere in time. He awoke every morning with Tish on his eyelids and fell asleep every night with Tish tormenting his navel. He lived, now, in time, with the roar and the stink and the beauty and horror of innumerable men: and he had been dropped into this inferno in the twinkling of an eye.
Time could not be bought. The only coin time accepted was life. Sitting on the leather arm of Mr. Hayward’s chair, I looked through the vast window, way down, on Broadway, and I began to cry.
“Tish,” said Hayward, helplessly.
Mamam came and took me in her arms.
“Don’t do us like that,” she said. “Don’t do us like that.”
But I couldn’t stop. It just seemed that we would never find Mrs. Rogers; that Bell wouldn’t ever change his testimony; that Daniel would be beaten until he changed his. And Fonny would rot in prison, Fonny would die there – and I -1 could not live without Fonny.
“Tish,” Mama siad, “you a woman now. You got to be a woman. We are in a rough situation – but, if you really want to think about it, ain’t nothing new about that. That’s just exactly, daughter, when you do not give up. You can’t give up. We got to get Fonny out of there. I don’t care what we have to do to do it – you understand me, daughter? This shit has been going on long enough. Now. You start thinking about it any other way, you just going to make yourself sick. You can’t get sick now – you know that – I’d rather for the state to kill him than for you to kill him. So, come on, now – we going to get him out.”
She moved away from me. I dried my eyes. She turned back to Hayward.
“You don’t have an address for that child in Puerto Rico, do you?”
“Yes.” He wrote it out on a piece of paper, and handed it to her. ‘We’re sending somebody down there this week.”
Mama folded the piece of paper, and put it in her purse.
“How soon do you think you’ll be able to see Daniel?”
“I intend,” he said, “to see him tomorrow, but I’m going to have to raise all kinds of hell to do it “
“Well,” Mama said, “just as long as you do it.”
She came back to me.
“We’ll put our heads together, at home, Mr. Hayward, and start working it on out, and I’ll have Ernestine call you early tomorrow morning. All right?”
“That’s fine. Please give Ernestine my regards.” He put down his cigar, and came and put one clumsy hand on my shoulder. “My dear Tish,” he said. “Please hold on. Please hold on. I swear to you that we will win, that Fonny will have his freedom. No, it will not be easy. But neither will it be as insurmountable as it seems to you today.”
‘Tell her,” Mama said.
“Now – when I go to see Fonny, the first question he always asks is always about you. And I always say, Tish? she’s fine. But he watches my face, to make sure I’m not lying. And I’m a very bad liar. I’m going to see him tomorrow. What shall I tell him?”
I said, “Tell him I’m fine.”
“Do you think you can manage to give us a little smile? – to go with the message. I could carry it with me. He’d like that.”
I smiled, and he smiled, and something really human happened between us, for the first time. He released my shoulder, and walked over to Mama. “Could you have Ernestine call me around ten? or even earlier, if possible. Otherwise, she may not be able to get me before six.”
“Will do. And thank you very much, Mr. Hayward.”
“You know something-? I wish you’d drop the mister.”
“Well – okay. Hayward. Call me Sharon.”
“That I will do. And I hope that we become friends, out of all this.”
“I’m sure we will,” Mama said. “Thank you again. ‘Bye now.”
“Dood-bye. Don’t forget what I said, Tish.”
“I won’t. I promise. Tell Fonny I’m fine.”
“That’s my girl. Or, rather” – and he looked more boyish than ever – “Fonny’s girl.” And he smiled. He opened the door for us. He said, “Good-bye.”
We said, “Good-bye.”
Fonny had been walking down Seventh Avenue, on a Saturday afternoon, when he ran into Daniel again. They had not seen each other since their days in school.
Time had not improved Daniel. He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three – he is a little older than Fonny – he was already running out of familiar faces. So, they grabbed each other on the avenue – after a moment of genuine shock and delight – howling with laughter, beating each other around the head and shoulders, children again, and, though Fonny doesn’t like bars, sat themselves down at the nearest one, and ordered two beers.
“Wow! What’s happening?” I don’t know which of them asked the question, or which of them asked it first: but I can see their faces.
“Why you asking me, man?”
“Because, like the man says about Mt. Everest, you’re there.”
“No kidding, man – how you making it?”
“I gotta slave for the Jew in the garment center, pushing a hand truck, man, riding up and down in them elevators.”
“How your folks?”
“Oh, my Daddy passed, man, while ago. I’m still at the same place, with my Mama. Her varicose veins come down on her, though. So” – and Daniel looked down into his beer.
“What you doing -1 mean, now?”
“You mean, this minute?”
“I mean, you any plans, man, you hung up, or can you come on and hang out with me? I mean, right now-?”
“I ain’t doing nothing.”
Fonny swallowed his beer, and paid the man. “Come on. We got some beer at the pad. Come on. You remember Tish?”
“Tish?- “
“Yeah, Tish. Skinny little Tish. My girl.”
“Skinny little Tish?”
“Yeah. She’s still my girl. We going to get married, man. Come on, and let me show you the pad. And she’ll fix us something to eat – come on, I told you we got beer at the house.”
And, though he certainly shouldn’t be spending the money, he pushes Daniel into a cab and they roll on down to Bank Street: where I am not expecting them. But Fonny is big and cheerful, overjoyed; and the truth is that I recognize Daniel by the light in Fonny’s eyes. For, it is not so much that time has not improved him: I can see to what extent he has been beaten. This is not because I am perceptive, but because I am in love with Fonny. Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind. And I could not be indifferent to Daniel because I realized, from Fonny’s face, how marvelous it was for him to have scooped up, miraculously, from the swamp waters of his past, a friend.
But it means that I must go out, shopping, and so out I go, leaving them alone. We have a record player. As I go out, Fonny is putting on “Compared To What,” and Daniel is squatting on the floor, drinking beer.
“So, you really going to get married?” Daniel asks – both wistful and mocking.
“Well, yeah, we looking for a place to live – we looking for a loft because that don’t cost no whole lot of bread, you know, and that way I can work without Tish being bugged to death. This room ain’t big enough for one, ain’t no question about its being big enough for two, and I got all my work here, and in the basement.” He is rolling a cigarette as he says this, for him and for Daniel, squatting opposite him. “They got lofts standing empty all over the East Side, man, and don’t nobody want to rent them, except freaks like me. And they all fire traps and some of them ain’t even got no toilets. So, you figure like finding a loft ain’t going to be no sweat.” He lights the cigarette, takes a drag, and hands it to Daniel. “But, man – this country really do not like niggers. They do not like niggers so bad, man, they will rent to a leper first. I swear.” Daniel drags on the cigarette, hands it back to Fonny – Tired old ladies kissing dogs! cries the record player – who drags on it, takes a sip of his beer and hands it back. “Sometimes Tish and I go together, sometimes she goes alone, sometimes I go alone. But it’s always the same story, man.” He stands up. “And now I can’t let Tish go alone no more because, dig, last week we thought we had us a loft, the cat had promised it to her. But he had not seen me. And he figures a black chick by herself, way downtown, look ing for a loft, well, he know he going to make it withher. He thinks she’s propositioning him, that’s what he really thinks. And Tish comes to tell me, just so proud and happy” – he sits down again – “and we go on over there. And when the cat sees me, he says there’s been some great misunderstanding, he can’t rent the loft because he’s got all these relatives coming in from Rumania like in half an hour and he got to give it to them. Shit. And I told him he was full of shit and he threatened to call the cops on my ass.” He takes the cigarette from Daniel. “I’m really going to have to try to figure out some way of getting some bread together and getting out of this fucking country.”
“How you going to do that?”
“I don’t know yet,” says Fonny. “Tish can’t swim.” He gives the cigarette back to Daniel, and they whoop and rock with laughter.
“Maybe you could go first,” says Daniel, soberly.
The cigarette and the record are finished.
“No,” says Fonny, “I don’t think I want to do that.” Daniel watches him. “I’d be too scared.”
“Scared of what?” asks Daniel – though he really knows the answer to this question.
“Just scared,” says Fonny – after a long silence.
“Scared of what might happen to Tish?” Daniel asks. There is another long silence. Fonny is staring out the window. Daniel is staring at Fonny’s back.
“Yes,” Fonny says, finally. Then, “Scared of what might happen to both of us – without each other. Like Tish ain’t got no sense at all, man – she trusts everybody. She walk down the street, swinging that little behind of hers, and she’s surprised, man, when some cat tries to jump her. She don’t see what I see.” And silence falls again, Daniel watching him, and Fonny says, “I know I might seem to be a weird kind of cat. But I got two things in my life, man – I got my wood and stone and I got Tish. If I lose them, I’m lost. I know that. You know” – and now he turns to face Daniel – “whatever’s in me I didn’t put there. And I can’t take it out.”
Daniel moves to the pallet, leans against the wall. “I don’t know if you so weird. I know you lucky. I ain’t got nothing like that. Can I have another beer, man?”
“Sure,” Fonny says, and goes to open two more cans. He hands one to Daniel and Daniel takes a long swallow before he says, “I just come out the slammer, baby. Two years.”
Fonny says nothing – just turns and looks.
Daniel says nothing; swallows a little more beer.
“They said – they still say – stole a car. Man, I can’t even drive a car, and I tried to make my lawyer – but he was really their lawyer, dig, he worked for the city – prove that, but he didn’t. And, anyway, I wasn’t in no car when they picked me up. But I had a little grass on me. I was on my stoop. And so they come and picked me up, like that, you know, it was about midnight, and they locked me up and then the next morning they put me in the lineup and somebody said it was me stole the car – that car I ain’t seen yet. And so – you know – since I had that weed on me, they had me anyhow and so they said if I would plead guilty they’d give me a lighter sentence. If I didn’t plead guilty, they’d throw me the book.Well” – he sips his beer again – “I was alone, baby, wasn’t nobody, and so I entered the guilty plea. Two years!” He leans forward, staring at Fonny. “But, then, it sounded a whole lot better than the marijuana charge.” He leans back and laughs and sips his beer and looks up at Fonny. “It wasn’t I let them fuck over me because I was scared and dumb and I’m sorry now.” He is silent. Then, “Two years!”
“By the balls,” says Fonny.
“Yes,” says Daniel – after the loudest and longest silence either of them has ever known.
When I come back in, they are both sitting there, a little high, and I say nothing and I move about in the tiny space of the kitchenette as quietly as I can. Fonny comes in for a moment and rubs up against me from behind and hugs me and kisses the nape of my neck. Then, he returns to Daniel.
“How long you been out?”
“About three months.” He leaves the pallet, walks to the window. “Man, it was bad. Very bad. And it’s bad now. Maybe I’d feel different if I had done something and got caught. But I didn’t do nothing. They were just playing with me, man, because they could. And I’m lucky it was only two years, you dig? Because they can do with you whatever they want.Whatever they want. And they dogs, man. I really found out, in the slammer, what Malcolm and them cats was talking about. The white man’s got to be the devil. He sure ain’t a man. Some of the things I save, baby, I’ll be dreaming about until the day I die.”
Fonny puts one hand on Daniel’s neck. Daniel shudders. Tears stream down his face.
“I know,” Fonny says, gently, “but try not to let it get to you too tough. You out now, it’s over, you young.”
“Man, I know what you’re saying. And I appreciate it. But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.”
Fonny says nothing, simply stands there, with his hand on Daniel’s neck.
I yell, from the kitchen, “You cats hungry?”
“Yeah,” Fonny yells back, “we starving. Move it!”
Daniel dries his eyes and comes to the door of the kitchenette and smiles at me.
“It’s nice to see you, Tish. You sure ain’t gained no weight, have you?”
“You hush. I’m skinny because I’m poor.”
‘Well, I sure don’t know why you didn’t pick yourself a rich husband. You ain’t never going to gain no weight now.”
“Well, if you skinny, Daniel, you can move faster and when you in a tight place, you got a better chance of getting out of it. You see what I mean.”
“You sound like you got it figured. You learn all that from Fonny?”
“I learned some things from Fonny. But I also have a swift, natural intelligence – haven’t you been struck by it?”
“Tish, I been struck by so many things that I really have not had time to do you justice.”
“You’re not the only one. And I can’t really blame you. I’m so remarkable, I sometimes have to pinch myself.”
Daniel laughs. “Td like to see that. Where?”
Fonny mutters, “She’s so remarkable, I sometimes have to go up side her head.”
“He beats you, too?”
“Ah! what can I do-? All my life is just despair, but I don’t care-“
Suddenly we are singing,
When he takes me in his arms,
The world is bright, all right.
What’s the difference it I say I’ll go away
When I know I’ll come back On my knees someday For, whatever my man is I am his,
Forevermore!
Then, we are laughing. Daniel sobers, looking within, suddenly very far away. “Poor Billie,” he says, “they beat the living crap out of her, too.”
“Man,” Fonny says, “we just have to move it from day to day. If you think too much about it, you really are fucked, can’t move at all.”
“Let’s eat,” I say. “Come on.”
I have prepared what I know Fonny likes: ribs and combread and rice, with gravy, and green peas. Fonny puts on the record player, low: Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On.”
“Maybe Tish can’t gain no weight,” says Daniel, after a moment, “but you sure will. You folks mind if I drop by more often – say, around this time?”
“Feel free,” says Fonny, cheerfully, and winks at me. “Tish ain’t very good looking, but she can sure get the pots together.”
“I’m happy to know I have some human use,” I tell him, and he winks at me again, and starts chewing on a rib.
Fonny: chews on the rib, and watches me: and, in complete silence, without moving a muscle, we are laughing with each other. We are laughing for many reasons. We are together somewhere where no one can reach us, touch us, joined. We are happy, even, that we have food enough for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. It’s wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.
Daniel stays with us till midnight. He’s a little afraid to leave, afraid, in fact, to hit those streets, and Fonny realizes this and walks him to the subway. Daniel, who cannot abandon his mother, yet longs to be free to confront his life; is terrified at the same time of what that life may bring, is terrified of freedom; and is struggling in a trap. And Fonny, who is younger, struggles now to be older, in order to help his friend toward his deliverance. Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? And why not every man?
The song is old, the question unanswered.
On their walk that night, and many nights thereafter, Daniel tried to tell Fonny something about what had happened to him, in prison. Sometimes he was at the house, and so I heard it, too; sometimes, he and Fonny were alone. Sometimes, when Daniel spoke, he cried – sometimes, Fonny held him. Sometimes, I did. Daniel brought it out, or forced it out, or tore it out of himself as though it were torn, twisted, chilling metal, bringing with it his flesh and his blood – he tore it out of himself like a man trying to be cured:
“You don’t know what’s happening to you, at first. No way to know it. They come and got me off my stoop and they searched me. When I thought about it later, I realized that I didn’t really know why. I was always on that stoop, me and the other cats, and they was always passing by, and, while I wasn’t never on no shit, they knew some of the other cats has to be – you know they knew it. And they could see the dudes scratching and nodding. I think they dug that. When I thought about it later, I thought to myself, the motherfuckers really dig that shit. They go on into headquarters and report, Everything’s cool, sir. We escorted the French connection while he made his rounds and the shit’s been delivered and the niggers is out of it. But this night I was by myself, about to go on in, and they stopped the car and yelled at me and pushed me into the hallway and searched me. You know how they do it.”
I don’t know. But Fonny nods, his face still, his eyes very dark.
“And I had just picked up this grass, it was in my ass-pocket. And so they pulled it out, man, do they love to pat your ass, and one of them give it to the other and one of them handcuffed me and pushed me into the car. And I hadn’t known it was going to come to that, maybe I was a little high, maybe I hadn’t had time to think, but, baby, when that man put his handcuffs on me and pushed me down the steps and on into the car and then that car started moving, I wanted to scream for my Mama. And then I started getting scared, because she can’t hardly do nothing for herself, and she’d start to worrying about me, and wouldn’t nobody know where I was! They took me down to the precinct and they booked me on a narcotics charge and they took everything I had off of me and I started to ask, Can I make a phone call? and then I realized that I didn’t really have nobody to call, except my Mama, and who she going to call this hour of night? I just hoped she was sleeping, you know, like she had just figured that I was out late, and, by time she woke up in the morning and realized I wasn’t there that maybe I’d have figured out – something. They put me in this little cell with about four or five other cats, they was just nodding and farting, and I sat there and I tried to get my mind together. Because what the fuck am I going to do? I ain’t got nobody to call – I really don’t, except maybe that Jew I work for; he a nice enough dude, but, man, he ain’t hardly going to dig it. What I’m really trying to figure is how I can get somebody else to call my Mama, somebody who’s cool, who can cool her, somebody who can do something. But I can’t think of nobody.
“Morning came and they put us in the wagon. There’s this old white motherfucker they picked up off the Bowery – I guess – he done vomited all over himself and he’s looking down at the floor and he’s singing. He can’t sing, but he sure is stinking. And, man, I’m sure grateful I ain’t on no shit because now one of the brothers is started to moan, he got his arms wrapped around himself, and sweat is starting to pour off that cat, like water down a scrubbing board. I ain’t much older than he is, and I sure wish I could help him but I know I can’t do nothing. And I think to myself, Now, the cops who put him in this wagon know that this dude is sick. I know they know it. He ain’t supposed to be in here – and him not hardly much more than a kid. But the mothers who put him in this wagon, man, they was coming in their pants while they did it. I don’t believe there’s a white man in this country, baby, who can even get his dick hard, without he hear some nigger moan.
“Well, we get on down there. And I still ain’t thought of nobody to call. I want to shit and I want to die, but I know I can’t do neither. I figure they’ll let me shit when they get ready, in the meantime I just got to hold it best I can, and it just pure foolishness for me to think of wanting to die because they can kill me any time they want to and maybe I’ll die today.Before I shit. And then I think of my Mama again. I know she worried by now.”
Sometimes Fonny held him, sometimes I did. Sometimes, he stood at the window, with his back to us.
“I can’t really tell you much more about it – maybe there’s a whole lot of shit that I won’t never be able to tell nobody. T’hey had me on the grass, and so they nailed me on the car – that car I ain’t seen yet. I guess they just happened to need a car thief that day. Sure wish I knew whose car it was. I hope it wasn’t no black dude’s car, though.”
Then, sometimes, Daniel would grin, sometimes he would dry his eyes. We would eat and drink together. Daniel was trying very hard to get past something, something unnamable: he was trying as hard as a man can try. And sometimes I held him, sometimes Fonny: we were all he had.
On the Tuesday after the Monday that I saw Hayward, I saw Fonny at the six o’clock visit. I had never seen him so upset before.
“What the fuck we going to do about Mrs. Rogers? Where the fuck did she go?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll find her.”
“How you going to find her?”
“We’re sending people to Puerto Rico. We think that’s where she went.”
“And suppose she went to Argentina? or Chile? or China?”
“Fonny. Please. How’s she going to get that far?”
“They can give her the money, to go anywhere!”
“The D.A.’s office, that’s who!”
“Fonny-“
“You don’t believe me? You don’t think they can do it?”
“I don’t think they have.”
“How you going to get the money to find her?”
“We’re all working, all of us.”
“Yeah. My Daddy’s working in the garment center, you’re working in a department store, your Daddy’s working on the waterfront-!”
“Fonny. Listen-“
“Listen to what? What we going to do about that fucking lawyer? He don’t give a shit about me, he don’t give a shit about nobodyl You want me to die in here? You know what’s going on in here? You know what’s happening to me, to me, to me, in here?”
“Fonny. Fonny. Fonny.”
“I’m sorry, baby. I don’t mean none of that for you. I’m sorry. I love you, Tish. I’m sorry.”
“I love you, Fonny. I love you.”
“How’s the baby coming?”
“It’s growing. It’ll start showing more next month.”
We stared at each other.
“Get me out of here, baby. Get me out of here. Please.”
“I promise. I promise. I promise.”
“Don’t cry. I’m sorry I yelled. I wasn’t yelling at you, Tish.”
“Please don’t cry. Please don’t cry. It’s bad for the baby.”
“AH right.”
“Give us a smile, Tish.”
“Is that all right?”
“You can do better than that.”
“Is this better?”
“Yeah. Give us a kiss.”
I kissed the glass. He kissed the glass.
“You still love me?”
“I’ll always love you, Fonny.”
“I love you. I miss you. I miss everything about you, I miss everything we had together, everything we did together, walking and talking and making love – oh, baby, get me out of here.”
“I will. Hold on.”
“I promise. – Later.”
He followed the guard into the unimaginable inferno, and I stood up, my knees and elbows shaking, to cross the Sahara again.
That night I dreamed, I dreamed all night, I had terrible dreams. In one of these dreams, Fonny was driving a truck, a great big truck, very fast, too fast, down the highway, and he was looking for me. But he didn’t see me. I was behind the truck, calling out his name, but the roar of the motor drowned my voice. There were two turnings off this highway, and they both looked exactly alike. The highway was on a cliff, above the sea. One of the turnings led to the driveway of our house; the other led to the cliff’s edge and a drop straight down to the sea. He was driving too fast, too fast! I called his name as loud as I could and, as he began to turn the truck, I screamed again and woke up.
The light was on, and Sharon was standing above me. I cannot describe her face. She had brought in a cold, wet towel and she wiped my brow and my neck. She leaned down and kissed me.
Then, she straightened and looked into my eyes.
“I know I can’t help you very much right now – God knows what I wouldn’t give if I could. But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better.Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.”
She took both my hands and held them tightly between her own. “Try to remember that. And: the only way anything ever gets done is when you make up your mind to do it. I know a lot of our loved ones, a lot of our men, have died in prison: but not all of them. You remember that. And: you ain’t really alone in that bed, Tish. You got that child beneath your heart and we’re all counting on you, Fonny’s counting on you, to bring that child here safe and well. You the only one who can do it. But you’re strong. Lean on your strength.”
I said, “Yes. Yes, Mama.” I knew I didn’t have any strength. But I was going to have to find some, somewhere.
‘Are you all right now? Can you sleep? ’Yes.”
“I don’t want to sound foolish. But, just remember, love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”
And, again, she kissed me and she turned out the light and she left me.
I lay there – wide awake; and very frightened. Get me out of here.
I remembered women I had known, but scarcely looked at, who had frightened me; because they knew how to use their bodies in order to get something that they wanted. I now began to realize that my judgment of these women had had very little to do with morals. (And I now began to wonder about the meaning of this word.) My judgment had been due to my sense of how little they appeared to want. I could not conceive of peddling myself for so low a price.
But, for a higher price? for Fonny?
And I fell asleep; for a white; and then I woke up. I had never been so tired in my life. I ached all over. I looked at the clock and I realized that it would soon be time to get up and go to work, unless I called in sick.But I could not call in sick.
I got dressed and went out to the kitchen, to have tea with Mama. Joseph and Ernestine had already gone. Mama and I sipped our tea in almost total silence. Something was turning over and over and over, in my mind: I could not speak.
I came down into the streets. It was a little past eight o’clock. I walked these morning streets; these streets are never empty. I passed the old blind black man on the corner. Perhaps I had seen him all my life. But I wondered about his life, for the first time, now. There were about four kids, all junkies, standing on the corner, talking. Some women were rushing to work. I tried to read their faces. Some women were finally going to get a little rest, and they headed off the avenue, to their furnished rooms. Every side street was piled high with garbage, and garbage was piled high before every stoop along the avenue. I thought, If I’m going to peddle ass, I better not try it up here. It would take just as long as scrubbing floors, and be a lot more painful. What I was really thinking was, I know I can’t do it before the baby comes, but, if Fonny’s not out by then, maybe I’ll have to try it. Maybe I better get ready. But there was something else turning over, at the bottom of my mind, which I knew I didn’t have the courage to look at yet.
Get ready, how? I walked down the steps and pushed through the turnstile and stood on the subway platform, with the others. When the train came, I pushed in, with the others, and I leaned against a pole, while their breath and smell rolled over me. Cold sweat covered my forehead and began to trickle down my armpits and my back. I hadn’t thought of it before, because I knew I had to keep on working up to just about the last minute; but now I began to wonder just how, as I became heavier and sicker, I was going to get to work. If I should pass out, these people, getting on and getting off, would simply trample me and the baby to death. We’re counting on you – Fonny’s counting on you – Fonny’s counting on you, to bring that baby here, safe and well. I held the white bar more firmly. My freezing body shook.
I looked around the subway car. It was a little like the drawings I had seen of slave ships. Of course, they hadn’t had newspapers on the slave ships, hadn’t needed them yet; but, as concerned space (and also, perhaps, as concerned intention) the principle was exactly the same. A heavy man, smelling of hot sauce and toothpaste, breathed heavily into my face. It wasn’t his fault that he had to breathe, or that my face was there. His body pressed against me, too, very hard, but this did not mean that he was thinking of rape, or thinking of me at all. He was probably wondering only – and that, dimly – how he was going to get through another day on his job. And he certainly did not see me.
And, when a subway car is packed – unless it’s full of people who know each other, going on a picnic, say – it is almost always silent. It’s as though everybody is just holding his breath, waiting to get out of there.Each time the train comes into a station, and some of the people push you aside, in order to get out – as happened now, for example, with the man who smelled of hot sauce and toothpaste – a great sigh seems to rise; stifled immediately by the people who get on. Now, a blond girl, carrying a bandbox, was breathing her hangover into my face. My stop came, and I got off, climbed the steps and crossed the street. I went into the service entrance and punched the clock, put my street clothes away and went out to my counter. I was a little late for the floor, but I’d clocked in on time.
The floor manager, a white boy, young, nice enough, gave me a mock scowl as I hurried to my place.
It isn’t only old white ladies who come to that counter to smell the back of my hand. Very rarely does a black cat come anywhere near this counter, and if, or when, he does, his intentions are often more generous and always more precise. Perhaps, for a black cat, I really do, too closely, resemble a helpless baby sister. He doesn’t want to see me turn into a whore. And perhaps some black cats come closer, just to look into my eyes, just to hear my voice, to check out what’s happening. And they never smell the back of my hand: a black cat puts out his hand, and you spray it, and he carries the back of his own hand to his own nostrils.And he doesn’t bother to pretend that he’s come to buy perfume. Sometimes, he does – buy some perfume; most often he doesn’t. Sometimes the hand he has brought down from his nostrils clenches itself into a secret fist, and, with that prayer, that salutation, he moves away. But a white man will carry your hand to his nostrils, he will hold it there. I watched everybody, all day long, with something turning over and over and over, in my mind. Ernestine came to pick me up at the end of the day. She said that Mrs. Rogers had been located, in Santurce, Puerto Rico; and someone of us would, have to go there.
“With Hayward?”
“No. Hayward’s got to deal with Bell, and the D.A. here. Anyway, you can see that, for many, many reasons, Hayward can’t go. He’d be accused of intimidating a witness.”
‘But that’s what they’re doing-!”
“Tish” – we were walking up Eighth Avenue, toward Columbus Circle – “it would take us until your baby is voting age to prove that.”
“Are we going to take the subway, or the bus?”
“We’re going to sit down somewhere until this rush hour’s over. You and me, we’ve got to talk anyway, before we talk to Mama and Daddy. They don’t know yet. I haven’t talked to them yet”
And I realize how much Ernestine loves me, at the same time that I remember that she is, after all, only four years older than I.
Mrs. Victoria Rogers, nee Victoria Maria San Felipe Sanchez, declares that on the evening of March 5, between the hours of eleven and twelve, in the vestibule of her home, she was criminally assaulted by a man she now knows to have been Alonzo Hunt, and was used by the aforesaid Hunt in the most extreme and abominable sexual manner, and forced to undergo the most unimaginable sexual perversions.
I have never seen her. I know only that an American-born Irishman, Gary Rogers, an engineer, went to Puerto Rico about six years ago, and there met Victoria, who was then about eighteen. He married her, and brought her to the mainland. His career did not go up, but down; he seems to have become embittered. In any case, having pumped three children out of her, he left. I know nothing about the man with whom she was living on Orchard Street, with whom, presumably, she had fled to Puerto Rico. The children are, presumably, somewhere on the mainland, with her relatives. Her “home” is Orchard Street. She lived on the fourth floor. If the rape took place in the “vestibule,” then she was raped on the ground floor, under the staircase. It could have taken place on the fourth floor, but it seems unlikely; there are four apartments on that floor. Orchard Street, if you know New York, is a very long way from Bank Street. Orchard Street is damn near in the East River and Bank Street is practically in the Hudson. It is not possible to run from Orchard to Bank, particularly not with the police behind you. Yet, Bell swears that he saw Fonny “run from the scene of the crime.” This is possible only if Bell were off duty, for his “beat” is on the West Side, not the East. Yet, Bell could arrest Fonny out of the house on Bank Street. It is then up to the accused to prove, and pay for proving, the irregularity and improbability of this sequence of events.
Ernestine and I had sat down in the last booth of a bar off Columbus.
Ernestine’s way with me, and with all her children, is to drop something heavy on you and then lean back, calculating how you’ll take it. She’s got to know that, in order to calculate her own position: the net’s got to be in place.
Now, maybe because I had spent so much of the day, and the night before, with my terrors – and my calculations – concerning the possible sale of my body, I began to see the reality of rape.
I asked, “Do you think she really was raped?”
“Tish. I don’t know what’s going on in that busy, ingrown mind of yours, but that question has no bearing on anything. As fax as our situation is concerned, baby, she was raped. That’s it.” She paused and sipped her drink. She sounded very calm, but her forehead was tense, intelligent, with terror. “I think, in fact, that she was raped and that she has absolutely no idea who did it, would probably not even recognize him if he passed her on the street. I may sound crazy, but the mind works that way. She’d recognize him if he raped her again. But then it would no longer be rape. If you see what I mean.”
“I see what you mean. But why does she accuse Fonny?”
“Because Fonny was presented to her as the rapist and it was much easier to say yes than to try and relive the whole damn thing again. This way, it’s over, for her. Except for the trial. But, then, it’s really over. For her.”
“And for us, too?”
“No.” She looked at me very steadily. It may seem a funny thing to say, but I found myself admiring her guts. “It won’t be over for us.” She spoke very carefully, watching me all the while. “There’s a way in which it may never be over, for us. But we won’t talk about that now. Listen. We have to think about it very seriously, and in another way. That’s why I wanted to have a drink alone with you, before we went home.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” I was suddenly very frightened.
“Listen. I don’t think that we can get her to change her testimony. You’ve got to understand: she’s not lying.”
“What are you trying to tell me? What the fuck do you mean, she’s not lying?”
“Will you listen to me? Please? Of course, she’s lying. We know she’s lying. But – she’s – not – lying. As far as she’s concerned, Fonny raped her and that’s that, and now she hasn’t got to deal with it anymore. It’s over. For her. If she changes her testimony, she’ll go mad. Or become another woman. And you know how often people go mad, and how rarely they change.”
” So – what are we to do?”
“We have to disprove the state’s case. There’s no point in saying that we have to make them prove it, because, as far as they’re concerned, the accusation is the proof and that’s exactly the way those nuts in the jury box will take it, quiet as it’s kept. They’re liars, too – and we know they’re liars. But they don’t.”
I remembered, for some reason, something someone had said to me, a long time ago – it might have been Fonny: A fool never says he’s a fool.
‘We can’t disprove it. Daniel’s in jail.”
“Yes. But Hayward is seeing him tomorrow.”
‘That don’t mean nothing. Daniel is still going to change his testimony, I bet you.”
“He may. He may not. But I have another idea.”
There we sat, in this dirty bar, two sisters, trying to be cool.
“Let’s say the worst comes to the worst. Mrs. Rogers will not change her testimony. Let’s say Daniel changes his. That leaves only Officer Bell, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. And so what?”
“Well – I have a file on him. A long file. I can prove that he murdered a twelve-year-old black boy, in Brooklyn, two years ago. That’s how come he was transferred to Manhattan. I know the mother of the murdered boy. And I know Bell’s wife, who hates him.”
“She can’t testify against him.”
“She hasn’t got to testify against him. She just has to sit in that courtroom, and watch him-“
“I don’t see how this helps us – at all-‘
“I know you don’t. And you may be right. But, if worse comes to worst, and it’s always better to assume that it will – come to worst – then our tactic has to be to shatter the credibility of the state’s only witness.”
“Ernestine,” I said, “you’re dreaming.”
“I don’t think I am. I’m gambling. If I can get those two women, one white and one black, to sit in that courtroom, and if Hayward does his work right, we ought to be able to shatter the case, on cross-examination.Remember, Tish, that, after all, it isn’t very much of a case. If Fonny were white, it wouldn’t be a case at all.”
Well. I understand what she means. I know where she’s coming from. It’s a long shot. But, in our position, after all, only the long shot counts. We don’t have any other: that’s it. And I realize, too, that if we thought it were feasible, we might very well be sitting here, cool, very cool, discussing ways and means of having Bell’s head blown off. And, when it was done, we’d shrug and have another drink: that’s it. People don’t know.
“Yes. Okay. What about Puerto Rico?”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you. Before we talk to Mama and Daddy. Look. You can’t go. You’ve got to be here. For one thing, without you, Fonny will panic. I don’t see how I can go. I’ve got to keep lighting firecrackers under Hayward’s ass. Obviously, a man can’t go. Daddy can’t go, and God knows Frank can’t go. That leaves – Mama.”
“Mama-?”
“She don’t want to go to Puerto Rico.”
“That’s right. And she hates planes. But she wants your baby’s father out of jail. Of course she doesn’t want to go to Puerto Rico. But she’ll go.”
“And what do you think she can do?”
“She can do something no special investigator can do. She may be able to break through to Mrs. Rogers. Maybe not – but if she can, we’re ahead. And if not – well, we haven’t lost anything, and, at least, we’ll know we’ve tried.”
I watch her forehead. Okay.
“And what about Daniel?”
“I told you. Hayward is seeing him tomorrow. He may have been able to see him today. He’s calling us tonight”
I lean back. “Some shit.”
“Yeah. But we in it now.”
Then, we are silent. I realize, for the first time, that the bar is loud. And I look around me. It’s actually a terrible place and I realize that the people here can only suppose that Ernestine and I are tired whores, or a Lesbian couple, or both. Well. We are certainly in it now, and it may get worse. It will, certainly – and now something almost as hard to catch as a whisper in a crowded place, as light and as definite as a spider’s web, strikes below my ribs, stunning and astonishing my heart – get worse. But that light tap, that kick, that signal, announces to me that what can get worse can get better. Yes. It will get worse. But the baby, turning for the first time in its incredible veil of water, announces its presence and claims me; tells me, in that instant, that what can get worse can get better; and that what can get better can get worse. In the meantime – forever – it is entirely up to me. The baby cannot get here without me. And, while I may have known this, in one way, a little while ago, now the baby knows it, and tells me that while it will certainly be worse, once it leaves the water, what gets worse can also get better. It will be in the water for a while yet: but it is preparing itself for a transformation. And so must I.
I said, “It’s all right. I’m not afraid.”
And Ernestine smiled, and said, “Let’s move it then.”
DMU Timestamp: October 19, 2020 19:17
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(Jan 05 2021 1:15PM) : fonny is a good person. he likes helping people in need. [Edited] more
he helped her walk to places that she didnt know
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JAYDEN T
(Jan 06 2021 1:21PM) : This is exactly why I said why I think he’s innocent he doesn’t seem like the type to get locked up.Also I bet you they didn’t even see his full explanation of the situation.
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NIERRA R
(Jan 08 2021 12:32PM) : i agree fonny dosent seem like he would do something like that.
HEATHER F
(Jan 08 2021 1:25AM) : Fonny is a trustworthy person. He seems to be loyal as well.
Nico V
(Jan 08 2021 8:52PM) : This shows Fonny cares for her. He is truly in love.
Bethzy H
(Jan 08 2021 10:00PM) : Fonny seems so loyal, he seems to be really in love with her.
Mbathio M
(Jan 13 2021 1:56PM) : It’s nice that they’re able to embrace eachother and got moments like these before he went to jail
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MARIO N
(Jan 06 2021 9:54AM) : Wow fonny seems like respectful person.I still wonder how he was arrested
ALEJANDRO R
(Jan 06 2021 12:52PM) : fonny sounds like a good respectful person for doing this.
(Jan 06 2021 12:58PM) : This paragraph alone makes me feel as if Fonny is innocent because as you can see he’s respectful and he really loves tish and I don’t think he has to the heart to commit a crime knowing tish is pregnant
shaliyah f
(Jan 10 2021 8:27AM) : agreed
SARA P
(Jan 06 2021 1:22PM) : everything about this paragraph makes it hard to believe Fonny isn't innocent. he's seems so respectful and caring.
Tasneem O
(Jan 06 2021 4:37PM) : Yeah i agree
(Jan 08 2021 12:33PM) : i also agree he seems like a really good person.
NICOLLE J
(Jan 11 2021 2:18AM) : Fonny is so sweet and caring that you can tell he cant hurt someone i mean everyone can including him but he wont because he cares.
Alexander w
(Jan 12 2021 10:43AM) : fonny really has to like tish to the point where hes going to hold her hands all the way until there stop in the subway
(Dec 21 2020 1:54PM) : That means they woke up extra extra early
AMRA B
(Jan 06 2021 9:51AM) : Summary more
I wonder why they were up. I guess they were up because they were partying or they were on drugs.
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ALEXANDER C
(Jan 08 2021 4:59PM) : could be comfortable for Tish that Fonny is holding her in his arms because of how scary walking on the street might be by yourself and how little people there are.
EMMANUEL R
(Jan 04 2021 10:32PM) : gentlemen more
instead of kissing her goodbye fonny decided to be nice enough and drop her off.
Ian D
(Jan 06 2021 9:44AM) : I agree. I think that it was very nice of Fonny to bring her up the stairs instead of just leaving at the front.
(Jan 05 2021 10:10AM) : this was nice of fonny to drop her off
(Jan 06 2021 12:53PM) : I feel like fonny will be an amazing father
ROJO V
(Jan 07 2021 11:33AM) : i agree
Kenneth P
(Jan 06 2021 11:08PM) : Fonny is such a good respectful person to drop her off and get her home safely.
(Jan 10 2021 8:29AM) : fonny did a great job by dropping her off,hes showing he will be a great dad to his child
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(Jan 08 2021 10:09PM) : Fonny is being such a gentlemen by taking her to her house and making sure she gets there safely.
(Jan 12 2021 10:37AM) : fonny being a gentleman more
Fonny walked tish up to her door
(Jan 08 2021 8:59PM) : its weird how their family dynamic changes.
(Jan 06 2021 10:11AM) : Fonnys relationship with tishs family changes often
(Jan 08 2021 12:33PM) : i agree , its kind of a love and hate relationship
(Jan 08 2021 10:12PM) : yeah that is true it does seem to be like a love and hate relationship with Tish's family and Fonny.
(Jan 06 2021 12:54PM) : So she’s basically fake
(Jan 10 2021 8:30AM) : yup
Drew H
(Jan 06 2021 6:44PM) : (Opinion) She hardly even tries to put up a nice front, being that Tish is a guest. I wonder what was going through her head when she established she wouldn't like her.
(Jan 08 2021 5:01PM) : seems to either project that Tish's sis doesn't like him or just isn't in the mood because of the time.
No paragraph-level conversations. Start one.
Leo P
(Jan 06 2021 9:46AM) : Why does he sound angry at her. Did something happen?
(Jan 06 2021 11:26PM) : What was it about his tone that gave her that reaction? [Edited]
MEKHI J
(Jan 14 2021 10:17AM) : Plot more
I wonder what Fonny and Tish are doing at her parents house. I think they may be going to ask for money.
Kaimea Z
(Jan 02 2021 9:21PM) : why did Ernestine have that reaction? more
What about Fonny’s tone of voice made her look at him sharply and come full awake? Was Fonny’s tone very serious? Did he sound as if he was planning to say something life changing?
(Jan 06 2021 12:55PM) : Yeah i have the same question
(Jan 05 2021 10:11AM) : why was fonnys tone of voice like this, was she mad?
Kiran C
(Jan 05 2021 2:15PM) : Fonny is Tish's boyfriend. His pronouns are he/him.
(Jan 06 2021 1:04PM) : i wonder why she had this reaction
(Jan 08 2021 10:18PM) : I also wonder why he had this reaction, I wanna know what tone he used since his tone made his sis look sharply and full awake ?
(Jan 06 2021 10:13AM) : I wonder if this hurt tish feeling s
benny v
(Jan 06 2021 12:55PM) : Fonny issa little bold
(Jan 13 2021 1:57PM) : fr
(Jan 06 2021 12:57PM) : I’m trying to figure out if he was sarcastic or was he serious or was he being rude
(Jan 06 2021 6:45PM) : That's also what I'm trying to figure out. And I wonder if Tish is having the same reaction as us.
(Jan 08 2021 5:02PM) : seems a little straight to the point and is weird for him to say this all of a sudden.
ANGELINA T
(Jan 10 2021 8:15PM) : Agreed. It makes no sense how he said that so quickly and abruptly. [Edited]
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Dehao L
(Jan 07 2021 1:26PM) : She was worried about them was gonna call the police because of how long they were taking
(Jan 08 2021 12:34PM) : i agree but i dont think they would do that
(Jan 11 2021 2:19AM) : you can tell that Fonny is family to them because of what's stated here she was relived and that's just sweet.
(Jan 12 2021 10:48AM) : facts because if fonny did not go to the door with tish it would have been a whole different situation
Alexis K
(Jan 06 2021 2:30AM) : Question more
why did he run away from her??
did he think that made the problem easier to face??
(Jan 07 2021 1:27PM) : agree he should have faced the problem instead of making it even harder for himself
(Jan 08 2021 12:34PM) : i agree as well he shouldnt run away from it
(Jan 06 2021 12:58PM) : Oh he sounds scared 👀
(Jan 08 2021 12:34PM) : i agree
(Jan 06 2021 12:58PM) : Omg someone pls tell me who Sharon is I forgot ???
DOUGLAS M
(Jan 05 2021 1:27PM) : fonny is getting scared because he thinks that tish is going to get taken or love someone else. this is kind of nice because it shows how much fonny really loves tish
(Jan 07 2021 1:27PM) : kinda wish more people were like this
(Jan 08 2021 12:35PM) : this is very wholesome of him this just shows how much he loves her
(Jan 08 2021 10:22PM) : This shows how much he really adores and loves Tish and how he scared someone would take Tish away from him.
(Jan 06 2021 10:12AM) : Summary more
I think Fonny is scared because he thinks his girl will get stollen thats why he stayed away for a long time.
Luisa P
(Jan 07 2021 11:56PM) : Fonny wants to marry tish because he wants Tish to be his and doesn't want her to get another lover.
(Jan 08 2021 9:09PM) : Fonny wants to strengthen their relationship by getting married
(Jan 06 2021 12:59PM) : I feel like Fonny thinks that since hes in jail Tish will find a new lover and love someone else and he’s prolly worried
alyssa g
(Jan 06 2021 10:18AM) : confused but certain, thats what he sounds like but in the end he really does like her a lot
(Jan 12 2021 10:50AM) : for real he really in love
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(Jan 06 2021 10:20AM) : he only has eyes for her and that's why he is so serious about their relationship
(Jan 06 2021 1:00PM) : This is a sign that they are meant for each other and will become great parents and can get married
(Jan 10 2021 3:35PM) : Fonny has never loved any other girl the way he loves Tish. more
“But I could see I was just fooling myself. 1 I didn’t love nobody else but her.”
JUAN V
(Jan 04 2021 10:04AM) : . more
Fonny is feared that Tish might lose interest in him if she’s away for a while,
(Jan 06 2021 9:58AM) : . [Edited] more
I would feel the same way in this situation.
(Jan 06 2021 1:00PM) : Yeah i agree i feel like Fonnys mothers is going to ruin everything as well
(Jan 12 2021 10:51AM) : yeah onnys mom plays a factor too
I think Tish dad is afraid to let her go and get married because she is only 18 years old she is a young girl.
(Jan 06 2021 1:03PM) : Yeah, but if his daughter is pregnant already then there shouldn’t be a problem getting married
(Jan 06 2021 1:02PM) : i still dont know why sharon hates tish or thinks that tish isnt enough for fonny
(Jan 08 2021 9:10PM) : yeah 118 is very young to get married
(Jan 10 2021 8:33AM) : i mean yea, but there is a lot of people who gets married young, some people find the love of their life early [Edited]
(Dec 22 2020 1:32PM) : They are talking about Tish and Fonny getting married. She is saying that the oldest should get married first.
(Dec 22 2020 1:34PM) : i agree
(Jan 05 2021 10:16AM) : hey shaliyahhhh , nah buh i agree too
(Jan 10 2021 8:34AM) : hiiiii
(Dec 29 2020 7:33PM) : I kinda disagree because I feel like it’s doesn’t matter if you are the youngest or the oldest because if your are ready to get married and you want to then you should
(Jan 04 2021 10:59PM) : agree more
I agree because you shouldn’t depend on the older sibling to get married first for you to get married because at that point your just wasting your time.
(Jan 12 2021 10:52AM) : same
(Jan 06 2021 9:48AM) : I think that the parents are just disappointed in the oldest child for not getting married.
(Jan 06 2021 4:41PM) : I dont think Tish’s mom is disappointed,i think she was just shocked and relied on SIS to get married first
(Jan 10 2021 8:37AM) : that exactly what i said,your age shouldn't make you wanna or not wanna get married you should do it because you know your ready for commitment
(Jan 10 2021 8:38AM) : you're*
(Jan 06 2021 1:05PM) : I dont like when she said the older sister should get married first because what if the oldest isnt ready for marriage and the youngest is. Your obviously not going to hold up her time because the oldest isnt ready
(Jan 07 2021 1:28PM) : agreed the oldest sister should get married when shes ready
(Jan 08 2021 10:27PM) : yeah I agree, I don't think she should wait until the oldest sister gets married for she can married. I think the oldest sister should get married when she feels ready and found the one.
(Jan 10 2021 3:41PM) : I agree more
Just because she is the oldest sister doesn’t mean that she has to get married before her sister. she should be able to wait until she is ready and finds a person that she loves.
(Jan 12 2021 10:55AM) : I feel like if shes ready she should get married because why would the younger sibling wan't to wait it might take decades till the older sister gets married
why she so mad??
(Jan 06 2021 10:11AM) : Question [Edited] more
I ment to say he
(Jan 07 2021 11:59PM) : Because he probably worried that something happens because she came home really late.
(Jan 06 2021 1:06PM) : I dont think she’s mad i think she just wants an answer [Edited]
(Jan 12 2021 10:57AM) : yeah same i would if they came home that late
I think that was the main reason Tish & Fonny went to that place so that Fonny can admit to Tish’s father that he wants to marry her
(Jan 06 2021 9:49AM) : I agree. I think that telling Tish's father was the reason Fonny was there
and I think this is a better move than just marry someone without notice.
(Jan 04 2021 11:05PM) : marry more
sounds sweet the fact that fonny confessed his love to tish father because he loves her and wants to marry her but needs tish father consent.
(Jan 05 2021 10:17AM) : i agree and now i feel like he should be more willing to say yes just for the fact that he asked for his consent
(Jan 05 2021 1:12PM) : i feel like there was no reson for fonny to think that "Mr.Rivers" would get mad becasue this isnt a bad thing for anyone.
(Jan 06 2021 1:08PM) : Exactly and Tish’s mother is always so supportive unlike fonnys mom
(Jan 05 2021 1:17PM) : ask to marry [Edited] more
all he wants to do is marry her because of how he has true love for her. he cares abut her feelings and her troubles.
(Jan 06 2021 1:08PM) : Aww i just cant wait till they have a baby and get married and hopefully fonnys mother won’t interfere with negativity
(Jan 06 2021 10:22AM) : he is serious about making her his wife and he is being respectful trying to get Mr. Rivers ok. Thats a very nice thing to do.
(Jan 06 2021 10:23AM) : I believe that this is true. He is doing what he has to.
(Jan 06 2021 6:47PM) : I'm glad that even if Fonny is nervous, he's standing up and not backing down. This shows that he really love that girl.
(Jan 07 2021 1:29PM) : agreed most people would be to scared to stand up even for the ones they love
(Jan 10 2021 5:30PM) : I like how Fonny knows what he wants and even though he may be nervous he is still answering Joseph's questions with absolute certainty.
(Jan 06 2021 1:10PM) : Ooo i love this conversation ,Fonny is not going to let himself down 😎
(Jan 06 2021 1:14PM) : Tish’s father is doing an amazing job asking Fonny theses questions and if i was a father I would’ve done the same thing because I wouldn’t want to send my daughter off to someone not responsible,so I would ask as much questions as possible to know him.
(Jan 06 2021 1:15PM) : So like he just swollen it so quickly that he didnt even tast it . I’m shocked 👁 👄 👁
That is a good question. I agree with Joseph they are so young.If I was Tish’s dad I would say she is to young to because she has no money and no house
(Jan 06 2021 1:16PM) : But if they did have money and a house i think that would be fine because she older then 18
(Jan 13 2021 2:05PM) : I think here Joe is just trying to be protective of her here.
(Jan 06 2021 10:22AM) : I agree with Joseph. I would ask how they are going to feed themselves too. How are the going to put food on the table so young
(Jan 08 2021 12:02AM) : I agree with you because parents want their kids to marry somebody with a stable job because they don't their kids to have to suffer.
(Jan 06 2021 12:55PM) : how are they going to provide for each other financially at a young age?
(Jan 06 2021 1:25PM) : It concerns me that they may not be able to provide for each other and her child. there both so young and at that time it was hard to find a well paying job for such young people.
(Jan 12 2021 10:59AM) : I would be confused as well on how they want to get married with no money to provide for themselves
(Jan 06 2021 11:34PM) : I think that joseph will PROBABLY accept her decision but also he might not because parents don't want to see their daughter pregnant.
(Jan 12 2021 11:00AM) : for real
hai cheng l
(Jan 06 2021 10:00AM) : I think Joseph will accept Tish's decision. One reason is because of how much he loves his daughter.
(Jan 06 2021 1:17PM) : And he knows that fonny is a good person and he loves tish
(Jan 14 2021 10:29AM) : Characters more
Tish’s dad seems very protective. It is good he asks her opinion. I don’t like when some adults take too much control and don’t listen
(Jan 06 2021 1:18PM) : Correction its supposed to say FONNY
(Jan 06 2021 11:37PM) : I think he was trying to disrespect Fonny by calling him by the wrong name.
(Jan 14 2021 12:26AM) : It is a typo in the text.
(Jan 12 2021 11:04AM) : i feel like that was mad disrespectful to call him the wrong name even if hes not fond of the marriage
(Jan 06 2021 1:20PM) : Uh oh this sounds bad , is he going to yell at him,give him a lecture,etc WHAT IS HE GOING TO TELL HIM 😱
(Jan 08 2021 12:03AM) : I don't think so I just think he going to talk about Tish and how is he going to take care of his daughter.
(Jan 05 2021 1:19PM) : they were in aw [Edited] more
they probably felt frozen in that moment. they stood there all surprised.
(Jan 08 2021 12:43PM) : agree i would have the same reaction too..
OCEAN D
(Jan 04 2021 8:53AM) : Why does Fonny want Tish to marry him, I personally think they're to young Fonny is 22 and Tish 19, is it because people got married at such a young age in the 70s and it was common ? Or does Fonny love Tish so much he couldn't wait [Edited]
(Jan 06 2021 10:26AM) : Mama is tryingt o be sure that tish is sure that she loves him and that she is sure that she is going to be happy with her decision.
(Jan 06 2021 1:21PM) : Lmaooo she’s so funny
(Jan 06 2021 1:23PM) : Best sister of the year
(Jan 06 2021 9:54AM) : what were Joseph and Fonny talking about? more
What were Joseph and Fonny talking about that they had to go to a different room? were they talking about Fonny’s plans of how to take care of Tish? Was Joseph giving Fonny advice?
(Jan 06 2021 1:24PM) : That’s the whole point we dont know yet we have to wait and read 😊
(Jan 12 2021 11:06AM) : I'm happy they got approval but i'm not happy they don't have a way to provide for them selves
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Tears Flow As Niger Delta Weeping Hero Set To Go Home Dec 4
By Mingo Saya
The burial arrangements for the late Niger Delta weeping hero, The founding fathers of Ijaw Youth council (IYC), worldwide, cum pioneer defence minister of the council, Ex-Niger Delta Agitator, Late Captain General Samson Funpuwei, AKA Yanyanbou, who passed on October 16, 2020 after a brief illness, at UBTH Benin City, Edo State,
According to the uncle of the deceased, Comrade Mingo F. Saya, who spoke with news men with tears said, Late Captain Samson, was an hero of Ijaw nation, who paid the supreme price for the survival of Niger Delta, describing him as a weeping freedom fighter in the creek of Niger Delta.
ALSO READ : COVID-19: Abba Kyari Buried Without Pomp And Ceremony
Adding that the ex-warlord indeed was a frontier of Kaiama declaration,
Mingo noted that Captain Funpuwei was the only survived son from his parents, saying that in his early days, he lost his two parents.
He stressed that his late uncle, Yanyanbou was among the 5,000 Ijaw youths, that were drawn from over five hundred communities, from over 40 clans that issued Kaiama declaration on 11th December, 1998 at Kaiama town, Bayelsa state, for the continuous survival of the indigenous people of the Ijaw Ethnic Nationality of the Niger Delta and struggle for the control of oil mineral resources as well articulated the freedom of Niger Delta people.
He urged Ijaw leaders to give him a befitting burial and pay the last honour to the Ijaw hero.
Late General Funpuwei agitated against ecological devastation, degradation of the environment and military repression, bombardment of Ijaw communities.
General Funpuwei rose against unabating damage done to Ijaw fragile natural environment and to the health of Ijaw people due to the uncontrolled exploration and exploitation of crude oil and natural gas which has led to numerous oil spillage, uncontrolled gas flaring, the opening up of Ijaw forests to loggers, indiscriminate canalisation, flooding, land subsidence coastal erosion, earth tremors and many others.
The final burial ceremony will be coming up on Friday 4th December 2020, at his country home, Ajakurama town, Egbema kingdom, Ovia South West LGA, Edo state.
Organizers of the event added: “On behalf of the entire family, we invite the Ijaw Nation, IYC worldwide, INC, Niger Delta Ex-agitatiors, Niger Delta Ex-warlord, Edo state PDP family and the general public to join us for his last rest.
Jubilation As Gospel Church Of Christ Dedicates Ultra Modern Church Building To God In Grandstyle
Photos: Cash Forex Group Holds Business Seminar In Warri
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Spectator Podcast: can Britain really become 'the Saudi Arabia of wind power'?
2020-12-16T14:30:00.0000000Z
Ørsted has sponsored a podcast with the Spectator looking at the future of offshore wind in the UK. Following the Prime Minister’s recent announcement of the government’s ten point plan there is now a pledge for offshore wind to produce enough power for every home by 2030. Offshore wind currently constitutes over 50 per cent of the renewables in the UK, with costs coming down considerably over recent years.
The podcast looks at whether offshore wind has its limits? Is it always a good deal for the consumer? And how far can it realistically advance us on our road to Net Zero by 2050?
Journalist Kate Andrews hears views from Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth; Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the UK government; and Benj Sykes, VP for UK Offshore at Ørsted.
Paul Haines
Head of UK Media Relations
pauha@orsted.co.uk
Benefits of offshore wind
Discover how offshore wind is transforming coastal communities
Explore the benefits of offshore wind
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Scientism and Pseudoscience: A Philosophical Commentary
I have built a reputation for being a critic of scientism, which my dictionary defines as “excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques.” Indeed, I am putting together a new volume on the topic for Chicago Press, which will be co-edited with my long time partner in crime, Maarten Boudry (a couple of years ago we put out an analogous collection on pseudoscience, a topic that I actually see as in some sense the mirror image of scientism). The contributors include colleagues who participated to a workshop I co-organized with Maarten at CUNY’s Graduate Center back in 2014.
But “scientism” can also be a label that defenders of pseudoscientific notions use to dismiss good science they don’t like, from evolutionary biology to atmospheric physics. So a paper I recently published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry takes on this alternative aspect of scientism, chastising a number of authors who rejected a very sound critical paper on the ethics of homeopathic “treatments.”
What happened was that back in 2012 the journal Bioethics published a commentary by K. Smith entitled “Against homeopathy—a utilitarian perspective.” In it, the author mounted an ethical challenge to homeopathic practice, framed in utilitarian terms, as the title obviously suggests (though a similar critique, I think, could be mounted also on both deontological and virtue ethical grounds).
Smith presented a systematic argument that began with an explanation of the theoretical implausibility of homeopathy and, in particular, of the two fundamental principles of the practice — the “law of similars” and the “law of infinitesimals.” He then engaged the empirical literature on homeopathy, finding it woefully insufficient to establish any of the claims on which the approach is based.
Smith also very carefully examined the possible benefits of homeopathy, including non-invasiveness and cost-effectiveness; its holistic approach; the possibility, range, and strength of placebo effects; and its fostering of patients’ autonomy regarding healthcare decisions. He concluded that “the benefits of homeopathy are rather minimal.”
Next, Smith went on to equally systematically analyze the possible disutilities of homeopathy: the risk of failing to seek conventional healthcare; the waste of resources that results from supporting homeopathic practice (since it is known not to work, outside of placebos); the problem raised by unwarranted credence, i.e., the credibility that homeopathy gains when it is endorsed by medical practitioners or healthcare agencies; the simultaneous weakening of support for evidence-based medicine and the weakening of support for types of “alternative” therapies that actually do work (e.g., some forms of meditation, massage, etc.). His conclusions were that “investment in homeopathy by public healthcare providers is unethical as it entails a waste of resources … the effect [of such investment] is important and amounts to a serious net disutility.”
I would have honestly thought all of the above to be a rather uncontroversial no-brainer. But, of course, I was wrong.
Bioethics published four responses to Smith’s paper (together with Smith’s counter-response), and that’s where things got interesting, and the s-word began to be carelessly thrown around. Let me give you some of the highlights:
One of the respondents, R. Moskowitz, began with the strange assertion that “if homeopathy is based on a mystery, that does not prove it to be a fake,” a type of “reasoning” that could just as well be used (and in fact has been used!) to defend the practice of astrology. He then went on, boldly and strangely, to turn the criticism that homeopathy works by placebo and via the natural self-healing of the human body into a positive: “can a higher compliment be paid to a medicine than that its action cannot be distinguished from a gentle, spontaneous, and long-lasting cure requiring no further treatment?” Well, if a medicine does not do anything beyond the spontaneous healing of the body, is it still medicine? And why do we charge patients for it?
A second critic, I. Sebastian, brought up a fallacious argument from authority, citing Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier’s (a virologist) support for homeopathy as somehow relevant to the discussion, in lieu of actual evidence originating from properly controlled, large, and well-statistically analyzed experiments. She characterized “allopathic” medicine as based on a deductive-nomothetic model (thus displaying only a superficial understanding of the philosophy of science), claiming that that is not the “model” adopted by homeopathy, for which somehow uncontrolled and anecdotal evidence is supposed to be sufficient. She then went on to accuse Smith of thinking that Mahatma Gandhi was unethical (because he was a proponent of homeopathy), which is an example of a colossal non sequitur (as well as yet another recourse to irrelevant authorities — Gandhi was not a medical researcher). Finally, and without any irony whatsoever, she concluded: “If Dr. Smith’s argument were simply an exercise in ivory tower philosophizing, it would be of little concern — but knowing that the health and in fact the lives of others may be affected by such thinking is very disturbing.” Indeed.
The third critic of Smith was one P. Bellavite, who rather idiosyncratically, preferred to focus only on a defense of the homeopathic principle of similitude — the idea that diseases causing certain symptoms are to be cured by the ministration of substances that produce similar effects on the body. He engaged in a manifest example of mumbo jumbo, i.e., talk that appears to be technical but in fact says nothing of substance whatsoever. His mention of “reorganizing regulation systems” and of “neuro-immuno-endocrine homeodynamics” was an artful mix of vacuities and obfuscatory language, as Smith clearly saw in his rebuttal.
Finally, let me turn to L. Milgrom and K. Chatfield, the authors who explicitly invoked scientism in the context of the exchange we are analyzing. To begin with, their response was self-contradictory: on the one hand, they wished to defend homeopathy on the ground of scientific evidence; on the other hand, they accused Smith of being scientistic precisely because he demanded such scientific evidence. It is either one or the other; they cannot have it both ways. Nonsensically, Milgrom and Chatfield complained that Smith avoided utilitarian scrutiny of conventional medicine, which of course not only was not the scope of the original article, but also would help homeopathy not at all.
We then come to the crux of the issue with the following extended quote:
“More perplexing is Dr Smith’s claim that homeopathy could weaken support for science-based medicine. Such fear is rooted not in science but in scientism, i.e. the unscientific belief that compared to other forms of knowledge, science is the absolute and only justifiable access to truth. Taken to the extreme, scientism defaults to Internet-fueled inquisitorial intolerance which, supported by certain academics, sections of the media, and (usually anonymous) blog sites, systematically vilifies anything considered ‘unscientific,’ e.g. the campaign to undemocratically rid Britain’s NHS of its homeopathy/CAM facilities. Fortunately, not all share such fundamentalist views, especially at the frontline.”
And here is my counter-commentary from the paper, in full:
To begin with, notice that Smith has never claimed that science is the “only justifiable access to truth,” much less that scientific knowledge is “absolute,” claims that truly would qualify as scientistic. He has simply treated medical research as a science, from which it follows that any claim about the medical efficacy or lack thereof of any treatment ought to be substantiated with the best scientific evidence available. I don’t know about you, but I quite like the medical advice I receive to be science-based. Notice also the semi-paranoid reference to undemocratic conspiracies to undermine homeopathy. As Smith himself explained in his rebuttal, public information campaigns about the lack of substantive evidence in favor of a particular practice, and calls for it not to be funded with taxpayers’ money, are — on the contrary — eminently democratic. Finally, also notice the use of the pejorative term “fundamentalism,” accompanied in the paper by a reference to an article by Holmes et al. where the word “fascism” is repeatedly used when writing about demands for scientific approaches to medical research. This sort of highly emotive talk — accompanied by precious little substantive evidence to back up one’s extraordinary claims — is one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience and in this case also represents an egregious, ideologically motivated misuse of the term “scientism.”
So, as you can see, my criticism of real instances of scientism does not preclude me from seeing clearly when the term is simply used as an excuse for lazy thinking and patently pseudoscientific “theorizing.”
This entry was posted in Massimo's Technical Stuff, Philosophy of Science on January 13, 2016 by Massimo.
46 thoughts on “Scientism and Pseudoscience: A Philosophical Commentary”
jorgelaris January 14, 2016 at 10:18 pm
Massimo, I recently had the following discussion with a science writer of a well known dairy in Mexico.
He wrote an article claiming that practicing vegetarianism is bad for health, endorsing all of his claims in just one published pepper (http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0088278&representation=PDF).
Well, I’m almost a vegetarian (I eat some fish now and then), and although I’m well aware that maybe my food habits may not be very healthy, I thought his argument had some flaws and pointed them to him in a comment: not just his entire criticism was based in only one study, but he discarded vegetarians as endorsing pseudoscience. So I explained to him that there is still alot of scientific controversy in this issue and also that comparing vegetarianism with pseudoscience was a bit naive and irresponsible because must vegetarians endorse this practice not because we wanna be healthy but because we have big issues with the way animals are treated by the industry and about environmental impact.
He answered to me that I was endorsing pseudoscience and that I will die eating my “herbs”. I felt so weird because I don’t see myself as the kind of person that will endorse pseudoscience, but maybe I am.
So, what do you think, I’m I being pseudoscientific? is being vegetarian something unhealthy?
And if not,
How should we react when a science writer witch has acces to such a big audience says such things? I regularly follow him, and this text surprised me. He almost always says coherent things.
ejwinner January 15, 2016 at 12:45 am
jorgelaris,
Vegetarianism is a dietary practice; it is neither science nor pseudo science.
Some forms of vegetarianism may be derived from pseudoscientific principles; others are well grounded in established, scientifically derived nutritional theories; still others developed ‘organically,’ so to speak, within cultures that needed to find sustenance without dependence of meat or dairy, which will largely prove sound, but not without certain issues than can be addressed through supplements.
The point is, if you wish to pursue vegetarianism in a healthy manner, consult a nutritionist, or a medical doctor (preferably one without your friend’s evident bias). Then you’ll have a consult with a scientifically informed advisor that you can wave in your friend’s face, if that gives you any joy.
Robin Herbert January 15, 2016 at 1:06 am
I have been a vegetarian for 37 years now and have never taken supplements except briefly because of undiagnosed Coeliac disease. Certainly I do have dairy. Mainly I don’t like meat.
Sounds like this science writer is spouting pseudo science. Yes, vegetarians will die. Everyone will die.
“I never cease to be amazed by the sheer amount of effort that goes into misinterpreting Dawkins!”
What misinterpretation would that be? A gene is not programming or designing anything, blindly or otherwise.
The are a pattern in a molecule.
He gets completely carried away and tortures the metaphor well beyond the point that it has any value at all for clarifying what is actually happening.
I said I knew it was a metaphor. I said that “seems” to forget this sometimes.
I never cease to be amazed at the sheer amount of effort you put into misinterpreting me Coel.
Coel,
Here is my original comment you were asking me to back up:
I must say that I find the relentless and unnecessary design and agency metaphors of the Dawkins school irritating and unhelpful, but I can fix that with the simple expedient of not reading any more of his books.
Of course I always got that it was a metaphor, but Dawkins himself appears to lose sight of this in his more purple passages.”
So to say as Dawkins does “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Is clearly a design and agency metaphor, not a truth.
Which is a nice segue back to the subject at hand.
Look at how creationists jump all over these metaphors and how they use them.
What they don’t say is that mainstream biologists mean these literally.
Because, despite what PZ Meyers may tell you, they are not idiots.
What they do say is that “evolutionists” hide behind the metaphors, because a dispassionate description of the plain unvarnished facts would sound self evidently absurd.
This is quite a different kind of pseudo science than the paranormal investigator.
What I wonder about are the homoeopathy crowd. Are they closer to the handfuls crowd, or the ID crowd.
“To be fair, he seems to gladly lend a big help to people who misinterpret him!”
I said this very thing to him on twitter. That was the exact moment he blocked me.
Coel January 15, 2016 at 5:13 am
What misinterpretation would that be?
Your misinterpretation that Dawkins “forgets” the metaphorical nature of some of his language. Your quote was: “Dawkins himself appears to lose sight of this in his more purple passages”, so perhaps you’re only saying that that’s how it appears to you. In which case, ok, but hundreds of thousands manage to read him without misinterpreting him that way.
Different people react in different ways to how something is presented, and nothing is optimal for everyone. If you don’t find Dawkins’s extended use of metaphorical language helpful then ok, but plenty of people do.
Is clearly a design and agency metaphor, not a truth.
He is also careful in his books to clarify exactly what his metaphors mean. And, given that interpretation of his language, the statement you quoted is indeed true. You are being overly pedantic here.
I partially disagree with Coel about the difference being one of quality. There is a lot of bad science out there, which is science nonetheless.
Perhaps any disagreement is pretty minor. On my quality continuum, we have “good science” a bit below unattainable perfection, then sloppy science, and a bit further down we have badly done science. Then, below that in quality we have badly done science that people persist in believing even though the mainstream has thoroughly discredited it, which we call pseudo-science. This seems pretty much in line with your comments.
I read it in its context, to see if I was being pedantic.
But still it reads like he thinks that we really are robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve a particular molecule.
He should really learn to employ phrases like “so to speak” or “as it were” instead of “this is a truth which continues to astonish me”.
I may be wrong, but it strikes me as absurd to talk, even metaphorically, of there being any sort of agency in evolution, even blind agency. It strikes me as even more absurd to point to one part of the system and say “that is the rationale”,
It seem misleading and pandering to the foible of wanting to see agency in everything. What would we lose if we dropped all of that sort of talk? Nothing that I can see.
Philosopher Eric January 15, 2016 at 7:56 am
While I think it’s good that we here seem quite opposed to homeopathy and other apparent examples of pseudoscience, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised by their prevalence, simply given common social beliefs. If there is a demand, a supply will surely be addressed in an adaptive market. But how might we improve this situation?
I would suggest working on the demand side, which is to say, helping people gain more faith in science. Though homeopathy practitioners may indeed promote their industry (and so may appear to be villains who take advantage of the stupid and the feeble) it’s surely the market which motivates them. Rather than attempting to fight the market, a more effective path may be to help change it.
If you consider my ideas “opaque,” “trite,” and “wrong,” then it is strange that you’ve never proposed any challenges to them, and going back to March of last year when a mutual friend introduced us. Instead I suspect that you’ve come to resent me for your inability to develop worthy arguments against my positions, and that this has culminated in your quite nasty response to me on Sunday (which Massimo has of course deleted). But what now? Will you silently permit your anger to build up once again, or will you and I be able to discuss our ideas in a civilized manner?
Sure, and that is exactly what he indeed does think — where the meaning of the phrases is explicitly and clearly explained in terms of Darwinian processes. He is not attributing consciousness or intelligence or deliberateness to this process, which is why he uses the word “blind”.
OK, so you, personally, don’t like his style. No problem. People are different. Plenty of people do like his style and find it very helpful in understanding such concepts. Millions of people — literally — have read his books and understood science better as a result.
I’m rather amused by the suggestion that he “should really learn” from you how to do science communication better. Are you *really* failing to understand his intent here, or are you just putting effort into seeing if you can find a way of misinterpreting him?
I do realise that — baffling though it is to me — that some people really can’t get what he’s saying. Mary Midgley is the obvious example.
Massimo Post author January 15, 2016 at 9:31 am
“Mary Midgley is the obvious example”
I think you keep confusing Midgley’s sarcasm for lack of understanding.
“This is quite a different kind of pseudo science than the paranormal investigator”
Are you suggesting that evolutionary biology is a pseudoscience?
as others have pointed out, vegetarianism is a perfectly rational (and healthy) choice, that one can make for ethical or health reasons, or simply because one doesn’t like meat. I think the Mexican journalist was the wacko here. (Of course that’s not to say that *some* vegetarians or vegans do make pseudoscientific claims. For instance, the idea of the paleo diet as healthy and natural probably is pseudoscience.)
“So some see science as trying, like classic verificationism, to restrict meaningfulness of claims to data-based foundations. But they see that (e.g.) moral and aesthetic claims appear to be meaningful without such foundations, and clumsily try to slide homeopathy’s claimed meaningfulness in on some like basis”
Yes, now I see what you meant. Well, but it’s not meaningfulness that is being restricted to evidence-based approaches, only the verification of health claims. And I doubt anyone can make a serious argument that health claims are aesthetic rather than empirical.
Coel January 15, 2016 at 10:06 am
Maybe in the latest piece. However, it’s clear that in her early writings about Dawkins on this topic she did indeed simply fail to understand, and she has never really admitted her error, which is why I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt.
Philosopher Eric January 15, 2016 at 11:37 am
…she has never really admitted her error, which is why I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt.
Coel I enjoy people who admit their past mistakes as well (such as Massimo, who has mentioned once being a platonist I believe) but in practice I also appreciate the political dynamics of the real world. Here I think it’s generally found that concessions of past mistakes harm a person’s influence, and therefore the most influential generally avoid this. Thus I’ve come to accept a lesser standard. I merely hope for people to get things right in the end, though publicly I’ll let them do what’s necessary. It’s a pragmatic position simply given that for the most part people seem to be, if not outright “idiots,” then at least “herded sheep.”
Will you silently permit your anger to build up once again …
I’m not in the least angry. Why would I be? You asked me what I thought of your posts about your scheme for revolutionising psychology and similar sciences, and my reply about them being a mixture of “opaque”, “trite”, and “wrong” might have been a bit blunt, but you asked me what I thought and if people do that I tend to answer.
… it is strange that you’ve never proposed any challenges to them …
That’s because I can’t make head or tail of them, nor see any merit or even substance in them. In order to be able to make a sensible response to a comment, that comment has to pass a threshold of being comprehensible and sensible enough to reply to. Sorry, I could probably word that in a more sugar-coated fashion, if I were any good at that sort of thing. I realise that diplomacy is not my strong point. But I’m not the only one who tends not to engage with your comments about revolutionising psychology and philosophy; possibly for the same reason.
I suspect that you’ve come to resent me for your inability to develop worthy arguments against my positions, …
As a general rule of thumb, if someone tries saying something several times and it doesn’t get replied to, it is most often because no-one can make sense of it or see any merit in it. It is generally not — despite the fond imaginings of the authors — that it is of such brilliance and insight that it is far beyond the capabilities of others to reply to, such that everyone is silently squirming or fuming or muttering to themselves or fearing for their jobs, or anything such.
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Thinker. Listener. Talker. Reader. Writer.
Breakout!
Feb 15, 2018 Apr 4, 2018 ~ Peter A Bell
Nice one, Pete! Putting a reference to Braveheart right at the top of your article was a stroke of genius. Braveheart is a trigger word for British Nationalists. They are pathologically obsessive about Mel Gibson’s kilt and claymore account of a mild-mannered minor Scottish nobleman turned blue-faced, bare-arsed freedum-fighter who, having out-thought and out-fought the Englander enemy, was betrayed by his ain folk and totally went to pieces over it. Unionists were bound to latch onto this cinematic allusion and be distracted from the vague, vacuous and vacillating drivel that follows.
I like Pete Wishart. He is a superb MP. He has served his constituency and his country admirably over many years at Westminster. As Chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee he has proved an embarrassment to most of his predecessors in that role. His work-rate is phenomenal. He is a credit to his party. He’s one of the good guys. But this article is almost a definitive statement of the very attitudes and thinking which the SNP and the Yes movement must eschew if Scotland is to be saved.
I say this, not to give offence – although I accept that offence may be taken, possibly by Pete Wishart himself and all but certainly by others on his behalf. I say it because my dedication to the cause of restoring Scotland’s independence is as strong as his. It would be remiss of me to be reticent out of respect for one individual when such a cause is at stake. To remain silent, even for friendship’s sake, in the face of what I can only regard as dangerous folly would be to betray the cause to which we both are committed.
The article deals with three main topics. The scheduling of a new independence referendum, and the timing of a formal declaration by the Scottish Government of its intention to hold such a referendum.
The relevance of Brexit to these questions of scheduling and timing.
The form, manner and conduct of the campaign to first secure and then achieve a Yes vote in a new independence referendum.
In each of these areas I find Pete Wishart’s analysis to be shallow, his conclusions indecisive, his ideas unimaginative and his general approach cautious almost to the point of paralysis. I know it’s only a short newspaper article. But if the intention was to give an impression of his thinking in relation to the core political issue of our time then, with every gram of goodwill I can muster, I cannot do otherwise than conclude that his thinking is woefully inadequate.
On the matter of when the new referendum should be announced and then held, Pete would have us wait until we can be “certain of victory”. He would have us put off the campaign until the campaign has been won. We should wait and see. We should make ourselves slave to the polls. We should be dictated to by events.
I genuinely don’t understand this. We don’t campaign because the polls have moved in our favour. We campaign in order to move them. We don’t campaign because public attitudes have changed. We campaign in order to change them. We don’t wait for the conditions to be right. We make them right.
If there is a point at which conditions are right for a new referendum, Pete declines to define it for us. He leaves such definition to indeterminate developments and unknown circumstances.
But what of developments which have already happened, or are in train now? What of the circumstances which already exist, or can be foreseen with a high degree of confidence? Where is their influence on Pete Wishart’s thinking? If development’s in the relationship between the UK and Scottish governments since 2014 do not have a definitive effect on thinking about the need for a new referendum, then what might?
What future developments might give adequate grounds if all the broken promises and exposed lies and imposition of execrable policies and casual disrespect of the last 40 grim months is to be borne without protest? What is it going to take before Pete Wishart is prepared to say enough?
The ‘Parable of Stirling Bridge’ with which Pete opens his article has a superficial ring of wisdom to it. It sounds very plausible to say that we should “hold” until the right moment. But this is no more than superficially plausible unless we are told precisely how close the enemy must be before we unleash our weaponry. And it makes absolutely no sense at all if the enemy is already upon is.
What are the circumstances in which Pete Wishart would consider the time ripe for making our move? We are none the wiser on that score for knowing his thoughts on the matter. To the extent that he chooses to reveal them, his thoughts appear to be that there is some mystical alignment of polling results and public mood which somehow allow us to know that the moment has arrived.
But what circumstances could be more propitious than those which have already been created by the British government? What circumstances could better suit the independence campaign than those which the British state is in the process of creating? We are already in a situation where Scotland is politically and economically disadvantaged by the Union. That situation isn’t going to get any better. It’s neither paranoia nor fear-mongering nor resort to the politics of grievance to state that things are going to get a great deal worse. The British political elite is telling us this every single day.
The process of delegitimising and bypassing our democratic institutions and elected representatives is already well advanced. It is not surreptitious. It is brazenly overt. The effort to undermine public confidence in our services and our infrastructure and our capacities is so ubiquitous and relentless as to have become a commonplace of daily life. Part of the prevailing circumstances.
This isn’t happening for no reason. There is a purpose. And we cannot afford to be so naive as to assume benign intent on the part of a British state whose imperatives include preventing the exercise of our democratic right of self-determination and locking Scotland into a political union on terms that are no more subject to meaningful consultation or negotiation involving the Scottish Government than the Brexit process. We have to take a realistic view of where all this delegitimising and undermining takes us.
These are the circumstances that pertain right now. We can be as sure as we need to be what those circumstances will become if we do nothing to alter the course of events. We don’t have to wait and see. The time to “hold” is already past. Now is certainly the day! Even if now isn’t quite yet the hour.
Then there is Brexit. And, if we take Pete Wishart’s advice, more holding. He acknowledges the inevitable economic impact of Scotland being dragged out of the EU despite voting decisively to Remain. He acknowledges that we’re “doomed”. Unless we take to the lifeboats. Pete deploys the metaphor of a stricken ocean liner. If you think of it that way, taking to the lifeboats is a, perhaps convenient, option. I prefer the analogy of a tall building.
When someone is threatening to push you off the top of a tall building you, firstly, don’t want to suppose that they might not do it. You’re now standing right on the edge of the roof; the precipice only millimetres away; your assailant advancing towards you with a mad gleam in their eye and arms outstretched, screaming their murderous intent, you should be naturally disinclined to pin your hopes on them changing their mind.
Nor need you reflect long and hard on the potential consequences of that final shove. When somebody pushes you off the top of a tall building, you don’t have to wait until you hit the pavement to know that it isn’t going to end well. There may be time for a last desperate hope of a parachute. Or the miracle of flight. Maybe even a lifeboat. But your fate is sealed. Having been pushed off that building you are doomed – with a capital ‘F’.
Pete Wishart’s assessment of the situation lacks the appropriate sense of urgency. Perhaps it might if he took any account of the constitutional, as well as the economic, implications of Brexit. Think of it as a precedent. The true relevance of Brexit to the independence campaign is, not that it promises to be economically ruinous, but that it represents probably the most extreme illustration to date of the asymmetry of power – or democratic deficit – which is one of the fatal flaws at the heart of the Union. Along with the denial of popular sovereignty, it is this inherent, systemic subordination of the needs, priorities and aspirations of Scotland’s people which makes the Union untenable.
But Pete seems not to consider this constitutional dimension. His analysis focuses almost entirely on the economic aspect. Eventually, people will feel the impact. Eventually they will hit the pavement. What use will a lifeboat be then?
There is no Brexit ‘deal’ which negates Scotland’s Remain vote. There is no Brexit ‘deal’ which is not an insult to Scotland. There is no Brexit ‘deal’ which can possibly compensate Scotland for the harm done by Brexit.
I don’t want to hear reassurances from SNP politicians that it may not happen, and even if it does it may not be so bad, and even if it is we may have a way out. I want to hear our elected representatives sounding angry and indignant about what is being done to Scotland. I want to hear them talking openly about the real and imminent threat to Scotland’s democracy and distinctive political culture from rampant ‘One Nation’ British Nationalism.
I want them to stop talking about Brexit as if it is the disease rather than merely a symptom of a cancer right at the heart of our constitutional arrangements. I want to hear them tell us of their determination to cut out this malignancy. I want to hear their ideas about how we might cure this increasing unbearable condition.
I don’t want to be placated with stories of how wonderful everything will be once the cancer of the Union is gone. I want to hear them come up with some convincing ideas about how we get rid of it.
I’m not getting any of that from Pete Wishart.
He asks the question, “How do we then get over the line and win?”. But his answer takes us absolutely nowhere.
“I don’t believe that it is in simply offering the same perspective that lost us the last referendum. We need a new independence offering that reflects the Scotland we now live in and takes into account the new political environment that we inhabit. Most importantly it needs to be sufficiently persuasive to win over that section of our population that have hitherto been unconvinced.”
This makes no more sense than talk of an “early referendum”. What constitutes “early”? Relative to what? What are the rules governing the interval between referendums? Who made these rules?
Was it our “perspective” that lost us the first referendum? What was it about that perspective which put people off? We need to be told.
What would a “new independence offering” look like? What could possibly be new about independence? How many different kinds of independence are there? This is not explained.
What might constitute “sufficiently persuasive”? What is the form of words which is going to induce an epiphany in “that section of our population that have hitherto been unconvinced”? Is such a form of words even possible? If it is, why has the entire Yes movement failed to find it? No answers.
Pete acknowledges that “offering the same prospectus, with the same arguments, is likely to produce the same result”. So don’t! Accept instead that there is no new way of presenting independence that is going to persuade those who aren’t listening because they’ve already decided that independence isn’t happening. Accept that we’ve already won over everybody who can be won over by the positive arguments.
Accept that we have already harvested the aspirational Yes vote. The only fertile ground left lies just to the No side of Yesland but well short of the desert of ideological British Nationalism. It is in that ground that we must now plant our seeds. And they must be the seeds of doubt.
Doubt was what Project Fear was all about. What gave the anti-independence campaign its strength was its capacity for generating doubt. Better Together was remarkably successful in creating an atmosphere of uncertainty even where none was warranted. Especially where none was warranted. Their strategy was to play on the fear of change. To exploit the insecurity that is a characteristic of the prevailing economic orthodoxy. To take the normal vagaries of life and exaggerate them until, however little actual substance they possessed, they took on the appearance of monstrous catastrophes awaiting those who dared challenge the established order.
They did this in various ways. And, of course, the anti-independence campaign enjoyed the support and assistance of shamefully compliant and docile mainstream media. This was essential, as the creation of doubt required that everything the Yes side did was constantly and repeatedly questioned while nothing the No side said or did was ever subject to any meaningful scrutiny. Uncertainty is relative. Simply by questioning one side more than the other, that side seems to have the most uncertainty associated with it.
If we want to win, we should look to the winners for lessons. We didn’t lose because there was something deficient or defective about the Yes message. We lost because they were better at frightening people than we were at inspiring people.
We have to accept that fear will tend to outweigh inspiration. Frightening people is relatively easy. Inspiring them is seriously hard.
Not that we want to emulate Project Fear. We don’t have to. We can instil in accessible minds an uncertainty about the assumed merits of the Union simply be telling the truth. Pretty much everybody who moved from No to Yes in the past started that journey by questioning their assumptions about the Union. The positive arguments of the Yes campaign had to be there in order for them to have somewhere to go when they let go of the status quo. But it was the letting go that was crucial.
The new Yes campaign must utilise this process in reverse. We need to change the emphasis of our narrative from one of heading towards a better future to one of breaking away from the past. We need to talk a bit less about the new age we hope to enter and considerably more about the existing mire from which we must extricate ourselves.
We don’t need a new independence campaign. We need an anti-Union campaign like we’ve never had.
That is the fresh thinking we require. That is the new approach we need. A more aggressive and proactive approach. In terms of the practical measures and methods we must adopt, we would do well to take what we can from the tactics that worked for Better Together/Project Fear. There is not space here to go into detail, but, by way of illustration, we might look to the fact that the No side had a message which was simple, concise and consistent. It may, when unwrapped, have been intellectually bereft; devoid of any substance or worth; riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies and contaminated by duplicity, deceit and dishonesty but. in its short form, it was always and everywhere the same.
By contrast, there were as many definitions of Yes as there were people asked to define it. The fundamental constitutional issue came to be lost in a welter of policy positions. People couldn’t see the question for the options.
While discussion of being independent has its place, that place is alongside the actual independence campaign. It cannot be the campaign. It is too diffuse and amorphous. If we are to break Scotland out of the Union, we need something hard and heavy and with a sharp point. We need some of that weaponry Wallace unleashed at Stirling Bridge. We need to be preparing that weaponry now. But we first of all need the leaders and influencers in the Yes movement to acknowledge that these are the kind of weapons we require.
I find in Pete Wishart’s article no such acknowledgement. His thinking appears to be that, faced with the formidable might of the British state, we need only fluff up the pillows we took to the last sword-fight.
I find no sense that the day of battle is already upon us, and that only the precise hour remains to be decided.
I find no evident awareness of the urgency of our fight. No recognition that, while Pete Wishart pores over polls and strives to read the public mood from the portents and urges ever more and ever ‘wider’ debate about this and that and this again, the British political elite is not idle. It is mustering its forces. it is conducting its intrigues. It is pursuing its agenda and its aims.
We know what is intended for Scotland. We know that the British government’s plans for our future will start to take solid form towards the end of this year. We know that Brexit is merely an opportunity and a means by which those plans can be taken forward. We know that, if it wasn’t Brexit, it would be something else. We know that if it isn’t Brexit then it certainly will be something else.
We know that the British establishment is absolutely determined to preserve the structures of power, privilege and patronage which define the British state and which advantage the few at the expense of the many.
We know all we need to know. If we don’t want to remain enmeshed in these structures; if we don’t want to be ensnared by the ‘One Nation’ British Nationalist project; If we want to do things differently, we must act before it is too late. We cannot be deterred by fear of losing. Because failure to act would bring about the same outcome, but make it even more unbearable.
We need a new independence referendum no later than September 2018. We need to conduct the Yes campaign on the basis that it is a fight to save Scotland. We need solidarity, focus and discipline. Because the front of battle lours.
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Posted in Politics, Uncategorized #Referendum2018BrexitPete Wishart
Published by Peter A Bell
Thinker. Listener. Talker. Reader. Writer. None of my attitudes is immutable. None of my conclusions is final. None of my opinions is humble. View all posts by Peter A Bell
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32 thoughts on “Breakout!”
kurikat says:
Agree on every point. Thank Christ somebody has challenged that mish mash of an article, coming from one of our own MPs it certainly has not lifted the spirits of the YES side..More Questions than answers were all that was on offer. NOT good enough at this stage..
Apr 5, 2018 at 15:15
Pete brilliant mate you have captured my feelings, lately I as an SNP member was feeling that Nicola and the SNP weren’t really wanting another indi ref and that gaining just a few crumbs more from the power mad English parliament will be enough. I didn’t vote for the SNP or join them for the dithering over this and that also ignoring the yes voters the same voters who put them in power in Scotland.
Peter A Bell says:
Don’t equate Pete Wishart with the SNP leadership. Listen carefully to everything Nicola Sturgeon has been saying over the past 18 months or so and you will hear her calling for a massive display of public demand for a new referendum. I know she already has a mandate. But, considering what she’s up against, that mandate has to be reinforced in every way possible.
Chas Clark says:
I’ve read Mr Wishart’s piece and your own in quick succession. I understand why you would feel frustration at his apparent reticence to pick up his spear. But I also see a lot of common ground, as you might expect from two stalwarts of the independence movement.
If you believe Pete’s article shows him to be shallow, indecisive, and unimaginative, I suggest you consider that a large swathe of the population of Scotland suffers the same malaise. If everyone in Scotland recognised what you, I, and many others take for granted – incompetent UK government, malicious unionist agenda, biased Scottish media, etc – we would have had independence in 2014.
But sadly this is not the case. I meet people every day who would never think of themselves as unionists, but who would not support independence. They lack the drive which comes from being aggrieved by the status quo. Many are simply disinterested in anything that smells of politics. Preaching independence to them is akin to standing with an “End of the world is nigh” washboard and a megaphone on the street corner. It doesn’t convert those who have no wish to be converted, even though they may not consider themselves atheists.
I believe this is where Pete is viewing matters and I’m afraid he might be right. We need to invigorate the agnostics with a campaign which opens their eyes. Only once they have become enlightened should we ask them to vote on it. If we fail to enlighten the masses, we will get the same result. I agree polls can be deceptive, but I would be unable to stomach another referendum loss, especially if it kills the entire movement for a(nother) generation.
We should be wary of basing our perspective within our echo chambers. It’s easy to assume the desire for change is greater than it really is if we surround ourselves with like-minded individuals. I suspect Pete has a richer perspective, especially with a slim majority in his own patch. You do a fantastic job of increasing awareness among those who may be unable to articulate matters to the same degree. But your words are spoken in a vacuum to those who are outside the movement.
We need to focus on educating the electorate. But they are a stubborn class who do not regard comprehension of the subject matter to be of benefit to their future grades. We need new ways to teach them in order to achieve results. And we certainly don’t want to force them to sit an exam they don’t want to sit.
Persuasive as it may seem, Chas, there’s something missing from your analysis. The same thing that’s missing from Pete Wishart’s. A sense of urgency. Whatever Louis Armstrong may say, we do not have all the time in the world. While it would be great to be able to wait for the optimum moment (although how you’d know it was the optimum moment is a mystery) we can’t. While it would doubtless be a fine thing to embark on a massive program of education, we simply don’t have time.
If we have not settled the constitutional question within a year, then the entire terrain upon which the independence battle is being fought will have altered. And not in ways that favour the Yes side.
It isn’t only about what we do. We have to be aware of moves being made on the other side. When, for example, David Mundell talks of ‘UK-wide common frameworks’, we cannot afford to dismiss this as mere political jargon. We have to consider what it means. We have to assume the worst. We have to proceed on the basis that he is talking about an entirely new structure; set up initially to take on powers repatriated from the EU, but capable also of taking powers removed from the Scottish Parliament. And if they can weaken the Scottish Parliament then we have to assume that they will
It’ll start with things like agriculture and fisheries. The argument will be that this needs to be dealt with on a UK-wide basis. The Scottish part of it will be handed to the Scotland Office on the grounds that this will better facilitate coordination of policy with the UK Government. They will claim that it’s not really taking powers away from Scotland because the powers are going to the Scotland Office. And it has the word Scotland in it. So stop being such a ‘grievance-monkey’ and get on with the day job usion the powers you have. you can just hear it, can’t you?
Then it will be argued that, in order to make the ‘UK-wide common framework’ more effective, the Scotland Office needs to have further powers. It will be argued that it makes no sense to have agriculture and fisheries responsibilities split between the Scottish Government and the Scotland Office. So they all have to go to the latter. Because that’s where the ‘common framework’ is. Right? Duh!
Thus begins a process of attrition. With the help of the media, and regardless of the reality, these ‘common frameworks’ will be hailed a stupendous success – at the same time as the Scottish Government is being portrayed as failing at everything it is responsible for. There will be a clamour for more powers to be transferred to the brilliant team at the Scotland Office. Resistance to this process will be portrayed as putting parochial nationalism before the needs of the economy.
At the same time. it will be maintained that the new arrangements need to be secured. There needs to be ‘certainty’. So the ‘threat’ of independence must be eliminated. Legislation will be passed at Westminster prohibiting constitutional referendums. Or introducing a requirement for the approval of both the Commons and the House of Lords. Or stipulating a qualified majority. Or some combination of these and, perhaps, other measures. The ground will have shifted. The possibility of a referendum will have receded almost out of sight. The chances of winning will have diminished to near-zero.
This is not a story about some hypothetical scenario for a remote future. This is actually happening. And it’s happening now. By the end of 2018 the British government will have everything in place to make a new referendum, and/or a Yes win, as close to impossible as makes no practical difference. By October or November the post-Brexit shape of the UK will be settled. It will be a fait accompli.
Of course, given the present UK Government’s record, it’s all but certain that they’ll screw this up in some way. But do we really want to pin all our hopes on their incompetence?
#Referendum2018! This time it’s urgent!
I don’t disagree with you in the slightest, Peter, on any of your points made above. It frustrates the hell out of me that the population in Scotland is akin to a group of lemmings running headlong for the cliff with their eyes shut. Unpalatable though it may sound, I believe democracy really stinks when it shows itself no better than mob rule – and the mob is being unduly influenced with lies and misdirection.
Your depiction of Mr Wishart et al naval gazing and procrastinating about heading for the lifeboats whilst the ship is sinking is understandable. But if that were the reality understood by the majority of the population I think we’d be seeing protests in the street. The sole point of my initial reply is that the general population don’t have that sense of what’s coming. They are passengers on the Titanic enjoying dinner before the iceberg has been struck. They don’t even have the incentive to get out on deck to see it on the horizon.
Imagine the scene when some well-meaning clairvoyant rushes into the Titanic’s dining room with a pile of life-jackets urging the passengers to take to the lifeboats before the iceberg has even been struck. They would have been dismissed as an inconvenience and arrested by the messenger at arms.
This, sadly, is the situation we are in. We can evangelize as much as we wish, but until we know that support for independence is growing further, we will always be one of the 45. I know from my own anecdotal experience of friends and work-colleagues that support for independence is no further forward than it was in 2014. It’s disheartening in the extreme, but I don’t think it wise to push for another referendum which would kill the movement if we lost. If we can build momentum and support for independence to the point that it is palpable, it will happen.
Derek Millar says:
You do not disappoint PAB.Excellent.
Alexander Barclay says:
An excellent piece again Peter which I agree with wholeheartedly. It would be nice to see more enthusiasm and leadership from the Scottish government on this matter and other similar matters. I would also like to see more challenges from them of the spurious claims and reports from people in power and from mostly TV heavily biased reports against Scotland. There is also the subliminal approach to change minds to accepting English rule by plastering the butcher’s apron all over produce, seemingly regardless of its origins, to the detriment of Scottish produce. This and other such attacks is a factor that needs an official response.
Kangaroo says:
I absolutely agree with everything you have said. An informed or interested voter would respond positively to the obvious narrative. However there is apparently a large unconvinced or disinterested population that are the soft ‘No’ people that we need to convince.
These are hard nuts to crack.
However I do agree witth your argument that we need to focus on the negatives of the Union and what we will lose if we vote No again. It will destroy Scotland and be like Ramsey Bolton playing with Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones. It does not bear thinking about.
In short we must get the campaign started NOW even as we wait for the moment to strike the date. Waiting is not an option it merely plays into the Unionists hands as they steadily building their fortress, even if we think they are destroying themselves, in the background they are strengthening.
See my other comments on
https://petewishart.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/timing-is-everything/#comments
We need someone with a head on their shoulders to front the grassroots campaign. I nominate YOU.
Not sure what I ever did to you that you want to stick me with that job. 😉
Ha ha nice one Peter. But we need someone with passion and intellect to lead from the front. Know anyone else who fits the bill?
I’m honestly not persuaded that the Yes movement needs a ‘leader’. I reckon it works just fine as it is. A figurehead just becomes a target, for the media and for the ‘snipers’ within the Yes movement. Having the entire movement embodied in one person is dangerous. That person only has to get caught eating one spit-roasted baby, and suddenly we’re all cannibals.
The individual that we all need to get behind is Nicola Sturgeon. She’s the one right up there at the sharp end. And,whatever you may have read in the Daily Express, she almost never devours children.
It’s also obvious that Mayhem is slowly but surely getting painted into a corner by
a) the Good Friday Agreement, and
b) the EU preparing legal text for withdrawal agreement, and
c) terms of transition, and
d) EU requests for UK to state what it wants?
e) internal party squabbling
Something’s got to give and it will be soon I suspect. The Starter will then fire the gun.
steelewires says:
The population is not disinterested. They are uninterested.
proudcybernat says:
Well articulated as ever, Mr Bell. A great piece and I sincerely hope Pete Wishart reads it and gets a grip of his knickers. Now is not the tie for ditherers – unless it is all part of some cunning charade to outfox the enemy? Doubtful. I think Pete Wishart has perhaps become too cosy in the corridors of power and would like his tenure there to continue for as long as possible – that’s how it comes across. Get a grip of yourself, Mr Wishart, and get with the programme. If you don’t feel YOU have the skills to win hearts and minds to make Indy happen, then stand aside from the Depute contest for someone who CAN make it happen.
grizebard says:
This is what real leadership looks like, Peter. Thank you from the heart. Inspirational.
I look forward to this very article (or something very like it) appearing in cold print in The National as a very necessary counterpoint to Pete Faintheart’s well-promoted views there. And ASAP.
jacquescolemanJames Coleman says:
Excellent piece. Exactly the same thoughts as I have expressed to Pete Wishart on Twitter and in James Kelly’s Blog “Scot goes Pop where he too severely criticises Wishart’s naivety.
And I have been doing my bit on that score too. But we need many more to enter the fray on Social Media. We must attack at every opportunity criticisms of Scotland by BBC, ITV, MSM, English MPs, WM Government, Unionist politicians in Scotland and organisations who are anti-Indy. And if we don’t personally attack we must vigorously support those who do.
Robert T says:
I for one Peter would love you to take a LEADING role in the YES camp alongside Paul Kavanagh , you and he are decisive , informative , passionate , fiery and honest , you both explain and expose publicly the lies and misinformation espoused by the corrupt BBC , STV and MSM and are astute and adept at ridiculing and berating the woeful unionist twats that impersonate what is laughingly called politicians in Hollyrood. Also and very very important you don’t take shit from anyone , you are combative but not arrogant ( cough) and quite honestly your attitude and determination is what is needed right now to put fire in the belly
geacher says:
Dearie me peter, you are not really very bright are you? certainly not as clever as Pete Wishart, and that’s not a statement I ever thought I would make. Wishart recognises several things but primaraly that if there is indyref2 soon, the answer would still be a resounding *NO*. Now think (if you can) what the repercussions of that would be. The indy movement would die a quick death, Sturgeon would resign and quite probably with the raison d’etre Accept that we’ve already won over everybody who can be won over by the positive arguments the SNP taken away, you would lose the 2021 Holyrood election.
Wishart is at least recognising this.
You say : ” Accept that we’ve already won over everybody who can be won over by the positive arguments”, so there is a tacit admittance that you KNOW you will lose again…perhaps one last ride on the gravy train is of more importance to you that the actual result?
I know that economics is not your strong point… your views on the currency issue are at best naive, but to answer your question ” What are the circumstances in which Pete Wishart would consider the time ripe for making our move?”, let me answer that.
When you guys have a clear currency plan.
When you guys come up with a viable economic strategy which will reduce that deficit.
And when you tell us how we are going to cope with the loss of £10b fiscal transfer.
Until then, no dice, not going to happen.
I didn’t actually read this. I know the troll too well.
Oops hit the wrong thing there.
In answer to your questions
a) Currency would be Scottish Pounds backed up by using the reserves that the Scottish commercial banks currently have on deposit with the Bank of England. Note that the USD/GBP graph and the USD oil price are in almost perfect correlation demonstrating that the GBP is floating on Scottish oil. See Bloomberg or other sources to get the data. I also know of no banker who would not be lining up to give Scotland as much money as it wanted. We probably don’t need any by the way, see below.
b) economics are fine at the moment Scotland is only part of Britain to consistently run a surplus.
See this data table https://www.uktradeinfo.com/Statistics/RTS/Pages/default.aspx if you need more then tweak the independence white paper.
c) the UK Fiscal deficit is extremely large and this is funded by continual borrowing, currently approaching GBP2trillion of debt. Scotland has not had any requirement to borrow funds for at least 50years as analysis of data shows.
The 10bn defecit you reference has been debunked by a number of eminent economists. It is essentially a fraudulent misrepresentation of the true fiscal position. I am not saying that the Scottish government would not run a deficit, just not anywhere near the figure suggested by GERS (UK Treasury figures) published bybthe Scottish government as part of the Devolution agreements. Blatant errors in the 10bn figure you quote are 4.5bn for interest Scotland does not borrow and an absurd amount on defence spending which is not required to be at that level. Therenare amounts allocatedmfor Scotlans share of the London olympics, the HS2 project, M25 ring road around London and the list goes on and on. GERS was and is a fraudulent device to try and bury the Independence argument. Here is just one example of the absurdity of GERS https://wingsoverscotland.com/gers-by-economists/ and if you don’t like that example it’s OK I have others.
It is normal practice for the Government of a country running a fiat currency system to run a deficit with the private sector running a surplus.. What you see with the UK is a government addicted to deficits and debt pursuing a neoliberal economic strategy doomed to failure. The UK is already bankrupt, it just needs a little shove and it will fall over with devastating consequences for everyone living on the island. Scotland has an escape route.
Further whist the OECD tables show that the UK is the 16th wealthiest country in the world, Scotland on its’ own would be the 6th. Scotland is a very wealthy resource rich country whose wealth is being siphoned off for the benefit of the wealthy Scottish and English elite and is largely being spent in the SE of England and stashed in tax havens, instead of in Scotland for the benefit of the people living there. This is why they will fight to keep Scotland shackled to WM.
I have seen your comments on other threads and therefore feel I need to add that I am a very experienced Scottish Chartered Accountant whom is extremely conversant with Banking, Capital Markets etc etc, so I have an authoritative opinion on the facts of the matter.
Dave McEwan Hill says:
Agree entirely,Peter. We have to make sure that this “wait till the time is right” fallacy is abandoned
@kangaroo. Well you set yourself out with some impressive bona fides, but the substance comes nowhere close to matching up to the rhetoric.
Take your first paragraph…… can you provide ANYTHING at all to back up your assertions? I sure as hell cannot. And bankers will be “lining up to give Scotland as much money as they want”
You are having a laff, right?
“economics are fine at the moment Scotland is only part of Britain to consistently run a surplus.”
Whit???? A surplus of what? Economics are fine? Our economic growth is one the lowest in the EU(last quarter, 0.2% versus 1.7% rUK), and projected to be the very lowest in the developed world over the nest two years.
Well Scotland can and does borrow.
“The 10bn defecit you reference has been debunked by a number of eminent economists” Oh really? For example? And Murphy isn’t an economist, he’s an accountant. And don’t quote the Cuthberts from ten years ago please.
Your paragraph “c” is a huge mish mash of errors…£4.5 billion in interest payments????? Where is this shown? Answer, it ain’t. London M25 road? Not one penny, ditto the Olympics. HS2? We will receive almost three times as much back in Barnett than we will pay for the total cost (around 2.2% as it happens) “The list goes on” OK, tell me more of this list. etcha can’t.
Wings? Now I know your are a fraud.
“Further whist the OECD tables show that the UK is the 16th wealthiest country in the world, Scotland on its’ own would be the 6th”
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha… really? Oh this I must see.
Last year we raised just under £58b in taxes but spent over £71b. Without the fiscal transfer we would have been mince.
An evidence based approach is obviously not one you want to grasp. Prefering abuse to reason when things don’t go your way. For example, and I use one where the emotional nature of your answer is minimised
My Statement: Scotland is the only part of the UK to consistently run a ‘surplus’ giving referenced uk data.
Your Answer: Whit????? A surplus of what.
No point in having rational discussion with someone who does not want to use the facts but just gets emotional because his/her arguements don’t stack up and therefore resorts to abuse.
Hugh Wallace says:
Nails it.
Reblogged this on Scotto Voce.
murren59 says:
Amazing Peter how you can so brilliantly put into words what I am thinking! Thank you!
Kenneth G Coutts says:
Peter! No more faffing about.
It’s time to go.
Regards🐼🐼
imacg says:
Brilliant, and so on the mark, I love this;
“We need to change the emphasis of our narrative from one of heading towards a better future to one of breaking away from the past. We need to talk a bit less about the new age we hope to enter and considerably more about the existing mire from which we must extricate ourselves.
Much easier to sell the absolute certainty of Impending doom than the vague, uncertain, though enchanting prospect of what a free Scotland will look like. It is a blank slate and necessarily so, there for us to build. The alternative, more of this and much worse…I think we have to talk about the broken treaty and how to dissolve it and move forward to a much brighter future (whatever that will be). We don’t need to lay it out, we just need to sell the freedom to imagine and make it so.
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My first reaction to this post is that you must give the substance of it as an address to the SNP Spring Conference. That Conference, however, has been postponed to the summer. It will be too late to plan and organise a referendum in September. I’m wondering how we can communicate the urgency of Scotland’s situation to Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP mandarins. What troubles me is that they must already know all the circumstances that you elaborate that make imminent action urgent. What is it that locks them into trusting in a change of mind and honest cooperation of the English Government of the UK? It simply does not make sense!
I’m tempted to think that it looks as if our hope must be in the 2021 election, but even that may be too late. I’m afraid that the SNP leaders will lose Scotland’s independence.
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Why we shouldn’t be taking Chris McEleny’s indyref back-up plan too seriously Jan 13, 2021
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Arse for elbow Jan 10, 2021
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Privacy Management Plan
Section 1 - Audience
Section 3 - Public Registers Maintained by the University
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(1) This policy applies to University staff, contractors, controlled entities, conjoints, volunteers, affiliates and the general public.
(2) This Privacy Management Plan (Plan) details how the University of Newcastle manages personal information of staff, students and the general public in their dealings with the University.
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personal and health information is relevant, accurate, complete, up-to-date, not excessive and that collection does not unreasonably intrude into the personal affairs of the individual;
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Human Resource Services Support for requests from staff; or
Student Central for requests from students.
(29) In response to a request, the University may amend an individual's personal or health informations or make an annotation on the document to detail the request. If the University considers that the personal or health information held is correct and does not require amendment, information will be provided advising the reasons for this decision.
(30) Requests for correction or amendment of personal or health information may also be sent to the Privacy Officer for advice or action as appropriate. In certain cases, requests may be referred for action under the GIPA application process. Such cases include where the information:
contains personal or health information about another individual;
may require further consideration and advice; or
is held across several different units of the University.
(31) The University takes reasonable steps to verify personal or health information and follows relevant processes relating to evidence required before using information, especially where the use of the information could lead to negative consequences for the individual.
(32) The use of personal or health informations primarily refers to its use within the University.
(33) Where personal or health information is to be used for a directly related purpose that is not the original purpose, staff should take reasonable steps to identify and document as appropriate why they have considered that use to be directly related to the original purpose.
(34) In considering whether a purpose is directly related to the original purpose, staff may consider the reasonable expectations of an individual.
(35) Disclosure primarily refers to sharing information held by the University with another agency or individual outside of the University.
(36) Staff should undertake reasonable actions to ensure that personal or health information is not disclosed, either routinely or on a single occasion, without the knowledge of the individual, unless an exemption applies.
(37) Individuals would likely be considered to have knowledge of a disclosure if:
there is documentation to indicate the individual provided valid consent;
they were made aware that the information may be disclosed on collection; or
there is a clear policy or process indicating that information of that type is usually disclosed.
(38) University staff should undertake reasonable actions to ensure that any sensitive personal information (such as information about ethnic or racial origin; political opinions; religious or philosophical beliefs; sexual activities or trade union membership) is not disclosed without an individual's consent.
(39) The University may only disclose sensitive information without consent to deal with a serious and imminent threat to any individual's health or safety.
(40) Individuals may be identified by using unique identifiers if it is reasonably necessary to carry out University functions efficiently.
(41) Services may be provided anonymously, where lawful and practicable.
(42) The University will generally require information about an individual to deliver a service. However anonymity may be allowed wherever possible.
(43) Health information may be transferred outside New South Wales if:
the recipient is subject to privacy principles that are substantially similar;
the individual consents to the transfer;
the transfer is necessary for the performance of a contract (either between the individual and the University or in the interests of the individual if the contract is between the University and a third party);
the information is required to prevent or lessen a serious or imminent threat; or
the use is authorised or required by another law.
(44) Health records linkage systems may only be used if the individual has provided or expressed their consent.
(45) Where the University seeks to use or disclose health information without the individual's consent, research proposals must be submitted to the Human Research Ethics Committee.
(46) The University requires law enforcement agencies to present a warrant, notice to produce or subpoena where they require the University to disclose personal information. All warrants, notices to produce and subpoenas must be served to the University's Legal Office.
(47) The University may exercise discretion and provide personal or health information to a law enforcement agency if legislation permits it to do so in the particular circumstances.
(48) This discretion may be exercised by:
the Vice-Chancellor;
the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) and Vice President where the information relates to a student or former student; or
the Chief People and Culture Officer, where the information relates to a staff member or former staff member.
(49) Staff should consider the requirements of the IPPs and HPPs when implementing or reviewing a project, process or system to identify issues and implement strategies to address those issues.
(50) Information on the University's Training and Awareness programs is included in Appendix 7.
(51) Individuals may raise concerns and complaints about the way in which the University has handled their personal or health information. A privacy complaint will be considered under the University's complaint handling processes.
(52) An individual may also request that the University undertake an internal review of the University's handling of their person or health information by completing the internal review form.
(53) Individuals may lodge a complaint with the Information and Privacy Commission New South Wales or seek an external review with the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal at:
NSW Privacy Commissioner
Email: ipcinfo@ipc.nsw.gov.au NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal
PO Box K1026
HAYMARKET NSW 1240
(54) Further information on privacy complaints and the Internal Review process is set out in Appendix 6.
(55) Where the University becomes aware of a breach, it will take appropriate steps to identify and address the breach. Reports of breaches or potential breaches should be sent to the Privacy Officer at privacy@newcastle.edu.au who will advise the Vice-Chancellor accordingly.
(56) Controlled entities must manage personal and health information in accordance with this Plan. Controlled entities may also have other requirements under the Australian Protection Principles and/or other legislation.
(57) If a complaint or internal review is received by the University about the conduct of a controlled entity, the University may conduct a review if necessary.
(58) An issues register is maintained by the Privacy Officer to support the review process. Issues or feedback may be e-mailed to privacy@newcastle.edu.au.
(59) This Plan will be reviewed within three years of approval.
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Portugal Passport And Citizenship
Acquiring Portuguese Citizenship
Portugal Passport
Find Out More About Portuguese Citizenship Through Marria...
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In many other countries, financial investment indicates beginning a company as well as producing tasks. That is among the choices on Portugal's Golden Visa Scheme, however it's not the only one. Investment can take lots of types yet, for lots of people, the easiest option is to purchase a home in Portugal as this comes with much less threat as well as job than starting an organization or investing in various other companies.
Residence needs to be valued at 500,000 or even more, unless the property is greater than three decades old or in a location of metropolitan improvement. If the residential or commercial property comes under the second classification, it just requires to be valued at 350,000 or even more. If you agree to acquire a property in a low-density populace area, the required value of the building might be lowered by 20% to either 400,000 or 280,000.
The Golden Visa plan allows capitalists to remain in Portugal (and to travel within the Schengen Area) for 5 years. After 5 years, capitalists can acquire long-term Portuguese residency. After 6 years, capitalists can make an application for Portuguese citizenship. 5 years of residency in Portugal. 280,000-500k financial investment + lawful and admin prices.
One of the most typical means to get citizenship in any country is to live there for long enough. In Portugal, that length of time is 5 years. It does not have to be 5 years in a row, although this is common. Those 5 years can be taken throughout a 15-year duration, yet the aim would certainly be to show that you have actually been consistently rather than sporadically staying in Portugal.
If you have been living in Portugal without residency, this is not likely to be legitimate. The biggest obstacle for a great deal of people will be finding a job to support themselves while they stay in Portugal for 5 years. Portugal is not known for its sufficient work opportunities and also those that do exist typically pay badly in contrast to other EU countries.
More Info On Acquiring Portuguese Citizenship IL
Find Out More About Portugal Citizenship In Haifa, Israel
Non-Portuguese married to or in a lasting partnership with a Portuguese nationwide for 3 years or longer can obtain Portuguese citizenship. You do not need to be staying in Portugal for those 3 years. Being wed is not a legal need, so there's no need to reserve the trip to Vegas right now.
Does that imply it's time to jump on Match.com? Not rather. If you've seen romantic funnies like The Proposal or The Permit, you'll know that weding for citizenship isn't treated gently within the government offices that process these applications. It's likewise worth explaining that, even if you're wed to or in a relationship with a Portuguese individual, doesn't imply that you're ensured a passport.
Instances of connections to Portugal could consist of having a standard (A2 or far better) understanding of Portuguese, possessing building below, or living right here. The more connections you can reveal, the far better. Having an A2 knowledge of Portuguese is not a certain need here, but several Portugalist visitors that have used using this route have actually been requested for a certification to verify language proficiency.
This could be via revealing records that show that they live at the exact same address, share bills, etc. Nevertheless, even though citizenship via your companion isn't constantly uncomplicated, Portugal does usually give residency to partners. This would offer you the right to live and also work in Portugal. 3 years Not necessarily, but in method yes.
Find Out More About Renew Passport In Haifa, Israel
If you fall under this category, the procedure is fairly straight-forward as you have an automatic right to citizenship and do not require to reveal any kind of various other ties to Portugal. If you have a Portuguese moms and dad, you may be eligible for Portuguese citizenship. If you were birthed beyond Portugal, and have a Portuguese grandparent, you might additionally have the ability to acquire Portuguese citizenship.
Great-grandparents are generally seen as also far back, nonetheless, you can navigate this by having your moms and dad or grandparent get citizenship very first (thinking they live and also able to do so). This is just one of the most straight-forward routes to getting Portuguese citizenship as you typically just need to get a hold of documents like birth and marital relationship certifications and also, unlike tracing your Sephardic Jewish origins, you're only going back a couple of generations.
It can be a challenge for those who do not have call with their parents, and also a lot more of a challenge for those that require their grandparents' birth and marital relationship certifications as these points frequently get shed over time. There's no need to live in Portugal No. Sometimes it deserves jumping on Ancestry.com especially if you think you may have Sephardic Jewish heritage.
More Info On Issuance Of A European Passport IL
To right a wrong, Portugal is offering citizenship to the ancestors of those who needed to leave Spain and also Portugal. Spain had a similar system, yet has actually since shut it down. קבלת אזרחות פורטוגלית. It's possible that Portugal may do the very same thing in the future. This is obviously fairly an one-of-a-kind situation.
According to RTP, since February 2020, greater than 50,000 people have actually currently obtained Portuguese citizenship using this plan. You don't require to trace your family history right back to 15th Century Iberia, yet you do require to trace much enough to reveal that you have Sephardic Jewish roots.
Others need to go back much further. Some of the ties that are made use of to reveal you have Sephardic Jewish origins include Sephardic Surnames, evidence of the ladino language being used in the household, cemetery records or other papers. One of the most beneficial paper, nonetheless, is the certificate from the Portuguese Jewish Community in Lisbon or Porto.
Find Out More About Portuguese Passport Visa In Haifa, Israel
You do not require to invest whenever in Portugal, but ought to anticipate the procedure to take somewhere between 6 and also 24 months. Admin expenses of 200, plus the cost of obtaining essential records. No. Read extra about Portuguese citizenship through Sephardi HeritageAt one point, Portugal was enabling people of previous Portuguese colonies to make an application for Portuguese citizenship.
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This part of DeFi feels like a new form of market. Anyone can join and everyone is invited. It has no KYC/AML (know your customer/anti-money laundering) hurdles and lags, and if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, that duck is a shiny tech casino. Of course all markets are casinos but if you can come up with a new form of market and it’s fun, exciting, instant and can be used sensibly or in insanely risky, win big/lose big ways, you are going have a winner. And they do. And it’s all powered by Ethereum.
ZIMBABWE ACCIDENTALLY LEAVES DOOR OPEN FOR CRYPTO. Here’s a recipe for creating a fertile environment for alternative payment systems: outlaw the system everyone is currently using. When the Zimbabwean government made the nutty step of banning digital payments – used for 85% of transactions by individuals, due to severe shortage of cash – it clearly wasn’t trying to promote bitcoin. In forcing people to go to a local bank to redeem funds locked in popular payments apps such as Ecocash, its goal was to protect the embattled Zimbabwean dollar. In a statement, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, said the move was “necessitated by the need to protect consumers on mobile money platforms which have been abused by unscrupulous and unpatriotic individuals and entities to create instability and inefficiencies in the economy.” The thinking is that Ecocash, which enables currency trading, is making it easier for people to dump the local currency. But here’s the thing: Ecocash, which said it suspended cash-in-cash-out functions (presumably because its banking lines will be cut) is still keeping in-app payment facilities open. And it said nothing about stopping its fairly popular service allowing people to buy cryptocurrency. Not surprisingly, since the ban “demand for bitcoin has skyrocketed,” according to African crypto news site, bitcoinke, with “sources claiming bitcoin is now selling at at 18% premium above the market rate.”
Two of these DeFi platforms are AAVE and Compound and you should zip over and take a look. I had some Ethereum sploshing about so I popped $23 worth in and in seconds I was watching the value tick up 79 billionth of a dollar every second or so. I’m going to have to wait a year to make a $1 but that’s not the point. I just opened a deposit account in one minute, transferred money into it in seconds and now I’m watching it grow instantaneously and that purely from landing on the beach of a new continent of financial services that can spin off from this.
“I’m shifting slightly away from Bitcoin in my interests, and in the things that I want to write about,” he said. He explained that recent world events meant he was less excited about focussing primarily on Bitcoin, and the harsh line that was adopted by some Bitcoin fans. He also said he believed that things were about to get more political—a prospect that didn’t excite him.
Ethereum is what is known as an open-source, blockchain-based, distributed computing platform. It has smart contract features that enable the processing of contractual agreements online. These smart contracts can be used to process the transfer of assets, such as shares, property, and money. When a smart contract is run on a blockchain, it becomes a self-operating program. It will automatically execute once certain predefined conditions have been met.
We’ve been using Google Ads for the past 6 months to help us get more visibility for our smart contract auditing services and we’ve noticed a strange change in the last few days. It seems that Google completely blacklisted Ethereum as a keyword. Any of the keywords that contain ‘ethereum’ in our campaigns are no longer showing ads as of January 9th.
Ethereum is another use-case for a blockchain that supports the Bitcoin network, and theoretically should not really compete with Bitcoin. However, the popularity of ether has pushed it into competition with all cryptocurrencies, especially from the perspective of traders. For most of its history since the mid-2015 launch, ether has been close behind bitcoin on rankings of the top cryptocurrencies by market cap. That being said, it's important to keep in mind that the ether ecosystem is much smaller than bitcoin's: as of January 2020, ether's market cap was just under $16 billion, while bitcoin's is nearly 10 times that at more than $147 billion.
This system is being fueled by a global innovation and development pool bigger than Bitcoin’s. As of June last year, there were 1,243 full-time developers working on Ethereum compared with 319 working on Bitcoin Core, according to a report by Electric Capital. While that work is spread across multiple projects, the size of its community gives Ethereum the advantage of network effects.
It’s difficult to estimate because the advertisers select who they target and it also depends on how many advertisers we have using AdWallet at any time. You may receive 1 or more ads a week. However, there will be days where you might not receive any ads. The number of ads you receive depends on if you are the right match for one of our advertisers. Keep in mind, advertisers choose when to run an ad on AdWallet, how long they’d like to run the ad for, and they select how many of our users they’d like to reach; which all factors into how many ads you will receive.
Description: BTC will slow down coming days. Alts will catch up. $ETH looks to be bottomed. Perfect time for a cocaine fueled high leverage play. Timeframe: One week. Indicators used: Force my neighbour to smoke crack, then dress him up in a suit and make him pitch me pump targets. We basicly pick the funniest one and just run with it. Shout out to: None
The increase in network activity on Ethereum is largely due to the ongoing DeFiDecentralized Finance (DeFi) is a term that is being used to describe the world of financial services that are increasingly... More boom. Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a hot topic right now as many of its tokens surge in value. DeFi promises to cut out the middleman in the financial world by hardcoding solutions to allow for decentralized lending, portfolio management, and more.
or Let's say more Startup project we have for now 5 project they are reall project each project give you good return everyday so of you invest for example :If you invest 10 USD in Ether we will keep 5 USD in our bank and we give the rest money 5 to the (company or the leader of the project )then he work daily . if something going wrong like these project is scam or stop we will ba k to you only 4USD so in these case you did not lose all your money but you lose some part.
TRUST ME, BOND MARKET, PLEASE. James Glynn at The Wall Street Journal had a piece this week about how the Federal Reserve is considering following Australia’s lead in using “yield caps” as a policy tool to keep long-dated interest rates down. The thinking is if the central bank explicitly signals it will always institute bond-buying if the yield on a benchmark asset such as the 10-year Treasury note rises above some predefined ceiling, the market will be less inclined to prematurely believe the Fed is going to start tightening monetary policy. In other words, we won’t see a rerun of the 2013 “Taper Tantrum,” when the U.S. bond market, worrying that the Fed would start tapering off its bond-buying, or quantitative easing, drove down bond prices, which pushed up yields. (For bond market newbies, yields, which measure the effective annual return bondholders will earn off a bond’s fixed interest rate when adjusted for its price, move inversely to price.)
Trading suggestion: . There is a possibility of temporary retracement to suggested support line (0.0251). if so, traders can set orders based on Price Action and expect to reach short-term targets. Technical analysis: . ETHBTC is in a range bound and the beginning of uptrend is expected. .The price is above the 21-Day WEMA which acts as a dynamic support. ....
Bitcoin was launched in January of 2009. It introduced a novel idea set out in a white paper by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto—bitcoin offers the promise of an online currency that is secured without any central authority, unlike government-issued currencies. There are no physical bitcoins, only balances associated with a cryptographically secured public ledger. Although bitcoin was not the first attempts at an online currency of this type, it was the most successful in its early efforts, and it has come to be known as a predecessor in some way to virtually all cryptocurrencies which have been developed over the past decade.
The latest saga in the cryptocurrency market and especially that related to the Ethereum is that the leading internet giant Google could have blacklisted “Ethereum” keyword from the company’s Ads platform. This comes after a Serbia –based blockchain startup, Decenter realized that the keyword ‘Ethereum’ can no longer be found on the Google Ads platform. The startup moved swiftly and made an announcement via Twitter where Google responded to the allegations almost instantly:
Welcome to this analysis of ETH/BTC. ETH/BTC has been in an uptrend since February after breaking out of a 6 months long double bottom reversal pattern. Since then it went sideways and consolidated for a bit more than 3 months, from the 8th of February till the 3rd of Jun. The consolidation looks like a symmetrical triangle pattern which is a continuation patter...
Demeester, an analyst and co-founder of crypto investment fund Adamant Capital, announced last month that he’s scaling back his public involvement in Bitcoin. But his recent statement doesn’t mean he's shifting wholeheartedly from Bitcoin to Ethereum. He’s emphasized that he’s still a Bitcoin believer, and retains plenty of reservations about Ethereum.
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About Q Voice News
Community & History
Politics, Law & Order
Greater Long Beach
Lesbian couple files discrimination complaint against Cherry Creek Mortgage, UnitedHealth Group
by Phillip Zonkel
Judith Dominguez announces at a press conference on Thursday in downtown Los Angeles that she and her wife, Patricia Martinez, left, have filed a discrimination complaint against Dominguez’s former employer, Cherry Creek Mortgage, who revoked Martinez’s medical benefits because the couple don’t meet the company’s definition of a spouse.
LOS ANGELES — An Alhambra lesbian couple filed a discrimination complaint in federal court today against the wife’s former employer and its health insurance company after the company revoked the wife’s health insurance because they provide benefits only for marriages “between a man and a woman.”
RELATED: California therapist who used ‘conversion therapy’ on lesbian client sued for fraud
THE COMPLAINT
Judith Dominguez, 59, a former employee with Cherry Creek Mortgage Company, and Patricia Martinez, 55, her wife since 2013 and partner of 29 years, took legal action in United States Central District Court against the Colorado-based employer and UnitedHealth Group, its health insurance administrator, for refusing to provide them the same spousal medical benefits they give to heterosexual employees, the complaint said.
“Cherry Creek is trying to take advantage of the current climate to move the country and LGBT rights backwards,” attorney Lori Rifkin said in a statement. “But federal law doesn’t allow employers to play politics on the backs of gay couples.”
Michael Norton, an attorney with Cherry Creek Mortgage, said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
Tyler Mason, spokesman with UnitedHealth Group, said he can’t comment on the complaint because he hasn’t yet seen it.
“We’re an inclusive organization that follows state and federal guidelines,” he said.
In their complaint, the couple accused Cherry Creek Mortgage of discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination, including violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Affordable Care Act, California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, and the California Labor Code.
RELATED: Court rules LGBT couples are protected from discrimination by federal housing law
Judith Dominguez, left, and Patricia Martinez, have been a couple 29 years and were married in 2013. Photo: Judith Dominguez and Patricia Martinez.
DEFINING A SPOUSE
In its health benefits policy, Cherry Creek Mortgage, which had covered Martinez for most of 2016, said it covers spouses “who are in a legal union between one man and one woman, including legally married opposite sex spouses or common-law opposite sex marriage,” according to court documents.
However, the company has no problem marketing its products to same-sex couples and required Dominguez, who was a mortgage loan officer, to attend a mandatory training that targeted mortgages to same-sex couples, according to the complaint.
“The only thing more stunning than Cherry Creek’s bigotry is their hypocrisy,” attorney Dan Stormer said in the statement. “Under the U.S. Constitution, Patricia and Judith’s marriage is equal to any throughout the land.
“Cherry Creek’s owners can believe anything they want, but they can’t take away health coverage because of that belief,” he said.
MEDICAL DEBT
In December 2016, after covering Martinez since March, Cherry Creek Mortgage told Dominguez that they would not only cancel spousal medical benefits to Martinez, but also retroactively revoke them.
As a result, the couple has faced medical debt rising past $50,000, including a July 2017 bill from UnitedHealth Group for more than $30,000, according to court documents.
RETALIATION, WRONGFUL TERMINATION
The complaint also accuses Cherry Creek Mortgage of retaliation and wrongful termination.
On Feb. 27, 2017, Dominguez filed a complaint against Cherry Creek with the Los Angeles office of the EEOC regarding denial of spousal health benefits to her wife.
In March, Dominguez was told she would transfer from the Diamond Bar to the Pasadena office.
After Dominguez relocated to the Pasadena office in April, the branch manager told her that the office would close.
In May, the EEOC told Dominguez that they agreed with her discrimination complaint and issued her a notice of right to sue.
On June 30, Dominguez’s position was terminated
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with responses from Cherry Creek Mortgage and UnitedHealth Group.
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Affordable Care Act California Labor Code California Laws Cherry Creek Mortgage Civil Rights Act Discrimination Fair Employment and Housing Act Federal Courts Health Insurance lawsuits Lesbian Title VII UnitedHealth Group
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Phillip Zonkel
Award-winning journalist Phillip Zonkel spent 17 years at Long Beach's Press-Telegram, where he was the first reporter in the paper's history to have a beat covering the city's vibrant LGBTQ. He also created and ran the popular and innovative LGBTQ news blog, Out in the 562.
He won two awards and received a nomination for his reporting on the local LGBTQ community, including a two-part investigation that exposed anti-gay bullying of local high school students and the school districts' failure to implement state mandated protections for LGBTQ students.
Q Voice News
Q Voice News provides daily coverage of Long Beach, greater Los Angeles and Southern California’s LGBTQ community.
Copyright © Q Voice News 2021. Created by Q Voice News, a division of Q Voice Media.
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Plastech Additive Manufacturing confirm BLB partnership
Plastech Industries Ltd’s 3D printing distribution and print service, Plastech Additive Manufacturing, has secured a partnership with Swedish vendor BLB Industries to distribute ‘The Box’ range of 3d printing systems.
Norfolk-based Plastech Industries will distribute BLB’s ‘The Box‘ portfolio of Small, Medium and Large 3D printing systems throughout the UK and Ireland, while installing a Box Medium itself which it has purchased with the support of a grant from the New Anglia LEP Growing Business Fund. Plastech Additive Manufacturing says the Box Medium system will act as both a demonstration model for the company’s resale endeavours and help to establish a service to manufacture high-end, large-scale parts.
Plastech Additive Manufacturing was established after the founding of Plastech Moulding, a high-volume manufacturing service specialising in high volume injection moulding also operating under the Plastech Industries umbrella. Plastech Additive Manufacturing aims to assist companies who require 3D printed parts in lower volumes, while also giving them the chance to bring the technology in-house.
Company Managing Director, Stephen Rundle, added: “We provide both a machine distribution and parts service, clients will be able to order printed parts as required in the short-term, and should demand for their product increase, they have the opportunity to purchase the very same additive manufacturing technology to oversee production themselves.”
Plastech Additive Manufacturing also recently joined online procurement platform PlastikCity, as part of the website’s new additive manufacturing super-section. Plastech offer both 3D printed part manufacture services, as well as offering machine distribution and servicing for BLB’s ‘The Box’ range in 3D printing systems.
“We’re hoping to offer a turnkey solution to companies looking to benefit from large scale additive manufacturing,” said Stephen. “We have set ourselves up with the capability to have our own machines, both as demonstration models and to take our customers on a journey. The idea is that we can work with them on the development and testing with materials and their new product and then take them through short-run manufacture. When they get to the position where they need more product, then we can assist them with the supply and service of their own machine.”
BLB Industries partnered with Plastech Additive Manufacturing at Formnext 2019 and, since it began operations in 2015, has brought to market a portfolio of 3D printing platforms powered by Fused Granular Fabrication technology and Bosch Rexroth drives and control. The Box series of machines are supported by one of the widest ranges of thermoplastic materials due to their ability to process from granules, and boast build volumes ranging from 1500 x 1000 x 1000 mm to 2000 x 2000 x 1500 mm.
Customers can also opt to have a Box system tailored for their exacting needs if none of the Box Small, Medium or Large systems are deemed suitable. Per their agreement, Plastech Additive Manufacturing will supply all three variations of the Box machine and will work with BLB to customise machines for interested parties in the UK and Ireland.
For more information about the BOX systems, and the other additive manufacturing solutions offered by Plastech, visit the company website.
Plastech Additive Manufacturing
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Ennio Morricone Signs to Decca, Announces New Album
Compiling work from across his career
By Kevin Lozano
Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images
Ennio Morricone has signed a record deal with Decca, who will subsequently release Morricone 60, a new album. It'll be out on October 7, a month before his eighty-eighth birthday. Morricone 60 will feature re-recorded versions of Morricone's greatest hits, taken from movies like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and The Hateful Eight. The new compositions were conducted, recorded, and curated by Morricone, and recorded with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Find its full tracklist here.
In a press release, Morricone talked about singing with Decca:
After the success of The Hateful Eight score, I’m delighted to be returning to Decca with my own record deal—an extraordinary moment in my 60th professional anniversary year. It’s been a wonderful experience to be able to conduct my scores and to record these with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The quality of their performance of my work is truly outstanding.
Read the review for his Oscar winning score for The Hateful Eight.
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India in the Global Order
FGV’s collection of Pocket Books, “Entenda o Mundo” (or “Understanding the World”) has just received a new volume: “A Índia na Ordem Global” (or “India in the Global Order”), by professor Oliver Stuenkel. The book develops important debates on this country dynamics, such as its democracy, foreign policy and global integration through valuable contributions from the greatest thinkers of India: Jawaharlal Nehru, C. Raja Mohan, Gurcharan Das, Ashutosh Varshney and Shivshankar Menon. We have invited professor Stuenkel to comment some of these contemporary issues about India, from his new book’s perspective.
What is India’s role in the balance of power in Asia, considering the new global order? Also considering this multilateral order and the new groupings in which India is inserted, such as BRICS and IBAS, how does India encourages these initiatives?
Unlike Brazil, India is in a highly complex regional context. Geopolitical tensions and border conflicts generate a feeling of insecurity that affects India’s insertion in this global order in a profound way. As a result, India is now the largest importer of weapons in the world - including nuclear weapons - and most of its researchers on foreign relations study regional security issues, such as the relationship with Pakistan, political instability in Afghanistan and the border conflict with China. In this context, institutions such as the BRICS are important platforms to strengthen communication between India and China, two countries that will likely dominate the geopolitical situation in Asia in the following decades.
At the 69th meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, a new resolution on the elimination of nuclear weapons in a global level was discussed. India, North Korea and Israel, among other countries, have voted against this resolution. What is the impact of this fact on the maintenance of international security?
For India, nuclear weapons are an international “currency” of strength and power. In its perspective, the possession of nuclear weapons is a requirement for achieving a great power status. Indian skepticism towards the NPT (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) and to any attempt to limit its nuclear capability is fundamentally tied to the belief that, in the first place, nuclear weapons are crucial to the status of a great power, which India surely wants to become; and secondly, that the nuclear States are intended to prevent India to achieve this status. Moreover, India believes that Russia and the United States must seriously compromise with the reduction of nuclear weapons before countries with fewer weapons do. There is no consensus on the impact of this position, because, in general, analysts differ on how nuclear weapons can affect the maintenance of international security.
What are the main challenges for India in terms of foreign policy nowadays? And what should be the main strategies to overcome these challenges?
The key challenge in this context is to find out how India could, in spite of the barriers mentioned above, articulate a regional vision and defend its national interests, especially considering that the most striking element in the region is China's rise and the increase of its ambition to take over regional leadership. India’s response has been to keep closer ties with countries such as Japan and the United States to balance China's ascension.
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Entrevistado:
índia, Oliver Stuenkel, Pocket Talks
Interviewed
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Matias Spektor 2
Ton Dassen 1
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Thanos Dokos 1
Stella Krepp 1
Sarah Brockmeier 1
Renata Dalaqua 1
Rafael Marquese 1
Philipp Rotmann 1
Osmar Chohfi 1
Miriam Saraiva 1
Matthew Connelly 1
Marcelo Carvalho Rosa 1
Marcelino Rodrigues 1
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro 1
Katherine Marino 1
James Cameron 1
Hugo Fazio Vengoa 1
Guilherme Mansur 1
Felix Dane 1
David Spence 2
Christian De Vito 1
Carlo Patti 1
Arlene Tickner 1
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Women and Children First Bookstore
Women & Children First’s Bestseller Lists for All of 2018
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for December 2018
“Becoming,” by Michelle Obama
“The Great Believers,” by Rebecca Makkai
“Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side,” by Eve L. Ewing
“New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay,” by Caitlin Kunkel
“Educated: A Memoir,” by Tara Westover
“We Are Never Meeting in Real Life,” by Samantha Irby [Read Jera Brown’s interview with Samantha]
“Less,” by Andrew Sean Greer
“The Best American Short Stories 2018,” edited by Roxane Gay
“Pachinko,” by Min Jin Lee
“Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present #6),” by Barbara Ransby
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for November 2018
“Shell Game: A V.I. Warshawski Novel,” by Sara Paretsky
“Hardly Children: Stories,” by Laura Adamczyk
“I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff,” by Abbi Jacobson
“The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences Working Towards Freedom,” edited by Alice Kim, Erica Meiners, Jill Petty, Audrey Petty, Beth Richie, and Sarah Ross
“Gmorning Gnight! Little Pep Talks for Me & You,” by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jonny Sun (Illustrator)
“Almost Everything: Notes on Hope,” by Anne Lamott
“Meteorites,” by S. Brook Corfman
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for October 2018
“Start Now! You Can Make a Difference,” by Chelsea Clinton
“She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy,” by Jill Soloway
“Vote Her In: Your Guide to Electing Our First Woman President,” by Rebecca Sive
“The Lake on Fire,” by Rosellen Brown
“The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago,” by Daniel Kay Hertz
“The Fourteenth of September,” by Rita Dragonette
“Citizen Illegal,” by José Olivarez
“Good & Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger,” by Rebecca Traister
“Black Queer Hoe,” by Britteney Black Rose Kapri
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for September 2018
“Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements,” by Charlene Carruthers
“Night Moves,” by Jessica Hopper
“The Wildlands,” by Abby Geni
“Fear: Trump in the White House,” by Bob Woodward
“To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults,” by Jess T. Dugan
“The Caregiver,” by Samuel Park
“Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers,” by Anne Balay
“The Incendiaries: A Novel,” by R.O. Kwon
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for August 2018
“If They Come for Us: Poems,” by Fatimah Asghar
“If You Leave Me,” by Crystal Hana Kim
“The Air You Breathe,” by Frances de Pontes Peebles
“Crazy Rich Asians,” by Kevin Kwan
“Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear,” by Kim Brooks
“Citizen Illegal,” by Jose Olivarez
“Fruit of the Drunken Tree,” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
“The Book of Unknown Americans,” by Cristina Henriquez
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for July 2018
“My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” by Ottessa Moshfegh
“An American Marriage,” by Tayari Jones
“Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward
“Calypso,” by David Sedaris
“Eileen,” by Ottessa Moshfegh
“Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,” by Roxane Gay
“Manhattan Beach: A Novel,” by Jennifer Egan
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for June 2018
“The Terrible: A Storyteller’s Memoir,” by Yrsa Daley-Ward
“Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches,” by John Hodgman
“Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s),” by Sophie Lucido Johnson
“We Are Never Meeting in Real Life,” by Samantha Irby [Read Jera Brown’s interview with her here]
“Meaty: Essays,” by Samantha Irby
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for May 2018
“Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist,” by Franchesca Ramsey
“I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness,” by Austin Channing Brown
“The Pisces,” by Melissa Broder
“We Are Never Meeting in Real Life,” by Samantha Irby [Read Jera Brown’s interview with Samantha here]
“The Displaced Children of Displaced Children,” by Faisal Mohyuddin
“The Female Persuasion,” by Meg Wolitzer
“Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,'” by Zora Neale Hurston
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for April 2018
“Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead–My Life Story,” by Cecile Richards
“We Ate Wonder Bread,” by Nicole Hollander
“True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness: A Feminist Coming of Age,” by Christina Lahti
“My Lady’s Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel,” by Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris
“Beyond Measure: Essays,” by Rachel Z. Arndt
“The Comedown,” by Rebekah Frumkin
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for March 2018
“The List: A Week-By-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year,” by Amy Siskind
“They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” by Hanif Abdurraqib
“Bizarre Romance,” by Audrey Niffenegger, Eddie Campbell (Illustrator)
“This Far Isn’t Far Enough: Stories,” by Lynn Sloan
“Unaccompanied,” by Javier Zamora
“Electric Arches,” by Eve Ewing
“Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders
“Her Body & Other Parties: Stories,” by Carmen Machado
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for February 2018
“This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America,” by Morgan Jerkins [Check out Jera Brown’s Q&A with Morgan here.]
“You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!: And 18 Other Myths about Teachers, Teachers Unions, and Public Education,” by Bill Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers
“Apocalypse, Darling (Machete),” by Barrie Jean Borich
“Reasons for Smoking,” by Xandria Phillips
“When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele
“Little Fires Everywhere,” by Celeste Ng
Women & Children First’s Bestseller List for January 2018
“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff
“The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation,” by Natalie Moore
“Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife,” by Pamela Bannos
“The Power,” by Naomi Alderman
“The Immortalists,” by Chloe Benjamin
Women & Children First Bookstore is located at 5233 N. Clark St. in Andersonville.
Feminist Erotica 1.1 — What Is Feminist Erotica?
Women & Children First’s Bestseller Lists for 2020
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Poetry. Prose. Print.
Art cannot be commodified — we survive by being rare, being unique.
exit one
By Ishan Marvel
Available at Amazon.in
But will I forget all your ways, city?
At 27, the author realised that the romantic Delhi he believed in mostly existed in his own head, and that he was stuck therein. So, he embarked on a half-conscious exit, alone into the country, an escape not only in terms of geography, but from the sundry trappings and numbing patterns of the urban bubble. Exit One provides first glimpses from this on-going journey, and as a precursor, includes poetic tales from the author’s days as a magazine reporter, venturing an unapologetic look into contemporary time and place.
Ishan Marvel takes his own sweet time to get to places. He was born in the mountains, and has now returned to them with the mission of building a samgh and effing the ineffable.
Most of this book was written by a young, confused city-writer who consciously or otherwise wanted nothing more than to be a city-writer. Dictions: Delhi ’15 stems from this phase of my life, deconstructing some of the undercurrents that make a city what it is, by venturing an unapologetic look into contemporary time and place.
Gradually, I realised the romantic city I believed in existed mostly in my own head, and was often simply an echo of my emotions and influences. Consequently, there grew a desire to exorcise myself off this metropolitan-chronicler ghost — the one skimming off cheap bars, men-about-town, dead-night roads, islandish women, crass laughter and naked neuroses; off institutionalised racket-systems (be it politics, governance, art, culture, academia, spiritualism or activism) that feed off themselves, creating their own illusory demand; off the hobnobbing, half-incestuous networks that go on loop-like performing and patting each other on the backs; and off the pervading arrogance, fear, guilt, paranoia, resentment and lust of the city.
So, as things came to pass, I embarked on a half-conscious exit, alone into the country — a desired escape not only in terms of geography, but from the sundry trappings and numbing patterns that we take for granted as part of the urban bubble. In Transit provides glimpses from this on-going journey, with more to come.
I dedicate this book to the late Hari Narayan Sanyal, who above all helped me understand that in the end one must choose life and love over words.
And thus, Exit One.
ISHAN MARVEL
From Last evenings in the city
Taking in the descending red sandstone glory of Agrasen ki Baoli — the 14th century step well attributed to the legendary king Agrasen from Mahabharat times — the one popular Delhi monument I failed to visit all these years
Too many people and too many phones (Amir Khan’s PK did for this place what Hrithik Roshan’s Lakshya did for Hauz Khas)
I walk down the three levels towards the dark narrow passage leading to the main reservoir at the bottom, where an elderly white couple is struggling to fit in a selfie
Back up, there is the mosque area, with skyscrapers peeking over its half-collapsed roof
Return to KG Marg, earlier called Curzon Road — one of eight main arteries radiating from CP circle
To Curzon Road Hostel, where my parents and I first set camp after arriving in the city about 25 years ago
I had never bothered to revisit the place, and now, to put it in the most clichéd oxymoronic terms — everything seems strange yet familiar:
The Mother Dairy and Delhi Milk Scheme outlets, the four-feet wide shops by the road, and of course, the high-rise sarkari apartments in shades of pink, where among other things, I first encountered an elevator, and used to run it up and down over a dozen times a day — not get out of the building, just up and down
After a quick piss in the public rest room by an under-the-tree barber’s spot (vacant at the moment) I sit at a chai shop just outside the hostel complex, run by a middle-aged, kaffiyeh-sporting man with a full, luxuriant beard
Apparently, he’s been here for over 25 years, and I’m probably re-enacting my father’s chai-cigarette routine from back then… pretty good chai though
Via KG Road back towards CP
Next cut into Inner Circle across Janpath
Then left before A block, near Metro gate 7,
and right into Middle Circle alley near booze shop —
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Ren Werks > Blog > Internet > World News > Inside the Knotty International of ‘Anyon’ Particles
Inside the Knotty International of ‘Anyon’ Particles
Prior to the emergence of quantum mechanics, Page Design Web essential physics changed into marked through an unusual dualism. On the only hand, we had electric and magnetic fields, governed by using Maxwell’s equations.
Knotty International
Knotty Antonym
The fields stuffed all of the space and had been non-stop. On the other hand, we had atoms, ruled by Newtonian mechanics. The atoms have been spatially restricted — indeed, quite small — discrete items. At the heart of this dualism turned into the evaluation of mild and substance, a topic that has involved no longer only scientists, however, artists and mystics for lots centuries.
One of the glories of the quantum concept is that it has replaced that dualistic view of the count with a unified one. We found out to make fields from photons, and atoms from electrons (together with different essential Particles). Each photon and electrons have described the usage of the equal mathematical shape. They’re Debris, in the sense that they arrive in discrete gadgets with specific, reproducible houses. But the new quantum-mechanical kind of “particle” cannot be associated with a precise area in the area. As an alternative, the viable outcomes of measuring its position are given through a probability distribution. And that distribution is given because of the rectangular of an area-filling field, its so-called wave function.
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Conceptually, quantum Debris range so substantially from their classical ancestors that an extraordinary call seems so as. Simply because the quantum “qubit” was named by way of analogy to the classical “bit” of information, I’m able to use the term “article” (reported wort-ice) for a quantum particle. This emphasis on the particle element (instead of “wavicle”) is suitable, due to the fact in practice quantum physicists usually examine quantum conduct with the aid of visualizing the conduct of Particles, and then refining — and, if vital, correcting — their photo until it really works for articles.
The quantum unification of light and substance, while pleasing, is constrained in scope. For whilst we pass beyond unmarried articles to don’t forget the conduct of collections of identical articles, a new dualism seems. certainly, the sector of quantum Debris divides into high-quality, mutually different kingdoms. There is the dominion of bosons, named after Satyendra Bose, and the dominion of fermions, named after Enrico Fermi. Every species of the article is either a boson or fermion.
Interactions among bosons are very exceptional from the ones of fermions. We call this impact “quantum information.” For functions of orientation, an easy advent may be in order.
Bosons are conformists. They like to behave inside the identical manner. (More technically: equal bosons have more suitable opportunity to occupy the equal quantum state.) Photons belong to the kingdom of bosons. A laser beam is the epitome of boson-ness. It includes many photons of the equal wavelength (that is, color) transferring in the same course, the end result of “stimulated emission” of photons in an imitative cascade.
Fermions, with the aid of evaluation, are individualists. They virtually refuse to occupy the same quantum state, a reality referred to as the Pauli exclusion precept. Electrons belong to the kingdom of fermions, and that is a key cause why the periodic desk exists. Electrons, being negatively charged, are strongly attracted to positively charged atomic nuclei, but they save you each other from surrounding the nucleus in an easy, green way. Alternatively, they increase complex configurations which could assist interesting chemistry.
Supersymmetry is a theoretical speculation that — if actual — might reconcile the 2 kingdoms. In line with supersymmetry, Every simple article has a mate inside the contrary state, its superpartner. The superpartner of a boson is a fermion, and vice versa. Superpartners percentage the equal electric fee and several different properties, however, fluctuate in mass and spin.
Supersymmetry is an attractive, logical extension of known physics, and it can be implemented with fashionable arithmetic. Many physicists, together with me, an experience that it deserves to be real.
But the closing word, naturally, goes to nature. while There is compelling circumstantial proof for supersymmetry, as but There’s no direct proof. For that, we need to locate some superpartners. Trying to find superpartners of regarded Particles is the first-rate preoccupation of experimentalists working On the Large Hadron Collider. Unfortunately, the outcomes so far are terrible. yet There may be still massive capacity for discovery because the device comes to operate at higher electricity and Extra collisions get analyzed.
Navistar Isis Log In
In reality, quantum records lie at the foundation of our know-how of nature. Additionally, as we’ve seen, it increases a profound query approximately the cohesion of matter. Addressing that question shows new opportunities for discovery.
Such a vital idea merits a worthy grounding. What’re quantum facts, at the bottom?
The contemporary answer to that query is deep, lovely and noticeably recent. It emerged inside the late 1970s, Greater than 50 years after quantum mechanics matured, and it turned into catalyzed via the pioneering work of Jon Leinaas and Jan Myrheim.
In quick, quantum records displays the topology of article Global traces. inside the next three paragraphs, I’ll unpack that dense bit of poetry.
In quantum idea, the opportunity for a system is expressed because of the rectangular of the amplitude of its wave characteristic. Amplitudes are More simple and obey less complicated guidelines than the possibilities they manipulate. The significant trouble of quantum dynamics, therefore, is to calculate the wavefunction amplitude for a given configuration of Debris at an initial time to adapt to some other configuration at a later time.
In calculating the full amplitude for 2 indistinguishable articles that begin at positions A and B and give up at positions C and D, we have to recall contributions from Every viable movement connecting the beginning positions to the quit factors. Those paths are the “World lines” of the articles. The motions divide into two instructions: one class in which the two articles, which started at A and B, respectively, land up at C and D, and some other magnificence wherein they wind up at D and C.
because the articles are indistinguishable, the final result — that is, articles at positions C and D — is the equal in Each case. but each Global line pair has an awesome topology.
We need a rule for the way to combine the contributions from those two classes. There are two mathematically constant possibilities. We can add them, or We will subtract them. The “add” choice gives us bosons, while the “subtract” option gives us fermions. All of the characteristic homes of bosons and fermions can be deduced from those basic guidelines.
It is a terrific intellectual achievement, to have traced such profoundly consequential homes of matter to a basic component of identification — this is, indistinguishability — and the topology of motion in area-time.
However, the real payoff comes while we bring that fundamental know-how to bear on new conditions and make new discoveries. The most dramatic software of our deeper understanding of quantum records arises when we recall articles that live in two dimensions, as I’ll now give an explanation for.
Knotty Hair Ties
Perhaps noticeably, in an International of dimensions, the topology of pairs (or large businesses) of worldwide strains becomes a whole lot richer than in words of 3 or Greater. The motive is carefully related to a simple feature of knots.
In 3 space dimensions, knot theory is a subtle, complicated problem. but in 4 space dimensions, It is trivial: All knots can be unraveled absolutely.
A knot, to mathematicians, is just a non-stop curve in the area. Believe labeling each point on that tangled curve with the numbers between zero and one, with 0 and one representing the same factor. Now take a circle and do the same.
To untangle the knot, certainly, permit the points on our not float to the points on the circle which is categorized with the corresponding range. Of direction, obstructions to this unraveling may stand up, such as whilst exceptional parts of the curve come to intersect. however, in four dimensions, We can always pass strands past one another.
The manner is tough to visualize without delay, however, We will recognize it using a simple trick. Allow us to constitute position in the extra size via the cost of a fictitious temperature. If our threatened intersection happens at a factor where the temperatures of the strands are exclusive, it isn’t always an actual intersection, due to the fact the strands are positioned in a different way in the extra size. And if the temperatures are identical, we need handiest make a temporary tour into the more dimension — heat one stand up, move it “through” (inside the regular dimensions), after which cool it back off — to avoid the intersection.
the world strains of articles that move in three-dimensional space form strands in four-dimensional area-time. consequently, as we’ve Just visible, they can’t definitely get tousled. Their topology reduces to preserving song of exchanges, as we discussed in advance.
Alternatively, International lines of articles whose movement is restricted to a two-dimensional area shape strands in a three-dimensional space-time. Strands in 3 dimensions maximum without a doubt can get snarled, as anybody who has braided hair is aware of.
With that richer topology comes a great deal more variety of the opportunities for adding up the contributions of global strains. In different words, there are many Extra possibilities for quantum data, and for that reason Extra classes of Particles past bosons and fermions. I coined the phrase “anyone” to explain articles whose motion is restrained to two space dimensions, and which are neither bosons nor fermions. I meant this humorously, to suggest “something goes,” however of direction that implication needs to not be taken literally. Anyone need to obey rather established mathematical policies. still, we find infinitely many constant possibilities for them, instead of handiest.
Particle Game 2
Due to the fact the rules for anyone conduct are sensitive to the articles’ movement over the years, anyone have memory. Extra exactly: For the reason that amplitude for an evolution related to anyone might be extraordinary, depending on how their Global lines got snarled over the years, the price of the amplitude presents a file of their relative movement. As we’ll speak momentarily, the reminiscence capabilities of anyone may electricity a crucial technology.
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Bloomfield, Hannah, Brayshaw, David and Charlton-Perez, Andrew (2020): ERA5 derived time series of European country-aggregate electricity demand, wind power generation and solar power generation. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.273
Bloomfield, Hannah, Brayshaw, David and Charlton-Perez, Andrew (2020): ERA5 derived time series of European country-aggregate electricity demand, wind power generation and solar power generation: hourly data from 1979-2019. University of Reading. Dataset. https://researchdata.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/272
Bloomfield, Hannah, Brayshaw, David and Charlton-Perez, Andrew (2020): MERRA2 derived time series of European country-aggregate electricity demand, wind power generation and solar power generation. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.239
Garratt, Michael, Bommarco, Riccardo, van Gils, Stijn, Martin, Emily, Redlich, Sarah, Steffan-Dewenter, Ingolf, Switek, Stanislaw, Kleijn, David, Mortimer, Simon, van der Putten, Wim, Takacs, Victoria, Senapathi, Deepa and Potts, Simon (2018): Crop growth and aphid populations in winter wheat fields from across Europe. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.136
Garratt, Michael and Degani, Erika (2018): Yield parameter relationships of oilseed rape (Brassica napus) under the influence of fertiliser and insect pollination. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.141
Gonzalez, Paula, Bloomfield, Hannah, Brayshaw, David and Charlton-Perez, Andrew (2020): Sub-seasonal forecasts of European electricity demand, wind power and solar power generation. University of Reading. Dataset. https://researchdata.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/275
Grimmond, Sue, Lindberg, Fredrik, Allen, Lucy, Yogeswaran, N and Kotthaus, Simone (2018): LUCY: Large scale Urban Consumption of Energy. University of Reading. Software. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.149
Harrison, Sandy (2019): Modern pollen data for climate reconstructions, version 1 (SMPDS). University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.194
Harrison, Sandy, González-Sampériz, Penélope and Gil-Romera, Graciela (2019): Fossil pollen data for climate reconstructions from El Cañizar de Villarquemado. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.219
Harrison, Sandy and Marinova, Elena (2017): EMBSeCBIO modern pollen biomisation. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.109
Hill, Peter (2018): The impact of precipitating hydrometeors on the atmospheric radiation budget. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.174
Maidment, Ross, Black, Emily and Young, Matthew (2017): TAMSAT Daily Rainfall Estimates (Version 3.0). University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.112
Marlton, Graeme, Charlton-Perez, Andrew and Harrison, Giles (2019): IS17 gravity wave climatology between 2007 and 2012. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.199
Moreton, Sophia and Roberts, Malcolm (2021): An eddy tracking dataset for N512-12, N216-12 and N216-025 model configurations of HadGEM3-GC3.1. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.283
Pithan, Felix (2016): Missing orographic drag leads to climate model biases in jet streams and storm tracks - Met Office Unified Model (UM) results. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.49
Suckling, Emma and Hawkins, Ed (2016): University of Reading Empirical Climate Model Version 1.0: Decadal Prediction Experiment. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.39
Wei, Dongyang, Harrison, Sandy and Prentice, Iain Colin (2019): The climatic space of European pollen taxa. University of Reading. Dataset. http://dx.doi.org/10.17864/1947.204
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US9811363B1 - Predictive management of on-demand code execution - Google Patents
Predictive management of on-demand code execution Download PDF
Timothy Allen Wagner
Amazon Technologies Inc
2015-12-16 Application filed by Amazon Technologies Inc filed Critical Amazon Technologies Inc
2016-12-01 Assigned to AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC. reassignment AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC. ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: WAGNER, TIMOTHY ALLEN
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Systems and methods are described for predictively managing calls to tasks on an on-demand code execution environment. Specifically, a task profile can be utilized to predict that a call to a first task will be followed by a call to a second task. Thereafter, a virtual machine can be loaded with executable code corresponding the second task, even before the call to the second task is received. If the call to the second task is received, the task can then be executed by utilizing the previously loaded executable code, thus increasing the speed at which the second task can be executed on the on-demand code execution environment.
This application is a related to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/971,882, entitled PREDICTIVE MANAGEMENT OF ON-DEMAND CODE EXECUTION, and filed Dec. 16, 2015, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/971,977, entitled PREDICTIVE MANAGEMENT OF ON-DEMAND CODE EXECUTION, and filed Dec. 16, 2015.
Computing devices can utilize communication networks to exchange data. Companies and organizations operate computer networks that interconnect a number of computing devices to support operations or to provide services to third parties. The computing systems can be located in a single geographic location or located in multiple, distinct geographic locations (e.g., interconnected via private or public communication networks). Specifically, data centers or data processing centers, herein generally referred to as a “data center,” may include a number of interconnected computing systems to provide computing resources to users of the data center. The data centers may be private data centers operated on behalf of an organization or public data centers operated on behalf, or for the benefit of, the general public.
To facilitate increased utilization of data center resources, virtualization technologies allow a single physical computing device to host one or more instances of virtual machines that appear and operate as independent computing devices to users of a data center. With virtualization, the single physical computing device can create, maintain, delete, or otherwise manage virtual machines in a dynamic manner. In turn, users can request computer resources from a data center, including single computing devices or a configuration of networked computing devices, and be provided with varying numbers of virtual machine resources.
In some scenarios, virtual machine instances may be configured according to a number of virtual machine instance types to provide specific functionality. For example, various computing devices may be associated with different combinations of operating systems or operating system configurations, virtualized hardware resources and software applications to enable a computing device to provide different desired functionalities, or to provide similar functionalities more efficiently. These virtual machine instance type configurations are often contained within a device image, which includes static data containing the software (e.g., the OS and applications together with their configuration and data files, etc.) that the virtual machine will run once started. The device image is typically stored on the disk used to create or initialize the instance. Thus, a computing device may process the device image in order to implement the desired software configuration.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS
FIG. 1 is a block diagram depicting an illustrative environment in which an on-demand code execution environment can operate;
FIG. 2 depicts a general architecture of a computing device providing an on-demand code execution environment manager for implementing low latency on-demand code execution;
FIG. 3 is a flow diagram depicting illustrative interactions for passively monitoring calls made to and from the on-demand code execution environment of FIG. 1, which may generate data utilized to determine frequently executed tasks in the on-demand code execution environment;
FIG. 4 is a flow diagram depicting illustrative interactions for analyzing passively gathered data within the on-demand code execution environment of FIG. 1 to determine a frequently executed tasks to mark those tasks for active monitoring;
FIGS. 5A and 5B are flow diagrams depicting illustrative interactions for conducting active monitoring on a task by modifying calls to and from that task;
FIG. 6 is a flow diagram depicting illustrative interactions for generating a task profile based on active monitoring data;
FIG. 7 is a flow chart depicting an illustrative routine for monitoring task executions on the on-demand code execution environment of FIG. 1 to generate a task profile, and provide that task profile to an end user;
FIGS. 8A and 8B are flow charts depicting illustrative interactions for handling execution of a second task predicted to occur based on an execution of a first task;
FIGS. 9A and 9B are flow charts depicting illustrative interactions for handling transmission of an auxiliary service call predicted to occur based on execution of a first task; and
FIG. 10 is a flow chart depicting an illustrative routine for utilizing a task profile to predictively manage calls based on an initial call and a task profile related to the initial call.
Generally described, aspects of the present disclosure relate to managing executions of tasks within a low latency, on-demand code execution environment, as well as the interactions of those executions within the on-demand code execution environment and with external services. The on-demand code execution environment may operate as part of a system of rapidly provisioned and released computing resources, often referred to as a “cloud computing environment.” Specifically, the code execution environment may include one or more virtual machine instances that are “pre-warmed” (e.g., booted into an operating system and executing a complete or substantially complete runtime environment) and configured to enable execution of user-defined code, such that the code may be executed rapidly without initializing the virtual machine instance. Each set of code on the on-demand code execution environment may define a “task,” and implement specific functionality corresponding to that task when executed on the on-demand code execution environment. Individual implementations of the task on the on-demand code execution environment may be referred to as an “execution” of the task. In some embodiments, executions of multiple “tasks” may be interrelated, such that a first task, when executed, triggers the execution of a second task, etc., until a complete set of desired functionality occurs. Moreover, tasks may be called for execution at the on-demand code execution environment by external services (such as database services, event parsing services, etc., each of which may be wholly or partially automated), and tasks may additionally or alternatively transmit calls to such external services. Thus, by utilizing tasks within the on-demand code execution environment, either alone or in conjunction with external services, complex functionality can be achieved. Beneficially, the division of this complex functionality into multiple constituent tasks or external service processes can create modularity, allowing individual tasks to be modified without effecting operation of other tasks. Moreover, dividing complex functionality into multiple constituent tasks or external service processes can increase the efficiency at which the functionality can be achieved, by distributing portions of the functionality to different devices and utilizing computing resources only when necessary. However, dividing complex functionality into multiple constituent tasks or external service processes may also make tracking of that functionality difficult, as no central entity may have knowledge of all tasks or external service processes. Thus, traditional debugging techniques, such as software profilers that monitor execution of a single program on a single computing device, are generally ineffective in monitoring execution of multiple tasks in an on-demand code execution environment. The present application addresses these issues and others by enabling executions of tasks within an on-demand code execution environment to be monitored (potentially in conjunction with external service processes), and enabling profiles of those executions to be generated for delivery to a user. As such, a user may be enabled to view or visualize the “paths” created by execution of tasks within the on-demand code execution environment, and thus more easily monitor, debug, or modify functionality implemented by interconnected tasks.
Moreover, the present application enables predictive handling of task calls based on a task profile. Specifically, the present application enables an on-demand code execution environment, on receiving a call to a first task, to determine whether a subsequent call (e.g., to an auxiliary service, to a second task, etc.) is likely to occur, and to modify operation of the on-demand code execution environment to facilitate that subsequent call. For example, where a call to a first task frequently results in a subsequent call to a second task, the on-demand code execution environment may, on receiving the call to the first task, load computer-executable instructions corresponding to both tasks within one or more virtual machines. As such, should the predicted call to the second task occur, that task may be executed on the pre-loaded virtual machines, minimizing time required to select a virtual machine for execution of the second task, and to load the code of the second task onto that virtual machine. As a further illustration, where execution of a first task frequently results in a call to an auxiliary service, a the on-demand code execution environment may select a virtual machine to execute the first task based on a communication path between the selected virtual machine and the auxiliary service. Illustratively, the on-demand code execution environment may select a virtual machine that is located nearby to the auxiliary service in terms of network distance (e.g., number of intermediary devices or “hops,” latency, etc.) or may select a virtual machine that has a high quality network path to the auxiliary service (e.g., high bandwidth, pre-existing communication session, ability to utilize a preferred protocol, etc.). Should a call to the auxiliary service occur during execution of the first task, that call can be quickly routed to the auxiliary service via that communication path, increasing the ability of the on-demand code execution environment to quickly transmit auxiliary calls. Thus, the use of a profile can enable the on-demand code execution environment to predict subsequent calls based on an initial call, and to predictively prepare the on-demand code execution environment for the subsequent calls, such that those calls are handled in an efficient manner, should they occur.
As noted above, a profile may be utilized to determine interrelations between various calls or tasks on an on-demand code execution environment. By way of illustration, a user may attempt to utilize a combination of the on-demand code execution environment and external services in order to generate “thumbnail” images for a website or other network-based content. Illustratively, the user may configure a data storage service as a designated point for end users of the website to upload profile pictures or other images. The user may also configure the external data storage service, on successfully receiving and storing an image, to call a task on the on-demand code execution environment that retrieves the uploaded image from the data storage service, generates a smaller “thumbnail” version of the image, and places that smaller image back into the data storage service for use by the website. Assuming that each step of this process is implemented correctly, the process may successfully generate thumbnail images for each image uploaded to the website. However, if implemented incorrectly, this process could result in an “infinite loop,” because each smaller image added to the data storage service may call a new execution of the task on the on-demand code execution environment, which places a yet smaller image into the data storage service, etc. Obviously, such a scenario is undesirable. However, because of the distributed and asynchronous nature of such a system, the user may have difficulty in diagnosing the problem. For example, while each individual component (e.g., the data storage service and the on-demand code execution environment) may provide logs to the user of its own activity, the user may be required to manually correlate those two activity logs in order to determine the cause of the error. While this example is somewhat simplified, such correlation becomes progressively more difficult as more diverse functionality is implemented across a variety of different systems.
To address these issues, the present application enables an on-demand code execution environment to monitor the execution of tasks on that environment, and to determine how such executions interrelate on the environment (e.g., to “trace” the execution of tasks within the on-demand code execution environment). Moreover, the present application enables the on-demand code execution environment to determine interactions between executions of tasks and external services (e.g., data storage services, event parsing services, etc.), and to generate a mapping or representation of those interactions. For example, the on-demand code execution environment may determine that a first external service called a first task, which called a second external service, which called a second task, etc. In some embodiments, this mapping or representation may be provided to a user, to ease monitoring, debugging, or modification of the tasks. For example, the on-demand code execution environment may generate a graph (such as a directed graph) that indicates the interconnections between executions of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment and/or external services, thereby enabling a user to visualize how multiple tasks or external services are used in conjunction to provide complex functionalities.
In one embodiment, monitoring of an execution may be facilitated by modifying a call to a task, to associate that call with a unique identifier. During and after execution of the task, subsequent related calls (e.g., to other tasks on the on-demand code execution environment or to auxiliary services) can also be associated with the same unique identifier. For example, the first time a task ‘A’ is called, the on-demand code execution environment may associate the call with the unique identifier ‘ID-1’, and store data indicating that the task ‘A’ was called, and assigned to unique identifier ‘ID-1’. The on-demand code execution environment may further monitor execution of the task, and log any information pertaining to the execution (e.g., total execution time or results of execution). In addition, the on-demand code execution environment may modify any calls made during that execution of that task ‘A’, such that the unique identifier ‘ID-1’ is included within those calls. If the call triggers a subsequent execution of the task ‘A’ (or another task) on the on-demand code execution environment, the on-demand code execution environment may maintain the unique identifier for that subsequent call, and any other calls made in response to that subsequent call, while also logging data indicating each subsequent call and the associated unique identifier. Thereafter, the on-demand code execution environment may inspect the logged data to generate a list of calls associated with the unique identifier, the order in which the calls occurred, and any information pertaining to executions caused by those calls. Further, the on-demand code execution environment may process the logged data to visualize the relationships between the calls (e.g., a call to execute task ‘A’ caused a call to execute task ‘B’, which in turn caused a call to execute task ‘C’, etc.).
In another embodiment, monitoring of task executions may be facilitated by including historical information directly into calls to execute tasks on the on-demand code execution environment. For example, where a call to execute task ‘A’ results in a subsequent call to execute task ‘B’, the on-demand code execution environment may modify that subsequent call to include an indication that the source of the subsequent call was an execution of task ‘A’ occurring at a given point in time. This information may be propagated through subsequent, related calls to or from the on-demand code execution environment. For example, if a call to task ‘B’ was caused due to execution of task ‘A’ at a first point in time, and if the execution of task ‘B’ calls an execution of a task ‘C’, the call to task ‘C’ may be modified with historical information regarding the call (e.g., that the call was generated by the execution of task ‘B’ at a certain point in time, which was itself generated by the execution of task ‘A’ at a certain point in time, etc.). Illustratively, insertion of historical information into calls may enable the on-demand code execution environment to determine the history of any call very rapidly, without requiring analysis of log files. This may enable information regarding the task execution to be generated very rapidly (e.g., in real-time or otherwise without perceivable delay to an end user). However, if the amount of historical information grows large, insertion of this information into calls may delay or hinder processing of those calls. To ensure that historical information appended to or included within a call does not grow too large, the on-demand code execution environment may limit the historical information to a threshold size (e.g., the last n historical tasks that led to a specific call), and omit any historical information over that threshold size from subsequent calls.
In some instances, rather than maintaining a complete history within each call, the on-demand code execution environment may include within calls an abbreviated or compacted history, such as identifiers of each task called or executed prior to an individual call, as well as the number of times each task was called or executed (e.g., a given call was preceded by three executions of task ‘A’, two executions of task ‘B’, etc.). Use of abbreviated or compacted historical information may reduce the amount of data appended to or inserted into calls. In some instances, a unique ID may also be inserted into such calls, and the on-demand code execution environment may log, at each execution of a task, a time of the execution, the unique ID associated with the execution, and the abbreviated or compacted historical information corresponding to that execution. Thereafter, the on-demand code execution environment may utilize the logged data (e.g., the unique IDs, timestamps, and abbreviated or compacted historical information) to determine the interactions between various executions, and to generate a visualization of those interactions (e.g., in the form of a directed graph) for a user.
While the above-noted tracking techniques are discussed with respect to the on-demand code execution environment, some embodiments of the present disclosure may also utilize tracking information generated by auxiliary or external services. For example, where the on-demand code execution environment and an auxiliary service are owned or operated by a single entity, that entity may configure both the on-demand code execution environment and the external service to implement a consistent tracking scheme (e.g., such that both services respect and propagate unique identifiers within calls between the two services, such that both services insert historical information within the calls, etc.). Thus, the on-demand code execution environment may determine interactions not only between executions of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment, but also between those tasks and calls to external services.
It may in some cases be undesirable for the on-demand code execution environment to attempt to actively monitor all executions of all tasks on the on-demand code execution environment. As used herein, active monitoring generally refers to modifying execution of, or calls to or from, a task in order to generate monitoring data for that task. For example, active monitoring may include modifying task calls to include a unique identifier in that task call, or may include including historical information regarding past calls or executions into subsequent calls made from a task. In some instances, active monitoring may increase the time required to execute tasks on the on-demand code execution environment, which may be undesirable. Illustratively, the on-demand code execution environment may generally attempt to complete executions of tasks within a relatively low threshold time period, such as under 100 milliseconds (ms). Actively monitoring calls or executions on the on-demand code execution environment may introduce overhead to those executions, slowing their completion on the on-demand code execution environment (potentially above the threshold time period). Moreover, actively monitoring calls or executions may require increased computing resources on the on-demand code execution environment (e.g., to conduct analysis of log data to determine interactions between executions). Accordingly, the on-demand code execution environment may select to actively monitor calls or executions of only a subset of tasks. In one embodiment, these tasks may be designated by users of the on-demand code execution environment (e.g., by enabling a “debugging” preference for a specific task). In another embodiment, these tasks may be automatically selected by the on-demand code execution environment based on passive monitoring data. As used herein, passive monitoring generally refers to data collected during normal operations of the on-demand code execution environment, without modifying calls to or from, or executions of, a task. For example, the on-demand code execution environment may utilize passive monitoring data to identify those tasks that are executed frequently (e.g., more than a threshold number of times over a given time period), and mark those tasks for active monitoring. As a further example, the on-demand code execution environment may use passive monitoring information to identify tasks that satisfy other thresholds, such as specific levels of computing resources on the on-demand code execution environment (e.g., total execution time, processing power, network bandwidth, memory, etc.), and to mark those tasks for active monitoring.
Illustratively, the on-demand code execution environment may select actively monitored tasks based on pre-existing logging information available to the on-demand code execution environment, such that selection of actively monitored tasks does not alter normal operation of the on-demand code execution environment. For example, the on-demand code execution environment may be configured to log each execution of a task, timing information for that execution (e.g., time of execution start, duration, and/or completion), authorization information for that execution (e.g., the user or service that authorized execution), a source of that execution (e.g., the call, such as an application program interface [“API”], that caused execution or the source of that call), and outputs of that execution (e.g., calls made from the execution to execute other tasks or external services). Thereafter, the on-demand code execution environment may periodically (e.g., as a background process) analyze the log to determine frequently repeated information. For example, where a given task is frequently executed based on a specific call, from a specific source, and results in similar outputs (e.g., calls to the same external service), that task may be designated for active monitoring on the on-demand code execution environment. In some instances, rather than designating all executions of the task for active monitoring, the on-demand code execution environment may specify criteria for when executions of the task should be monitored (e.g., when they are caused by the specific call from the specific source). In one embodiment, all task information in a log may be analyzed to determine whether those tasks satisfy criteria for active monitoring. In other embodiments, a selection of task information from the log may be sampled to determine whether any tasks within the selection satisfy criteria for active monitoring. Thereafter, the on-demand code execution environment may implement active monitoring for the executions of the task and create a profile of the task, detailing interactions caused by the task. In one embodiment, the profile may include a visualization or other representation of the interactions, which can be presented to an end user (e.g., for debugging or optimization purposes).
In accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure, a task profile may also be utilized to predictively manage calls within an on-demand code execution environment. Specifically, the on-demand code execution environment can utilize the information within a profile of a given task to predict a likely subsequent call generated during execution of the task, and to prepare the on-demand code execution environment for that subsequent call, should it occur. For example, where the predicted subsequent call will cause execution of a second task on the on-demand code execution environment, the on-demand code execution environment can preemptively load executable code corresponding to the second task onto a virtual machine, such that should the predicted call to the second task occur, that second task can be executed quickly. The code of the second task may be loaded, for example, to an available virtual machine (e.g., within a “warming pool,” such that that machine is capable of quickly executing the second task. In some instances, the code of the second task may be loaded onto the same virtual machine that is assigned to execute the initial task. Further, the virtual machine itself may be modified such that where execution of the initial task causes a call to the second task, that call need not be routed through other components of the on-demand code execution environment before returning to the virtual machine. For example, the virtual machine may be configured to intercept calls to the second task, and to directly execute the second task. As a further example, the code corresponding to the first and second tasks may be combined by the on-demand code execution environment, such that portions of code, initially corresponding to the first task, that generate a call to the second task are replaced with calls to other portions of the combined code that initially corresponded to the second code. Thus, no calls need be generated at all, and code of both the first and second tasks may be executed in combination. Accordingly, any overhead associated with generation of a call to the second task, assignment of that task to a virtual machine, loading of the virtual machine with requisite information, etc., can be greatly reduced by use of predictive call management based on task profiles.
As a further example, where a profile for a given task indicates that execution of that task will likely result in a call to an auxiliary service, the on-demand code execution environment may select a virtual machine to execute the task based on available communication paths between the selected virtual machine and the auxiliary service, potentially increasing the speed and reliability of transmission of the call to the auxiliary service. For example, where the on-demand code execution environment has access to virtual machines executed on host computing devices in a variety of geographical locations, the on-demand code execution environment may select a virtual machine instance that is physically proximate to the geographical location of the auxiliary service. Geographic locations of virtual machine instances (or hosts executing virtual machine instances) and/or of auxiliary services may be determined, for example, by manual data entry or use of a geographic information system (GIS), which correlates network addresses, such as Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, to geographic locations. Utilization of a GIS may in some instances be referred to as “IP geo-location.” As a further example, where the on-demand code execution environment has access to virtual machines with different network connectivities (e.g., access to different networks different network locations, different communication capabilities, etc.), the on-demand code execution environment may select a virtual machine instance based on its proximity (e.g., in terms of network distance) to the auxiliary service, or based on a quality of communication path between the selected virtual machine and the auxiliary service (which may reflect or include network distance, bandwidth, reliability, or other network path metrics). In some instances, the on-demand code execution environment may maintain one or more virtual machines that are preferred connection points for a given auxiliary service. These virtual machines may, for example, maintain a set of persistent connections to the auxiliary service, such that overhead related to initializing a connection to the auxiliary service is reduced or eliminated. In some instances, these virtual machines may utilize alternative or specialized communications protocols to communicate with the auxiliary service than would otherwise be used by the on-demand code execution environment, which protocols enable quicker or more reliable communication between the virtual machines and the auxiliary service. Thus, utilization of a task profile can enable the on-demand code execution environment to select a virtual machine to execute a first task, such that when a predicted call to an auxiliary service occurs, that call can be transmitted quickly and reliably.
As used herein, the term “virtual machine instance” is intended to refer to an execution of software or other executable code that emulates hardware to provide an environment or platform on which software may execute (an “execution environment”). Virtual machine instances are generally executed by hardware devices, which may differ from the physical hardware emulated by the virtual machine instance. For example, a virtual machine may emulate a first type of processor and memory while being executed on a second type of processor and memory. Thus, virtual machines can be utilized to execute software intended for a first execution environment (e.g., a first operating system) on a physical device that is executing a second execution environment (e.g., a second operating system). In some instances, hardware emulated by a virtual machine instance may be the same or similar to hardware of an underlying device. For example, a device with a first type of processor may implement a plurality of virtual machine instances, each emulating an instance of that first type of processor. Thus, virtual machine instances can be used to divide a device into a number of logical sub-devices (each referred to as a “virtual machine instance”). While virtual machine instances can generally provide a level of abstraction away from the hardware of an underlying physical device, this abstraction is not required. For example, assume a device implements a plurality of virtual machine instances, each of which emulate hardware identical to that provided by the device. Under such a scenario, each virtual machine instance may allow a software application to execute code on the underlying hardware without translation, while maintaining a logical separation between software applications running on other virtual machine instances. This process, which is generally referred to as “native execution,” may be utilized to increase the speed or performance of virtual machine instances. Other techniques that allow direct utilization of underlying hardware, such as hardware pass-through techniques, may be used, as well.
While a virtual machine executing an operating system is described herein as one example of an execution environment, other execution environments are also possible. For example, tasks or other processes may be executed within a software “container,” which provides a runtime environment without itself providing virtualization of hardware. Containers may be implemented within virtual machines to provide additional security, or may be run outside of a virtual machine instance.
The execution of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment will now be discussed. Specifically, to execute tasks, the on-demand code execution environment described herein may maintain a pool of pre-initialized virtual machine instances that are ready for use as soon as a user request is received. Due to the pre-initialized nature of these virtual machines, delay (sometimes referred to as latency) associated with executing the user code (e.g., instance and language runtime startup time) can be significantly reduced, often to sub-100 millisecond levels. Illustratively, the on-demand code execution environment may maintain a pool of virtual machine instances on one or more physical computing devices, where each virtual machine instance has one or more software components (e.g., operating systems, language runtimes, libraries, etc.) loaded thereon. When the on-demand code execution environment receives a request to execute the program code of a user, which specifies one or more computing constraints for executing the program code of the user, the on-demand code execution environment may select a virtual machine instance for executing the program code of the user based on the one or more computing constraints specified by the request and cause the program code of the user to be executed on the selected virtual machine instance. The program codes can be executed in isolated containers that are created on the virtual machine instances. Since the virtual machine instances in the pool have already been booted and loaded with particular operating systems and language runtimes by the time the requests are received, the delay associated with finding compute capacity that can handle the requests (e.g., by executing the user code in one or more containers created on the virtual machine instances) is significantly reduced.
The on-demand code execution environment may include a virtual machine instance manager configured to receive user code (threads, programs, etc., composed in any of a variety of programming languages) and execute the code in a highly scalable, low latency manner, without requiring user configuration of a virtual machine instance. Specifically, the virtual machine instance manager can, prior to receiving the user code and prior to receiving any information from a user regarding any particular virtual machine instance configuration, create and configure virtual machine instances according to a predetermined set of configurations, each corresponding to any one or more of a variety of run-time environments. Thereafter, the virtual machine instance manager receives user-initiated requests to execute code, and identify a pre-configured virtual machine instance to execute the code based on configuration information associated with the request. The virtual machine instance manager can further allocate the identified virtual machine instance to execute the user's code at least partly by creating and configuring containers inside the allocated virtual machine instance. Various embodiments for implementing a virtual machine instance manager and executing user code on virtual machine instances is described in more detail in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/502,648, entitled “PROGRAMMATIC EVENT DETECTION AND MESSAGE GENERATION FOR REQUESTS TO EXECUTE PROGRAM CODE” and filed Sep. 30, 2014 now issued as U.S. Pat. No. 9,323,556 (the “'556 Patent”), the entirety of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
The foregoing aspects and many of the attendant advantages of this disclosure will become more readily appreciated as the same become better understood by reference to the following detailed description, when taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an illustrative operating environment 100 in which an on-demand code execution environment 110 may operate based on communication with user computing devices 102 and auxiliary services 106. By way of illustration, various example user computing devices 102 are shown in communication with the on-demand code execution environment 110, including a desktop computer, laptop, and a mobile phone. In general, the user computing devices 102 can be any computing device such as a desktop, laptop or tablet computer, personal computer, wearable computer, server, personal digital assistant (PDA), hybrid PDA/mobile phone, mobile phone, electronic book reader, set-top box, voice command device, camera, digital media player, and the like. The on-demand code execution environment 110 may provide the user computing devices 102 with one or more user interfaces, command-line interfaces (CLI), application programing interfaces (API), and/or other programmatic interfaces for generating and uploading user-executable code, invoking the user-provided code (e.g., submitting a request to execute the user codes on the on-demand code execution environment 110), scheduling event-based jobs or timed jobs, tracking the user-provided code, and/or viewing other logging or monitoring information related to their requests and/or user codes. Although one or more embodiments may be described herein as using a user interface, it should be appreciated that such embodiments may, additionally or alternatively, use any CLIs, APIs, or other programmatic interfaces.
The illustrative environment 100 further includes one or more auxiliary services 106, which can interact with the one-demand code execution environment 110 to implement desired functionality on behalf of a user. Auxiliary services 106 can correspond to network-connected computing devices, such as servers, which generate data accessible to the one-demand code execution environment 110 or otherwise communicate with the one-demand code execution environment 110. For example, the auxiliary services 106 can include web services (e.g., associated with the user computing devices 102, with the on-demand code execution environment 110, or with third parties), data bases, really simple syndication (“RSS”) readers, social networking sites, or any other source of network-accessible service or data source. In some instances, auxiliary services 106 may be associated with the on-demand code execution environment, e.g., to provide billing or logging services to the on-demand code execution environment. In some instances, auxiliary services 106 actively transmit information, such as API calls or other task-triggering information, to the on-demand code execution environment 110. In other instances, auxiliary services 106 may be passive, such that data is made available for access by the on-demand code execution environment 110. As described below, components of the on-demand code execution environment 110 may periodically poll such passive data sources, and trigger tasks within the on-demand code execution environment 110 based on the data provided. While depicted in FIG. 1 as distinct from the user computing devices 102 and the on-demand code execution environment 110, in some embodiments, various auxiliary services 106 may be implemented by either the user computing devices 102 or the on-demand code execution environment 110.
The user computing devices 102 and auxiliary services 106 may communication with the on-demand code execution environment 110 via network 104, which may include any wired network, wireless network, or combination thereof. For example, the network 104 may be a personal area network, local area network, wide area network, over-the-air broadcast network (e.g., for radio or television), cable network, satellite network, cellular telephone network, or combination thereof. As a further example, the network 104 may be a publicly accessible network of linked networks, possibly operated by various distinct parties, such as the Internet. In some embodiments, the network 104 may be a private or semi-private network, such as a corporate or university intranet. The network 104 may include one or more wireless networks, such as a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network, a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network, a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, or any other type of wireless network. The network 104 can use protocols and components for communicating via the Internet or any of the other aforementioned types of networks. For example, the protocols used by the network 104 may include Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), HTTP Secure (HTTPS), Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), and the like. Protocols and components for communicating via the Internet or any of the other aforementioned types of communication networks are well known to those skilled in the art and, thus, are not described in more detail herein.
The on-demand code execution environment 110 is depicted in FIG. 1 as operating in a distributed computing environment including several computer systems that are interconnected using one or more computer networks (not shown in FIG. 1). The on-demand code execution environment 110 could also operate within a computing environment having a fewer or greater number of devices than are illustrated in FIG. 1. Thus, the depiction of the on-demand code execution environment 110 in FIG. 1 should be taken as illustrative and not limiting to the present disclosure. For example, the on-demand code execution environment 110 or various constituents thereof could implement various Web services components, hosted or “cloud” computing environments, and/or peer to peer network configurations to implement at least a portion of the processes described herein.
Further, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may be implemented directly in hardware or software executed by hardware devices and may, for instance, include one or more physical or virtual servers implemented on physical computer hardware configured to execute computer executable instructions for performing various features that will be described herein. The one or more servers may be geographically dispersed or geographically co-located, for instance, in one or more data centers.
In the example of FIG. 1, the on-demand code execution environment 110 is illustrated as connected to the network 104. In some embodiments, any of the components within the on-demand code execution environment 110 can communicate with other components of the on-demand code execution environment 100 via the network 104. In other embodiments, not all components of the on-demand code execution environment 110 are capable of communicating with other components of the virtual environment 100. In one example, only the frontend 120 may be connected to the network 104, and other components of the on-demand code execution environment 110 may communicate with other components of the virtual environment 100 via the frontend 120.
In FIG. 1, users, by way of user computing devices 102, may interact with the on-demand code execution environment 110 to provide executable code, and establish rules or logic defining when and how such code should be executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, a user may wish to run a piece of code in connection with a web or mobile application that the user has developed. One way of running the code would be to acquire virtual machine instances from service providers who provide infrastructure as a service, configure the virtual machine instances to suit the user's needs, and use the configured virtual machine instances to run the code. In order to avoid the complexity of this process, the user may alternatively provide the code to the on-demand code execution environment 110, and request that the on-demand code execution environment 110 execute the code using one or more pre-established virtual machine instances. The on-demand code execution environment 110 can handle the acquisition and configuration of compute capacity (e.g., containers, instances, etc., which are described in greater detail below) based on the code execution request, and execute the code using the compute capacity. The on-demand code execution environment 110 may automatically scale up and down based on the volume, thereby relieving the user from the burden of having to worry about over-utilization (e.g., acquiring too little computing resources and suffering performance issues) or under-utilization (e.g., acquiring more computing resources than necessary to run the codes, and thus overpaying).
To enable interaction with the on-demand code execution environment 110, the environment 110 includes a frontend 120, which enables interaction with the on-demand code execution environment 110. In an illustrative embodiment, the frontend 120 serves as a “front door” to the other services provided by the on-demand code execution environment 110, enabling users (via user computing devices 102) to provide, request execution of, and view results of computer executable code. As shown in FIG. 1, the frontend 120 includes a variety of components to enable interaction between the on-demand code execution environment 110 and other computing devices. Specifically, the frontend 120 includes a request interface 122, a job queue 124, a distribution manager 126, a polling interface 128, and an output interface 129. The request interface 122 may provide user computing devices 102 with the ability to upload or otherwise communication user-specified code to the on-demand code execution environment 110, and to thereafter request execution of that code. In one embodiment, the request interfaces 122 communicates with external computing devices (e.g., user computing devices 102, auxiliary services 106, etc.) via a graphical user interface (GUI), CLI, or API. The frontend 120 processes the requests and makes sure that the requests are properly authorized. For example, the frontend 120 may determine whether the user associated with the request is authorized to access the user code specified in the request.
The user code as used herein may refer to any program code (e.g., a program, routine, subroutine, thread, etc.) written in a specific program language. In the present disclosure, the terms “code,” “user code,” and “program code,” may be used interchangeably. Such user code may be executed to achieve a specific function, for example, in connection with a particular web application or mobile application developed by the user. As noted above, individual collections of user code (e.g., to achieve a specific function) are referred to herein as “tasks,” while specific executions of that code are referred to as “task executions” or simply “executions.” Tasks may be written, by way of non-limiting example, in JavaScript (e.g., node.js), Java, Python, and/or Ruby (and/or another programming language). Requests to execute a task may generally be referred to as “calls” to that task. Such calls may include the user code (or the location thereof) to be executed and one or more arguments to be used for executing the user code. For example, a call may provide the user code of a task along with the request to execute the task. In another example, a call may identify a previously uploaded task by its name or an identifier. In yet another example, code corresponding to a task may be included in a call for the task, as well as being uploaded in a separate location (e.g., storage of an auxiliary service 106 or a storage system internal to the on-demand code execution environment 110) prior to the request being received by the on-demand code execution environment 110. The on-demand code execution environment 110 may vary its execution strategy for a task based on where the code of the task is available at the time a call for the task is processed.
The request interface 122 may receive calls to execute tasks in response to Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) requests from a user. Also, any information (e.g., headers and parameters) included in the HTTPS request may also be processed and utilized when executing a task. As discussed above, any other protocols, including, for example, HTTP, MQTT, and CoAP, may be used to transfer the message containing a task call to the request interface 122.
A call to execute a task may specify one or more third-party libraries (including native libraries) to be used along with the user code corresponding to the task. In one embodiment, the call may provide to the on-demand code execution environment 110 a ZIP file containing the user code and any libraries (and/or identifications of storage locations thereof) corresponding to the task requested for execution. In some embodiments, the call includes metadata that indicates the program code of the task to be executed, the language in which the program code is written, the user associated with the call, and/or the computing resources (e.g., memory, etc.) to be reserved for executing the program code. For example, the program code of a task may be provided with the call, previously uploaded by the user, provided by the on-demand code execution environment 110 (e.g., standard routines), and/or provided by third parties. In some embodiments, such resource-level constraints (e.g., how much memory is to be allocated for executing a particular user code) are specified for the particular task, and may not vary over each execution of the task. In such cases, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may have access to such resource-level constraints before each individual call is received, and the individual call may not specify such resource-level constraints. In some embodiments, the call may specify other constraints such as permission data that indicates what kind of permissions or authorities that the call invokes to execute the task. Such permission data may be used by the on-demand code execution environment 110 to access private resources (e.g., on a private network).
In some embodiments, a call may specify the behavior that should be adopted for handling the call. In such embodiments, the call may include an indicator for enabling one or more execution modes in which to execute the task referenced in the call. For example, the call may include a flag or a header for indicating whether the task should be executed in a debug mode in which the debugging and/or logging output that may be generated in connection with the execution of the task is provided back to the user (e.g., via a console user interface). In such an example, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may inspect the call and look for the flag or the header, and if it is present, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may modify the behavior (e.g., logging facilities) of the container in which the task is executed, and cause the output data to be provided back to the user. In some embodiments, the behavior/mode indicators are added to the call by the user interface provided to the user by the on-demand code execution environment 110. Other features such as source code profiling, remote debugging, etc. may also be enabled or disabled based on the indication provided in a call.
To manage requests for code execution, the frontend 120 further includes an execution queue 124, which can maintain a record of user-requested task executions. Illustratively, the number of simultaneous task executions by the on-demand code execution environment 110 is limited, and as such, new task executions initiated at the on-demand code execution environment 110 (e.g., via an API call) may be placed on the execution queue 124 and processed, e.g., in a first-in-first-out order. In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may include multiple execution queues 124, such as individual execution queues 124 for each user account. For example, users of the on-demand code execution environment 110 may desire to limit the rate of task executions on the on-demand code execution environment 110 (e.g., for cost reasons). Thus, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may utilize an account-specific execution queue 124 to throttle the rate of simultaneous task executions by a specific user account. In some instances, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may prioritize task executions, such that task executions of specific accounts or of specified priorities bypass or are prioritized within the execution queue 124. In other instances, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may execute tasks immediately or substantially immediately after receiving a call for that task, and thus, the execution queue 124 may be omitted.
As noted above, tasks may executed at the on-demand code execution environment 110 based on explicit calls from user computing devices 102 (e.g., as received at the request interface 120). Alternatively or additionally, tasks may be executed at the on-demand code execution environment 110 based on data retrieved from one or more auxiliary services 106. To facilitate interaction with auxiliary services 106, the frontend 120 can include a polling interface 128, which operates to poll auxiliary services 106 for data. Illustratively, the polling interface 128 may periodically transmit a request to one or more user-specified auxiliary services 106 to retrieve any newly available data (e.g., social network “posts,” news articles, etc.), and to determine whether that data corresponds to a user-established trigger to execute a task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. Illustratively, each trigger may specify one or more criteria for execution of a task, including but not limited to whether new data is available at the auxiliary services 106, the type or content of the data, or timing information corresponding to the data.
In addition to tasks executed based on explicit user calls and data from auxiliary services 106, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may in some instances operate to execute tasks independently. For example, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may operate (based on instructions from a user) to execute a task at each of a number of specified time intervals (e.g., every 10 minutes).
The frontend 120 further includes an output interface 129 configured to output information regarding the execution of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment 110. Illustratively, the output interface 129 may transmit data regarding task executions (e.g., results of a task, errors related to the task execution, or details of the task execution, such as total time required to complete the execution, total data processed via the execution, etc.) to the user computing devices 102 or to auxiliary services 106, which may include, for example, billing or logging services. The output interface 129 may further enable transmission of data, such as service calls, to auxiliary services 106. For example, the output interface 129 may be utilized during execution of a task to transmit an API request to an external service 106 (e.g., to store data generated during execution of the task).
To execute tasks, the on-demand code execution environment 110 includes a warming pool manager 130, which “pre-warms” (e.g., initializes) virtual machine instances to enable tasks to be executed quickly, without the delay caused by initialization of the virtual machines. The on-demand code execution environment 110 further includes a worker manager 140, which manages active virtual machine instances (e.g., currently assigned to execute tasks in response to task calls).
The warming pool manager 130 ensures that virtual machine instances are ready to be used by the worker manager 140 when the on-demand code execution environment 110 receives a call to execute a task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. In the example illustrated in FIG. 1, the warming pool manager 130 manages the warming pool 130A, which is a group (sometimes referred to as a pool) of pre-initialized and pre-configured virtual machine instances that may be used to service incoming task execution calls. In some embodiments, the warming pool manager 130 causes virtual machine instances to be booted up on one or more physical computing machines within the on-demand code execution environment 110 and added to the warming pool 130A. For example, the warming pool manager 130 may cause additional instances to be added to the warming pool 130A based on the available capacity in the warming pool 130A to service incoming calls. In some embodiments, the warming pool manager 130 may utilize both physical computing devices within the on-demand code execution environment 110 and one or more virtual machine instance services to acquire and maintain compute capacity that can be used to service calls received by the frontend 120. In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may comprise one or more logical knobs or switches for controlling (e.g., increasing or decreasing) the available capacity in the warming pool 130A. For example, a system administrator may use such a knob or switch to increase the capacity available (e.g., the number of pre-booted instances) in the warming pool 130A during peak hours. In some embodiments, virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A can be configured based on a predetermined set of configurations independent from a specific call to execute a task. The predetermined set of configurations can correspond to various types of virtual machine instances to execute tasks. The warming pool manager 130 can optimize types and numbers of virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A based on one or more metrics related to current or previous task executions.
As shown in FIG. 1, instances may have operating systems (OS) and/or language runtimes loaded thereon. For example, the warming pool 130A managed by the warming pool manager 130 comprises instances 152, 154. The instance 152 includes an OS 152A and a runtime 152B. The instance 154 includes an OS 154A. In some embodiments, the instances in the warming pool 130A may also include containers (which may further contain copies of operating systems, runtimes, user codes, etc.), which are described in greater detail below. Although the instance 152 is shown in FIG. 1 to include a single runtime, in other embodiments, the instances depicted in FIG. 1 may include two or more runtimes, each of which may be used for running a different user code. In some embodiments, the warming pool manager 130 may maintain a list of instances in the warming pool 130A. The list of instances may further specify the configuration (e.g., OS, runtime, container, etc.) of the instances.
In some embodiments, the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A may be used to serve any user's calls. In one embodiment, all the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A are configured in the same or substantially similar manner. In another embodiment, the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A may be configured differently to suit the needs of different users. For example, the virtual machine instances may have different operating systems, different language runtimes, and/or different libraries loaded thereon. In yet another embodiment, the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A may be configured in the same or substantially similar manner (e.g., with the same OS, language runtimes, and/or libraries), but some of those instances may have different container configurations. For example, one instance might have a container created therein for running code written in Python, and another instance might have a container created therein for running code written in Ruby. In some embodiments, multiple warming pools 130A, each having identically-configured virtual machine instances, are provided.
The warming pool manager 130 may pre-configure the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A, such that each virtual machine instance is configured to satisfy at least one of the operating conditions that may be requested or specified by the call to execute a task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. In one embodiment, the operating conditions may include program languages in which the potential user code of a task may be written. For example, such languages may include Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and the like. In some embodiments, the set of languages that the user code of a task may be written in may be limited to a predetermined set (e.g., set of 4 languages, although in some embodiments sets of more or less than four languages are provided) in order to facilitate pre-initialization of the virtual machine instances that can satisfy calls to execute the task. For example, when the user is configuring a task's call via a user interface provided by the on-demand code execution environment 110, the user interface may prompt the user to specify one of the predetermined operating conditions for executing the task. In another example, the service-level agreement (SLA) for utilizing the services provided by the on-demand code execution environment 110 may specify a set of conditions (e.g., programming languages, computing resources, etc.) that calls should satisfy, and the on-demand code execution environment 110 may assume that the calls satisfy the set of conditions in handling the requests. In another example, operating conditions specified in the call may include: the amount of compute power to be used for executing the task specified in the call; the type of the request (e.g., HTTP vs. a triggered event); the timeout for the task (e.g., threshold time after which an execution of the task may be terminated); and security policies (e.g., may control which instances in the warming pool 130A are usable by which user), among other specified conditions.
The worker manager 140 manages the instances used for servicing incoming calls to execute tasks. In the example illustrated in FIG. 1, the worker manager 140 manages the active pool 140A, which is a group (sometimes referred to as a pool) of virtual machine instances that are currently assigned to one or more users. Although the virtual machine instances are described here as being assigned to a particular user, in some embodiments, the instances may be assigned to a group of users, such that the instance is tied to the group of users and any member of the group can utilize resources on the instance. For example, the users in the same group may belong to the same security group (e.g., based on their security credentials) such that executing one member's task in a container on a particular instance after another member's task has been executed in another container on the same instance does not pose security risks. Similarly, the worker manager 140 may assign the instances and the containers according to one or more policies that dictate which requests can be executed in which containers and which instances can be assigned to which users. An example policy may specify that instances are assigned to collections of users who share the same account (e.g., account for accessing the services provided by the on-demand code execution environment 110). In some embodiments, the requests associated with the same user group may share the same containers (e.g., if the user codes associated therewith are identical). In some embodiments, a call does not differentiate between the different users of the group and simply indicates the group to which the users associated with the call belong.
As shown in FIG. 1, instances may have operating systems (OS), language runtimes, and containers. The containers may have individual copies of the OS, the runtimes, and user codes corresponding to various tasks loaded thereon. In the example of FIG. 1, the active pool 140A managed by the worker manager 140 includes the instances 156, 158. The instance 156 has an OS 156A, runtimes 156B, 156C, and containers 156D, 156E. The container 156D includes a copy of the OS 156A, a copy of the runtime 156B, and a copy of a code 156D-1. The container 156E includes a copy of the OS 156A, a copy of the runtime 156C, and a copy of a code 156E-1. The instance 158 has an OS 158A, runtimes 158B, 158C, 158E, 158F, a container 158D, and codes 158G, 158H. The container 158D has a copy of the OS 158A, a copy of the runtime 158B, and a copy of a code 158D-1. As illustrated in FIG. 1, instances may have user codes loaded thereon, and containers within those instances may also have user codes loaded therein. In some embodiments, the worker manager 140 may maintain a list of instances in the active pool 140A. The list of instances may further specify the configuration (e.g., OS, runtime, container, etc.) of the instances. In some embodiments, the worker manager 140 may have access to a list of instances in the warming pool 130A (e.g., including the number and type of instances). In other embodiments, the worker manager 140 requests compute capacity from the warming pool manager 130 without having knowledge of the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A.
In the example illustrated in FIG. 1, tasks are executed in isolated on-demand code execution environments referred to as containers (e.g., containers 156D, 156E, 158D). Containers are logical units created within a virtual machine instance using the resources available on that instance. For example, the worker manager 140 may, based on information specified in a call to execute a task, create a new container or locate an existing container in one of the instances in the active pool 140A and assigns the container to the call to handle the execution of the task. In one embodiment, such containers are implemented as Linux containers.
Once a call has been successfully processed by the frontend 120, the worker manager 140 finds capacity to service the call to execute a task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, if there exists a particular virtual machine instance in the active pool 140A that has a container with the user code of the task already loaded therein (e.g., code 156D-1 shown in the container 156D), the worker manager 140 may assign the container to the call and cause the task to be executed in the container. Alternatively, if the user code of the task is available in the local cache of one of the virtual machine instances (e.g., codes 158G, 158H, which are stored on the instance 158 but do not belong to any individual containers), the worker manager 140 may create a new container on such an instance, assign the container to the call, and cause the used code to be loaded and executed in the container.
If the worker manager 140 determines that the user code associated with the called task is not found on any of the instances (e.g., either in a container or the local cache of an instance) in the active pool 140A, the worker manager 140 may determine whether any of the instances in the active pool 140A is currently assigned to the user associated with the call and has compute capacity to handle the call. If there is such an instance, the worker manager 140 may create a new container on the instance and assign the container to execute the task specified in the call. Alternatively, the worker manager 140 may further configure an existing container on the instance assigned to the user, and assign the container to the call. For example, the worker manager 140 may determine that the existing container may be used to execute the task if a particular library demanded by the task is loaded thereon. In such a case, the worker manager 140 may load the particular library and the code of the task onto the container and use the container to execute the task.
If the active pool 140 does not contain any instances currently assigned to the user, the worker manager 140 pulls a new virtual machine instance from the warming pool 130A, assigns the instance to the user associated with the call, creates a new container on the instance, assigns the container to the call, and causes the user code of the task to be downloaded and executed on the container.
In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 is adapted to begin execution of a task shortly after it is received (e.g., by the frontend 120). A time period can be determined as the difference in time between initiating execution of the task (e.g., in a container on a virtual machine instance associated with the user) and receiving a call to execute the task (e.g., received by a frontend). The on-demand code execution environment 110 is adapted to begin execution of a task within a time period that is less than a predetermined duration. In one embodiment, the predetermined duration is 500 ms. In another embodiment, the predetermined duration is 300 ms. In another embodiment, the predetermined duration is 100 ms. In another embodiment, the predetermined duration is 50 ms. In another embodiment, the predetermined duration is 10 ms. In another embodiment, the predetermined duration may be any value chosen from the range of 10 ms to 500 ms. In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 is adapted to begin execution of a task within a time period that is less than a predetermined duration if one or more conditions are satisfied. For example, the one or more conditions may include any one of: (1) the user code of the task is loaded on a container in the active pool 140 at the time the request is received; (2) the user code of the task is stored in the code cache of an instance in the active pool 140 at the time the call to the task is received; (3) the active pool 140A contains an instance assigned to the user associated with the call at the time the call is received; or (4) the warming pool 130A has capacity to handle the call at the time the call is received.
Once the worker manager 140 locates one of the virtual machine instances in the warming pool 130A that can be used to serve the call, the warming pool manager 130 or the worker manger 140 takes the instance out of the warming pool 130A and assigns it to the user associated with the request. The assigned virtual machine instance is taken out of the warming pool 130A and placed in the active pool 140A. In some embodiments, once the virtual machine instance has been assigned to a particular user, the same virtual machine instance cannot be used to service calls of any other user. This provides security benefits to users by preventing possible co-mingling of user resources. Alternatively, in some embodiments, multiple containers belonging to different users (or assigned to requests associated with different users) may co-exist on a single virtual machine instance. Such an approach may improve utilization of the available compute capacity.
In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may maintain a separate cache in which code of tasks are stored to serve as an intermediate level of caching system between the local cache of the virtual machine instances and a web-based network storage (e.g., not shown in FIG. 1). The various scenarios that the worker manager 140 may encounter in servicing the call are described in greater detail within the '556 Patent, incorporated by reference above (e.g., at FIG. 4 of the '556 Patent).
After the task has been executed, the worker manager 140 may tear down the container used to execute the task to free up the resources it occupied to be used for other containers in the instance. Alternatively, the worker manager 140 may keep the container running to use it to service additional calls from the same user. For example, if another call associated with the same task that has already been loaded in the container, the call can be assigned to the same container, thereby eliminating the delay associated with creating a new container and loading the code of the task in the container. In some embodiments, the worker manager 140 may tear down the instance in which the container used to execute the task was created. Alternatively, the worker manager 140 may keep the instance running to use it to service additional calls from the same user. The determination of whether to keep the container and/or the instance running after the task is done executing may be based on a threshold time, the type of the user, average call volume of the user, and/or other operating conditions. For example, after a threshold time has passed (e.g., 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 24 hours, 30 days, etc.) without any activity (e.g., task execution), the container and/or the virtual machine instance is shutdown (e.g., deleted, terminated, etc.), and resources allocated thereto are released. In some embodiments, the threshold time passed before a container is torn down is shorter than the threshold time passed before an instance is torn down.
In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may provide data to one or more of the auxiliary services 106 as it services incoming calls. For example, the frontend 120 may communicate with the monitoring/logging/billing services included within the auxiliary services 106. The monitoring/logging/billing services may include: a monitoring service for managing monitoring information received from the on-demand code execution environment 110, such as statuses of containers and instances on the on-demand code execution environment 110; a logging service for managing logging information received from the on-demand code execution environment 110, such as activities performed by containers and instances on the on-demand code execution environment 110; and a billing service for generating billing information associated with executing user code on the on-demand code execution environment 110 (e.g., based on the monitoring information and/or the logging information managed by the monitoring service and the logging service). In addition to the system-level activities that may be performed by the monitoring/logging/billing services (e.g., on behalf of the on-demand code execution environment 110), the monitoring/logging/billing services may provide application-level services on behalf of the tasks executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, the monitoring/logging/billing services may monitor and/or log various inputs, outputs, or other data and parameters on behalf of the tasks being executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110.
In some embodiments, the worker manager 140 may perform health checks on the instances and containers managed by the worker manager 140 (e.g., those in the active pool 140A). For example, the health checks performed by the worker manager 140 may include determining whether the instances and the containers managed by the worker manager 140 have any issues of (1) misconfigured networking and/or startup configuration, (2) exhausted memory, (3) corrupted file system, (4) incompatible kernel, and/or any other problems that may impair the performance of the instances and the containers. In one embodiment, the worker manager 140 performs the health checks periodically (e.g., every 5 minutes, every 30 minutes, every hour, every 24 hours, etc.). In some embodiments, the frequency of the health checks may be adjusted automatically based on the result of the health checks. In other embodiments, the frequency of the health checks may be adjusted based on user requests. In some embodiments, the worker manager 140 may perform similar health checks on the instances and/or containers in the warming pool 130A. The instances and/or the containers in the warming pool 130A may be managed either together with those instances and containers in the active pool 140A or separately. In some embodiments, in the case where the health of the instances and/or the containers in the warming pool 130A is managed separately from the active pool 140A, the warming pool manager 130, instead of the worker manager 140, may perform the health checks described above on the instances and/or the containers in the warming pool 130A.
The worker manager 140 may include an instance allocation unit for finding compute capacity (e.g., containers) to service incoming code execution requests and a user code execution unit for facilitating the execution of user codes on those containers. An example configuration of the worker manager 140 is described in greater detail within the '556 Patent, incorporated by reference above (e.g., within FIG. 2 of the '556 Patent).
In the depicted example, virtual machine instances (“instances”) 152, 154 are shown in a warming pool 130A managed by the warming pool manager 130, and instances 156, 158 are shown in an active pool 140A managed by the worker manager 140. The illustration of the various components within the on-demand code execution environment 110 is logical in nature and one or more of the components can be implemented by a single computing device or multiple computing devices. For example, the instances 152, 154, 156, 158 can be implemented on one or more physical computing devices in different various geographic regions. Similarly, each of the frontend 120, the warming pool manager 130, and the worker manager 140 can be implemented across multiple physical computing devices. Alternatively, one or more of the frontend 120, the warming pool manager 130, and the worker manager 140 can be implemented on a single physical computing device. In some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may comprise multiple frontends, multiple warming pool managers, and/or multiple worker managers. Although four virtual machine instances are shown in the example of FIG. 1, the embodiments described herein are not limited as such, and one skilled in the art will appreciate that the on-demand code execution environment 110 may comprise any number of virtual machine instances implemented using any number of physical computing devices. Similarly, although a single warming pool and a single active pool are shown in the example of FIG. 1, the embodiments described herein are not limited as such, and one skilled in the art will appreciate that the on-demand code execution environment 110 may comprise any number of warming pools and active pools.
In accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure, the on-demand code execution environment 110 further includes a task profiler 160, which includes components enabling profiles to be created for individual tasks executed on the on-demand code execution environment, which profiles indicate the interactions occurring based on the execution of a task (e.g., which calls to the on-demand execution environment 110 or to auxiliary services 106 were made by an execution of the task, any subsequent calls caused by those initial calls, details regarding those calls, etc.). As will be described below, these task profiles may allow a user to monitor the “path” of executions on the on-demand code execution environment 110 and/or on various auxiliary services 106. For example, a task profile for ‘task A’ may indicate that an execution of task A called an execution of ‘task B’, which called an execution of ‘task C’, etc. As a further example, a task profile for ‘task A’ may indicate that an execution of task A called ‘auxiliary service X’, which called an execution of task B, which again called auxiliary service X, etc. As such, a task profile can provide a user with detailed information regarding how executions of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment 110 are interrelated.
To enable interaction between the task profiler 160 and the on-demand code execution environment 110, the task profiler 160 includes a task data interface 162, which interacts with the frontend 120 of the on-demand code execution environment 110 to receive task data and profile task profiles, among other information. For example, data may be received from the request interface 122 to indicate that a call (e.g., an API call) has been received at the frontend 120 requesting execution of a task on the on-demand code execution environment, or that an execution of a task transmitted a call to an auxiliary service 106.
The task profiler 160 further includes a task data store 164 to store the received task data and/or task profiles generated based on the task data. The task data store 164 may correspond to any persistent or substantially persistent data storage, such as a hard drive (HDD), a solid state drive (SDD), network attached storage (NAS), a tape drive, or any combination thereof.
The task profiler 160 further includes an analysis engine 166 configured to read data from the task data store 164, and generate task profiles based on that data. In one embodiment, generation of a task profile may include gathering data regarding individual executions of that task, and determining what other task executions or external service functionalities are related to that individual execution. For example, the analysis engine 166 may monitor task executions or calls that precipitated the individual execution (e.g., that the individual execution was caused by a call from a first auxiliary service, which was caused by a call from an additional task, etc.), as well as task execution or calls that follow the individual execution (e.g., the individual execution called an additional task, which when executed called an external service). In one embodiment, prior or subsequent calls or executions related to an individual task execution may be determined based on a unique identifier associated with each of the calls or executions. For example, the analysis engine 166 may determine that any record of calls or executions associated with a given unique identifier are interrelated, and generate a profile (such as a map or graph) detailing those interrelations (e.g., based on the tasks or auxiliary services called and the timestamp at which the call was made). In another embodiment, prior or subsequent calls or executions related to an individual task execution may be determined based on historical information embedded within calls themselves. For example, a call to execute a task ‘B’ may indicate that it was caused by a prior execution of task ‘A’, which was called by an external service, etc. This information may serve as at least a partial record of calls prior to the execution of task ‘B’. The analysis engine 166 may further determine that the executed task ‘B’ called a task ‘C’ at a specific time, and inspect the log for information regarding that execution of task ‘C’ (including, e.g., what calls the execution of task ‘C’ made). The analysis engine 166 may repetitively inspect log information in this manner to determine subsequent calls made from a given task execution. In some instances, the analysis engine 166 may gather this information simultaneously to the chain of task executions itself, such that a user may view, in real-time, a profile detailing how a series of task executions on the on-demand code execution environment 110 are interrelated. While profiles are discussed above with respect to individual task executions, in some embodiments the analysis engine 166 may generate statistical information regarding multiple executions of a task. For example, the analysis engine 166 may compile profile information regarding multiple executions of a task, and determine the probabilities that an execution of a task was caused by a multitude of potential calls, the probabilities that an execution of the task results in a call to other tasks or auxiliary service, etc. In one embodiment, the analysis engine 166 may monitor all executions of a task occurring on the on-demand code execution environment 110. In another embodiment, the analysis engine 166 may monitor a sample (e.g., a subset selected according to selection criteria, which may include random sampling) of executions of the task.
In addition to generating information regarding how task executions (or calls to those executions) are interrelated, the analysis engine 166 may also function to select specific tasks for monitoring. As noted above, it may be infeasible or undesirable for the on-demand code execution environment 110 to conduct active monitoring of all executions of all tasks, and to generate data needed to generate a profile of those tasks (e.g., by inserting monitoring information into calls to or from those tasks). Thus, the analysis engine 166 may select specific tasks that, when executed, are subject to active monitoring by the on-demand code execution environment 110. In one embodiment, the analysis engine 166 may select tasks based on the task's execution frequency (e.g., how often the task is executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110). In another embodiment, the analysis engine 166 may select tasks based on a frequency of specific types of task execution, such as how often the task is executed based on a specific call (e.g., from a specific auxiliary service, from another specific task, etc.), how often the task, when executed, makes a specific call, or a combination thereof. In this manner, the analysis engine 166 may function to identify “hot paths” within the on-demand code execution environment 110 (e.g., a specific pattern of calls and executions that occurs frequently relative to other patterns of calls and executions). Tasks that occur as part of a “hot path” may be marked for subsequent monitoring, such that when called on the on-demand code execution environment 110, additional logging information regarding the calls and executions of that task are generated at the on-demand code execution environment 110, in accordance with embodiments of the present disclosure.
While operation of the analysis engine 166 is described herein with respect to the task data store 164, in some embodiments the analysis engine 166 may further operate in real-time or substantially real-time based on task data received at the task profiler 160. For example, the analysis engine 166 may analyze individual items of task data received at the task profiler 160 to determine whether that task data (e.g., individually or in conjunction with the task data stored in the task data store 164) should be included in a profile provided to a user. While the task profiler 160 is shown in FIG. 1 as included within the on-demand code execution environment 110, embodiments of the present disclosure may include a task profiler 160 that is operated separately from the on-demand code execution environment 110, and which communicates with the on-demand code execution environment 110 and/or with auxiliary services 106 to receive task call and execution information, as described herein.
While not shown in FIG. 1, in some embodiments, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may include multiple frontends 120. In such embodiments, a load balancer may be provided to distribute the incoming calls to the multiple frontends 120, for example, in a round-robin fashion. In some embodiments, the manner in which the load balancer distributes incoming calls to the multiple frontends 120 may be based on the state of the warming pool 130A and/or the active pool 140A. For example, if the capacity in the warming pool 130A is deemed to be sufficient, the calls may be distributed to the multiple frontends 120 based on the individual capacities of the frontends 120 (e.g., based on one or more load balancing restrictions). On the other hand, if the capacity in the warming pool 130A is less than a threshold amount, one or more of such load balancing restrictions may be removed such that the calls may be distributed to the multiple frontends 120 in a manner that reduces or minimizes the number of virtual machine instances taken from the warming pool 130A. For example, even if, according to a load balancing restriction, a call is to be routed to Frontend A, if Frontend A needs to take an instance out of the warming pool 130A to service the call but Frontend B can use one of the instances in its active pool to service the same call, the call may be routed to Frontend B.
FIG. 2 depicts a general architecture of a computing system (referenced as worker manager 140) that manages the virtual machine instances in the on-demand code execution environment 110. The general architecture of the worker manager 140 depicted in FIG. 2 includes an arrangement of computer hardware and software modules that may be used to implement aspects of the present disclosure. The hardware modules may be implemented with physical electronic devices, as discussed in greater detail below. The worker manager 140 may include many more (or fewer) elements than those shown in FIG. 2. It is not necessary, however, that all of these generally conventional elements be shown in order to provide an enabling disclosure. Additionally, the general architecture illustrated in FIG. 2 may be used to implement one or more of the other components illustrated in FIG. 1. As illustrated, the worker manager 140 includes a processing unit 190, a network interface 192, a computer readable medium drive 194, and an input/output device interface 196, all of which may communicate with one another by way of a communication bus. The network interface 192 may provide connectivity to one or more networks or computing systems. The processing unit 190 may thus receive information and instructions from other computing systems or services via the network 104. The processing unit 190 may also communicate to and from memory 180 and further provide output information for an optional display (not shown) via the input/output device interface 196. The input/output device interface 196 may also accept input from an optional input device (not shown).
The memory 180 may contain computer program instructions (grouped as modules in some embodiments) that the processing unit 190 executes in order to implement one or more aspects of the present disclosure. The memory 180 generally includes RAM, ROM and/or other persistent, auxiliary or non-transitory computer readable media. The memory 180 may store an operating system 184 that provides computer program instructions for use by the processing unit 190 in the general administration and operation of the worker manager 140. The memory 180 may further include computer program instructions and other information for implementing aspects of the present disclosure. For example, in one embodiment, the memory 180 includes a user interface unit 182 that generates user interfaces (and/or instructions therefor) for display upon a computing device, e.g., via a navigation and/or browsing interface such as a browser or application installed on the computing device. In addition, the memory 180 may include and/or communicate with one or more data repositories (not shown), for example, to access user program codes and/or libraries.
In addition to and/or in combination with the user interface unit 182, the memory 180 may include an instance allocation unit 186 and a user code execution unit 188 that may be executed by the processing unit 190. In one embodiment, the user interface unit 182, instance allocation unit 186, and user code execution unit 188 individually or collectively implement various aspects of the present disclosure, e.g., finding compute capacity (e.g., a container) to be used for executing user code, causing the user code to be loaded and executed on the container, etc. as described further below.
The instance allocation unit 186 finds the compute capacity to be used for servicing a call to execute a task. For example, the instance allocation unit 186 identifies a virtual machine instance and/or a container that satisfies any constraints specified by the call and assigns the identified virtual machine instance and/or container to the user or the call itself. The instance allocation unit 186 may perform such identification based on the programming language in which the user code corresponding to the task is written. For example, if the user code is written in Python, and the instance allocation unit 186 may find a virtual machine instance (e.g., in the warming pool 130A of FIG. 1) having the Python runtime pre-loaded thereon and assign the virtual machine instance to the user. In another example, if the program code specified in the call of the user is already loaded on an existing container or on another virtual machine instance assigned to the user (e.g., in the active pool 140A of FIG. 1), the instance allocation unit 186 may cause the call to be processed in the container or in a new container on the virtual machine instance. In some embodiments, if the virtual machine instance has multiple language runtimes loaded thereon, the instance allocation unit 186 may create a new container on the virtual machine instance and load the appropriate language runtime on the container based on the computing constraints specified in the call.
The user code execution unit 188 manages the execution of the program code corresponding to the task specified by the call of the user once a particular virtual machine instance has been assigned to the user associated with the call and a container on the particular virtual machine instance has been assigned to the call. If the code is pre-loaded in a container on the virtual machine instance assigned to the user, the code is simply executed in the container. If the code is available via a network storage (e.g., storage service 108 of FIG. 1), the user code execution unit 188 downloads the code into a container on the virtual machine instance and causes the code to be executed (e.g., by communicating with the frontend 120 of FIG. 1) once it has been downloaded.
While the instance allocation unit 186 and the user code execution unit 188 are shown in FIG. 2 as part of the worker manager 140, in other embodiments, all or a portion of the instance allocation unit 186 and the user code execution unit 188 may be implemented by other components of the on-demand code execution environment 110 and/or another computing device. For example, in certain embodiments of the present disclosure, another computing device in communication with the on-demand code execution environment 110 may include several modules or components that operate similarly to the modules and components illustrated as part of the worker manager 140.
In some embodiments, the worker manager 140 may further include components other than those illustrated in FIG. 2. For example, the memory 180 may further include a container manager for managing creation, preparation, and configuration of containers within virtual machine instances.
While the computing device of FIG. 2 is described as implementing a worker manager, the same or a similar computing device may additionally or alternatively be utilized to implement other components of the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, such a computing device may be utilized, independently or in conjunction with other components (e.g., data stores) to implement the task profiler 160 of FIG. 1. The software or computer-executable instructions placed within the memory 180 may be modified to enable execution of the functions described herein with respect to the task profiler 160. For example, computer-executable instructions may be placed within the memory that configure the computing device to execute the routine 600 of FIG. 6, described in more detail below.
With reference to FIG. 3, illustrative interactions are depicted for generating passive monitoring data regarding execution of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment 110. As discussed above, this passive monitoring data may be utilized by the task profiler 160 to identify tasks (or specific executions of those tasks) for active monitoring. The data from such active monitoring may then be used to generate a profiler for a task, which may aid a user in visualizing the “path” of executions on the on-demand code execution environment 110 that precipitated or stemmed from a task, as well as in debugging or optimizing that path of executions.
The interactions of FIG. 3 begin at (1), where an auxiliary services 106 transmits a call to the frontend 120 of the on-demand code execution environment 110 to execute a task. In one embodiment, interaction (1) may include transmission of an API call from the auxiliary services 106 to the frontend 120. In another embodiment, interaction (1) may include transmission of data to the frontend 120 (e.g., in response to a request for the data initiated by the polling interface 128) that indicates that execution of a task should occur (e.g., the posting of a new message to a social networking service, the uploading of a file, etc.).
Thereafter, at (2), the frontend 120 transmits data of the task profiler 160 indicating that a call to a specific task has been received. The data may include any information related to the call, including but not limited to the time at which the call occurred, the identity of the auxiliary services 106 making the call, the credentials or authorization data provided by the auxiliary services 106, the specific task being called, the parameters for the task specified in the call (e.g., function parameters to be provided by user code when executing the call). In some embodiments, the data may include a verbatim record of the call itself. The task profiler 160 may store the received task data within the task data store 164.
At (3), the frontend 120 can distribute the task to the worker manager 140 for execution. The work manager 140, in turn, can select a virtual machine instance (not shown in FIG. 3) to handle the task, and cause the virtual machine instance to execute user code corresponding to the task, at (4). Further details regarding distribution and execution of user code are provided within the '556 Patent, incorporated by reference above (e.g., at FIG. 4 of the '556 Patent).
At (5), the worker manager 140 (which may include virtual machine instances executed by the worker manager 140) transmits a call to an auxiliary service 106. Illustratively, the call may be transmitted based on execution of user code on the worker manager 140 (e.g., based on an API call to the auxiliary service 106 made during execution of the user code) which instructs a virtual machine instance to generate and transmit an API call or an HTTP packet to the auxiliary service 106. In addition, at (6), the worker manager (e.g., a virtual machine instance executed by the worker manager 140) notifies the task profiler 160 of the auxiliary service call. In one embodiment, the notification is transmitted by the worker manager 140 by modifying the user code corresponding to the distributed task, such that when execution of that code would cause transmission of a call to the auxiliary service 106, a notification is also transmitted to the task profiler 160. In another embodiment, the notification is transmitted by the worker manager 140 by monitoring, at the worker manager 140, execution of the user code corresponding to the task, and generating (e.g., via a separate process than the task execution) the notification to the task profiler 160. The notification may include any data regarding the auxiliary service call, including but not limited to the timing of the call, the identity of the task making the call, the credentials or authorization data provided by the task, the specific auxiliary service 106 being called, the parameters for the auxiliary service 106 specified in the call (e.g., function parameters or data to be provided to the auxiliary service 106 via the call). In some embodiments, the data may include a verbatim record of the call itself. The task profiler 160 may store the received task data within the task data store 164. The interactions of FIG. 3 may then end.
One of skill in the art will appreciate that the additional or alternative interactions to those describe in FIG. 3 may also occur within the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, the interactions described in FIG. 3 may be repeated multiple times, sequentially, in parallel, or both, to enable execution of tasks on the on-demand code execution environment 110. In some instances, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may be configured to process thousands or millions of calls and task executions simultaneously. Thus, the depictions of FIG. 3 (discussing the processing of a single task call) may represent only a tiny fraction of operations occurring on the on-demand code execution environment 110. Moreover, the specific interactions of FIG. 3 may vary. For example, while the task call of FIG. 3 is described as transmitted by an auxiliary service 106, such task calls may additionally or alternatively be transmitted by a user computing device 102. Moreover, such task calls may be transmitted by the on-demand code execution environment 110 itself. Illustratively, a first task executing on the on-demand code execution environment 110 may transmit a call to a second task, which when executed may transmit a call to a third task, etc. In addition, while some interactions of FIG. 3 are described with respect to transmission of notifications to the task profiler 160, embodiments of the present disclosure can also include retrieval of information by the task profiler 160. For example, rather than obtaining notifications of task calls and/or auxiliary service calls, the task profiler 160 may be configured to query or poll the frontend 120, the worker manager 140 (including potentially virtual machine instances of the worker manager 140), or other components of the on-demand code execution system for information regarding calls or executions occurring with respect to calls. Such polling may occur, for example, periodically or on a “just-in-time” basis (e.g., as the information is needed by the task profiler 160). Still further, the interactions of FIG. 3 are described with respect to monitoring calls and executions on the on-demand code execution environment 110, the task profiler 160 may additionally or alternatively be configured to obtain call data from other components, such as auxiliary services 106. For example, where one or more auxiliary services 106 are configured to implement active monitoring of calls as described herein, those auxiliary services 106 may notify the task profiler 106 of calls to the auxiliary services 106 (e.g., alone or with details regarding those calls) in order to facilitate generation of a task profile by the task profiler 160. Thus, the interactions of FIG. 3 are illustrative, rather than exhaustive, in nature.
With reference to FIG. 4, an illustrative set of interactions will be described enabling the on-demand code execution environment 110 to initiate active monitoring on one or more tasks, in order to gather additional data utilized to generate a profile of the task. The interactions of FIG. 4 begin at (1), where the task profiler 160 analyzes data within the task data store 164 to identify a task for active monitoring. In one embodiment, tasks may be identified for active monitoring based on a threshold frequency of calls to the task on the on-demand code execution environment 110 (e.g., as an absolute threshold, a relative threshold versus other calls on the on-demand code execution environment 110, etc.). In other embodiments, tasks may be identified for active monitoring based on other criteria, such as the source of calls to the tasks, the authentication information provided to authorize execution of a task, or calls made from the tasks. For example, where a specific auxiliary service 106 transmits a threshold number of calls to the on-demand code execution environment 110, which correspond to multiple tasks, each of those multiple tasks may be identified for active monitoring. In still more embodiments, multiple criteria may be utilized by the task profiler 160 to identify tasks for monitoring. For example, the task profiler 160 may be configured to identify tasks for active monitoring only when: 1) the task is called with a threshold frequency, 2) a threshold number or percentage of those calls stem from a given source (e.g., an auxiliary service or a task executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110) or utilize given authentication information, and 3) a threshold number or percentage of executions resulting from those calls result in subsequent calls to a given destination (e.g., an auxiliary service or a task executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110). In some embodiments, the same or similar criteria may be utilized to identify which executions of a task are actively monitored. For example, rather than actively monitoring all executions of a given task, the task profiler 160 may identify that only executions of that task that result from a call from a given source should be actively monitored.
With reference to FIGS. 5A and 5B, a set of interactions will be described for conducting active monitoring on a task within the on-demand code execution environment 110. While the interactions of FIGS. 5A and 5B are divided between those figures for clarity, these interactions are described in conjunction, and the numbering of interactions is maintained between the two figures.
The interactions of FIG. 5A begin at (1), where an auxiliary services 106 transmits a call to the frontend 120 of the on-demand code execution environment 110 to execute a task. In one embodiment, interaction (1) may include transmission of an API call from the auxiliary services 106 to the frontend 120. In another embodiment, interaction (1) may include transmission of data to the frontend 120 (e.g., in response to a request for the data initiated by the polling interface 128) that indicates that execution of a task should occur (e.g., the posting of a new message to a social networking service, the uploading of a file, etc.).
Thereafter, at (2), the frontend 120 detects that the called task has been previously identified for active monitoring. Illustratively, the frontend 120 may maintain (e.g., within a data store not shown in FIG. 5A) a list of tasks marked for active monitoring, and compare the called task to that listing to detect a call to an actively monitored task. In one embodiment, all calls to a specific task may be actively monitored. In another embodiment, calls must meet a set of criteria (e.g., utilizing a specific set of authentication information, coming from a specific source, etc.) to trigger active monitoring. Thus, the frontend 120 may compare data regarding the call to that criteria in order to detect that the call should trigger active monitoring.
At (3), the frontend 120 can transmit active monitoring data regarding the task to the task profiler 160. This active monitoring data may include any data that would otherwise be captured via passive monitoring (e.g., time of the call, parameters, source, authentication information, task called, etc.). In addition, active monitoring data may include data that would not otherwise be captured via passive monitoring. For example, where the call does not yet include a unique identifier, the frontend 120 may assign a unique identifier to the call, such that subsequent calls stemming from execution of the called task may be correlated to the initial call. As a further example, where the on-demand code execution environment 110 is configured not to monitor some information (e.g., function parameters) during passive monitoring, that data may be transmitted to the task profiler 160 during active monitoring.
At (4), the frontend 120 can distribute the task to the worker manager 140 for execution. The work manager 140, in turn, can select a virtual machine instance (not shown in FIG. 5A) to handle the task, and cause the virtual machine instance to execute user code corresponding to the task, at (5). Further details regarding distribution and execution of user code are provided within the '556 Patent, incorporated by reference above (e.g., at FIG. 4 of the '556 Patent).
The illustrative interactions described above continue with reference to FIG. 5B, where the worker manager 140 (which may include virtual machine instances executed by the worker manager 140), at (6) generates a call to an auxiliary service 106 that is modified with active monitoring data. Illustratively, the call may be generated based on execution of user code on the worker manager 140 which instructs a virtual machine instance to generate and transmit an API call or an HTTP packet to the auxiliary service 106. In one embodiment, the worker manager 140 may act to “intercept” calls to the auxiliary service 106, such that when execution of user code on a virtual machine instance causes transmission of a call to the auxiliary service 106, the worker manager 140 (e.g., the virtual machine instance, a host computing device to the virtual machine instance, a separate computing device implementing functionality of the worker manager 140, etc.) detects that call, and modifies the call to include active monitoring information within the call. In another embodiment, the user code being executed at the worker manager 140 may itself be modified to cause insertion of active monitoring information into the call. For example, the virtual machine executing the user code may modify parameters or libraries used by the code, such that calls generated to the auxiliary service 106 include active monitoring information without further action being required by the worker manager 140. As described above, modification to a call may include addition of a unique identifier to the call (e.g., a unique identifier previously assigned to the task that generated the call). Further, modification may include insertion of historical information into the call, such as the information regarding the task that generated the call (e.g., identity, time of execution, source of call to that task, etc.) and/or other historical information regarding that task (e.g., past tasks or auxiliary services that preceded the task that generated the call, as well as information regarding those past tasks or auxiliary services).
At (7), the worker manager 140 notifies the task profiler 160 of the secondary call, as well as any active monitoring information inserted into the secondary call (e.g., unique identifier or historical information). The worker manager 140 can also, at (8), transmit the modified secondary call to the destination auxiliary service 106. The interactions of FIGS. 5A and 5B may then end.
One of skill in the art will appreciate that the additional or alternative interactions to those describe in FIGS. 5A and 5B may also occur within the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, where the call transmitted to the auxiliary service 106, at (9), results in a subsequent call to the on-demand code execution environment 110, the interactions of FIGS. 5A and 5B may be repeated with respect to that call. Moreover, the active tracking information (e.g., previously assigned unique identifier or historical information) previously placed within the calls may be maintained by either or both of the auxiliary service 106 and the on-demand code execution environment, such that the task profiler 160 can correlate the calls as interrelated. While the interactions of FIGS. 5A and 5B are described above with respect to an auxiliary service 106, these interactions may also occur wholly within the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, a task executed within the on-demand code execution environment 110 may be recursive, such that a first execution of that task calls a second execution of the task, etc. At each call, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may insert or maintain the active monitoring information in the call, and report the calls to the task profiler 160 to generate active monitoring data. While the interactions described with respect to FIGS. 5A and 5B include transmission of notifications to the task profiler 160 (e.g., including active monitoring data), some embodiments of the present disclosure may include a task profiler 160 configured to retrieve such information from the frontend 120, the worker manager 140, other components of the on-demand code execution environment, or auxiliary services 106 themselves. For example, the task profiler 160 may be configured to “poll” these components for information periodically or as the information is required at the task profiler 160. Thus, the interactions of FIGS. 5A and 5B are illustrative in nature.
With reference to FIG. 6, illustrative interactions for generating a profile of a task executed on the on-demand code execution environment 110 will be described. The interactions of FIG. 6 may occur, for example, subsequent to the interactions described above with reference to FIGS. 3-5B, and may be based on task data gathered at the on-demand code execution environment 110 based on active monitoring of task calls and executions.
The interactions of FIG. 6 begin at (1), where a user device 102A requests a task profile. In one embodiment, the user device 102A may request a complete profile of the task, including data for all executions of the task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. In another embodiment, the user device 102A may specify criteria identifying specific executions of the task to be included in the task profile. Such criteria may include, but is not limited to, a time of task call or execution, credentials (e.g., username) used to invoke the task, or a source of call to the task (e.g., a specific auxiliary service 106, a specific task execution, etc.).
At (2), the frontend 120 passes the request to the task profiler 160, including any criteria indicating specific executions of the task that should be included in the task profile. The task profiler 160 can then utilize the request (and any criteria) to generate a profile for the task. To do so, the task profiler 160 can first inspect the task data store 164 to identify any data related to execution of the task (and satisfying any provided criteria). Additionally or alternatively to the information within the task data store 164, the task profiler 160 can retrieve data related to calls or executions of tasks from other components either within or outside of the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, as shown in FIG. 6 as interaction (3), the task profiler 160 can interact with one or more auxiliary services 106 to retrieve call information from those auxiliary services 106 (e.g., when auxiliary services 106 received calls from the on-demand code execution environment 110, from other auxiliary services 106, etc.) Thereafter, the task profiler 160 can utilize data gathered via active monitoring of task calls and executions to correlate those calls and executions, and utilize such correlations to generate a task profile at (4).
For example, where unique identifiers are utilized by the on-demand code execution environment 110 to actively monitor task calls and executions, the task data may indicate the following:
A call to task ‘A’ was obtained at the on-demand code execution environment 110 at time 1. The call was received from a user computing device 102A and assigned a unique identifier ‘ID1’ by the on-demand code execution environment 110. Task ‘A’ was subsequently executed beginning at time 2, and made calls to both task ‘B’ and an auxiliary service ‘C’ at time 3.
A call to task ‘B’ was obtained at the on-demand code execution environment 110 at time 3. The call was received from the on-demand code execution environment 110, and included the unique identifier ‘ID1’. Task ‘B’ was subsequently executed at time 4, and that execution made no calls to other tasks or auxiliary services.
A call to task ‘A’ was obtained at the on-demand code execution environment 110 at time 7. The call was received from auxiliary service ‘C’, and included the unique identifier ‘ID1’. Task ‘A’ was subsequently executed at time 8, and that execution made no calls to other tasks or auxiliary services.
Because each of the above data points is associated with the same unique identifier, the task profiler 160 can determine that each data point is interrelated (e.g., part of the same “thread” of calls and executions). Further, by correlating i) the times at which calls and executions occurred, ii) the sources of call to execute each task, and iii) the calls made by those executions, the task profiler 160 can determine the interactions between the calls. For example, based on the data above, the task profiler 160 can determine that an initial call from user computing device 102A to task ‘A’ (at time 1) resulted in execution of task ‘A’, which resulted in calls to both task ‘B’ and auxiliary service ‘C’ at time 3, which resulted in both execution of task ‘B’ (with no subsequent calls) and reception of a new call to task ‘A’ from auxiliary service ‘C’, which finally resulted in a second execution of task ‘A’. The task profiler 160 can then, at (4), generate a task profile indicating this information. In some embodiments, this information may be represented in a chart or diagram (such as a directed graph), where each node indicates a task or auxiliary service, and where the edges between nodes indicate calls to those tasks or auxiliary services.
As a further example, where active monitoring by the on-demand code execution environment 110 includes embedding historical information within task calls, the task data may indicate the following:
A call to task ‘A’ was obtained at the on-demand code execution environment 110 at time 1. The call was received from a user computing device 102A, and did not include any historical information. Task ‘A’ was subsequently executed beginning at time 2, and made calls to both task ‘B’ and an auxiliary service ‘C’ at time 3.
A call to task ‘B’ was obtained at the on-demand code execution environment 110 at time 3. The call was received from the on-demand code execution environment 110, and included historical information indicating that it was generated based on a past execution of task ‘A’, which in turn was called by user computing device 102A. Task ‘B’ was subsequently executed at time 4, and that execution made no calls to other tasks or auxiliary services.
A call to task ‘A’ was obtained at the on-demand code execution environment 110 at time 7. The call was received from auxiliary service ‘C’, and included historical information indicating that it was generated based on a past call to auxiliary service ‘C’, which was called by an execution of task ‘A’, which in turn was called by user computing device 102A. Task ‘A’ was subsequently executed at time 8, and that execution made no calls to other tasks or auxiliary services.
By utilizing the historical information within each subsequent call, the task profiler 160 can determine that each data point is interrelated (e.g., part of the same “thread” of calls and executions). Specifically, the information above enables the task profiler 160 to determine the same thread of calls and executions described in the prior paragraph, but without requiring the use of a unique identifier. Instead, the historical information embedded within later calls enables the task profiler 160 to determine interrelations that occur prior to those later calls. Beneficially, this may enable the task profiler 160 to determine those interrelations quickly, without requiring high levels of analysis on the logged data.
While the interactions described above are simplified, any number of calls and executions, involving any number of tasks or auxiliary services, may be indicated by task data. Thus, by utilizing task data regarding the calls and executions of tasks (or calls to auxiliary services), the task profiler 160 may assist in determining the interrelations between these calls and executions. While the examples described above relate to using either unique identifiers or historical data exclusively, in some embodiments, the task data may include both unique identifiers and historical data. Further, in some instances, the historical data may be reduced or compacted, to limit the amount of data that is included within calls themselves. For example, rather than indicating a complete chain of calls and executions, the historical data may include only a count of the number of times individual tasks or auxiliary services was called. This compact data may be especially beneficial in instances were a task is called recursively, and therefore may execute a large number of times. In some instances, frequently occurring patterns of task calls may be replaced within historical data with an identifier assigned to that frequently occurring pattern. For example, assume that historical data within a call indicates that execution of a first task called a first auxiliary service, which called a second task, which calls a second auxiliary service, which generated the present call. In such an instance, the pattern within the historical data may be removed and replaced with a path identifier (e.g., “path A”) which indicates the pattern (e.g., first task calls first auxiliary service, which calls second task, which calls second auxiliary service). In one embodiment, patterns may be identified and replaced with path identifiers based on a threshold number of occurrences of the pattern with respect to an individual task or a related group of tasks (e.g., within the same “thread” of execution or across multiple threads occurring in parallel, serial, or both). After identification, these patterns may be used to reduce the size of historical information included within the call. These patterns may further be shared by the on-demand code execution environment 110 with other components (e.g., auxiliary services 106) monitoring task calls. In some embodiments, patterns may additionally or alternatively be used to represent information within task profiles themselves. For example, where a task profile includes a graph of task calls, a specific pattern of nodes and edges in the graph may be replaced by a single pattern node, which corresponds to a sub-graph depicting the pattern. Such patterns may be especially useful, for example, where “loops” of nodes and edges occur frequently within the graph. Thus, patterns may be utilized in task profiles to reduce the information stored therein.
In some embodiments, a task profile may be generated based on a single thread or path of executions, like that described above. In other embodiments, the task profile may be generated based on multiple threads or paths of executions. Each thread may be represented individually with the task profile, such that a user may view or visualize each thread. Additionally or alternatively, data regarding each thread may be combined into a single data set within a task profile. Illustratively, such a data set may indicate, for each task or auxiliary service, a percentage of times that task or auxiliary service made a call to another task or auxiliary service. In one embodiment, this data may be represented by a directed graph within the task profile, where the nodes of the graph indicate individual tasks or auxiliary services, where the edges of the graph represent calls to other tasks or auxiliary services, and where those edges are weighted according to a percentage of times that that call was made. Thus, a user may be enabled to quickly understand the general execution paths of a task, based on a collection of large amounts of historical data.
After generating the task profile, the task profiler 160 returns the task profile to the frontend 120, at (5). The frontend 120, in turn, returns the task profile to the user device 102A at (6). Thereafter, the user device 102A may display the task profile to a user, enabling the user to view or visualize the interactions caused by execution of a task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. The interactions of FIG. 6 may then end.
With reference to FIG. 7, a block diagram depicting an illustrative routine 700 for generating a task profile based on execution of tasks on an on-demand code execution environment 110 will be described. The routine 700 may be implemented, for example, by the task profiler 160 of FIG. 1, alone or in conjunction with other components of the on-demand code execution environment 110.
The routine 700 begins at block 702, where the task profiler 160 identifies tasks for active monitoring. In one embodiment, identification of tasks may be based on an explicit user request, which specifies criteria for actively monitoring tasks. That criteria may include, but is not limited to, an identity of the task, credentials used to call the task, a time of call to the task (e.g., within certain hours of the day), a source of a call to the task, or parameters used to call the task. For example, a user (via a user computing device 102A) may request that “debugging mode” be turned on for executions of a specific task called by that user. Thus, task profiler 160 may identify all calls to that specific task under the credentials of that user be identified for active monitoring. In another embodiment, tasks may be identified for active monitoring based on frequency, such that if a threshold number of related calls to a task occur at the on-demand code execution environment 110 within a given period of time, that task (or specific executions of that task corresponding to the related calls) are identified for active monitoring. Calls may be related for the purposes of active monitoring based, for example, on credentials used to call the task, a time of call to the task (e.g., within certain hours of the day), a source of a call to the task, or parameters used to call the task. Illustratively, if the frequency of calls to a specific task from a specific auxiliary service exceeds a threshold amount, calls to that task from that auxiliary service may be identified for active monitoring.
At block 704, the task profiler 160 causes the on-demand code execution environment 110 to modify calls to or from actively monitored tasks, to inject active monitoring information into those calls. In one embodiment, this active monitoring information is a unique identifier. In another embodiment, this active monitoring information is historical information regarding the call (e.g., the source of the call, results or timing information of prior executions, etc.). Where a call is not associated with prior active monitoring information, new active monitoring information (e.g., a new unique identifier) may be generated by the on-demand code execution environment 110 and injected into the calls. Where a call is associated with prior active monitoring information, that active monitoring information may be retained and propagated through subsequent calls, to enable interrelations between those calls to be determined.
At block 706, the task profiler 160 records active monitoring information gathered regarding monitored tasks, as well as calls made to or from monitored tasks. Illustratively the active monitoring information may include, for any given execution of a task, a source of a call to execute the task, active monitoring information within that call, details of execution of the task on the on-demand code execution environment 110, calls made from that execution, and active monitoring information injected into those calls.
At block 708, the task profiler 160 receives a request to generate a profile for actively monitored tasks. Illustratively, the request may be generated by a user computing device 102, in order to gain information used to optimize or debug monitored tasks.
At block 710, the task profiler 160 generates a task profile based on the recorded active monitoring information. Specifically, the task profiler 160 may compile previously recorded active monitoring information, and correlate that information to determine a “path” or “thread” of executions or calls caused by a monitored task. The task profiler 160 may additionally generate statistical information regarding that “path” or “thread”, such as a directed graph that indicates historical probabilities that execution of a task will result in specific calls to tasks or auxiliary services.
At block 712, the task profiler 160 outputs the task profile to the requesting user. In one embodiment, the task profile may be output in a complete or substantially complete manner, such that the information contained therein is static. In another embodiment, the task profile may be output to the requesting user over time (e.g., as a “data stream”). Illustratively, the task profiler 160 may generate an initial task profile, based on currently available data, and transmit that initial task profile to the user. Thereafter, the task profiler 160 may continuously update the task profile based on newly received data, and transmit updated versions of the task profile to the user. Illustratively, use of a streamed task profile may enable a user to view a “path” of calls and executions in real-time (e.g., immediately after those calls and executions occur on the on-demand code execution environment 110). After outputting the task profile, the routine 700 may end at block 714.
The routine 700 may be altered based on the requirements of the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, in some embodiments of the present disclosure various functionalities described with respect to the routine 700 may be implemented in parallel, or as separate routines. For example, block 702 may be implemented as a first routine (e.g., running at fixed intervals on the on-demand code execution environment 110 or in response to a user request to enable active monitoring for specific tasks), blocks 704 and 706 may be implemented as a second routine (e.g., running continuously to actively monitor specific calls or executions), and blocks 708 through 712 may be implemented as a third routine implemented in response to user requests to provide task profiles. Division of the routine 700 into multiple parallel routines may advantageously increase the speed of various functionalities of the routine 700, for example, where the on-demand code execution environment 110 utilizes parallel processing techniques. In some embodiments, one or more portions of the routine 700 may be carried out by other systems or devices, including systems or devices external to the on-demand code execution environment, which provide information to the task profiler 700. For example, blocks 702-706 may be implemented (collectively or individually) by a frontend of the on-demand code execution environment 110, while blocks 708-712 are implemented by the task profiler 160 or other component of the on-demand code execution environment 110.
With reference to FIGS. 8A and 8B, illustrative interactions for utilization of a task profile to predictively manage task calls will be described. Specifically, the interactions of FIGS. 8A and 8B can enable the on-demand code execution environment 110, on obtaining a call to a first task, to predict a call to a second task (which may be the same task as the first task or a different task), and to preemptively load code corresponding to the second task onto a virtual machine, such that a call to the second task (if it occurs) can be processed rapidly by the on-demand code execution environment 110. While shown in two figures, the numbering of interactions between FIGS. 8A and 8B is maintained between the figures.
The interactions of FIGS. 8A and 8B begin at (1), where an auxiliary service 106 transmits a call, such as an API call, to a first task to the on-demand code execution environment 110, which is received at the frontend 120. While transmission of a call is shown for illustrative purposes in FIG. 8A, the on-demand code execution environment 110 may obtain a call to a task in a variety of additional or alternative manners (e.g., based on a previous execution of task, based on polling an auxiliary service 106, etc.). Thereafter, at (2), the frontend 120 distributes the task to the worker manager 140.
On receiving instructions to execute the first task, the worker manager 140 interacts with the task profiler 160 to retrieve a task profile for the first task, at (3). As discussed above, the task profile can include statistical information regarding past executions of the first task, including a statistical likelihood that a given past execution of the first task is followed by a call to a second task. Accordingly, at (4), the worker manager 140 determines that execution of the first task is likely to result in a call to a second task. Illustratively, the determination that a call to a second task is likely may include determining that at least a threshold percentage of past executions of the first task resulted in a call to the second task. While not shown in FIG. 8A, the worker manager 140 may additionally apply eligibility criteria to the task profile or the second task, to determine that predictive management of the call to the second task is appropriate. For example, the worker manager 140 may verify that historical calls to the second task have occurred within a threshold time of executing the first task. As a further example, the worker manager 140 may verify that the second task would benefit from predictive management (e.g., preemptively loading code of the second task on a virtual machine, prior to receiving a call to the second task). Illustratively, the worker manager 140 may compare the typical execution time of the second task to the overhead time required to process a call to the second task (e.g., processing the call at the frontend 120, loading a virtual machine with code of the second task, etc.). Where the typical execution time is large compared to the overhead time, it may be unnecessary to predictively manage calls to the second task. As yet another example, the worker manager 140 may verify that preemptive management of calls to the second task is compatible with the functionalities of the first task, the second task, or both. For example, where both the first task and second task run asynchronously, or where both tasks run synchronously, combining the code of the first and second tasks into a single set of executable code may not alter functionality of those tasks. However, where one of the first and second tasks runs asynchronously, and the other runs synchronously, combining the code of the first and second tasks may alter their functionality. Thus, the worker manager 140 may determine that the second task should not be preemptively managed, or that such management should not include combining the code of both tasks into a single set of code (but may include, for example, preemptively loading code of the second task onto a virtual machine).
For the purposes of FIG. 8A, it will be assumed that a call to the first task is likely to result in a call to the second task, and that the tasks satisfy any criteria for predictive management. Thus, at (5), the worker manager 140 can load a virtual machine with computer-executable instructions of both the first and second tasks. Such a virtual machine may be selected, for example, from the active pool 140A or the warming pool 130A of FIG. 1 (neither shown in FIG. 8A). Selection of a virtual machine to which to assign to execution of a task is described in more detail within the '556 Patent, incorporated by reference above (e.g., at FIG. 4 of the '556 Patent). In addition to the considerations described in the '556 Patent, the worker manager 140 may additionally select a virtual machine for loading of code of the first and second tasks based on the machine's ability to execute the first and second tasks (e.g., based on appropriate system resources, operating environment, etc.). In one embodiment, a single virtual machine is loaded with the code of both the first and second tasks. In another embodiment, a first virtual machine is loaded with the code of the first task, while a second virtual machine is loaded with the code of the second task. Where the same virtual machine is loaded with code of both tasks, operation of that virtual machine may be modified to facilitate execution of both tasks. For example, the configuration of the virtual machine may be modified such that, if execution of the first task results in generation of a call to the second task, that call is handled locally at the virtual machine (e.g., without transmission to the frontend 120). In one embodiment, the virtual machine may be configured to intercept calls to the second task, and to execute the second task. In another embodiment, the code of both the first and second tasks may be combined, and portions of code that generate a call to the second task (e.g., portions of code that generate an API call to the second task) may be replaced with function calls (or other internal cross references) to code of the second task.
The interactions of FIG. 8A are continued on FIG. 8B, where, at (6), the worker manager 140 causes the selected virtual machine to execute the first task, thus implementing the functionality of the first task at the on-demand code execution system. For the purposes of description, it will be assumed in FIG. 8B that execution of the first task results in a call to execution of the second task. Accordingly, at (7), the worker manager 140 can detect the call to the second task. The worker manager 140 can then, at (8), assign execution of the second task to the virtual machine on which code of the second task was preemptively loaded. At (9), that virtual machine can execute the second task, thus implementing functionality of the second task on the on-demand code execution environment 110. As will be appreciated by the description of FIGS. 8A and 8B, because execution of the second task may be handled completely at the worker manager 140, and because little or no delay need occur to load the virtual machine with the code of the second task, the time required to execute the second task may be reduced significantly, thus improving the performance of the on-demand code execution environment 110.
While illustrative interactions are described above with respect to FIGS. 8A and 8B, additional or alternative interactions may also occur in the context of these figures. For example, where a single virtual machine is loaded with the code of both a first and second task, that virtual machine may not be required to transmit calls to the second task to the worker manager 140 itself. Instead, the virtual machine may be configured to directly execute the second task. Thus, interactions (7) and (8) may be omitted, further reducing time required to process the call to the second task. Either the worker manager 140 or the virtual machine itself may also be configured to notify other components of the on-demand code execution environment 110 regarding execution of the second task (e.g., for billing purposes, capacity management purposes, profile-creation purposes, etc.). For example, the worker manager 140 or the virtual machine may be configured to notify the frontend 120 of a call to or execution of a second task. In some instances, it may be desirable to continue processing of task calls through the frontend 120, rather than allowing the worker manager 140 or virtual machine to manage execution a second task. In such instances, the worker manager 140 or virtual machine may be configured to transmit the call to the second task to the frontend 120 for handling (e.g., in the same manner as a typical task). The frontend 120 may then distribute the task to the worker manager 140, who may utilize a virtual machine previously loaded with code of the second task to execute the second task. Thus, even where management of a call to a second task is processed by the frontend 120, execution of that second task may occur more quickly, because a virtual machine has been preemptively loaded with the code of the second task.
With reference to FIGS. 9A and 9B, illustrative interactions for utilization of a task profile to predictively manage calls to auxiliary services will be described. Specifically, the interactions of FIGS. 8A and 8B can enable the on-demand code execution environment 110, on obtaining a call to a first task, to predict a call to an auxiliary service 106, and to select a virtual machine to execute the first task based on a communication path between the selected virtual machine and the auxiliary service 106, such that a call to the auxiliary service 106 (should it occur) can be transmitted quickly to the auxiliary service 106 over the communication path. While shown in two figures, the numbering of interactions between FIGS. 9A and 9B is maintained between the figures.
On receiving instructions to execute the first task, the worker manager 140 interacts with the task profiler 160 to retrieve a task profile for the first task, at (3). As discussed above, the task profile can include statistical information regarding past executions of the first task, including a statistical likelihood that a given past execution of the first task is followed by a call to a second task. Accordingly, at (4), the worker manager 140 determines that execution of the first task is likely to result in a call to an auxiliary service 106. Illustratively, the determination that a call to an auxiliary service 106 is likely may include determining that at least a threshold percentage of past executions of the first task resulted in a call to the auxiliary service 106. While not shown in FIG. 9A, the worker manager 140 may additionally apply eligibility criteria to the task profile or the call to the auxiliary service 106, to determine that predictive management of the call to the auxiliary service 106 is appropriate. For example, the worker manager 140 may verify that the auxiliary service 106 has been designated (e.g., by an administrator of the on-demand code execution environment) as eligible for predictive management.
For the purposes of FIG. 9A, it will be assumed that a call to the first task is likely to result in a call to the auxiliary service 106, and that the call to the auxiliary service 106 satisfies any criteria for predictive management. Thus, at (5), the worker manager 140 can select a virtual machine to execute the first task based on available communications paths between the selected virtual machine and the auxiliary service 106. In one embodiment, the worker manager 140 can select a virtual machine based on a network distance between that virtual machine and the auxiliary service 106. Generally described, network distance can describe aspects of a communication path between two devices, such as the latency of the communication path (e.g., the time required to transmit information from one device to the other) or the number of “hops” along the path (e.g., the number of intermediary devices). In another embodiment, the worker manager 140 can select a virtual machine based on a communication path quality, which may include any individual metric or combination of metrics regarding the communication path between the virtual machine and the auxiliary service 106, including but not limited to network distance, bandwidth, and reliability. In other embodiments, one or more virtual machines on the on-demand code execution environment 110 may be designated as preferred to communicate with the auxiliary service 106. For example, one or more virtual machines may maintain persistent connections to the auxiliary service 106, or may be executed by host devices that maintain persistent connections to the auxiliary service 106. The use of such a persistent connection can allow a call to the auxiliary service 106 to be transmitted without a delay that may be caused to establish a connection. As a further example, one or more virtual machines may be configured to communicate with the auxiliary service 106 via a specialized protocol. For example, where the auxiliary service 106 and the on-demand code execution environment 110 are operated by the same, related, or cooperating entities, the auxiliary service 106 and on-demand code execution environment 110 may be configured allow use of a high-speed communication protocol, or to allow communication via a private network. Thus, the worker manager 140 may select a virtual machine to execute the first task that utilizes such a high-speed protocol or private network to communication with the auxiliary service 106. In addition to the considerations described herein, selection of a virtual machine may also utilize any of the considerations described within the '556 Patent, incorporated by reference above (e.g., at FIG. 4 of the '556 Patent).
The interactions of FIG. 9A are continued on FIG. 9B, where, at (6), the worker manager 140 causes the selected virtual machine to execute the first task, thus implementing the functionality of the first task at the on-demand code execution system. For the purposes of description, it will be assumed in FIG. 9B that execution of the first task results in generation of a call to execution of the auxiliary service 106, at (7). Thereafter, at (8), the virtual machine executing the first task can transmit the generated call to the auxiliary service 106 to the auxiliary service 106, via a communication path to the auxiliary service 106. As described above, such a communication path may be selected based on network distance or network quality metrics, or may include the use of specialized protocols or private networks, thereby increasing the speed or reliability by which the call can be transmitted to the auxiliary service 106.
While illustrative interactions are described above with respect to FIGS. 9A and 9B, additional or alternative interactions may also occur in the context of these figures. For example, rather than utilizing a virtual machine with a pre-existing connection to an auxiliary service 106, the worker manager 140 may instruct a virtual machine to preemptively establish a connection to the auxiliary service 106 before or during execution of the first task, such that should a call to the auxiliary service 106 occur, that call may be transmitted to the auxiliary service 106 via the pre-established connection. Moreover, while direct communication between the auxiliary service 106 and the worker manager 140 (e.g., including the virtual machine on which the first task is executed) is shown in FIG. 9B, such direct communication may not be required. For example, in some embodiments, the virtual machine may transmit the call to the auxiliary service 106 to the frontend 120, which may transmit the call to the auxiliary service 106. Illustratively, the frontend 120 may utilize a preferred communication channel (e.g., utilizing a specialized protocol or private network) to transmit the call to the auxiliary service 106. Thus, the interactions of FIGS. 9A and 9B should be viewed as illustrative in nature.
With reference to FIG. 10, a block diagram depicting an illustrative routine 1000 for predictively managing calls on an on-demand code execution environment 110 based on a task profile will be described. The routine 1000 may be implemented, for example, by the worker manager 140 of FIG. 1, alone or in conjunction with other components of the on-demand code execution environment 110.
The routine 1000 begins at block 1002, where the worker manager 140 obtains a call to a first task. As described above, such a call may be generated based on execution of a prior task on the on-demand code execution environment 110, based on transmission of an API call or other communication to the on-demand code execution environment 110, based on polling of an auxiliary service 106 by the on-demand code execution environment 110, etc.
At block 1004, the worker manager 140 loads a task profile of the first task. The task profile may be maintained, for example, by the task profiler 160. Thus, implementation of block 1004 may include communicating with the task profiler 160 to retrieve the task profile of the first task. Thereafter, at block 1006, the worker manager 140 determines, based on the task profile, whether a subsequent call is likely to be generated based on execution of the first task. In one embodiment, the determination of block 1006 may include analyzing or reviewing statistical information within the task profile to determine that historical executions of the first task have resulted in subsequent calls in at least a threshold percentage of instances. Implementation of block 1006 may further include determining that a predicted subsequent call satisfies other criteria, such as timing criteria, or eligibility criteria. For example, where a predicted subsequent call is to a second task, eligibility criteria may be satisfied by determining that predictive management of the second task will not interfere with functionality of the first or second task. Where the predicted subsequent call is to an auxiliary service 106, eligibility criteria may be satisfied by determining that the called auxiliary service 106 is one of a number of auxiliary services 106 designated as eligible by an administrator of the on-demand code execution environment 110.
If, at block 1006, the worker manager 140 determines that a subsequent call is likely, and that such a call is a call to another task on the on-demand code execution environment 110, the routine 1000 continues to block 1008, where a virtual machine is loaded with code of the task predicted to be called. In one embodiment, the code of the predicted task is loaded onto the same virtual machine assigned to execute the initially called task, and may be combined with the code of the initially called task. In another embodiment, the code is loaded onto a different virtual machine than is assigned to execute the initially called task.
If, at block 1006, the worker manager 140 determines that a subsequent call is likely, and that such a call is a call to an auxiliary service 106, the routine 1000 continues to block 1010, where a virtual machine is selected for execution of the initially called task based on a communication path to an auxiliary service. In one embodiment, the virtual machine may be selected based on a determination that a communication path between the selected virtual machine and the auxiliary service 106 satisfies network distance metrics (e.g., number of hops, latency) or network quality metrics (network distance, bandwidth, reliability, etc.). Additionally or alternatively, the virtual machine may be selected based on the ability of the selected virtual machine to communicate with the auxiliary service 106 via a pre-established connection, via a private network, or via specific communication protocols.
Thereafter, the routine 1000 continues to block 1012, where the initially called task is executed on a selected virtual machine. Illustratively, the selected virtual machine may be provisioned with code of the initially called task, and execute that code, in order to implement functionality of the first task.
At block 1014, the worker manager 140 can determine whether the predicted subsequent call occurred based on execution of the initially called task. If so, and if the predicted subsequent call is a call to a second task, the routine continues at block 1016, where the called second task is executed on the virtual machine that was pre-emptively loaded with code of the second task. Because this virtual machine has been pre-loaded with code of the second task, execution of the second task can occur more quickly than would otherwise be possible on the on-demand code execution environment 110.
If, at block 1014, the worker manager determines that a predicted subsequent call has occurred, and that the predicted subsequent call is a call to an auxiliary service 106, the routine 1000 continues to block 1018, where the subsequent call is transmitted to the auxiliary service 106 via a communication path between the virtual machine executing the initial task and the auxiliary service 106. Because the virtual machine executing the initial task was previously selected based at least in part on that a communication path, transmission of the subsequent call to the auxiliary service 106 may occur more quickly or reliably than would occur during normal operation of the on-demand code execution environment 110.
After implementation of blocks 1016 or 1018, or if the predicted subsequent call is not obtained, the routine 1000 can then end at block 1020.
The routine 1000 may be altered based on the requirements of the on-demand code execution environment 110. For example, in some embodiments of the present disclosure various functionalities described with respect to the routine 1000 may be implemented in parallel, or as separate routines. For example, blocks 1002 through 1012 may be implemented as a first routine (e.g., in response to obtaining an initial task call), and blocks 1014 through 1020 may be implemented as a second routine (e.g., during execution of the initially called task). In some embodiments, one or more portions of the routine 1000 may be carried out by other systems or devices, including systems or devices external to the on-demand code execution environment. For example, blocks 1002 through 1010 may be implemented (collectively or individually) by a frontend 120 of the on-demand code execution environment 110, while blocks 1014 through 1020 are implemented by the worker manger 140 or other component of the on-demand code execution environment 110. While the routine 1000 is described above as predictive of a subsequent call to either a task or an auxiliary service 160, in some instances, a task profile may indicate that a call to a first task may result in subsequent calls to both a second task and an auxiliary service. Thus, implementation of the routine 1000 may include implementation of both blocks 1008 and 1010 and/or block 1016 and 1018. Accordingly, the description of the routine 1000 should be viewed as illustrative in nature.
All of the methods and processes described above may be embodied in, and fully automated via, software code modules executed by one or more general purpose computers or processors. The code modules may be stored in any type of non-transitory computer-readable medium or other computer storage device. Some or all of the methods may alternatively be embodied in specialized computer hardware.
Conditional language such as, among others, “can,” “could,” “might” or “may,” unless specifically stated otherwise, are otherwise understood within the context as used in general to present that certain embodiments include, while other embodiments do not include, certain features, elements and/or steps. Thus, such conditional language is not generally intended to imply that features, elements and/or steps are in any way required for one or more embodiments or that one or more embodiments necessarily include logic for deciding, with or without user input or prompting, whether these features, elements and/or steps are included or are to be performed in any particular embodiment.
Disjunctive language such as the phrase “at least one of X, Y or Z,” unless specifically stated otherwise, is otherwise understood with the context as used in general to present that an item, term, etc., may be either X, Y or Z, or any combination thereof (e.g., X, Y and/or Z). Thus, such disjunctive language is not generally intended to, and should not, imply that certain embodiments require at least one of X, at least one of Y or at least one of Z to each be present.
Unless otherwise explicitly stated, articles such as ‘a’ or ‘an’ should generally be interpreted to include one or more described items. Accordingly, phrases such as “a device configured to” are intended to include one or more recited devices. Such one or more recited devices can also be collectively configured to carry out the stated recitations. For example, “a processor configured to carry out recitations A, B and C” can include a first processor configured to carry out recitation A working in conjunction with a second processor configured to carry out recitations B and C.
Any routine descriptions, elements or blocks in the flow diagrams described herein and/or depicted in the attached figures should be understood as potentially representing modules, segments, or portions of code which include one or more executable instructions for implementing specific logical functions or elements in the routine. Alternate implementations are included within the scope of the embodiments described herein in which elements or functions may be deleted, or executed out of order from that shown or discussed, including substantially synchronously or in reverse order, depending on the functionality involved as would be understood by those skilled in the art.
It should be emphasized that many variations and modifications may be made to the above-described embodiments, the elements of which are to be understood as being among other acceptable examples. All such modifications and variations are intended to be included herein within the scope of this disclosure and protected by the following claims.
1. A computer-implemented method for predictively managing code execution in an on-demand code execution environment, the on-demand code execution environment comprising at least one virtual machine instance executing an initialized operating system and awaiting requests to execute user-specified code within that operating system, the method comprising:
as implemented by one or more computing devices configured with specific computer-executable instructions,
obtaining a task profile for a first task associated with the on-demand code execution environment, the first task corresponding to a first set of user-defined code executable by the virtual machine instance, wherein the task profile indicates a likelihood that a request to execute the first task on the on-demand code execution environment will be followed by a request to execute a second task corresponding to a second set of user-defined code executable by the virtual machine instance;
obtaining the request to execute the first task on the on-demand code execution environment;
instructing the virtual machine instance to execute the first set of user-defined code;
determining that the likelihood indicated by the task profile satisfies a threshold value;
prior to receiving the request to execute the second task, loading the virtual machine instance with the second set of user-defined code;
receiving the request to execute the second task; and
instructing the virtual machine instance to execute the second set of user-defined code previously loaded on the virtual machine instance.
2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the request to execute the first task corresponds to at least one of an application programming interface (API) call, a hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) request, a request generated by execution of a task on the on-demand code execution environment, or a request generated by the on-demand code execution environment based on data obtained from an auxiliary service.
3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein loading the virtual machine instance with the second set of user-defined code comprises:
combining first set of user-defined code and the second set of user-defined code into a combined set of code;
modifying the combined set of code to replace a portion of the combined set of code that generates the request to execute the second task with a reference to a portion of the combined set of code that corresponds to the second set of user-defined code; and
loading the combined set of code on the virtual machine instance.
4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the task profile includes a directed graph identifying a statistical relationship between an individual execution of the first task and calls caused by the individual execution.
5. The computer-implemented method of claim 4, wherein nodes of the directed graph identify at least one of a task on the on-demand code execution environment or an auxiliary service, and wherein edges of the directed graph indicate calls between the nodes of the directed graph.
6. A system for predictively managing code execution in an on-demand code execution environment, the on-demand code execution environment comprising at least one virtual machine instance executing an initialized operating system and awaiting requests to execute user-specified code within that operating system, the system comprising:
a non-transitory data store including a task profile for a first task associated with the on-demand code execution environment, the first task corresponding to a first set of user-defined code executable by the virtual machine instance, wherein the task profile indicates a likelihood that a request to execute the first task on the on-demand code execution environment will be followed by a request to execute a second task corresponding to a second set of user-defined code executable by the virtual machine instance; and
a computing device comprising a processor in communication with the non-transitory data store and configured with specific computer-executable instructions to:
obtain the request to execute the first task on the on-demand code execution environment;
determine that the likelihood indicated by the task profile satisfies a threshold value;
prior to receiving the request to execute the second task, load a virtual machine instance with the second set of user-defined code;
obtain the request to execute the second task; and
execute, on the virtual machine instance, the second set of user-defined code previously loaded on the virtual machine instance.
7. The system of claim 6, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further configure the computing device to execute the first set of user-defined code on the virtual machine instance.
8. The system of claim 6, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further configure the computing device to execute the first set of user-defined code on a second virtual machine instance.
9. The system of claim 6, wherein the request to execute the second task is generated by the virtual machine instance during execution of the first set of user-defined code and is intended for a frontend component of the on-demand code execution environment, and wherein obtaining the request to execute the second task comprises intercepting, at the virtual machine instance, the request to execute the second task.
10. The system of claim 6, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further configure the computing device to verify that the second task satisfies eligibility criteria for preemptive loading of the second set of user-defined code.
11. The system of claim 10, wherein the eligibility criteria includes at least one of synchronicity of the second task, execution time of the second task, or operating environment required by the second task.
12. The system of claim 6, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions configure the computing device to load the virtual machine instance with the second set of user-defined code at least in part by:
13. The system of claim 6, wherein the task profile further indicates a likelihood that execution of the first task on the on-demand code execution environment will cause transmission of information to an auxiliary service, and wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further configure the computing device to:
determine that the likelihood that execution of the first task on the on-demand code execution environment will cause transmission of information to the auxiliary service satisfies a second threshold value; and
select a virtual machine instance to execute the first set of user-defined code based at least in part on a quality of communication channel between the selected virtual machine instance and the auxiliary service.
14. Non-transitory, computer-readable storage media comprising computer-executable instructions for predictively managing code execution in an on-demand code execution environment, wherein the computer-executable instructions, when executed by a computer system, cause the computer system to:
obtain a request to execute a first task on the on-demand code execution environment;
determine that execution of the first task on the on-demand code execution environment is likely to result in a request to execute a second task on the on-demand code execution environment, wherein the first task corresponds to a first set of user-defined code executable by the on-demand code execution environment, wherein the second task corresponds to a second set of user-defined code executable by the on-demand code execution environment, and wherein said determination is based at least in part on a task profile for the first task that indicates a likelihood that the request to execute the first task will be followed by the request to execute the second task; and
15. The non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 14, wherein the computer-executable instructions further cause the computer system to obtain the task profile from a task profiler of the on-demand code execution environment.
16. The non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 14, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further cause the computer system to execute the first set of user-defined code on the virtual machine instance.
17. The non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 14, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further cause the computer system to execute the first set of user-defined code on a second virtual machine instance.
18. The non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 14, wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further cause the computer system to load the virtual machine instance with the second set of user-defined code at least in part by:
19. The non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 14, wherein obtaining the request to execute the second task comprises executing a portion of the first set of user-defined code that references the second set of user-defined code.
20. The non-transitory, computer-readable storage media of claim 14, wherein the task profile further indicates a likelihood that execution of the first task on the on-demand code execution environment will cause transmission of information to an auxiliary service, and wherein the specific computer-executable instructions further cause the computer system to:
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Owner name: AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC., WASHINGTON
Free format text: ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST;ASSIGNOR:WAGNER, TIMOTHY ALLEN;REEL/FRAME:040483/0556
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Home Economy Government Ruggerio submits bill to pause for-profit hospital conversions for one year
Ruggerio submits bill to pause for-profit hospital conversions for one year
R.I. SENATE PRESIDENT Dominick J. Ruggerio has submitted a bill that would pause hospital conversions in Rhode Island for one year if the acquiree or acquirer was a for-profit entity. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
PROVIDENCE – Senate President Dominick J. Ruggerio on Tuesday said he’s filed legislation that would impose a one-year moratorium on hospital conversions involving for-profit corporations.
“The questions swirling around the financial instability of [Our Lady of Fatima Hospital] and [Roger Williams Medical Center] stem in no small part from their for-profit status,” said Ruggerio in a statement, referring to Prospect CharterCARE LLC’s two Rhode Island hospitals. “Public allegations have been made that the hospital network they are a part of has incurred over a billion dollars in debt, and that the owners have personally taken over $500 million in dividends. They are insolvent and headed for bankruptcy, according to allegations made in court filings.”
Ruggerio said he has called upon Sen. Louis P. DiPalma, D-Cumberland, to convene the R.I. Senate Rules, Government Ethics & Oversight Committee to review matters related to Fatima, for-profit hospitals and hospital conversions. The hearings are expected to begin Jan. 20 and will include a review of the applications pending for a transfer of control at Fatima and Roger Williams hospitals.
Prospect CharterCARE RWMC LLC, doing business as Roger Williams Medical Center, filed an application in November 2019, which was resubmitted in February 2020, for a change in ownership of its ultimate parent company, Ivy Holdings Inc., to effectuate a buyout of the private-equity investors. Roger Williams Medical Center is owned by Prospect CharterCARE LLC, which is 85% owned by Prospect East Holdings Inc., which is wholly owned by Prospect Medical Holdings Inc., which is wholly owned by Ivy Intermediate Holdings Inc., which is wholly owned by Ivy Holdings Inc. The buyout would grant Prospect Medical Holdings CEO Sam Lee and President David Topper sole ownership of a newly formed parent company, which would be named Chamber Inc. The proposed acquisition price of $11.9 million would come from available Prospect Medical Holdings corporate cash, according to the application.
Ruggerio also cited the shutdown of Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket and the impact it has had on the health care sector in Rhode Island amid the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason for the bill. Care New England Health System received approval to close Memorial in 2017. The hospital was losing tens of millions of dollars per year when Care New England proposed its closure.
“We have seen the ripple effect that the closure of Memorial Hospital had on hospitals across the state. Hospital facilities and staff are stretched to their limit, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the strain. The strength of our overall statewide hospital network is critical to the well-being of Rhode Islanders. We need to conduct a comprehensive review of for-profit hospital entities and their impact on the financial condition of the hospitals they operate and the broader health care network in the state.”
The legislation, if approved, would not affect the proposed merger between Lifespan Corp. and Care New England, as both are nonprofit entities, but would impact the proposed acquisition of CNE by Pennsylvania-based StoneBridge Healthcare LLC, which offered a $550 million acquisition package in December.
Chris Bergenheim is the PBN web editor. You may reach him at Bergenheim@PBN.com.
Care New England Health System
Dominick J. Ruggerio
Lifespan Corp.
Our Lady of Fatima Hospital
Prospect CharterCARE LLC
Prospect Medical Holdings Inc.
Roger Williams Medical Center
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Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing: Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016
Erin M. Warshaw, Jamie P. Schlarbaum, Howard I. Maibach, Jonathan I. Silverberg, James S. Taylor, Amber R. Atwater, Margo J. Reeder, Joel G. Dekoven, Melanie D. Pratt, Vincent A. Deleo, Kathryn A. Zug, Anthony F. Fransway, Donald V. Belsito, Toby Mathias, Joseph F. Fowler, James G. Marks, Denis Sasseville, Matthew J. Zirwas
Importance: Facial dermatitis in women is well characterized. However, recent shifts in the men's grooming industry may have important implications for male facial dermatitis. Objective: To characterize male patients with facial dermatitis. Design, Setting, and Participants: A 22-year retrospective cross-sectional analysis (1994-2016) of North American Contact Dermatitis Group (NACDG) data, including 50507 patients who underwent patch testing by a group of dermatology board-certified patch test experts at multiple centers was carried out. Facial dermatitis was defined as involvement of the eyes, eyelids, lips, nose, or face (not otherwise specified). Main Outcomes and Measures: The main outcome was to compare characteristics (including demographics and allergens) between male patients with facial dermatitis (MFD) and those without facial dermatitis (MNoFD) using statistical analysis (relative risk, CIs). Secondary outcomes included sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis and, for occupationally related cases, specific occupations and industries in MFD. Results: Overall, 1332 male patients (8.0%) were included in the MFD group and 13732 male patients (82.0%) were included in MNoFD. The mean (SD) age of participants was 47 (17.2) years in the MFD group and 50 (17.6) years in the MNoFD group. The most common facial sites were face (not otherwise specified, 817 [48.9%]), eyelids (392 [23.5%]), and lips (210 [12.6%]). Participants in the MFD group were significantly younger than MNoFD (mean age, 47 vs 50 years; P <.001). Those in the MFD group were less likely to be white (relative risk [RR], 0.92; 95% CI,-0.90 to 0.95) or have occupationally related skin disease (RR, 0.49; 95% CI,-0.42 to 0.58; P <.001) than MNoFD. The most common allergens that were associated with clinically relevant reactions among MFD included methylisothiazolinone (n = 113; 9.9%), fragrance mix I (n = 27; 8.5%), and balsam of Peru (n = 90; 6.8%). Compared with MNoFD, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine (RR, 2.49; 95% CI,-1.42 to 4.37]) and paraphenylenediamine (RR, 1.43; 95% CI,-1.00 to 2.04; P <.001). Overall, 60.5% of NACDG allergen sources were personal care products. Conclusions and Relevance: Although many allergens were similar in both groups, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine and paraphenylenediamine, presumably owing to their higher prevalence in hair products. Most sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis in MFD were personal care products. This study provides insight into the risks and exposures of the increasing number of grooming products used by male dermatology patients. This will enable clinicians to better identify male patients who would benefit from patch testing and treat those with facial dermatitis.
https://doi.org/10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
Fingerprint Dive into the research topics of 'Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing: Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Contact Dermatitis Medicine & Life Sciences
Dermatitis Medicine & Life Sciences
Allergens Medicine & Life Sciences
4-phenylenediamine Medicine & Life Sciences
Grooming Medicine & Life Sciences
Eyelids Medicine & Life Sciences
Dermatology Medicine & Life Sciences
Lip Medicine & Life Sciences
Warshaw, E. M., Schlarbaum, J. P., Maibach, H. I., Silverberg, J. I., Taylor, J. S., Atwater, A. R., Reeder, M. J., Dekoven, J. G., Pratt, M. D., Deleo, V. A., Zug, K. A., Fransway, A. F., Belsito, D. V., Mathias, T., Fowler, J. F., Marks, J. G., Sasseville, D., & Zirwas, M. J. (2020). Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing: Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016. JAMA Dermatology, 156(1), 79-84. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
Warshaw, Erin M. ; Schlarbaum, Jamie P. ; Maibach, Howard I. ; Silverberg, Jonathan I. ; Taylor, James S. ; Atwater, Amber R. ; Reeder, Margo J. ; Dekoven, Joel G. ; Pratt, Melanie D. ; Deleo, Vincent A. ; Zug, Kathryn A. ; Fransway, Anthony F. ; Belsito, Donald V. ; Mathias, Toby ; Fowler, Joseph F. ; Marks, James G. ; Sasseville, Denis ; Zirwas, Matthew J. / Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing : Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016. In: JAMA Dermatology. 2020 ; Vol. 156, No. 1. pp. 79-84.
@article{1072041cdd5e4a90a7ca12967dca5fd4,
title = "Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing: Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016",
abstract = "Importance: Facial dermatitis in women is well characterized. However, recent shifts in the men's grooming industry may have important implications for male facial dermatitis. Objective: To characterize male patients with facial dermatitis. Design, Setting, and Participants: A 22-year retrospective cross-sectional analysis (1994-2016) of North American Contact Dermatitis Group (NACDG) data, including 50507 patients who underwent patch testing by a group of dermatology board-certified patch test experts at multiple centers was carried out. Facial dermatitis was defined as involvement of the eyes, eyelids, lips, nose, or face (not otherwise specified). Main Outcomes and Measures: The main outcome was to compare characteristics (including demographics and allergens) between male patients with facial dermatitis (MFD) and those without facial dermatitis (MNoFD) using statistical analysis (relative risk, CIs). Secondary outcomes included sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis and, for occupationally related cases, specific occupations and industries in MFD. Results: Overall, 1332 male patients (8.0%) were included in the MFD group and 13732 male patients (82.0%) were included in MNoFD. The mean (SD) age of participants was 47 (17.2) years in the MFD group and 50 (17.6) years in the MNoFD group. The most common facial sites were face (not otherwise specified, 817 [48.9%]), eyelids (392 [23.5%]), and lips (210 [12.6%]). Participants in the MFD group were significantly younger than MNoFD (mean age, 47 vs 50 years; P <.001). Those in the MFD group were less likely to be white (relative risk [RR], 0.92; 95% CI,-0.90 to 0.95) or have occupationally related skin disease (RR, 0.49; 95% CI,-0.42 to 0.58; P <.001) than MNoFD. The most common allergens that were associated with clinically relevant reactions among MFD included methylisothiazolinone (n = 113; 9.9%), fragrance mix I (n = 27; 8.5%), and balsam of Peru (n = 90; 6.8%). Compared with MNoFD, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine (RR, 2.49; 95% CI,-1.42 to 4.37]) and paraphenylenediamine (RR, 1.43; 95% CI,-1.00 to 2.04; P <.001). Overall, 60.5% of NACDG allergen sources were personal care products. Conclusions and Relevance: Although many allergens were similar in both groups, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine and paraphenylenediamine, presumably owing to their higher prevalence in hair products. Most sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis in MFD were personal care products. This study provides insight into the risks and exposures of the increasing number of grooming products used by male dermatology patients. This will enable clinicians to better identify male patients who would benefit from patch testing and treat those with facial dermatitis.",
author = "Warshaw, {Erin M.} and Schlarbaum, {Jamie P.} and Maibach, {Howard I.} and Silverberg, {Jonathan I.} and Taylor, {James S.} and Atwater, {Amber R.} and Reeder, {Margo J.} and Dekoven, {Joel G.} and Pratt, {Melanie D.} and Deleo, {Vincent A.} and Zug, {Kathryn A.} and Fransway, {Anthony F.} and Belsito, {Donald V.} and Toby Mathias and Fowler, {Joseph F.} and Marks, {James G.} and Denis Sasseville and Zirwas, {Matthew J.}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2019 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
doi = "10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531",
journal = "JAMA Dermatology",
publisher = "American Medical Association",
Warshaw, EM, Schlarbaum, JP, Maibach, HI, Silverberg, JI, Taylor, JS, Atwater, AR, Reeder, MJ, Dekoven, JG, Pratt, MD, Deleo, VA, Zug, KA, Fransway, AF, Belsito, DV, Mathias, T, Fowler, JF, Marks, JG, Sasseville, D & Zirwas, MJ 2020, 'Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing: Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016', JAMA Dermatology, vol. 156, no. 1, pp. 79-84. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing : Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016. / Warshaw, Erin M.; Schlarbaum, Jamie P.; Maibach, Howard I.; Silverberg, Jonathan I.; Taylor, James S.; Atwater, Amber R.; Reeder, Margo J.; Dekoven, Joel G.; Pratt, Melanie D.; Deleo, Vincent A.; Zug, Kathryn A.; Fransway, Anthony F.; Belsito, Donald V.; Mathias, Toby; Fowler, Joseph F.; Marks, James G.; Sasseville, Denis; Zirwas, Matthew J.
In: JAMA Dermatology, Vol. 156, No. 1, 01.2020, p. 79-84.
T1 - Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing
T2 - Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016
AU - Warshaw, Erin M.
AU - Schlarbaum, Jamie P.
AU - Maibach, Howard I.
AU - Silverberg, Jonathan I.
AU - Taylor, James S.
AU - Atwater, Amber R.
AU - Reeder, Margo J.
AU - Dekoven, Joel G.
AU - Pratt, Melanie D.
AU - Deleo, Vincent A.
AU - Zug, Kathryn A.
AU - Fransway, Anthony F.
AU - Belsito, Donald V.
AU - Mathias, Toby
AU - Fowler, Joseph F.
AU - Marks, James G.
AU - Sasseville, Denis
AU - Zirwas, Matthew J.
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2019 American Medical Association. All rights reserved. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
N2 - Importance: Facial dermatitis in women is well characterized. However, recent shifts in the men's grooming industry may have important implications for male facial dermatitis. Objective: To characterize male patients with facial dermatitis. Design, Setting, and Participants: A 22-year retrospective cross-sectional analysis (1994-2016) of North American Contact Dermatitis Group (NACDG) data, including 50507 patients who underwent patch testing by a group of dermatology board-certified patch test experts at multiple centers was carried out. Facial dermatitis was defined as involvement of the eyes, eyelids, lips, nose, or face (not otherwise specified). Main Outcomes and Measures: The main outcome was to compare characteristics (including demographics and allergens) between male patients with facial dermatitis (MFD) and those without facial dermatitis (MNoFD) using statistical analysis (relative risk, CIs). Secondary outcomes included sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis and, for occupationally related cases, specific occupations and industries in MFD. Results: Overall, 1332 male patients (8.0%) were included in the MFD group and 13732 male patients (82.0%) were included in MNoFD. The mean (SD) age of participants was 47 (17.2) years in the MFD group and 50 (17.6) years in the MNoFD group. The most common facial sites were face (not otherwise specified, 817 [48.9%]), eyelids (392 [23.5%]), and lips (210 [12.6%]). Participants in the MFD group were significantly younger than MNoFD (mean age, 47 vs 50 years; P <.001). Those in the MFD group were less likely to be white (relative risk [RR], 0.92; 95% CI,-0.90 to 0.95) or have occupationally related skin disease (RR, 0.49; 95% CI,-0.42 to 0.58; P <.001) than MNoFD. The most common allergens that were associated with clinically relevant reactions among MFD included methylisothiazolinone (n = 113; 9.9%), fragrance mix I (n = 27; 8.5%), and balsam of Peru (n = 90; 6.8%). Compared with MNoFD, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine (RR, 2.49; 95% CI,-1.42 to 4.37]) and paraphenylenediamine (RR, 1.43; 95% CI,-1.00 to 2.04; P <.001). Overall, 60.5% of NACDG allergen sources were personal care products. Conclusions and Relevance: Although many allergens were similar in both groups, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine and paraphenylenediamine, presumably owing to their higher prevalence in hair products. Most sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis in MFD were personal care products. This study provides insight into the risks and exposures of the increasing number of grooming products used by male dermatology patients. This will enable clinicians to better identify male patients who would benefit from patch testing and treat those with facial dermatitis.
AB - Importance: Facial dermatitis in women is well characterized. However, recent shifts in the men's grooming industry may have important implications for male facial dermatitis. Objective: To characterize male patients with facial dermatitis. Design, Setting, and Participants: A 22-year retrospective cross-sectional analysis (1994-2016) of North American Contact Dermatitis Group (NACDG) data, including 50507 patients who underwent patch testing by a group of dermatology board-certified patch test experts at multiple centers was carried out. Facial dermatitis was defined as involvement of the eyes, eyelids, lips, nose, or face (not otherwise specified). Main Outcomes and Measures: The main outcome was to compare characteristics (including demographics and allergens) between male patients with facial dermatitis (MFD) and those without facial dermatitis (MNoFD) using statistical analysis (relative risk, CIs). Secondary outcomes included sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis and, for occupationally related cases, specific occupations and industries in MFD. Results: Overall, 1332 male patients (8.0%) were included in the MFD group and 13732 male patients (82.0%) were included in MNoFD. The mean (SD) age of participants was 47 (17.2) years in the MFD group and 50 (17.6) years in the MNoFD group. The most common facial sites were face (not otherwise specified, 817 [48.9%]), eyelids (392 [23.5%]), and lips (210 [12.6%]). Participants in the MFD group were significantly younger than MNoFD (mean age, 47 vs 50 years; P <.001). Those in the MFD group were less likely to be white (relative risk [RR], 0.92; 95% CI,-0.90 to 0.95) or have occupationally related skin disease (RR, 0.49; 95% CI,-0.42 to 0.58; P <.001) than MNoFD. The most common allergens that were associated with clinically relevant reactions among MFD included methylisothiazolinone (n = 113; 9.9%), fragrance mix I (n = 27; 8.5%), and balsam of Peru (n = 90; 6.8%). Compared with MNoFD, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine (RR, 2.49; 95% CI,-1.42 to 4.37]) and paraphenylenediamine (RR, 1.43; 95% CI,-1.00 to 2.04; P <.001). Overall, 60.5% of NACDG allergen sources were personal care products. Conclusions and Relevance: Although many allergens were similar in both groups, MFD were more likely to react to use of dimethylaminopropylamine and paraphenylenediamine, presumably owing to their higher prevalence in hair products. Most sources of allergic and irritant contact dermatitis in MFD were personal care products. This study provides insight into the risks and exposures of the increasing number of grooming products used by male dermatology patients. This will enable clinicians to better identify male patients who would benefit from patch testing and treat those with facial dermatitis.
U2 - 10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
DO - 10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
JO - JAMA Dermatology
JF - JAMA Dermatology
Warshaw EM, Schlarbaum JP, Maibach HI, Silverberg JI, Taylor JS, Atwater AR et al. Facial Dermatitis in Male Patients Referred for Patch Testing: Retrospective Analysis of North American Contact Dermatitis Group Data, 1994 to 2016. JAMA Dermatology. 2020 Jan;156(1):79-84. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamadermatol.2019.3531
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Halfords reveals plans to shut Cycle Republic chain
Boardman Performance Centre also set to be closed following business review
by Simon_MacMichael
Mon, Mar 16, 2020 10:28
Halfords has said that it plans to close its Cycle Republic chain, currently trading from 22 stores throughout the country, following a review of the business. The company, which sells more bikes than any other retailer in the UK, has also said that it plans to shut the Boardman Performance Centre.
In a statement, Halfords said that the proposed closure of the chain, relaunched in late 2014 with its first store next to London’s Euston Tower, “reflects the challenging economics of a store-based dedicated performance cycling operation.
“Exiting a low-returning, stock intensive business allows us to improve our return on capital whilst freeing up investment and resources to continue to drive our services-focused strategy, with an emphasis on accelerating the growth of our motoring businesses.
“The proposed closure is expected to be marginally accretive to earnings in FY21 and will also enhance cashflow and net debt on an ongoing basis, principally through lower working capital requirements.”
The 2014 relaunch of the brand came five years after the retailer announced in September 2009 that it was closing its then eight standalone bike shops, trading under either the Bikehut or Cycle Republic fascias.
One store, in York, closed, with the other seven converted into high street branches of Halfords. The Bikehut brand itself was retained for use within Halfords stores.
> Bye bye Bikehut … on the High Street
In today's announcement, Halfords said that it would be consulting with 226 staff impacted by the decision and hoped to avoid redundancies as far as possible, adding that it plans to focus on its mainly online Tredz business, bought in 2016.
The company said that Tredz "offers a winning proposition for the Halfords Group to unlock its ambitions to grow and enhance the performance cycling market.”
It continued: “The group proposes to reduce the overlap in its brands and singularly focus its investment and resources into Tredz. We intend to make an initial substantial investment in logistics and It infrastructure during the course of the next financial to help Tredz further growth.”
The company added: "Mainstream and performance cycling are important markets for Halfords.
“With the proposed investment in Tredz, alongside the core Halfords Retail cycling business, the company believes it will be uniquely placed to serve both the enthusiast and the mainstream customer and support further market growth.
“Both Tredz and Halfords Retail offer unique and differentiated customer propositions, with high brand equity and stronger business economics.”
Incorporating a wind tunnel and a physiology lab, the Boardman Performance Centre opened in Redditch, Worcestershire (the town where Halfords is based) in 2018.
> Wind assisted: a day at the Boardman Performance Centre
Commenting on its planned closure today Chris Boardman, who remains chairman of the Boardman Bikes business he sold to Halfords in 2014, said: “Whilst I’m obviously disappointed the Performance Centre isn’t going to form part of our strategy going forward, I do understand the immense pressure Halfords, along with other retailers, is under right now.
“Pioneering, worlds-first things like this take courage to back, and we need to remember Halfords showed leadership in enabling us to do something different and wonderful.
“This was a tough decision and I know it wasn’t taken lightly. It is my hope that we can find someone who is in a position to take the centre on as a going concern.
“It’s still an amazing place and most importantly, it has an amazing team. That’s what I will be striving for over the next few weeks.”
Halfords CEO Graham Stapleton commented: “The board has come to the difficult, but necessary, decision to propose the closure of Cycle Republic, our retail store-focussed performance cycling brand.
“This proposal is not a reflection of the hard work of our Cycle Republic colleagues, who I would like to thank for their commitment and passion in serving our customers.
“We are now moving into a Classification: Restricted period of consultation with impacted colleagues with a view to mitigating as many redundancies as possible.
“Going forward we propose to focus our investment and resources in Halfords and Tredz, through which we will deliver market-leading specialist propositions for both mainstream and enthusiast cyclists via a business model that improves our overall economics.”
News of the planned closure of Cycle Republic comes two months after road.cc revealed that retail group Outdoor and Cycle Concepts had informed staff at its Cycle Surgery chain that it planned to close that business, which it described as “unsustainable.”
> Cycle Surgery to be closed down as owners declare business “unsustainable”
Cycle Republic
Boardman Performance Centre
Simon MacMichael
Simon has been news editor at road.cc since 2009, reporting on 10 editions and counting of pro cycling’s biggest races such as the Tour de France, stories on issues including infrastructure and campaigning, and interviewing some of the biggest names in cycling. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, his background has proved invaluable in reporting on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, and the bike industry. He splits his time between London and Cambridge, and loves taking his miniature schnauzer Elodie on adventures in the basket of her Elephant Bike.
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| ERROR: type should be string, got "https://rocketswire.usatoday.com/2020/07/28/as-nba-restart-looms-late-betting-money-backs-rockets-to-win-title/\nAs NBA restart looms, late betting money backs Rockets to win title\nThe resumption of the NBA’s 2019-20 season is only a few days away, and much of the late betting money is on the side of the Houston Rockets.\nAccording to Tuesday’s update from popular betting affiliate Oddschecker, 15% of all wagers placed within the last day have backed the Rockets to win the 2020 NBA title, with odds as friendly as +1600.\nOnly the Los Angeles Lakers — currently the +270 favorites to win — have accounted for more bets during the same time period.\n“Given that the Rockets odds of +1600 imply just a 5.88% chance of winning, the betting trends clearly demonstrate that bettors believe that Rockets are great value and have confidence that their small-ball style could cause serious problems for the biggest teams in the league,” said Pete Watt, spokesperson for Oddschecker. “Given that a current wager would be increased sixteen-fold in the event of a successful Rockets’ challenge, it’s easy to see why they’re proving so popular.”\nWe're talking inner-circle contenders in the final NBA bubble preview at @FiveThirtyEight. Deeper dive into title odds this time around, including the Rockets and Sixers getting sizable bumps from the neutral-site environment. https://t.co/UesmGAWnPz\n— Yaya Dubin (@JADubin5) July 27, 2020\nLed by an All-Star backcourt of former NBA MVPs James Harden and Russell Westbrook, the Rockets currently have the fourth-best championship odds of any NBA team heading into the restart. As of Tuesday, the only teams ahead of Houston were the Lakers (+270), the Milwaukee Bucks (+280), and the Los Angeles Clippers (+340).\nJust behind the Rockets are the Boston Celtics (+2000), the defending champion Toronto Raptors (+2400), and the Philadelphia 76ers (+2700).\nHow to watch: Rockets conclude scrimmage play Tuesday vs. Boston\nOddschecker determines its lines by examining the current odds for each team across 10 leading sportsbooks, including BetMGM. They then highlight the most friendly number available to bettors.\nFor example, at some sportsbooks, Houston’s title odds are as low as +1200. But Oddschecker uses +1600 as the official figure for the Rockets, since anyone backing them would be incentivized to search for the longest odds, and thus the highest potential payout.\nHouston resumes its 2019-20 regular season on Friday versus Dallas (40-27), with the playoffs set to begin in mid-August from the NBA “bubble” in Florida. The Rockets (40-24), who are tied for the No. 5 spot in the Western Conference, have already clinched a playoff spot and can finish anywhere between No. 2 and No. 7 in the final West standings.\nRockets unveil new schedule for remaining regular season games\nRockets schedule: Houston's slate for NBA restart at Disney World"
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NEW LUXURY
A feeling.
An idea.
A thought.
Every moment of time in space exudes specific energy.
A unique set of characteristics.
That was never reproduced before and will never be reproduced again.
It as an energy that is unique.
And when this energy is extraordinary, when it sits at the edge of reality, it creates a sensation in our body, mind, and soul, a sensation that surprises us into alive hood by pushing us up and forward in our quest for self-actualization.
I call these moments Extraordinary Moments of Time in Space.
These are the moments that define who we are and where we are.
By connecting our inner experience of self with our outer experience of self.
Sizzling with emotions, ideas, thoughts, and sensations.
We finally wake up from the mundane.
And are transformed by the combination of elements connecting this moment of extraordinariness.
Towards a higher self.
We have an aesthetic experience that finally makes us feel aware.
Aware that we are humans.
That we have the power to create.
To learn, to play, to dream the unimaginable.
To choose.
To move.
From one state of reality to the next.
By allowing ourselves the liberties that are often called luxuries.
Luxury.
Hated by many but coveted by even more.
It is a privilege of the excess.
From the ordinary that plagues our every day.
It is an abundant expression of our ideas/ideals.
Forever pushing human consciousness.
Up and forwards on the arrow of time.
Towards an elevated state of living.
Uplifting our humanity.
By inspiring the extraordinary.
From within.
And by expressing it.
From without.
Wealth, Time, Space, Emotions and You.
How the Great Pause is Challenging Our Sense of Aliveness
New Luxury branding is defined as a way to achieve sustainable business growth by creating a value-driven brand strategy that aligns with the global quest of oneness while respecting the extraordinary experience offer characteristic of luxury.
It is a forward-thinking model that uses the power of digital storytelling to uplift the brand experience and connect with the luxury consumer of the future.
NEW LUXURY:
Consultancy for brands
Mentorship for startups
The Essentiality of New Luxury © 2018 Roxy Genier All rights reserved.
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Haley Skarupa
Home / Posts tagged "Haley Skarupa"
Capitals hire Olympic gold medalist Haley Skarupa as hockey ambassador
The Washington Capitals named local hockey legend Haley Skarupa as one of the team’s official hockey ambassadors Monday.
According to the team, the Olympic gold medalist will help to drive growth within the local youth hockey community across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. She’ll also serve as the team’s core liaison with USA hockey.
By Ian Oland 1 year ago
My experience at the Capitals Media Fantasy Camp
Tuesday afternoon, I had the pleasure of representing RMNB at the Capitals Media Fantasy Camp from the practice home of the Caps, Medstar Capitals Iceplex. Representatives from all of your favorite local media outlets were hosted by the team and its staff to a day of all things hockey.
By Chris Cerullo 1 year ago
Gritty ties up Penguins fan in electrical cord, kisses one of his own at Hockey Day on the Hill
Gritty is an inexorable force of chaos and Capitol Hill got to witness the full breadth of the mascot’s antics on Wednesday morning.
From tying up a Penguins fan with an extension cord, to yanking the shirt over the head of a congressman, Gritty was anything but predictable at the 2019 Hockey Day on the Hill event.
Gritty, the manic, bright orange, dead-eyed Philadelphia Flyers mascot who took the hockey world by storm last September, had no mercy for any taunting Penguins fans that were at the event.
By Elizabeth Kong 2 years ago
Capitals players involved in Hockey ‘N Heels event hope team’s female supporters ‘become lifelong fans of the game’
On Monday evening, the Capitals held the 13th annual Hockey ‘N Heels event. The event, which is exclusive to members of the Scarlet Caps, is a special evening dedicated to the team’s female fans.
The evening featured instructional sessions from a handful of Capitals and off-ice presentations, including a question and answer session with USA gold medal-winning Olympian Haley Skarupa.
By Cara Bahniuk 2 years ago
Olympic gold medalist Haley Skarupa throws out ceremonial first pitch before Baltimore Orioles game
US women’s hockey team member Haley Skarupa was honored Saturday at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The Rockville, Maryland native, who won gold in PyeongChang, South Korea, threw out the ceremonial first pitch before the Baltimore Orioles took on the Minnesota Twins.
Skarupa won gold for the first time after Team USA defeated Canada 3-2 in a shootout. Skarupa is the first woman from the Washington metro area ever named to a US Hockey Olympic roster.
USWNT gold medalist Haley Skarupa will be recognized at tonight’s Caps game
There’s a lot to look forward to for tonight’s Caps-Rangers game at Capital One Arena. Rookie Shane Gersich is making his NHL debut and the Caps could clinch a playoff spot with some help from the Flyers.
On top of that, some hockey royalty will be in the building. 2018 Olympic gold medalist Haley Skarupa, a member of the United States women’s national team, will be in attendance along with Noah Grove, a member of the 2018 gold medal-winning Paralympic sled hockey team.
Skarupa grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and was a member of the Washington Pride, while Grove is from RMNB’s hometown of Frederick, Maryland. Skarupa held up a Maryland flag after winning gold in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Fan holds Maryland flag on glass after Rockville native Haley Skarupa wins gold medal with US Women’s National Team
On the 38th anniversary of the Miracle On Ice, Team USA defeated Team Canada 3-2 in a shootout to give the US women’s team its first goal medal in 20 years.
Rockville, Maryland native and Washington Pride alum Haley Skarupa was the first woman from the Washington metro area ever named to a US Hockey Olympic roster. During the medal ceremony, one of her friends held up a Maryland flag along the glass at Gangneung Hockey Centre.
Rockville native Haley Skarupa was named to the US Olympic women’s team. Her nod gives hope to local girls with big hockey dreams.
Matt Mendelsohn, who writes below, has been a photographer and journalist for the last thirty-three years. He worked at UPI and USA Today during the 80’s and 90’s and is now primarily a portrait photographer. His daughter Alexandra plays hockey at MYHA in the U14 girls travel team.
Like most local rinks, the walls around the Rockville Ice Arena are crammed with banners of championships and teams long gone by — a 2003 U14 win here, a 2013 Silver Stick runner-up there. But Rockville might have do a bit of reorganizing in the coming weeks to make room for its biggest banner yet.
This one will read simply: “Home of Haley Skarupa, US Olympian.”
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Tag Archives: Jim Simpson
Here is How TV Covered the League Championship Series in the Early Years
October 8, 2015 Chuck Hildebrandt
There’s a great post over at the Classic TV Sports blog by Jeff Haggar (@classicTVsports) about the early years of televised coverage of the League Championship Series, during the time when the weekday games would run in the afternoon, and what would happen when the two series had games scheduled at the exact same time. Remember, there were no cable networks who could easily pick up that second game, so read below how this eventuality was handled.
You can read the article in full below, or read it on the original website here. By the way, if you are interested in the coverage of all sports (not just baseball) in years gone by, I’d recommend subscribing to Jeff’s blog.
TV coverage for the early years of the LCS (1969-1975)
Can you imagine a baseball playoff game with no national TV coverage? This actually happened multiple times during the early years of the League Championship Series.
MLB created divisions in 1969 and added the LCS playoff round. NBC held the national TV rights to these games, but its LCS coverage in those first years left much to be desired.
At the time, the best-of-5 LCS began on a Saturday for both leagues and NBC would kick things off with an afternoon doubleheader. Then things would get interesting. On Sunday, NBC typically selected one of the baseball games for a national telecast and presented a “football/baseball” doubleheader with regional NFL action at 1 pm and an LCS game at 4. The other LCS game was relegated to a local telecast. Neither MLB nor the NFL scheduled any games for Sunday night at the time.
When both leagues played on the same weekday, the starting times overlapped by 1.5 hours. NBC would televise one game in full in the early afternoon and then join the late game in progress.
The standard practice for NBC was to send its top announcer team of Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek to the weekend games of one LCS and then shift them to the opposite league for the weekday games. Jim Simpson handled play-by-play duties for the other series from 1969-1974 with Joe Garagiola filling that role in 1975. The “B” team analysts were Sandy Koufax (1969-1972) and Maury Wills (1973-1975).
During this era, MLB typically scheduled these playoff series with no off day for travel unless one of the teams was from the west coast. And the game times were fixed in advance with no provisions for moving a start later in the day if the other series ended early.
For example, check out the NBC TV schedule for the 1972 LCS round (all times ET):
Sat 10/7, Reds @ Pirates, NLCS game 1, 1 pm, Simpson, Koufax
Sat 10/7, Tigers @ Athletics, ALCS game 1, 4 pm, Gowdy, Kubek
Sun 10/8, Tigers @ Athletics, ALCS g2, 4 pm, Gowdy, Kubek
(Note: NBC did not carry NLCS g2 which started at 1 pm and was only televised locally.)
Mon 10/9, Pirates @ Reds, NLCS game 3, 3 pm, Gowdy, Kubek
Tue 10/10, Athletics @ Tigers, ALCS game 3, 1:30 pm, Simpson, Koufax
Tue 10/10, Pirates @ Reds, NLCS game 4, (joined in progress – 3 pm first pitch), Gowdy, Kubek
Wed 10/11, Athletics @ Tigers, ALCS game 4, 1:30 pm, Simpson, Koufax
Wed 10/11, Pirates @ Reds, NLCS game 5, (joined in progress – 3 pm first pitch), Gowdy, Kubek
Thu 10/12, Athletics @ Tigers, ALCS game 5, 1:30 pm, Simpson, Koufax
After the successful 1971 experiment to move one World Series game to prime time, MLB began scheduling all weekday World Series games at night. But for some reason, MLB continued to keep all the weekday LCS games in the afternoon. It wasn’t until 1975 that MLB moved any LCS game to prime time (when it provided regional coverage of game 3 of each series on a Tuesday night).
Because of the incomplete national TV coverage, NBC allowed the participating markets to carry the LCS telecasts using local announcers. So fans in those markets would have access to each game in its entirety (and had a choice of which telecast to watch when NBC also aired the game).
In 1976, for the first time, MLB placed each LCS game into a unique national TV window and scheduled one game for prime time each day including Sunday. The practice allowing for separate LCS telecasts with local announcers continued through 1983.
Sadly, very little NBC footage survived from these early LCS years. Much of 1973 NLCS game 1 exists as well as portions of the 1972 ALCS game 2 telecast.
Here is the earliest LCS footage I have found – a few clips of Gowdy calls from the 1969 NLCS:
Curt GowdyJim SimpsonJoe GaragiolaLCSMaury WillsNBCSandy KoufaxTony Kubek
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Cavity Ringdown Sensors for Atmospheric and Combustion Diagnostics Open Access
The main objectives of the work presented in this dissertation are 1) using cavity enhanced techniques, including cavity ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS) and integrated cavity output spectroscopy (ICOS) to analyze gases extracted from various combustion systems with the goal of gaining insight into reaction mechanisms and 2) developing commercialized CRDS sensors for use as fire detectors and toxic gas sensors. CRDS and ICOS are highly sensitive types of optical absorption spectroscopy that have been applied to numerous environments for gas detection: extractive sampling from flames, advanced fire detection, and in-situ flame diagnostics. CRDS was used to obtain concentration measurements of NOx intermediates (NH3 and HCN) from gas samples extracted from various locations in a neat and a pyridine-doped methane/air flame with the goal of understanding the fate of nitrogen-containing fuels, such as pyridine, as they degrade to form environmental pollutants, including NOx. Recently, in-situ CRDS and ICOS was demonstrated by locating an axisymmetric methane/air flame in a free-space optical cavity at atmospheric pressure. Two near-infrared spectral regions were scanned with the laser at various positions in the flame to obtain line-of-sight absorption spectra containing CO2 and C2H2 vibrational-rotational lines. An Abel inversion was used to deconvolve the lateral line-of-sight absorption spectra to their respective radial distributions. The sensor projects discussed in this dissertation were completed through collaborative work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and with Analytical Technology, Incorporated (ATI). A portable CRDS sensor was developed in our laboratory and applied to controlled fires at NIST to test its feasibility as an advanced fire detector. Gas samples were extracted from effluents during smoldering paper fires and the sensor monitored concentrations of combustion products CO, CO2, HCN, and C2H2 near-simultaneously. The CRDS sensor detected increases in these gases prior to commercial smoke detectors alarming. ATI's interest is to commercialize CRDS sensors to target specific toxic gases. Through this collaboration, ringdown statistics were studied extensively to determine factors that influence detection limits with the goal of developing a robust, reliable, and compact gas sensor.
Fallows, Eric Alan
cavity ringdown spectroscopy
combustion diagnostics
cavity enhanced absorption
Miller, John Houston
Gillmor, Susan
Owrutsky, Jeffrey
Vertes, Akos
King, Michael
Ramaker, David
https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/jd472w49x
Fallows_gwu_0075A_10109.pdf 2018-01-16 Open Access
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Sculptor Guide
Home Featured Sculpture Suzi Quatro doco movie review: Rocker defies critics
Suzi Quatro doco movie review: Rocker defies critics
We thought she was bad to the bone, so it’s a surprise to learn that the real Susan Kay Quatro – for that is her real name – was a good Catholic girl from a musical family in Detroit; someone who believed in hard work, fidelity and clean living. She is so far from her image that you wonder where the bad girl thing came from. Melbourne filmmaker Liam Firmager asks the same question in this excellent Australian documentary, the first to try to explain her longevity and place in rock history.
Quatro was on stage from age seven. Her father Art had a jazz trio. Her three sisters and one brother were all musically trained. Suzi joined her sister Patti’s all-girl band, The Pleasure Seekers, at 14. They were having some success when Suzi left for the United Kingdom, to strike out on her own. Patti and her father found that hard to forgive. The sisters are refreshingly open here about the schism that followed.
Quatro was invited to the UK by musical impresario Mickie Most, but the key production work on her early albums was by expatriate Australian producer Mike Chapman. Some British rock journalists turned on her after the first big hits, claiming she was entirely their creation.
The film does a reasonable job of rebutting that: a number of men were important in her career, including the guitarist she married, Len Tuckey. None of them stood up there and sang the songs, playing the strings off a Fender bass that was almost as big as she was, lighting up audiences in high energy gigs with her very real talent. Sexism takes many forms and an absurd and common form at the time said that girls couldn’t do hard rock. Quatro proved them wrong and inspired a generation of femme rockers – many of whom (like Joan Jett) are in the film.
Firmager is clever about structure here, holding back her songs, then letting them rip in a way that reminds us of the impact she had at the time – especially in Australia, more than in other countries.
She had hits here when her songs were barely charting in the United States. It’s fitting then that a skilful and sensitive Australian production is the first to recognise her achievements.
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Topic Customer data
SubTopic Data integration
Imagery Majestic - Fotolia
Customer identity management still thorn in side of e-commerce
As mobile e-commerce gathers steam, companies are struggling to make it a frictionless reality for customers and pain-free for themselves.
Lauren Horwitz
ATLANTA -- As customers increasingly go mobile, companies are struggling to keep pace with accompanying data challenges in order to serve them effectively.
Today's consumer can now use a smartphone not only to research products but also potentially to buy them online. The advent of mobile apps, electronic payment services like Apple Pay and mobile wallet technologies have made it increasingly easy for consumers to use mobile devices to purchase products -- and for companies to gather data about them in the process. But increased mobile adoption has also placed additional pressures on companies to make that experience easy, secure and feasible given their own technology and data constraints.
Research suggests that mobile is an increasingly compelling e-commerce channel for consumers. According to 2013 data from comScore, for example, mobile purchases accounted for 55% of online purchases compared with desktops at 45%. Consumers now have new options for paying via mobile devices, browsing products on their phones and redeeming loyalty points or other offers when they shop with a mobile device. But even as the mobile consumer experience becomes more friction-free, companies can't always connect the dots on consumers' behavior with customer identity management technologies.
"We're looking across the board to create the same experience in all channels," said John Holland, senior manager of digital analytics at Atlanta-based Home Depot, during the Social Shake-Up conference held in that same city this week. "But everything is so siloed. There are big pockets of data in various places that are hard to unify," he said.
With those data silos, a customer might have received multiple messages about items left in an abandoned online shopping cart, possibly receiving an alert via email, Facebook and other channels. But today, the Home Depot is trying to consolidate customer identities in various channels to have one 360-degree view of the customer.
Unifying customer digital identity
Part of the challenge is to create a unifying identity for a consumer as he or she travels from one channel to another. So, for example, companies need to be able to identify a customer on social media and link that customer's Twitter handle, say, to account information in a customer relationship management (CRM) database online and to the customer information that resides in a mobile app.
"You need to be able to sync the [customer] identity from the app to the device to the Web," said Beth Gregg, co-founder of ShopperBridge, a company that develops mobile advertising technology. For example, music streaming service Spotify "is a killer app because it authenticates [user identity] on the back end."
Companies can begin to close the loop on this data by mapping customer journeys -- or the various paths through which consumers use multiple commerce channels, said Mark Josephson, the CEO of Bitly, a URL shortening service. Companies must understand the various ways in which customers travel through to ultimately link their digital identities and information from these different avenues.
You need to be able to sync the [customer] identity from the app to the device to the Web.
Beth Greggco-founder, ShopperBridge
"When you focus on the customer journey," said Josephson, "the channel goes away." That is, by linking customer data into a single profile, the medium through which a customer communicates becomes unimportant because companies can unify fragmented data through a common customer identity. At the same time, Josephson acknowledged, unified customer identities are still a distant reality. "Companies have thousands of customer journeys," he said. "It can be difficult to focus on one."
Monitor and measure customer data
Holland indicated that it's important to unify this data by religiously tracking customer behavior. "Nothing makes me want to pull my hair out more than things that aren't measurable," Holland said. "You can't manage what you don't measure."
Email messages, for example, should have tracking codes assigned to them, and a CRM database needs to connect to marketing automation software so that companies can link email communications with customer account information.
However, Josephson warned, excessive experimentation can be a company's downfall. Testing too many initiatives at once can be counterproductive. "Start with some basic tracking," Josephson said. "Then iterate."
Moreover, he added, don't inundate each channel with too many efforts. "Don't try to push too much through one channel. It overwhelms customers and staff, and it's ineffective messaging."
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UAM students compete in Southeastern Wildlife Conclave
by University of Arkansas-Monticello | Apr 2, 2013
UAM Wildlife Conclave team (kneeling) Curtis Stehle of Mablevale, (standing) Dr. Douglas Osborne, advisor, Robert Floyd of Stuttgart, Morgan Bradley of Pine Bluff, Pat Johnson of Searcy, Millie Karnes of Henderson, Tenn., Heather Sanders of Beebe, Sam Aldridge of Hot Springs, Emily Oliver of Crossett, James Whitaker of Osceola, Ali Slusher of Wentzville, Mo., Ozzie Young of El Dorado, & Skyler McLean of Rison.
Wildlife majors from the University of Arkansas at Monticello recently joined their counterparts from 21 other colleges and universities in a competition of technical and physical events at the 2013 Southeastern Student Wildlife Conclave hosted by North Carolina State University.
Held at Southern Pines, North Carolina, the event is one of four regional student conclaves hosted annually by The Wildlife Society, providing college students with hands-on training in wildlife management and conservation.
Teams of students from each university competed in 21 different events, ranging from fish identification and ecology to wetland plant identification, scat and track identification, animal anatomy, antler scoring, and something called “all frog radio.”
“They set up speakers in the woods at different distances from the student competitors and play different frog calls over the speakers,” said Dr. Douglas Osborne, assistant professor in the UAM School of Forest Resources and faculty advisor. “The students have to identify the type of frog, estimate the distance from the frog, and using a mathematical formula, estimate the frog population.”
In team competition, UAM placed third in forest measurements, seventh in wildlife population estimation, eleventh in obstacle course, and 15th in the Quiz Bowl competition.
Individually, Skyler McLean, a junior from Rison, placed first in unaltered photography, third in field photography, and third in free-form art with a sturgeon made from cow bone, cypress knee, clay, and muscadine vine.
Emily Oliver, a sophomore from Crossett, placed third in turkey calling and seventh in the rifle competition; Ozzie Young, a senior from El Dorado, was sixth in dendrology; James Whitaker, a graduate student from Osceola, placed seventh in lab practicum; and Robert Floyd, a junior from Stuttgart, was ninth in the shotgun competition.
The 2014 Southeastern Wildlife Conclave will be hosted by Clemson University. For more information, contact the School of Forest Resources at (870) 460-1052.
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SocietyNation
Market surveillance agency seizes fake items for sale on Facebook
By Nhu Phu
Fake and smuggled handbags found at a warehouse at 145 Hoang Dieu Street in Lao Cai City. Market surveillance forces and 100 mobile police officers on July 7 raided a 10,000-square-meter warehouse in Lao Cai City and seized a huge volume of fake, smuggled and low-quality goods meant to be sold on Facebook – PHOTO: DTO
Nhu Phuhttps://sgtimes.net
HCMC – Market surveillance forces and 100 police officers have raided a 10,000-square-meter warehouse in Lao Cai City and seized a huge volume of fake, smuggled and low-quality goods meant to be sold on Facebook.
After six months of surveillance and investigation, the Vietnam Directorate of Market Surveillance on July 7 teamed up with the Mobile Police High Command and the Ministry of Public Security’s Department of Cyber Security and High-Tech Crime Prevention to raid the warehouse at 145 Hoang Dieu Street.
The smuggled products stored at the warehouse comprised footwear, glasses, watches, consumer goods and cosmetics, apart from multiple counterfeit LV, Chanel, Adidas and Gucci items.
At the time of the raid, three online sales staffers were found live streaming the marketing of their goods and selling them under the Facebook names, Thao Tran and Giay Dong Gia, Dan Tri Online reported.
These sales staffers declared that at least 100-200 orders were placed each day in the past two years. The ordered goods would be packaged and sent to several provinces and cities in the country through major postal and delivery service suppliers such as Viettel Post.
Based on the preliminary results, the competent agencies said the owner of the warehouse was identified as Tran Thanh Phu, born in 1992, and residing in Lao Cai City. He was running the facility and online business along with his younger sister.
All the goods at the facility were confiscated and checked, stated a representative of the Vietnam Directorate of Market Surveillance, adding that sanctions would soon be imposed on violators in line with prevailing regulations.
low-quality goods
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Two Russian Covid-19 patients confirmed negative after re-testing positive
HCMC - The HCMC Pasteur Institute confirmed today, January 12 that a 31-year-old Russian woman and her one-year-old daughter, who re-tested positive on January...
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Book SalonCommunityFDL Main Blog
FDL Book Salon Welcomes Tom Geoghegan
17 Feb 2008 Rick Perlstein
FDL Book Salon Welcomes Tom Geoghegan Rick Perlstein 2008-02-17
< (Please welcome in the comments Tom Geoghegan, author of See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation and host Rick Perlstein — jh)
We all know conservatism killed something. It’s just hard for us to put our finger on exactly what. We smell it, we feel it, we taste it—how the elementary particles of civilization, the very molecules that join together our social life, have been breaking down. But, not being molecular physicists, we somehow can’t describe it, can’t name it. You have to be really, really smart, pay extraordinary attention to the tiniest details, to do that.
Tom Geoghegan? He’s our molecular physicist. In his daily work as a lawyer for people screwed by the new American order—employees fired for joining a union, losing their pensions, replaced by younger workers that companies can pay less; working mothers whose daily life is monopolized by harassment from collection agencies; retirees sued for debts they didn’t even know they owed—he’s gathered the evidence to make sense of all that does not make sense.
So read Tom Geoghegan. For those who haven’t had time for See You in Court—let alone his other masterpieces, Which Side Are You On? (1991), The Secret Lives of Citizens, and In America’s Court (2002)—I’m pleased to provide Cliff Notes. Goggle this. I’ll wait.
Back yet? Good. You’re hooked.
So what’s the argument?
In the world Ronald Reagan gave us, "More and more people experience the law as arbitrary." Our work lives, even if we weren’t necessarily in unions, were bounded by stable, transparent, easily enforceable contracts. Now we sign "employee handbooks" that look like labor contracts used to look—"but on page 100 it says: ‘Nothing herein is enforceable.’ Warning: This is not a contract. We take job because of promised "lifetime" benefits that get cut off with a week’s warning.
Here’s a classic Geoghegan aperçus, what he sees every day in the trenches among his working class clients: "With no early retirement and no funded pension based on thirty years and out, the only way ‘out’ for people now is to fight to get on Social Seurity disability…. Disability is the new kind of welfare, a kind of AFDC for older men. We got young single mothers off welfare, and we have older men on instead…. And they aren’t faking. People really are sick. It’s the stress of not having a pension or a retirement. To keep taking on stress is an unconscious way of trying to put yourself out of business. It’s a call for help. Or maybe it’s despair."
I guess that’s why Geoghegan’s books don’t become bestsellers: most of us would prefer to avert our eyes from the spectacle of old men working themselves near to death, intentionally, because it’s the only way they can imagine a secure and stable environment. Of course we avert our eyes: we let it happen. "Over the last thirty years, we have made big changes in the law. But to all these big changes, there has been no real consent."
What happened? Instead of contracts, we have tort—suing people for perceived wrongs. That got rid of an efficient, predictable, cheap method for settling disputes. "People scream over something for years that a union business agent used to handle in a single afternoon." Instead, you get slash-and-burn lawsuits, with endless periods of harassing "discovery," in which opposing lawyers endeavor into plaintiff and defendants’ hearts. Which rich corporations love. Because they can afford to hire more and more voracious lawyers, and keep the thing going on forever, until ordinary folks simply give up.
Or, if it’s a credit card company they’re dealing with, they’ll be forced to submit to "arbitration"—and the banks literally hire the arbitrators. "The more we ‘rationalize’ the law to get out of the way of the market, the more irrational and arbitrary it seems to become."
"People want more stability, but they keep getting less." That’s the wages of deregulation." Instead of the government setting the rules, we give the field over to boodlers, and call it a "free market." "And one paradox is that the more we deregulate, the more we have to go to court—much more than fifty years ago." Or, as he puts it more pithily: "When people are treated like suckers, no wonder they’re in court." And the rich love lawsuits. Or they certainly prefer them to democracy.
They hate citizenship, too. All Tom’s books are about citizenship. In this one, he points out that when companies fire union-minded folk, they strangle nascent citizens in their cradle—"the types who go to meetings. Our worthiest citizens learned a terrible lesson: don’t stick your neck out, don’t worry about your neighbor, don’t get involved. All these illegal firings had a paralyzing effect on the political life of this country, as it is lived out at the median income level and below."
Another cost of deregulation: "charitable institutions" that chew people up and spits them up like bloodthirsty beasts. "No trustees, the guardians… Indeed, these new voracious ‘charities’ are partly responsible for our litigation mess… Hospitals and doctors sue their patients far more than their patients sue them." One thing it isn’t: a free market. A "charity" hospital "picks any price it likes, and then effectively negotiates the real contract in court, by threat and intimidation."
All these intersecting vicious circles just degrade the moral level of our civilization. "Getting rid of law does not end litigation. It often leads to new types of litigation, especially the kind where people stalk each other for revenge."
"We can identify with the guarded or we can identify with the guards…. more and more of us are developing the moral character of guards….. Instead of celebrating equality under the law, we are developing more of a Hindu sense of caste."
"It will be truly hard to imagine all of us under a single rule of law…. It’s not the income inequality, but the sense of unfairness and futility that is so destabilizing."
"Perhaps as the rich get richer, the meek get meeker. Instead of farmers or skilled mechnanics or industrial workers in unions, more people work in ‘services.’ They ‘serve.’ Just as waiters depend on the rich for tips, more of us also earn our living by currying favor with people higher up."
Grim stuff, yes. But as for me, it’s not like I read every word Tom Geoghegan writes out of some misbegotten sense of duty. I read it because he’s hilarious.
"I became co-counsel in a suit against a drug company. The original lawyer started with one woman, a top salesperson. The drug company replaced her with an ex-college cheerleader, a blond bunny who could lure the doctors into the lobby and giggle and say, ‘Would you like to see my pills?’ But usually it’s a pattern. In fact, other people lost jobs to bunnies. The drug industry is turning into a version of Hooter’s."
Hilarious, and hopeful. This book, unlike all his others, features a concluding chapter with a program for what we can, as citizens, do about all this. Ask him, maybe, about that.
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Our Place: Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late? by Mark Cocker
by Shiny New Books | Posted on May 1, 2018 August 7, 2020
Review by Peter Reason
When I was a small boy, back in the 1950s, we were taken on Sunday School outings to the seaside. I remember seeing great flocks of lapwing from the windows of our coach; the black and white pattern made by their wings as they tumbled through the air is etched into that part of my mind that is still seven years old. My grandchildren will rarely see this, for today, I only see lapwing on trips to northern uplands. I remember too the thrill of hearing the first cuckoo calling on Wandsworth Common in south London where we lived. I am pretty sure no cuckoos call there today; we used to have cuckoos where I live in Bath, but no more. And in the last few years I have realised that for the there have been very few swifts shrieking overhead hunting insects over the city. I notice how the world around me is impoverished.
These are just my lay person’s experience, for I am not formally a naturalist. For the past few years I have been attending the annual meeting of New Networks for Nature, an association drawing together scientists and artists, naturalists and poets, concerned to celebrate and appreciate the more-than-human in Britain. These are people who know what they are talking about, having spent a lifetime as scientists, birders and naturalists, some generalists, some with detailed knowledge of one species or ecosystem. I have heard, time and again, immensely well-informed women and men speak with alarm about the accelerating decline of wildlife in Britain and our collective failure to respond to catastrophic loss. As they speak of it, and of our collective failure to acknowledge or address the crisis, it is as if a shadow passes across their faces. They live close up and personal to astonishing loss; as a result, many experience what Mark Cocker describes as a ‘persistent low-level heartache, a background melancholia’.
Cocker’s book starts with the State of Nature report (2013), a collaboration of twenty-five environmental organisations. It chronicles the health and prospects for British wildlife, a total of 3,148 species, and concludes 60% have declined in the last in the last half century, 31% have declined badly, and more than 600 species are threatened with extinction. And, it is important to note, the decline is not bottoming out: it continues and often accelerates. But there is a paradox here, writes Cocker, because a huge number of people in Britain are members of conservation organisations, far more than in most other European countries; there are apparently more ‘nature obsessed’ people than any other nation, yet we still face this catastrophic decline. So what is going on?
Cocker describes his book as a piece of ‘natural-historical research… an autobiographical narrative of place and a historical exploration of how and why the British countryside has come to look as it does’. This means that detailed and well-researched historical accounts of environmental organisations are grounded in evocative accounts of Cocker’s experience of places that, for better or worse, have been central to the story. This arrangement works well: the historical accounts are grounded in place, and the detailed historical accounts set off by evocative description of place.
There is so much that is of outstanding quality in this book: the way Cocker draws the reader into understanding the extent, range and significance of the issues; the exquisite pieces of classical ‘nature writing’, gems of intimate description; the quality of in-depth historical research; the intellectual sensemaking that draws on wider ecological theory; the sheer elegance of the writing sustained over 300 pages. Maybe most refreshing is Cocker’s willingness to ‘speak truth to power’, to name names, to point to stupidities in policy and in action. As Lord Debden—as John Gummer, Secretary of State of Environment under Margaret Thatcher—remarks in his review in Country Life, ‘However much Mr Cocker’s stance might annoy, it works.’
The first chapters of the book take the reader through the history of conservation organisations. It tells the story of the founding and development of the big three—the National Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the Wildlife Trusts in considerable historical detail; showing how their strengths and weaknesses arise from their origins.
From a conservation point of view, the great success story of the National Trust is Enterprise Neptune, the visionary project to purchase and preserve the coastline of the Britain. But generally, the National Trust’s prime concern has been preserving landscape and built heritage, and this is what the membership has come to expect from it. He has far more time for the RSPB, which he sees as more strongly based in its enthusiastic membership and describes as the de facto voice of nature. The Wildlife Trusts, have the great advantage of being organised primarily on a local, county, basis. Cocker notes a further twelve organisations with substantial support.
Later chapters tell the parallel story of the development of governmental organisations that were established in the 1940s and 1950s from the impetus that ‘Things are going to be different after the War’. The establishment of National Parks on the one hand and Nature Conservancy on the other were great steps forward, but their creation as separate organisations reinforced what many environmentalists call the Great Divide: ‘Do we cherish nature’s manifest beauties measured by some arbitrary aesthetic code? Or do we value and protect wildlife diversity for its own sake?’ This division is intellectually flawed and often gets in the way of effective action. For, as Cocker emphasises both here and later in the book when he discusses the impact of farming, British countryside is not ‘wild’ in the sense of parks in Africa: rather ‘this island has been shaped and made beautiful by a perpetual collaboration between its human inhabitants and the ground on which they dwelt’, as is exemplified in Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and in Shakespeare’s ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows’. The peak of biodiversity was probably not in time of the hunter gatherers but the middle of the eighteenth century after several millennia of continuous farming.
So what has gone wrong? In part it is the multiplicity of non-governmental organisations that so often fail to collaborate. ‘There is no green movement except in name; there are just overlapping, sometimes competing, organisations… Time and again these fissiparous tendencies have led to lack of clarity and absence of cohesion’. And the governmental organisations were over the years undermined, to eventually be dismembered by Nicholas Ridley, ‘the Minster against the Environment’, in the later 1980s. Cocker chronicles some of the great losses of ecologically complex places that resulted from these failings: the construction of a reservoir on the rare sugar limestone at Cow Green in Teesdale; the ploughing of Waddington Common; the draining of the Fens, the forestry on the Flow country Scotland.
While these failures make alarming stories of short sightedness and vested interest, in many ways the cause of ecological loss is less visible. Cocker is quite clear that the prime culprits are modern farming, and forestry that have stripped meadows of diversity and planted ryegrass, ploughed heathlands, drained bogs and fens, dug up hedges, cut down ancient woodlands and created the industrialised landscape we see today. Most farmers have not benefited from this: the relatively small, mixed farm of the middle years of the twentieth century have been taken over by vast landowning interests, driven by perverse subsidies and tax evasion. We should not lay the blame for subsidies solely on the EU and the Common Agricultural Policy, for they started way back in the 1930s. Size and specialisation in agriculture has has ‘stripped away environmental intricacy’ and ‘the most sustained loss of biodiversity since large swathes of the country were unlocked from a smothering carapace of ice at the beginning of the Holocene’.
Subsidies have moved on, however, since they crudely paid farmers to produce more. There has been an, albeit modest, move to support environmentally sensitive agriculture. Cocker describes his visit to a profitable farming estate and describes how these new subsidies are used creatively to make a significant difference. It not just a ‘set aside’ for nature, but an integration of the conventional parts of the farm with its wildlife component. ‘I was on a farm’ Cocker writes, ‘but it looked and felt like a nature reserve’; and he notes the professionalism and sense of obligation brought to both the conventional farm and its wildlife component. There are hundreds of farms across the country working to similar high standards, and clearly the integration of profitable agriculture with ecological richness is entirely possible.
All these stories of loss make for pretty grim reading, enough to evoke the kind of melancholia I refer to above. But interleaving these historical accounts and analyses are Cocker’s accounts of his personal experiences of places that have been significant in this history; closely observed, informed nature writing in its evocative best. We start in his own place, Blackwater—two fields, five acres—where he is working to recreate ecologically rich habitats. We join him, almost physically, as he heaves roots out of his dykes, an effort he makes not for money, but for love of emperor moths and hawker dragonflies, for dreams of making a habitat that might attract the fen raft spider. We accompany him down the north Norfolk coast, visiting key places in the development of environmentalism—Holme Dunes, Blakeney Spit, the salt marsh at Burnham Overy, the reserve at Cley. He takes us with him to see the gentians at Cow Green in Teesdale as an introduction to his discussion of the controversial construction a reservoir on the unique habitats there; and to the Flow country as a prelude to the discussion of the destructive impact of forestry. These accounts reinforce the importance of ecological complexity and invite us to join him in profound love for what we are losing.
But do most of us know what we are losing? The last chapter is sardonically titled, ‘Our Green and Pleasant Land’, a phrase which he sees as sustaining the pernicious myth that all is well in the countryside. He points out that most of us in Britain, as city dwellers, are understandably too busy running our lives to worry about much of this; so long as we can be comforted by the twittering of sparrows in our suburban hedge, we are probably not too worried. (Of course, the situation in Britain reflects the wider reality that we are living in the sixth great extinction of beings on the planet, this time caused by human activity).
To counter the myth that all is well, Cocker ends with ‘ten interlocking Truths that are fundamental to the story of British nature’ which draw together the arguments and illustrations of the complex story he has told in the book. Practically, we need to understand the depth of the unfolding loss, draw together the diverse interests groups and build a single environmental movement that speaks with one voice and integrates the ‘Great Divide’ between beauty and biodiversity. Along with this we need to simplify the confusing alphabet soup of designations—SSSIs, NNRs, LNRs, AONBs and so on—that fail to inform the public or effectively guide policy. We also need to change our habits of thought, ‘to acquire something that might be called ‘ecological thinking’, the ability to approximate, through our imaginations, the processes of a real ecosystem’; we need to see ourselves as ‘within nature’, that everything we do has ecological consequences.
Finally, as Cocker argues that ‘Change happens when individuals have the courage to do something independently’—big things like changing farming practices, little things like thinking about our everyday choices of food and transport from an ecological perspective.
Mark Cocker’s book is a huge achievement. It will without doubt ruffle some feathers. But he has done all of life on these islands, human and more-than-human, a great service in having the skill and courage to speak out so eloquently.
New Networks for Nature http://www.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/
State of Nature Reports https://www.wildlifetrusts.org
Peter Reason is a writer who links the tradition of travel and nature writing with the ecological predicament of our time. He writes a regular column in Resurgence & Ecologist, and has contributed to EarthLines, GreenSpirit, Zoomorphic, LossLit, The Island Review, and The Clearing. His book In Search of Grace was published in 2017 by Earth Books. His previous book Spindrift: A wilderness pilgrimage at sea is published by Jessica Kingsley. Find Peter at peterreason.net, and on Twitter @peterreason.
Mark Cocker, Our Place (Jonathan Cape, 2018) ISBN 978-0224102292, hardback, 352 pages.
BUY at Blackwell’s, now in pbk, via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
Ecology & Environment, Natural World Non FictionAuthor: Cocker M Reviewer: Reason P
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Well-kept Secrets: The Story of William Wordsworth by Andrew Wordsworth
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Maryam Monsef announcement
$2 million for gender equality projects
NEWS RELEASE From Status of Women Canada Projects will engage local women leaders in pan-Canadian network to support a thriving gender equality movement AUGUST 31, 2017, SAINT JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK – Status of Women Canada As Canada marks the 150th anniversary of Confederation, it is important to reflect on our legacy for the future. Despite the important milestones witnessed in these 150 years, women, girls, and gender non-conforming people still
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Cool Grey City of Football: Week 14
Jeremy Dorn | December 9, 2013 | Lifestyle Story City Life
Patrick Willis
It's hard to be a Grinch after your team takes down the top team in the NFL, but that is the reason for my existence. So, after I give a big victory chest bump to the rest of Niner Nation—gives online chest bump—let's get down to business: My issue this week, besides a significant lack of sideline whining by the evil Pete Carroll, is Colin Kaepernick.
There's no question the dude can out-run, jump and throw almost anyone in the NFL, but when he doesn't utilize his legs and only chucks the ball into triple coverage, all that potential he was hyped for never grows. Let’s take yesterday’s win for example. Kaepernick threw a touchdown pass to Vernon Davis, but also missed an easy throw to Michael Crabtree in the red zone that would have given the 49ers a 10-point cushion. Oh, that throw was intercepted by a Seahawk who looked like a Pee Wee football player most of the game. Kaepernick also went 15-29, meaning he completed just over 50 percent of his passes. Russell Wilson, despite playing only slightly better than Kaepernick, proved he was the better QB by constantly making better decisions on his way to a 60 percent completion rate. Statistically speaking, Kap is one of the worst quarterbacks in the league this season.
That the 49ers are 9-4 and in the driver's seat for a playoff spot is a testament to the overall talent they possess. We know Kaepernick has all the physical tools in the world, but a recent x-ray of his head showed a lump of mashed potatoes surrounded by more hot air than a Jim Harbaugh sideline freak-out. That’s bad. Trust me, it’s science.
Even with all that nonsense, the Niners have made it this far with a very mediocre quarterback, so they will probably snag a playoff spot after all. But beating the Seahawks might turn out to be the crowning achievement in a disappointing 2013 season. Because if you actually think Kaepernick is going to win playoff games in Carolina, New Orleans or Seattle, you may need your head x-rayed too.
At least nostalgic 49ers fans can root for old friend Alex Smith and his 10-3 Kansas City Chiefs. If you squint, you might think that red jersey is still sporting a 49ers logo.
Follow Jeremy Dorn on Twitter @jamblinman
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info@soafi.org
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Fascinated by Film: Valerie Betts
Spotlight Date:
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Throughout the years, as a Flip video camera was traded in for a Canon 80D,and basic iMovie editing transformed into an Adobe Premiere Certification, one thing remained consistent: pursuing a passion.
Communications senior Valerie Betts has discovered a love for videography and found great success within it. Though she has only been participating in film classes since her middle school years, her admiration for it as a hobby began much earlier in her life.
“I would record everything from my pet hamsters to family events,” Betts said. “Eventually, my parents realized I was dedicating so much of my time to filmmaking, they encouraged me to apply to Bak MSOA for Communications. At the time, I had no idea what that meant, but when I look back now I am extremely grateful for the opportunity my parents and the teachers at Bak gave me to discover my passion.”
In her four years at Dreyfoos, Betts has acquired many leadership positions that allow for growth as an artist, and a filmmaker. As president of The Film Association Club, Betts is in charge of hosting film workshops for underclassmen seeking to learn more about film, as well as organizing the school’s annual Streaming Canvas event, which is a student film festival, featuring the highlights of work produced throughout the school year. In addition, Betts is the Multimedia editor for The Muse the school’s student publication, consistently creating and overseeing content for the website, as well as the social media and Youtube channel.
“Another thing I’ve done with videography [in school] is filming Dreyfoos’ Spirit Week and Pep Rally these past two years,” Betts said. “Putting together videos of the class dances and events has been a great experience because it gives me the opportunity to create videos about the school that I love while also getting an incredible reaction from my peers who watch the videos of the class dances on repeat.”
As a result of the hard work within her department, Betts received the nomination for the Pathfinder High School Scholarship Awards in the Communications Department. The Pathfinder High School Scholarship is an award presented to students across the county in 18 different categories for their general excellence in areas of expertise. The awards provide $4000 for first-place winners, $3000 to the runner-ups, and $2500 to third place winners. Winners for the scholarships will be announced on May 14 in the Raymond F. Kravis Center for Performing Arts.
“It feels incredible to receive the nomination for Pathfinders and to be recognized by teachers that I have looked up to for years,” Betts said. “All the work I have put into the Communications department feels appreciated and it makes me want to work even harder.”
Both inside and outside of school, Betts has been motivated to continue her pursuit of her passion by those around her. “Some of my inspirations include Casey Neistat and Gary Vaynerchuk because of their determination and drive to be successful, Betts said. “Another is Ellen DeGeneres because she is unapologetically herself.”
With teachers guiding her through the learning process of becoming a creator at school, Betts has bonded with and esteemed the help of educators in her department.
“The teacher that has helped me the most by far, especially this year, has been Ms. Hernandez,” Betts said. “She gives me advice on how to negotiate with clients and ensure that my work is the best quality possible. She pushes me to do better because she sees potential in me. Outside of videography, she is always there to support me whether with college applications or just personal advice.”
Recognizing an opportunity, Betts took the initiative to create a brand out of her talent. She has started a videography company titled “Valography”, a combination of a nickname people use for her and the word videography itself.
“I started “Valography” because I wanted to establish myself as a creator.” I needed some way for clients to contact me and take me seriously as a high schooler,” Betts said. “Creating a website, social media, business cards, stickers, etc. with the same name and branding shows people that I am dedicated to my work and produce quality content. To me, Valography is the transition from just some kid making videos to a serious creator with a career in videography ahead of them.”
As a content creator, Betts produces videos for weddings, live events, and personal projects forcommissions. Using her devotion as her driving force, she films each event awaiting the audience’s reaction.“Filming weddings, although very difficult, are always a fulfilling experience because I love having the privilege of documenting a day that is so special, Betts said. “In the end, being able to watch the couple’s emotional reaction of seeing themselves on their big day fills my heart and makes all the hard work worth it.”
Though she is not decided on what college she will be attending yet, Betts knows one thing for sure: film will come with her. “Seeing a musician react to watching themselves play on video for the first time or watching a couples’face light up as they watch their wedding video is the best feeling in the world,” Betts said. “My plans for college are not definitive as of right now, however I know I will be going to a school with either a Film Production or Communications program with a focus in videography.
By Anamaria Navarrete
Check out more Student Spotlights, Alumni Spotlights or Donor Spotlights.
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This 2020-21 school year is the 30th anniversary of Dreyfoos School of the Arts. Our school has flourished for the last 30 years and we are committed to continue ensuring excellence for the next 30.
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In-plane strain modification of polarization behavior of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers
Author(s): Krassimir P. Panajotov; Bob Nagler; Guy Verschaffelt; Jan Albert; Jan Danckaert; Irina P. Veretennicoff; Hugo Thienpont; Jennifer L. Yong; Judy M. Rorison
We demonstrate experimentally how an external mechanical stress applied to a VCSEL wafer results in an in-plane anisotropic strain, which dramatically alters the polarization behavior of our VCSELs. In the presence of in-plane strain, the VCSEL still emits linearly polarized light but its direction strongly depends on the magnitude and the orientation of the strain (with respect to the crystal co-ordinate system). The latter behavior can be understood by taking into account the elasto-optic effect and the proper strain distribution. Furthermore, for a specific range in magnitude and orientation of the externally induced strain, current induced polarization switching between the two fundamental modes (with orthogonal linear polarization) is present in a reproducible way. The current at which switching occurs strongly depends on the magnitude of the external stress and can be tuned in the whole region of single-mode operation. These effects can be explained by accounting for the anisotropy of the valence band. The latter is induced by the in-plane uniaxial strain, leading to a modification of density of states and effective masses for different directions in the plane of the QW, and henceforth to a gain anisotropy and a different gain curve for each of the two polarization modes. Furthermore, the frequency splitting between the two cavity eigenmodes (also a result of the stress via the elasto-optic effect) has to be taken into account. We will discuss how the gain anisotropy changes with current, lattice temperature and carrier density, and how all these determine the polarization behaviour of VCSELs.
Date Published: 4 May 2001
Proc. SPIE 4286, Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers V, (4 May 2001); doi: 10.1117/12.424814
Krassimir P. Panajotov, Vrjie Univ. Brussel (Belgium) and Institute of Solid State Physics (Bulgaria) (Belgium)
Bob Nagler, Vrije Univ. Brussel (Belgium)
Guy Verschaffelt, Vrije Univ. Brussel (Belgium)
Jan Albert, Vrije Univ. Brussel (Belgium)
Jan Danckaert, Vrije Univ. Brussel (Belgium)
Irina P. Veretennicoff, Vrije Univ. Brussel (Belgium)
Hugo Thienpont, Vrije Univ. Brussel (Belgium)
Jennifer L. Yong, Univ. of Bristol (United Kingdom)
Judy M. Rorison, Univ. of Bristol (United Kingdom)
Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Lasers V
Kent D. Choquette; Chun Lei, Editor(s)
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Reviews// Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4
Posted 5 Feb 2016 16:39 by Nikki Manson
Companies: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment UK CyberConnect2
Games: Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4
Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 is the latest and last title in the Ultimate Ninja Storm series and the first to be released on new generation platforms. Developer CyberConnect2 takes full advantage of this, with enhanced visuals and some of the most epic battles ever seen in the Storm series. With a plethora of features in this new game, it's hard to choose a place to start from. So I took a deep breath and went head first into Story Mode...
From playing the other games in the Storm series I had a vague idea of what would be happening in Story Mode. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was wrong. This mode plays through the main story starting from where the last Storm game left off. We are now into the last arc of the Shippuden series, which means all the best battles are to be included in this game.
Spoiler warning for people who are watching the anime and have not read the manga - this mode tells the entire story including the end, which has not yet been released through the anime. Some elements of the story have been changed slightly to make the battles more epic but the main core of the story still remains.
There are various chapters to work through in this mode - you can speed your way through the main episodes or take your time and also explore the few side episodes that can be unlocked. These are a lot like the flashbacks in the Shippuden anime series: little side stories with a battle or two. Most of them felt like just playing through filler episodes... thankfully you can skip all cutscenes if you wish (some of the cutscenes can be very lengthy) and just fight your way through.
The battle system in place is pretty much a copy and paste job from the previous [i]Storm[i] games. There is no tutorial stage in this game so I would suggest heading over to the Free Battle Mode to freshen up on those skills. Or if you're slightly impatient like me then just get on with it and you'll pick it all back up eventually.
The battles in this mode are intense - they include a lot more of the interactive cinematic battles that we had a glimpse of in previous iterations: timed actions that require you to press a certain button as quick as possible or at the right time, which then earns you stars which count towards your final battle score. I would sometimes miss these prompts as I was so taken aback with the sheer awesomeness of the graphics and the epic fighting that was unfolding that I would completely miss them.
Never before in the Storm games has there been this level of epicness in the real-time battles. I was often left gobsmacked at how astounding the fight sequences were. These battles are fantastic! Grand spectacles worthy of conveying the astounding grandness of the culmination of the Shippuden series.
The interesting thing about Story Mode is that you cannot be truly defeated in battle. If you are KO'd, you awaken in the presence of the Rikudo Sennin who revives you and lets you choose to continue your battle with full health and either enhanced strength or defence, with the bonus of your enemies' health not being recovered... basically a glorified God Mode.
It's interesting that they chose to include this invincible mode into the story. Personally it doesn't bother me but I know a few people who might believe that this takes the challenge aspect out of this mode and so takes all the fun with it. Please don't let it bother you though - beautiful graphics and spot on sound editing make these Story Mode battles some of the best ever seen in the Storm series.
-1- 2 next >>
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2017 NFL Draft: Scouting Florida CB Quincy Wilson
Like his University of Florida teammate Teez Tabor, cornerback Quincy Wilson has been on an interesting road to the NFL Draft.
After spending most of his final collegiate season being considered as a first round corner, some questionable testing and the rise of other cornerbacks in this draft class has dropped Wilson down some draft boards.
Still, everyone would be shocked if Wilson fell as far as the end of round two. And after watching the tape, it was obvious why.
At 6’1″ 211 pounds, Quincy Wilson has the prototypical size of an outside corner in the NFL. With his size comes physicality and confidence. Wilson is a flat-out gambler, who will jump routes in order to make the splashy play whenever possible.
While this gambler element could end up with some big plays going over his head, I love the cockiness that Wilson plays the game with.
Though he is a gambler, Wilson’s risks seem calculated at most times. He has very good field awareness, and understands where routes are headed right from the snap. His ability to read and diagnose the play is impressive.
Consistently showing the ability to jump on in-breaking routes, Wilson’s coverage skills in man are more than adequate. With his size and coverage skills, Wilson could potentially play in a press-man scheme at the next level.
Wilson has very long arms which he uses to his advantage in coverage. Multiple times I saw him avoid interfering with the wide-out while still being able to poke his long arms into the catch radius and break up the pass.
As a tackler, Wilson is both willing and able to bring down receivers on the outside. He likes to be active against the run, and doesn’t avoid contact whatsoever. Of course, when you are as big as Wilson is, contact is a little less worrisome.
Wilson did a good job of shedding blocks on the edge in college, and with his technique and physicality, should be able to do more of the same once in the NFL. He comes downhill to make tackles nicely, which could even have some wondering if safety is in his future somewhere down the line.
For now, though, he is an outside cornerback in my opinion.
While Quincy Wilson is willing to tackle, his technique is somewhat lacking. Wilson must learn to better drive his hips through contact, and wrap up on offensive players.
In coverage, his “gambling” style can sometimes catch up with him. Considering that he is not a very fluid athlete, his lack of lateral quickness and vertical speed can hurt him as well. While he is normally able to diagnose the route and stay on top of it, this is not always the case. When Wilson is unable to do so, he can get beat down the field rather quickly.
Wilson is a below average athlete for the cornerback position in the NFL, which will certainly scare off some teams. He will need to be perfect in his technique, and with his hands/jabs in order to make up for this problem.
Sometimes, Wilson will actually get too hands-y or physical down the field with receivers, which could result in more penalties at the next level.
I have seen Quincy Wilson ranked as high as the number one cornerback in this class, but for me, he falls somewhere in the 8-11 range.
Earning a second round grade on my draft board, I think Quincy Wilson can carve out a nice career for himself in the NFL. Hopefully, he will get put into the right system, and will be able to overcome the athletic deficiencies he seems to have.
Related Topics2017 NFL DraftCornerbackFlorida GatorsQuincy WilsonScouting Report
While I am a Staff Writer for Inside The Star, and an avid Dallas Cowboys fan, I have a passion for almost all sports; especially for the New York Mets and Knicks.
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· Published January 5, 2020
Report: 49ers LB Kwon Alexander has ‘good chance’ to play in Divisional Round
Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports
San Francisco 49ers linebacker Kwon Alexander reportedly has a chance to match J.J. Watt with an early comeback from a torn pectoral.
According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, the 49ers now believe Alexander has a “good chance” to make his return sooner than anyone anticipated, next weekend in the Divisional Round.
“Alexander has made progress in his recovery from a pectoral tear that he suffered on Halloween to the point that the Niners now believe he has a good chance of returning for Saturday’s NFC divisional round playoff game, league sources told ESPN.”
This news comes just days after 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan publicly said he thought Alexander might be able to return in the NFC Championship Game, should the 49ers advance next weekend.
Should Alexander be healthy enough to play well, then he’d be a welcome addition back into the starting lineup. The 49ers have gotten stellar play out of Dre Greenlaw, but Alexander was playing at an incredibly high level before suffering his regular-season-ending injury.
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Report: ‘At least two teams’ wary of Tua Tagovailoa due to self promotion
Jasen Vinlove-USA TODAY Sports
It’s lying season in the NFL, so take this information with the requisite grain of salt: Reportedly, at least two teams are concerned about all the attention Tua Tagovailoa has been seeking since his hip surgery, and about the leaks that have transpired about his health.
Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald wrote about this dynamic late Wednesday night. He shared that, “at least two NFL teams, including the Miami Dolphins,” have noticed that Tagovailoa is trying too hard to sell himself. And he wrote that “it’s not necessarily a good thing.”
Salguero ran through all the high-profile interviews Tagovailoa has engaged in since the Super Bowl, noting he’s the only quarterback among the top four who has engaged in so many like ventures. He also pointed to leaks about Tagovailoa’s NFL Combine interviews with the Dolphins and Washington, and to the leaks about his health progress.
He wrote: “Then there were the curiously timed leaks of Tagovailoa’s progress as he rehabilitated from his hip surgery. I counted two of these before moving on — and, not shockingly, both reported positive news but lacked tangible details or evidence.”
As all of this relates to Miami in particular, Salguero noted that Tagovailoa’s behavior goes against what head coach Brian Flores is looking to instill as he builds a new culture with the Dolphins.
“Flores likes his team as insulated from the outside as possible. He doesn’t like leaks. He doesn’t like medical information getting out. And he doesn’t want his quarterback distracted by national television interviews. Or local television interviews. Or freakin’ Face Time calls spent with a friend, for that matter, if it steals time from preparation. Flores wants his players focused on what is inside and private to the team.”
We recently delved into why Tagovailoa may end up taking a draft-day tumble due to his medical issues and because NFL teams have to rely on third-party evaluations for medicals during the COVID-19 pandemic. If other teams really do have the same concerns expressed in Salguero’s column, the idea he could fall is even more salient.
However, given the level of talent this young gunslinger has in his left arm, all of this may end up being a gigantic smokescreen in the end.
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Klopp expects another Man City 'thunderstorm'
While things have changed since April, Jurgen Klopp told Liverpool to expect a huge test against Manchester City.
Dejan Kalinic
03 January, 2019 11:58 IST
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp - Getty Images
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp expects to face another "thunderstorm" when his team visits Manchester City in the Premier League on Thursday.
Klopp's side heads to the Etihad Stadium with a six-point lead atop the table and sits seven clear of third-placed City.
It will be Liverpool's first trip to City since April, when it had to survive early before battling to a 2-1 win to seal a 5-1 aggregate success in the Champions League quarterfinals.
Related: Guardiola lauds 'incredible' Klopp
The German expects a similar response from Pep Guardiola's side this time around, although he said there was no way to compare the two games.
"A thunderstorm," Klopp told UK newspapers.
"We were a bit lucky, we know that, because they scored a second goal that the referee disallowed.
"That can be the situation again, but on the other side we are a different team. I don't want it to sound like a threat because it's not. It is just the situation.
Related: De Bruyne faces late fitness test for Liverpool clash, says Guardiola
"I don't prepare any game in the world by saying, 'Last time there we smashed them.' That is just not right.
"We changed, they changed, the situation changed. The weather will be different, the pitch will be different, there is nothing to compare."
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Paris & Ile de France
National Geographic Paris City Map
National Geographic London City Map
Rick Steves Prague & The Czech Republic
by National Geographic
National Geographic’s Paris City Map combines a city map and travel guide, making it the ultimate travelling companion.
National Geographic Paris City Map quantity
SKU: 9781566957953 Category: Paris & Ile de France
National Geographic's Paris City Destination Map is a complete travel guide to this top tourist destination, with valuable information not found in traditional maps. The front side presents an easy-to-read map of the city with its road network and features 3D depictions of many top attractions, like Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower and The Louvre. Hundreds of points of interest are displayed with the aid of a multi-language legend, including metro and train stations, hotels, parks, hospitals, police stations, places of worship, theatres and pedestrian areas.
The reverse side has a regional map and descriptions of the city, many popular attractions and the transit system. A user-friendly index of streets, metro stations, hotels and points of interest along with a metro map and diagrams of Charles de Gaulle and Orly Airports will help you arrive at your destination quickly. With all of this specialized content, this map is the perfect companion to National Geographic's Paris Traveler Guide.
Every City Destination Map is printed on durable synthetic paper, making them waterproof, tear-resistant and tough – capable of withstanding the rigours of any kind of travel.
The map is two-sided and unfolds to 630mm x 450mm.
Scale 1:11,500 / 1 cm = 115 m
Street Maps & Directories
Folded sheet map
The Little Paris Kitchen: Classic French recipes with a fresh and fun approach
The Little Paris Kitchen includes all the big name dishes that you would expect in a French cookbook, such as Boeuf Bourguignon and Coq au vin, but it’s not simply another collection of classic French recipes.
Insight Guides Paris City Guide
Insight City Guide Paris is a full-colour, comprehensive travel guide to one of the world’s favourite cities.
Rick Steves Pocket Paris
Rick Steves Pockets are full-colour, 154mm x 115mm guides that include walks, sights, handy reference charts, photos, and a full-sized fold-out city map.
AA CityPack Guide to Paris
A handy travel guide to Paris that includes a weather-resistant, pull-out, map.
Fodor’s Paris 2016
This stunning full-color Fodor’s guide captures the best of the City of Light, from the masterful cuisine to the sweeping romance of the Eiffel Tower.
Marco Polo Paris Spiral Guide
Paris Marco Polo Spiral Guide is a compact travel guide for people who have little time to prepare for a trip, don’t want to miss anything, like to be inspired by great ideas for exciting days out and love all things ultra-practical and easy to use.
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science, Christianity and … Islam?
July 12, 2010 ScienceChris Swann
various medieval Islamic figures and scholars
I’ve been trying to get behind the popular account of the rise of modern science — in which science is said either to have emerged as it shook off the dogmatic slumber of faith or to be fundamentally indebted to the recovery of explicitly Christian beliefs (especially belief in the world as God’s creation).
Colin Gunton’s Triune Creator has been massively helpful. Especially in underscoring the story’s many complexities. But it’s been The Copernican Revolution, Thomas Kuhn’s landmark intellectual history of astronomy, that I’ve found most compelling.
Kuhn’s discussion of the role of Islam has particularly piqued my curiosity. In Chapter 4, Kuhn charts the changing way the Aristotelian framework was inherited over the course of thirteen centuries. And he makes the following points about Islam:
The Islamic invasion of Mediterranean in the seventh century contributed to the decline (or hibernation) of Western learning that marked the ‘Dark Ages’. It did so by shifting Europe’s intellectual centre of gravity northward. And, crucially, it resulted in many important documents and manuscripts being ‘lost’ to the West.
However, the very same geopolitical shifts resulted in the new Islam empire appropriating the intellectual heritage of the West. This allowed for the preservation and proliferation — through translation and commentary — of ancient texts and learning, as well as providing invaluable stimulus to Arabic scholars in making significant scientific advances all of their own.
The transmission of the deposit of ancient learning from medieval Islamic to European scholars began (in the late Middle Ages) affected its form. Generations of debate were telescoped in their reception into one, more or less coherent body of timeless wisdom. Modern science developed within this context — and partly in reaction to its newly visible tensions and fissures.
How’s that for complicating the story!
← conversation and the rhythms of friendship
between delight and wisdom →
irishanglican ~ Fr. Robert says:
But whatever “genre” were always thrown back on the ancient Text Itself! And will the Bible or Holy Scripture ‘with its ancient origins and multiple scribes maintain its relevancy in the postmodern world?’ Will the creation story continue to be “revelation” from God? Or just “sources” of scholastic information of men and man?
Matthew Moffitt says:
DB Hart and Philip Jenkins have some interesting ideas about this, partiucarly about Eastern Christians dominating “academia” in the Islamic world until the 13th century.
Fascinating, Matt. I’ll have to check out what they’ve turned up!
Nathan Lovell says:
Hey Chris,
For another source of interesting discussion on this, check out Torrance. I’m currently listening to some lectures he gave back in 1980 – I think they are the ones I downloaded here: http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2007/02/t-f-torrance-audio-lectures-1.html.
In the first couple of lectures he makes the argument that science (and epistemology generally) went in the completely wrong direction because of the influence of the Aristotelian framework. His claim is that its not until the late 19th century (Plank then Einstein) that we accidentally recover enough of the Judeo-Christian framework to make science true “science.” Before that the whole world was doing a kind of counterfeit. He doesn’t explicitly apply this to historical science in the Islamic world. But it is easy to see an extrapolation relevant to what you are talking about when you listen to his argument about Aristotle and the influence of classical cosmology. Interestingly (and counter-intuitively for me, I admit), he seems to be asserting that it was science that rescued theology by finally ridding Aristotle from Western epistemology.
I’m not sure I’m describing a very complicated argument particularly well, and I’m not even sure I’ve understood him correctly at points. But it is worth a listen if you want to think through the progress of science and the influence of Greek thought.
Thanks, Nathan. That’s terrific!
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Studio Fogline Logo
One Of A Kind Lighting
Studio Fogline Mark
Inspiration / The Bixby Bridge and Collection
The Bixby Bridge and Collection
The Bixby Collection was inspired by the iconic Bixby Bridge along the California Coastline. This bridge, for good reason, is considered to be the most photographed bridge in the country, and the gateway to Big Sur.
We will begin with a little history about Charles Bixby and the Iconic Bridge. In 1852, the California coastline south of Monterey, caught the eye of Charles Bixby, a native New Yorker who would travel back and forth between east and west coast. In 1889 he purchased 160 acres of land south of the Bixby Creek, where he lumbered the land and created a railroad track for shipping the lumber.
The Bridge was conceived In 1931, by CH Purcell, a highway engineer and FW Pahorst, who developed designs for the Bixby Bridge. Building began August 24, 1931 and was completed Oct 15, 1932. The bridge is made from metal and concrete. Concrete was used primarily because it was inexpensive, but also it looked more like the cliffs of the area. The cost was $200,000.
When we began to design for this collection, we started with the concept of the bridge using natural elements. Though concrete was considered, we felt the raw metal material captured the feeling and idea of the Bixby Bridge and the surrounding area. The first design was the Bixby Ottoman, with tray table. We love this beautiful and functional piece of art/furniture that marriages metal, wood and leather. Stay tuned for new inspired designs: The Bixby Sidetable, and the Bixby Console.
The Bixby Bridge is a continual source of inspiration for us, and if you’ve ever seen the bridge, we are sure you’ll agree.
The Inspiration Continues
Shady Business
Marfa, Texas and Donald Judd
“Sofa” is a four letter word
info@studiofogline.com 831-250-7760
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Be the first to know about the Studio Fogline scoop.
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Home > Finance
Sears Files Lawsuit Against Former CEO Claiming Creditor Fraud
| April 21, 2019, 2:17
The lawsuit lays outs its charge in its introduction. Lampert was the winning bidder for Sears Holdings assets despite creditors's attempts to block his purchase of the company's remains in favor of liquidation. The lawsuit also names former Se...
Bonus eggs coming to Marquette City-Wide Easter Egg Hunt
| April 20, 2019, 22:10
There will be different coloured balls for different age groups and when a child returns to the café with their ball they can swap it for a chocolate Easter egg . To be eligible for the hunt you must be 18 or older. On Sunday, head to Castle Park...
Barnes & Noble is offering free download of the Mueller report
The company added that customers will also be able to view the report on the NOOK reading app. So far, the public has been privy only to Attorney General William Barr's four-page summary of Mueller's report. Not since the days that President Bill C...
ConocoPhillips to sell United Kingdom oil and gas business for $2.68bn
In 2017, it bought assets in the North Sea from Royal Dutch Shell PLC for $3.8 billion. The deal, expected to complete in late 2019, requires regulatory approval. "This significant acquisition reflects our continuing belief that the U.K. North Se...
United Kingdom regulator wants big 4 audit separation
Marcus Scott, chief operating officer of finance sector industry body TheCityUK, said: "Radical solutions imposing operational splits on the big audit firms may make for good headlines, but they are poorly focused, with no evidence that they will lea...
Unilever first-quarter sales top expectations
Strong ice cream performance was a boost for the United Kingdom and Italy, but retail conditions were "extremely challenging" in Germany. Turnover, meanwhile, fell 1.6% to €12.4bn, driven by the disposal of spreads completed last July. Unilever's ...
£14bn case against illegal Mastercard card fees to proceed
Should Mastercard lose the case, any consumer in the United Kingdom during the period could be reimbursed. A claim against Mastercard , the largest ever filed in United Kingdom legal history, has been given the green light to proceed and could m...
Australia's unemployment rate rises to 5 per cent
While unemployment has been hovering around 5 per cent, it's failed to tighten the labour market sufficiently to drive the faster wage growth policy makers are seeking to return inflation to its 2-3 per cent target. The under-utilisation rate increas...
5G global users to touch 2.8 bn by 2025: Huawei
The 5G signal is more than faster than Internet speed. "5G changes the mode of services from buying to subscription". "America says it wants open competition but then says: 'Huawei, you can't work in America - you're banned.' My belief is America...
This Calgary Easter egg hunt is for ADULTS ONLY
The park is separated into age groups. Signs will also be posted for each area. (For children 12 & Under). The Apple Valley Optimist Club #15017 has helped fill and distribute thousands of eggs annually for more than 50 years for the free Easter eg...
Pinterest opens at $23.75, 25% above IPO pricing
Zoom, one of the few profitable tech unicorns, may be an even better bet for investors - its shares starting trading on Thursday at $65 a share , 80.5% above IPO price. Pinterest allows users to search for topics like home improvement projects and t...
SpiceJet to give hiring preference to employees of Jet Airways
Hundreds of Jet Airways employees protested in Delhi and Mumbai on Thursday to push its management for answers about their future after the airline shut down all flight operations on Wednesday having failed to secure new funding from its lenders.
Here's What Is Open Over The Easter Long Weekend
People can take part in fun activities and free giveaways at Chinguacousy Park's Easter at Mini-Moo Farm on Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. With a long weekend in store, Montrealers are going to want to be enjoying the city this Easter weekend.
Uber unveils safety measures after college student's murder
If an Uber beacon is installed, after they've confirmed a ride request, the rider's app prompts them to choose a color. The areas will be well-lit and have law enforcement officers stationed nearby to ensure safe travel. Support for campus rides prog...
Hudson Media CEO James Cohen Purchases the National Enquirer
In addition, the sale includes "a multi-year service contract that will generate substantial fees for American Media to provide publishing, financial and distribution services for the tabloid brands", the company said in a press release on Thursday.
Shop & stop apologizes for offerings that are Restricted Throughout Attack
The United Food & Commercial Workers union said in an emailed statement. Every three years, the contract is renewed, and the most recent contract was set to expire at midnight on February 23. "We've received an overwhelming amount of support, but the...
Pendragon launches review as it posts loss amid 'challenging' conditions
Aftersales revenue was up 5.5%. However, pre-tax profits were around £10 million below Pendragon's expectations. The Nottingham-based company, which trades under the Evans Halshaw , Stratstone and Car Store brands, also said the cost of ex...
Two hopping Easter egg hunts get underway Friday
If you don't want to wait until Monday, another Easter event will draw crowds in nearby Naramata. On Easter Monday, LocoLanding will be hosting its ninth annual easter egg hunt, featuring a staggering 10,000 eggs hidden in the area and on board the...
Amazon plans to shut online store in China
Within the next 90 days, Amazon.cn will cool off support for all its domestic dealers. And for cross-border e-commerce in China, Amazon has only a 5.9% marketshare as of Q2 in 2018, while Tmall International accounted for 29.1%, NetEase Kaola 22....
Mercedes-AMG GLC 63 Promises More Tech and Even Better Handling
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Bilawal ‘congratulates’ nation after Asad Umar’s removal
Sabharwal said Umar, who was handpicked by Khan when he came to power in August 2018, had become a target for the opposition because of some tough decisions he was taking in terms of ratcheting up of the tax collection which continues to remain abysm...
China's economic growth unexpectedly held up in first quarter
Bucking sustained headwinds, China's economy posted a surprising 6.4 percent growth in its GDP during the first quarter. "President Trump and other US officials spent much of the a year ago saying that China's slowdown was making Beijing desperat...
Australia's Fortescue trims annual iron ore shipments guidance after cyclone
BHP Group PLC (LON: BHP ) shares fell on Wednesday as the miner cut its forecast for 2019 iron ore output to reflect the impact of a tropical cyclone that hit western Australia last month, mirroring rival Rio Tinto PLC (LON:RIO) which did the ...
Top Versus Top: Canopy Growth Corporation (NYSE:CGC), Infosys Limited (NYSE:INFY)
Furthermore, over the 90.0 days, the stock was able to yield 18.04%. The Healthcare stock ( Canopy Growth Corporation ) created a change of 1.73% from opening and finally closed its business at 41.68 by making a change of 2.33% ( Gain , ↑) on 16-...
North Korea reportedly tests new tactical guided weapon
Kim said recently that his personal relationship with Trump was still good, but that he had no interest in a third summit if it were a repeat of the February meeting in Hanoi. Kim Chang-son, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's head of protocol, is ...
President-elect Joe Biden unveils trillion-dollar coronavirus recovery and mass vaccination plan
B lands on Best Places to Work in 2021 list
French 'No' To Canada's Couche-Tard Regarding Carrefour Is 'Final': Minister
USA close: Stocks end session lower as Biden unveils stimulus package
Visa and Plaid announce mutual termination of merger agreement
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Dow, S&P futures perk up with eye on Biden's stimulus plan
China 2020 exports up despite virus; surplus surges to $535 billion
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Yes Dan Patrick… You Voted For School Funding Cuts
August 29, 2014 L. Wayne Ashley Leave a comment
Dan Patrick, State Senator and Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, is trying to pull one over on the people of Texas. But thankfully, Democratic candidate Leticia Van de Putte isn’t letting him get away with the lies any longer. Here’s an EPIC press release (with sourcing) from the Van de Putte campaign…
San Antonio, Texas – In 2011, Sen. Dan Patrick voted for the budget that slashed over $5 billion from Texas’ education system.
Then, in 2013, Patrick voted against the budget that partially restored funding to Texas’ neighborhood schools.
Today, State District Judge John Dietz ruled that Texas’ system of funding neighborhood schools is unconstitutional.
Dan Patrick responded to the decision, saying, “As chair of the Senate Education Committee, I led the charge to restore most of the education funding cuts from last session.” [Dan Patrick for Lt. Governor, 8/28/14]
However, Republicans and Democrats alike can see through Patrick’s hypocrisy when it comes to funding education for Texas children.
In 2013, Senate Finance Chair Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, said, “Patrick was directly responsible for these same education programs not being funded…Such revisionism cannot go unchallenged.” [Texas Tribune,06/21/13]
And if that’s not enough for you, just listen to Dan Patrick speak for himself. He’s proud of the 2011 education cuts and even considers them an important credential for his TeaPublican bonafides. Leticia’s not making this up!!
Oh, and by the way… Dan Patrick wanted to cut teacher salaries too. He says he wants school districts to be able to cut administrative jobs only, but admits that if they can’t reduce teacher salaries, then educators themselves will lose their jobs. And boy was he right on both counts. Thanks to the funding cuts Dan Patrick championed, over 25,000 Texans lost their jobs, more than 11,000 of which were teachers. Contrary to the Senator’s claims, Texas schools could not simply “get by” after the severe cuts of the 2011 legislative session. They lots so many jobs that over 600 districts are suing the state saying their funding levels are unconstitutional.
But thankfully this November, Texans have a chance to cut Dan Patrick’s job. One thing is for sure… we can’t afford to have him as Lieutenant Governor.
Dan Patrick education cutsLeticia Van De PutteTexas 2014 electionsTexas Education funding cutstexas schools vs dan patricktxltgovtxsen
Equality, Houston, Houston Politics
HERO Opponents Beg Texas Supreme Court For Repetitive Action
Apparently the opponents of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance cannot take “yes” for an answer. Even after Mayor Annise Parker already agreed that HERO will not be enforced until all matters are settled in court, the anti-equality group is not satisfied in the least. Here’s the Houston Chronicle’s Mike Morris with more…
Opponents of Houston’s equal rights ordinance have asked the Texas Supreme Court to force the city secretary to certify the signatures on a petition they submitted seeking to trigger a repeal referendum on the law.
Houston’s 14th Court of Appeals denied a similar request on Aug. 15, ruling that the emergency writ of mandamus would have the same result as a favorable ruling in the pending lawsuit opponents filed against the city earlier this month. The plaintiffs, the judges wrote, could appeal after a ruling comes down at the trial court level.
Trial in that case is set for Jan. 19.
The new filing with the Supreme Court, turned in late Tuesday, is similar to the group of conservative pastors and activists’ previous requests. It seeks to have the court force the city to suspend enforcement of the ordinance, to put the ordinance to another vote of the City Council and, if the council does not repeal it, to put the issue before voters.
The case already scheduled for January is seeking a writ of mandamus— a court-ordered directive for the signatures to be certified, and therefore require a referendum. But the filing to the Texas Supreme Court asks for virtually the same thing, though both sides know the January trial is already pending.
Some may wonder… if the Mayor and the City are already giving HERO haters what they want by suspending enforcement of the ordinance, why is it necessary to keep crying for a court-ordered suspension? It’s proving to be not only a waste of time for our court system, but as Off the Kuff points out, is surely costing a mountain in legal fees.
The simple answer? Because politics.
For one thing, the recently ousted Jared Woodfill needs something to do, or else he risks losing all relevance with the political elite. Parker’s decision to preemptively suspend the law is a special thorn in the opponent’s side because it denies them any possible political win. If the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance is not in effect, they don’t get to shout from the rooftops that their court order was able to suspend it. So instead they’re trying for the next best thing… a milk-toast version of victory via paper. In order to give their cause any hope, they are desperate for something to cling to.
It’s true that anything could happen with the Texas Supreme Court. They may choose to take the case and push HERO to a referendum. But even in that event, supporters are the law are ready for the fight… whether it takes place today, in January or years down the line.
See Texpatriate for more analysis on this, including a better explanation of the actual legalese.
Annise ParkerequalityHEROHouston Equal Rights OrdinanceHouston Non- Discrimination OrdinancehouvoteJared Woodfilllgbt rights texasMike Morris Houston ChronicleTexas
Houston Politics, Politics, Texas Politics
2014 Texas Leftist Candidate Questionnaire
It’s happening!!
As time gets closer to the November election, it is important that voters have a variety of resources with which to research candidates and make an informed decision when they go to the polls. One of the best ways to obtain that information is to ask the candidates directly. Not only do these questions help voters in their decision-making, but they also help inform politicians of what their legislative priorities should be. Sometimes they even influence policy directly.
For all of these reasons, I am happy to announce the 2014 Texas Leftist Candidate Questionnaire. Questions have already been sent out to several candidates, with a goal of covering even more in the next few days. As responses are received, they will be published on Texas Leftist.
Here is an example of the TLCQ 2014…
1. What is your name, as it will appear on the ballot?
2. Are you a current or former elected official? If so what office(s)?
3. As a political candidate, you clearly care about what happens in certain levels of government. In your own words, why is government important?
4. If elected, name your top 3 priorities you hope to accomplish for 2015 legislative session. Describe how you plan to accomplish them.
5. A 2013 survey found that 54 percent of Texas voters support Medicaid Expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Expansion is also supported by the Texas Hospital Association. Without Medicaid Expansion or an alternate solution, Texas Hospitals are having to provide over $5 billion dollars annually in uncompensated care to patients who lack insurance. This leaves Texas taxpayers paying not only for the uncompensated care of our residents, but also paying for expanded healthcare benefits in other states. If elected, would you support Medicaid Expansion or an alternate solution for the state of Texas, so we can bring our tax dollars back where they belong? If not, please explain why. If so, please explain how you would work to pass such a measure.
6. In the coming years, the state of Texas is projected to have a population boom of historic proportions. But with more people and more opportunities comes an ever-increasing strain on Texas roads and infrastructure. Describe your thoughts on what needs to be done to improve Texas infrastructure now so we can plan for a bright future for the state.
7. What makes you the best candidate for this office?
8. When not on the campaign trail, how do you like to spend your free time?
The above format is going to be used for legislative races, but formats will vary for the other statewide offices. There are a lot more races to cover than in last year’s municipal elections, but I’ve decided to give it a try.
Texas 2014 elctionsTexas Leftist Candidate QuestionnaireTexWatch 2014TLCQ 2014txgovtxlegetxltgovtxsen
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← New Vasquez and James coming May 2014—Because of Jade, from Dreamspinner Press
HAHAT 2014 will start May 17th—stop by on your hop! →
by lsylvestre | March 25, 2014 · 6:01 pm
Mending the Holes in History with Historical Fiction—article by Christopher Hawtorne Moss
Something a little different this week on sylvre.com—I’m delighted to welcome guest blogger Christopher Hawthorne Moss, author of Beloved Pilgrim, a YA transgender historical novel published by Harmony Ink Press. (As usual on sylvre.com, the cover image is the buy link, just click.)
Elias knows in his heart that despite his female body he is a man. When his twin brother dies suddenly he has the opportunity to live his truth by donning his armor and setting out for the adventure of a lifetime in the world-changing Crusade of 1101.
I remember when feminists coined the expression “herstory” to counteract the overt and subtle mascullinism of the word “History”. Of course, we all know that the “his” in “history” is not actually the masculine pronoun, but it was an acknowledgement that what we were taught in school was, in fact, the history of men. Women were a side issue. The impetus for developing “herstory” was to bring to light the equally central role of women in our past. The impact of this effort did more than just add female names and faces to the story of humanity. It helped change the way we looked at how we both learned of and interpreted our collective past. We stopped reciting the dates of battles and started looking at the records for clues to the actual lives of people of the past.
People who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer deserve a history/herstory too. There is even less record of our lives. Much of what we have in the records consists mostly of religious diatribes and criminal records, for that was the interface between the dominant culture and us: their attempts to control our behavior through threats and punishment. Sadly, there is little alternative if you want to tell our story. The evidence of our lives and loves is at best spotty.
That’s where I believe historical fiction can mend our lack of a history. Intelligent people realize that times change, but every type of person alive today has existed in every era. If the estimate that ten percent of people are GLBTQ now, then we were in those numbers at every point in the history of humankind. The capable storyteller can see the forest for the trees, that is, see just where and how people like us found a way to be no matter when. It is our job, in essence, to tell the stories of our forebears in sexual identity. That the people we write about may or may not have actually lived is irrelevant. They are our history… our story. As Monique Wittig wrote:
“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
Deprived of concrete records it is our job, and in the case of GLBTQ historical fiction sites such as Our Story – GLBTQ Historical Fiction, which I edit at http://www.glbtbookshelf.com, our purpose, to invent.
My novel, Where My Love Lies Dreaming, used the title of a Stephen Foster song to introduce the ourstrical, to coin a term, tale of two men from different cultures who make a life together in spite of intolerance and also in spite of the American Civil War.
More ambitious, perhaps, is my current novel, Beloved Pilgrim, which attempts a plausible transgender character at the beginning of the 12th century CE. The main character is a woman who has known all her life that she is a man in heart and mind and takes the tragic event of her twin brother’s death to strike out as a knight, using his identity. The biological origins of transgenderism make it absolutely certain that people like this character did exist, everywhere and throughout time, and it is my job as a historical novelist to show how this could happen.
But where does plausibility come in? In the instance of Beloved Pilgrim clearly the surgical and pharmacological advances that would make sex reassignment possible are many centuries hence. Would a person even have the framework to realize he or she is not in the right body? The simple fact that ancient cultures, the Romans, Plains Indians, and Hindu, had transgender gods and traditions points to this being more than possible. On a practical level, could a female-bodied person really pass as a man? Yes. Our histories are full of examples of this, including surgeon James Barry, numerous Civil War soldiers, and others throughout time. The person would simply need to be clever and lucky. And as Elias tells Albrecht, people tend to see what they expect to see. I have a female body, but I was called “he” and “sir” just this morning.
It is the responsible novelist’s task to reason this out and represent it plausibly. It would be a mistake in Beloved Pilgrim for anyone to use the term “transgender”, an expression that will not exist for hundreds of years. But my own experience and my knowledge of historical examples tell me that the individual can and at least sometimes would have recognized when a body did not match a soul.
For more examples of how GLBTQ people may have lived and loved in times less tolerant and educated as now visit Our Story – GLBTQ Historical Fiction will provide a collecting place for that invention with book reviews and more. We want to hear about your work and your ideas. We want to know how you are writing another piece of “Our Story”.
Christopher Hawthorne Moss wrote his first short story when he was seven and has spent some of the happiest hours of his life fully involved with his colorful, passionate and often humorous characters. Moss spent some time away from fiction, writing content for websites before his first book came out under the name Nan Hawthorne in 1991. He has since become a novelist and is a prolific and popular blogger, the historical fiction editor for the GLBT Bookshelf, where you can find his short stories and thoughtful and expert book reviews. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his husband of over thirty years and four doted upon cats.
He owns Shield-wall Productions. He welcomes comment from readers sent to christopherhmoss(at)gmail(dot)com and can be found on Facebook and Twitter.
Filed under guest authors, Writers on writing
Tagged as Beloved Pilgrim, Christopher Hawthorne Moss, Dreamspinner, historical, transgender, Where My Love Lies Dreaming
One Response to Mending the Holes in History with Historical Fiction—article by Christopher Hawtorne Moss
annebarwell
Loved the post, Kit. The line that really hit home for me was: Intelligent people realize that times change, but every type of person alive today has existed in every era. I think that’s very important, and I suspect one of the reasons why I read/write not just historical but fantasy/SF. Times change but people are still people as they react to their surroundings and try to make the best of who they are within their society.
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Remilk secures $11m new funding led by fresh.fund
December 17, 2020 December 14, 2020 by Talent4Boards Team
– ISRAEL, Tel Aviv – Remilk, an Israel-based start-up producing identical dairy products through microbial fermentation, today announced the completion of an $11.3 million funding round led by fresh.fund with participation from OurCrowd, CPT Capital, ProVeg, and food manufacturers Hochland, Tnuva, and Tempo, as well as Co-founder & Former Managing Director of Berkshire Partners, Bradley Bloom; prominent investor, Sake Bosch; serial technology entrepreneur and investor, Amiad Solomon; food-tech investor Beni Nofech and others.
With this new capital, the company plans to rapidly expand its production and distribution capabilities, and meet global demand, for its revolutionary animal-free dairy products.
“Today’s non-dairy alternatives address environmental and health concerns, but universally fail to create authentic dairy-based products, like cheese. We’re bridging this gap by making dairy products with dairy proteins, without needing a single cow,” said Co-Founder & CEO, Aviv Wolff. “Our proprietary technology delivers the most authentic animal-free dairy product in the market today and is identical to natural dairy. With our new partnerships for production and distribution, we’ll soon be ready to reinvent this multibillion-dollar industry.”
Remilk’s first-of-its-kind, lab-made dairy product is indistinguishable from natural dairy and is essential for developing the authentic taste and texture of dairy derivatives like cheese, yogurt, and cream, without cows. The company uses a unique, patented process to replicate the properties of dairy proteins. This process recreates these proteins in the most effective way, and even optimizes functionalities compared to their animal-derived equivalent.
Remilk’s commercial manufacturing and distribution partners use its functional animal-free dairy as a starting material for large-scale dairy production.
“Relying on animals to make our food is no longer sustainable. This model of food production has all but reached its limits in terms of scale, reach and efficiency and the implications are devastating for our planet. Remilk is revolutionizing the way we produce food around the world, and importantly, is creating a lasting and environmentally-friendly food system that takes no more than what our planet can give,” added Wolff.
Remilk products are cholesterol-free and contain no lactose, antibiotics, or growth hormones. Importantly, Remilk is far more sustainable and eco-friendlier than traditional dairy systems, requiring 1% of the land, 4% of the feedstock, and 10% of the water to produce than comparable dairy products.
fresh.fund Managing Partner said: “Protein alternatives to meat and dairy are gaining global traction with both consumers and producers taking notice of the environmental, health-related and efficiency benefits they present. We see significant market potential for Remilk’s unique technologies across categories.”
About Remilk
Remilk is a global leader in the development of animal-free dairy. The company produces identical dairy proteins through microbial fermentation, and has developed a unique and patented approach to lab-based dairy manufacturing which dramatically increases production efficiency, and, for the first time in history, allows to cost-efficiently replace dairy cows in industrial-scale dairy protein production, without compromising on taste, functionality, or nutritional values.
For more information: https://www.remilk.com/
Tempo Automation announces Matthew Granade to its Board along with raising $45m Series C…
Tempo adds Edward Yip and Holly Maloney to Board along with raising $60m Series B funding…
Brodmann17 raises $11m in Series A funding round led by OurCrowd
Categories Company News Tags Food & Beverages, fresh.fund, Israel, Venture Capital
Impossible Foods adds Christiana Figueres to its Board of Directors
RIMES appoints Anna Ewing to its Board as Non-Executive Director
Tractor Supply welcomes Joy Brown to its Board of Directors
Masonite International welcomes John Chuang to its Board of Directors
Monster Beverage appoints Hilton Schlosberg as Co-CEO alongside Rodney Sacks
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Beck Elementary
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John M. Tidwell Middle School » Our School » General Information » Namesake
Mr. John M. Tidwell
John Morgan Tidwell was a Roanoke resident and long-time Northwest ISD supporter, serving on the NISD Board of Trustees for nine years. He was known for his passion for Northwest ISD and was active in the Roanoke community.
Born September 30, 1911 in southern Denton County, John Tidwell attended school at Elizabethtown (nicknamed Bugtown), which was located near the current Texas Motor Speedway. As a young teenager, he moved with his family to Roanoke where they continued farming. After graduating from Roanoke High School, he raised wheat and cotton on the 400-acre family farm.
“Toots” – as he was known to family and friends – married the former Rosetta Polley in 1934 in Grapevine. They moved to “the farm across the fence,” where he continued to farm and also cut hair for neighbors for free – a practice he had begun at home years earlier.
In 1936 he decided to make a career of his barbering and went to Fort Worth for six months to attend barber school and returned to cut hair in Justin. Drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II, he continued cutting hair during the 21 months of service at a stateside base in San Diego, California. Following the war, he opened Tidwell’s Barbershop in downtown Roanoke. He continued cutting hair at this location until 1964. During this time, he would often work 16 hour days and travel around the countryside on Sundays cutting hair for shut-ins.
His barber shop was the site of many, many lively conversations among the locals and those passing through Roanoke. In 1960, a very young Edward “Ted” Kennedy came through town on the campaign trail for his brother, and the county officials in his traveling party directed him to Tidwell’s barber shop. Consequently, “Toots” told the story for years of a very charismatic future U.S. senator who “hopped up on the hood of a car and delivered a powerful speech for his brother – right there in front of the barber shop in downtown Roanoke!”
In 1964, “Toots” was appointed U.S. Postmaster in Roanoke and held that position until his retirement in 1983. During these years, he carefully and tediously watched over his post office as he faithfully performed his duties.
Following his retirement from the post office, “Toots” decided to run for mayor of Roanoke in 1985. He served two terms at this position and was instrumental in preparing Roanoke for its current growth.
John M. Tidwell served in many public roles during his lifetime, including the following:
Trustee of the former Roanoke School Board
City Council Member of Roanoke
Board of Directors, Northwest Bank in Roanoke
John believed it a great privilege to be a citizen of the United States of America and took his civic duties very seriously. Somewhat unique for his generation, he welcomed the economic growth and changes in and around the Roanoke area. He believed that only great things could come with more businesses bringing more jobs and opportunities.
John Tidwell was also a great believer in education and encouraged all who would listen to obtain as much education as possible. His passion for education was passed on through his family. His family members graduating from Northwest ISD include three children, four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. Three great-grandchildren and two great-great grandchildren are currently enrolled in Northwest ISD schools. Two granddaughters teach for NISD, and another granddaughter teaches in Van Alstyne ISD.
John M. Tidwell was a diligent worker throughout his 88 years of life. He worked hard for his family, community, and country. He believed that honesty and hard work were of the utmost importance. In 1990 he addressed a class of high school seniors, and one of the students asked him what he would title a book if he were to write one. His response came quickly: “Just be Honest.” There are no other words that could better describe John M. “Toots” Tidwell.
John M. Tidwell Middle School
3937 Haslet-Roanoke Road, Roanoke, Texas 76262 | Phone 817-698-5900 | Fax 817-698-5870
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NISD Campus Crime Stoppers
NISD affirms its commitment to ensuring people with disabilities have an equal opportunity to access online information and functionality. If you believe any online information or functionality is currently inaccessible, contact Melissa Shawn, communications and web specialist at 817-215-0135 or mshawn@nisdtx.org.
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Times Pakistan
Daily News & Headlines
5 day nationwide polio vaccination campaign kicked off on Monday
According to the Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme, as many as 39 million children under the age of 5 years will be administered anti-polio vaccine drops across the country during the campaign that will continue until December 04.
Dr Safdar Rana, the head of the National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) of the Pakistan Polio Eradication Programme, said a total of 285,000 polio teams will take part in the campaign.
In all, 9 million children will be vaccinated against the crippling disease in Sindh, 20 million in Punjab, 2.5 million in Balochistan, 6.5 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 240,000 in Gilgit Baltistan, 360,000 in Islamabad, and 660,000 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Dr Safdar appealed to religious scholars of all schools of thought to play their role in making the drive a success. A total of 81 cases of poliovirus have been reported this year thus far, he said. Of them, 23 were reported from Balochistan, 22 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 22 from Sindh, and 14 from Punjab.
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©2021 Times Pakistan. All rights reserved.
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Krzana storms into big data league.
By Geof Todd on September 8, 2016 • ( Leave a comment )
London’s Krzana storms into big data league with energy traders and hedge fund clients
Krzana provides data-hungry companies like hedge funds with relevant signals drawn from over 10,000 sources.
Written By Ian Allison
Originally published here.
September 2, 2016 08:37 BST
London-based real-time search specialists Krzana are disrupting the marketplace for financial data by signing up energy focused hedge funds and equities watchers. Krzana provides data-hungry companies, such as hedge funds looking to trade quickly on relevant signals (drawn from over 10,000 sources), with a simple to use dashboard that filters news, social media, RSS feeds, blogs and pictures.
The platform, which has been built to deal with half a billion tweets a day, has an elegant and agile system of filters (eg. powerful enough to process real-time data streams) so users can decided what is relevant to them and arrive back a point where less is literally more.
The company’s recent success is also being driven by its pricing, which is also designed to be disruptive: licences can start from as little as £200 per user per month.
A powerful illustration of how Krzana can help traders find alpha concerns a recent fire that broke out at Motiva Enterprises’ oil refinery in Louisiana. Before Bloomberg, Reuters or Dow Jones had the news, an energy trading hedge fund client of Krzana had accessed the first tweets about the fire coming from a local Baton Rouge-based newspaper.
In the intervening, crucial ten minutes or so the hedge fund made a tidy profit. The margin for refined fuel products, known as the diesel crack spread, widened 7%. Meanwhile, expectations of reduced demand from Louisiana for oil in need of refining sent the cost of the local Gulf Coast Medium Sour benchmark tumbling 25 to 35 cents a barrel.
Sandip Sarda, CEO of Krzana, told IBTimes UK: “Krzana picked up the tweet before any of the majors. Our engine consists of multiple data feeds that flow into our custom filters, which we call ontologies, and they are then processed before being displayed. So for example, our energy module Krzana Energy Terminal, is very energy-sector specific. It can include earthquakes, seismic data, weather events, pipelines, transmissions, anything to do with energy-related structures, the businesses and companies involved in the sector.
“Typically news breaks at a local point, and the ability of the user to get that information before it comes on to the main news feeds is absolutely critical. That’s what gives them the edge.”
Geoffrey Todd, chief marketing officer at Krzana, explained that the two core modules it delivers today are equities and energy. Todd said: “We train the engine specifically around those sectors. Our focus today is on financial markets, but we are also looking at others; there are lots of siren calls in other risk environments and also security – and of course from a media perspective, it’s all news.”
Krzana’s technology team is leading the shift out of an era dominated by detailed market data and broad, sweeping fundamentals data into an era of highly-granular, ordered data, generated by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
One way to deal with the noise that social media generates, and the risk of users reacting to false positives, is allowing Krzana to provide “story aggregation”. “If one tweet comes in and then another 100 come in, it will show up as a cluster, as opposed to each just being an errant tweet in its own right,” said Sarda.
Krzana says it takes five minutes to configure its filters and then the cloud-based platform is up and running. It’s an inexpensive “no brainer”. Todd said that as more users trial it, he has noticed a tendency to switch off the Twitter feeds in order to compare and contrast data outputs.
Todd said: “Don’t get me wrong – we love Twitter’s raw data power. But you can easily set up two near identical search channels with the same sets of qualifiers, words and domains you are looking for, with Twitter active in one and not in the other.
“Then there is also the ability to exclude terms. If somebody is trading gold, say as the Olympics were in progress, we could exclude the word ‘Rio’. We still want ‘gold’ but as we see the results emerging, we can exclude irrelevant ancillary terms in a very agile way.
“So we can refine that term from the Twitter stream, and perhaps keep running it separately. We find Twitter is also a good place to pick up pictures for example. It’s the agility of the search tool that counts.”
In addition to filtering data on an external basis, there is also a growing opportunity to partner with the big systems’ integrators who are well placed to engage on large scale BPR projects. “There’s the social feed, there’s other external data. But then how do I also monitor the chatter in my email system? Well you can only do that by being inside your firewall,” said Todd.
“Then I might want to go back and look into my archive. Perhaps I want to compare and contrast something; what’s being said about the history of a product sign-off, what do people know and what’s out in the market place? Organising and ordering multiple big data and real-time sources is a growing challenge – there is a significant integration opportunity for embedding this kind of engine.”
Categories: Comedy, Geof Todd, Krzana, News, Opinion, technology, TODD Creative Services, TODD Creative Solutions
Tagged as: energy traders, financial data, Geof Todd, hedge fund, Krzana, London, RSS feeds, Sandip Sarda, social media, technology, TODD Creative Services, TODD Creative Solutions, toddcs, tweet, Twitter
Why OTT streaming really is the new broadcasting
Krzana is the search engine of the future.
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There’s one track and distance for Vass
It’s not a surprise that trainer Colin Little has aimed Vassilator at a Flemington 1400 metres race, the Chester Manifold Stakes, as he is the epitome of a track and distance specialist.
Vassilator has the unique distinction of his four career wins all being over 1400 metres at Flemington, which is again the track and distance of his next assignment on Saturday.
At his last start on December 19, Vassilator again underlined his preference for the Flemington 1400 metres with a win at his 28th start.
Vassilator gave the Caulfield trainer an early indication of his preference for the Flemington 1400 metres when he won at $101 at his third start on Anzac Day as a two-year-old.
He followed that up with another win at his next start at the track and distance but he had to wait another 18 starts for his next win.
There was only a five-run gap between that and his last start victory. He’s had four other runs at the track and distance with his best efforts two fourths.
Little said Vassilator was “a big scopey horse” who was suited by the wide expanses of Flemington.
“It’s one of those things. He’s suited by the long run in and often there’s more pace on in races. He loves the space he can find there,” Little said.
“El Segundo loved Moonee Valley over 2040 metres but he couldn’t win over 2000 metres at Flemington.”
Little pointed out that as a three-year-old, Vassilator finished second in the Caulfield Guineas to The Autumn Sun which was a great effort but in some-ways it didn’t help his career.
“He got beaten about five lengths and his ratings went from 70 to 100. He then worked his way back to around 90 and he’s back to 96,” he said.
Little said the key to Vassilator as he has gotten older is that he was a little easier on him in training.
“He likes that. He’s a very sound horse and he should have good longevity,” he said.
Damien Oliver who rode Vassilator to win at his last start will stay on the five-year-old gelding.
Little is also pleased that Vassilator will carry 58.5 kg which is 1.5 kg less than he has at his last start win.
Gotta Kiss looking for Magic redemption
Peters sets star for All-Star Mile
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Home » Lifestyle » Mass. Girl Who Lost Her Dad and Godfather Weeks Apart Asks for Mail to Celebrate Her 4th Birthday
Mass. Girl Who Lost Her Dad and Godfather Weeks Apart Asks for Mail to Celebrate Her 4th Birthday
09/01/2021 Comments Off on Mass. Girl Who Lost Her Dad and Godfather Weeks Apart Asks for Mail to Celebrate Her 4th Birthday
A little girl from Massachusetts wants just one thing when she turns 4 in a few weeks — and her mom is hoping that people around their community can help, especially after her and her daughter's incredibly difficult year.
Lilly Sedlak suffered back-to-back losses in 2020 after her dad and her godfather both died within weeks of each other, ABC/Fox affiliate WGGB/WSHM reported.
With her 4th birthday coming up on Jan. 27 — the first birthday without her father — Lilly's mom Dorothy Sedlak said her daughter just wants cards because she is obsessed with receiving mail.
"She's always loved the mail," Dorothy explained to the outlet. "Her grandmother would take her to get the mail, and she just loves to do it. She's a little helper. She just loves to do everything for everyone."
As she turns to their Holyoke community for help, Dorothy is hoping the birthday card surprise will help brighten her daughter's day — something that seemed nearly impossible just months ago.
Back in June, Dorothy and Lilly returned home one day to a sight that no mother, wife or child ever wants to see.
"We came up the hill here into the neighborhood, and there were just tons of cop cars everywhere," Dorothy recalled to WGGB/WSHM. "I didn't even make it into the entrance before I leaped out of the car."
The pair soon learned that Lilly's father, Brandon, had suffered unexpected medical complications and died. He was 28 years old.
Just four weeks to that day, Lilly and her mom suffered another unimaginable loss when they learned that Brandon's best friend, who was also Lilly's godfather, died by suicide, according to the outlet.
"Our favorite boys, gone too soon," Dorothy wrote in a recent Facebook post.
In order to make her daughter's 4th birthday special, Dorothy turned to Facebook and asked her followers to send Lilly birthday cards.
"Lillian LOVES mail. She loves the mailman, she loves getting the mail from the mailbox & she LOVES when there is mail for HER," she wrote in the post. "I am reaching out to ask if anyone would be willing to mail her a birthday card, drawing or letter. She does not need gifts but she really loves to open cards and letters and look at the pretty pictures."
Dorothy also added that Lilly's "favorite color is violet (not to be confused with purple), she loves unicorns and all things magical as well as flowers & animals of all kinds especially if they are cute!"
Within 24 hours, Dorothy confirmed that Lilly received "a stack of Amazon packages" and her mail has only continued to grow since.
On Friday, Dorothy shared a photo of herself holding a stack of envelopes, revealing that "Today’s PO Box haul was 75 cards!!!!" and later posted a shot of Lilly opening 85 cards with a huge smile on her face.
"Lilly has been so excited! We have been blown away by the response and never expected this," Dorothy tells PEOPLE. "We are just so thankful to feel so much love. It’s been overwhelming in the best way."
Those interested in sending Lilly a birthday card can send it to Lillian Sedlak, PO Box 4981, Holyoke MA, 01041.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
deathHappy BirthdayHuman Int
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Return of Darth Maul Teased for Season 2 of 'Star Wars: The Mandalorian'
Chloe Rowland
Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll probably be aware Disney fanatics finally got to sign up for the studio's long-awaited streaming service, Disney Plus last month. The service boasts an impressive slate of Disney content - from gripping superhero spectacles from the Marvel Universe to classic Disney princesses, there's no shortage of content to feast your eyes on, straight from the house of the mouse.
But the one show that everyone has been talking about? The Mandalorian.
There's no doubt the series has been a breakthrough smash hit. Now, season 2 has been teased along with a release date, but there's one element, in particular, that's got fans divided...
The Mandalorian has completely won over viewers.
The original sci-fi spin-off series, set in the Star Wars universe, has been drawing in significant praise from fans, who have been eagerly digging into the episodes available on Disney's new streaming service, Disney +.
The series is set 5 years after the events of Return of the Jedi.
Directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, best known for playing Claire Dearing in Jurassic World, The Mandalorian offers Star Wars fans a tantalizing new live-action spin-off of the beloved franchise.
And it's the first of its kind on the platform.
The Mandolorian well and truly keeps the franchise alive - offering what many are describing as a "gritter" take on the universe.
The show chronicles the story of a galactic bounty hunter, Dyn Jarren.
Boasting an impressive cast including the likes of Narcos' Pedro Pascal in the leading role, viewers watch as Dyn attempts to survive in the aftermath of the Empire’s collapse.
The show takes a much darker approach than other Star Wars spinoffs.
Far from the authority of the New Republic, we get to see the adventures of the lone gunfighter as he reaches the outer edges of the universe. Meaning we're bound to see some new, never-seen-before locales.
Though we still got see the odd Storm Trooper...
Because what would a Star Wars spin-off be without them?
And we get introduced to baby Yoda...
He's arguably been the star of the show, with the internet completely gushing over him since the show's debut. Let's be honest, he's adorable.
Of course, the show is packed full of the usual strange creatures...
We're introduced to IG-11, a droid that's the same model as IG-88 - one of the bounty hunters seen on Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back. We've also caught a glimpse of an Ugnaught - the porcine species previously seen working as janitors on Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back - named Kuill, who appears to be an ally of the Mandalorian.
The premiere of the series landed on the platform's launch date - November 12.
With the remaining episodes set for a staggered weekly release - keeping anticipation sky high.
After its premiere, critics were typing away to award the show glowing reviews.
Writing for Forbes, Dani Di Placido said: "Only two episodes in, and The Mandalorian already feels more authentic, more Star Wars, than any of Disney's film sequels.
"The Mandalorian is slightly darker than what we're used to, yet undeniably goofy, packed with peculiar creatures, gunfights that end in disintegrations, and environments that feel like Ralph McQuarrie concept art brought to life."
The show has earnt an impressive score of 9.1 on imdb.
It well and truly had fans hooked and has completely taken over pop-culture since it hit screens. Scroll on to get all the details on the upcoming second season.
And it seems fans can't get enough, with some branding the show a "masterpiece."
Okay, The Mandalorian is a masterpiece. Can’t wait to see where the season goes!! Great job on this one @disneyplus @themandalorian
— Emily🕉 (@Emily🕉)1574004475.0
Many have been saying that the show trumps all the other Star Wars spin-offs, creating a quintessential Star Wars tone that mirrors that of the classics. Sadly, however, that hasn't been the case for the new Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, which people are saying completely copied another popular film... Read more at the end.
The show's profound success recently reached new heights...
The Mandalorian has officially dethroned Stranger Things as the top streaming TV show in the U.S.
It was an impressive achievement.
Stranger Things enjoyed twenty-one consecutive weeks at the top of Parrot Analytics' weekly list of the most in-demand original streaming shows in the U.S. but The Mandalorian appears to have already surpassed it.
The show's success is measured by "demand expressions."
The unit is designed to reflect the desire, engagement, and viewership of a series weighted by importance, Business Insider reports.
The Mandalorian had a staggering number of these impressions between November 17th to November 23rd.
The show raked in an impressive 100 million demand expressions during the week period, while Stranger Things had 81 million.
Now that season 1 has wrapped up...
After an epic finale, fans have been desperate to find out what the future of the show will look like.
So, what can we expect from season 2?
Throughout season 1, we got a glimpse into Mandalorian’s childhood, which was set sometime around the Clone Wars - paving the way for a more detailed look into Mando’s past.
The Mandalorian managed to steer clear of the usual tropes like cameos, but it seems there may be a change in direction for the next offering...
According to Deadline: “Insiders have hinted that several established characters from the Skywalker saga’s feature films mythology will make appearances" in season 2.
But there's one new detail that has surfaced, and fans are massively divided over it...
... The possible return of Darth Maul.
It all started when 2 of the actors who played him weighed in on the show.
Ray Park posted of himself in the Darth Maul makeup on Instagram, along with the caption: "Meet me on Dathomir" SITH LIFE! #maul #soloastarwarsstory #starwars #thephantommenace #darthmaul #sith #sithrule #sithlife #raypark #action #darkside." But that wasn't all...
Sam Witwer then took to Twitter to directly reference The Mandalorian.
I'm a little angry. No. Furious. Just watched Mandalorian. That's MINE. #Mine #MineMine
— Sam Witwer (@Sam Witwer)1577490053.0
His tweet was, of course, a reference to the Darksaber. The fact that both actors weighed in on the show lead many to speculate the return of the infamous villain for the show's second offering.
But how would his return even be possible?
Well, he has cheated death before, so it wouldn't be off the table. Even if it's just a brief flashback, it would certainly be a hook for the new season.
But it seems fans are split over the rumors.
The rumors of Darth Maul being in season 2 of Mandalorian could be true. It’ll most likely be a flashback type stor… https://t.co/pDKkaKgCbj
— ︎ ︎ (@︎ ︎)1577784638.0
Many seem excited by even just a possible flashback, but others aren't as thrilled by the rumors.
Some fans think he shouldn't be in the series full stop.
Obi won killed Darth Maul in Rebels prior to a new hope. Maul is dead and should not be in Mandalorian https://t.co/1OfNzZuNDg
— ▲ Stimmy God (@▲ Stimmy God)1577734009.0
Either-way, we suppose we'll have to wait and see. The Mandalorian season 2 will hit screens in fall 2020. In other Star Wars news, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker recently landed in theaters, but many have said it has copied another smash hit movie. Keep scrolling to see why.
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Game 24: Michigan at Northwestern Recap
Road starts are critical, but Michigan’s couldn’t have been much worse on Wednesday night. The Wolverines missed their first 11 shots of the game, the majority of which were dunk and layup attempts, and failed to score before the first media timeout.
That’s precisely how road games against last-place teams go wrong, but Juwan Howard’s team had a trump card.
It took nearly six minutes for Eli Brooks to hit Michigan’s first basket of the game, but the Wildcats had only scored four points in their first eight possessions. The Wolverine defense was dominant for forty minutes and provided the necessary breathing room.
The Brooks three woke up Michigan’s offense, which went on to score 1.25 points per possession over the remaining 63 possessions in Evanston.
You can join UM Hoops for a discounted rate of $3 per month with promo code JOIN and unlock exclusive content. Sign up today for coverage throughout the season.
Related Items:2019-20 Game 24, Northwestern, Recap
Game 10: Minnesota at Michigan Recap
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Visiting Minds Panama: Kunst ist was sie ist
Veranstaltungsreihe zu den Implikationen des Konzepts \"Radikale Pädagogik: Kunst als Bildung\". Kuratoren: Humberto Vélez, Adrienne Samos.
VISITING MINDS is a long-term project that aims to advance understanding and collaboration between a broad range of people worldwide. The key strategy is to invite personalities of the arts and sciences to meet in Panama to establish high-level dialogues on pivotal themes, often related to popular culture.
VISITING MINDS was conceived by artist Humberto Vélez and embraced by curator and cultural manager Adrienne Samos. Both Panamanians have been working — together and independently — to promote Panama as a hub for multidisciplinary debates in the Americas, by hosting conferences, round tables, workshops, seminars, art and social events, residencies, and exhibitions.
VISITING MINDS 2013: Radical Pedagogy
How can we maintain close, flexible, and dynamic ties between art, education, and the people these practices should serve? Artist, critic, and educator Luis Camnitzer insists "art should shape all academic activities and not be confined to one discipline."
The series of events organized under the title "Radical Pedagogy: Art as Education" tried to identify the implications of this concept by stimulating reflections and open discussions on the kinds of education required to engage more critically, horizontally, and creatively with the community, moving away from academic stagnation, hierarchical stances, and didacticism.
The most reliable assessment involves lived experience and ongoing praxis. Therefore, public performances specifically conceived for this event by two artists famously preoccupied with education — Luis Camnitzer and Humberto Vélez — further delved into these issues through direct observation of art practice and spectatorship response.
Miss Education
With his performance Miss Education, Humberto Vélez has dared once again to tackle an art world taboo: for the first time, a beauty pageant has been the subject of an artwork. Conceived especially for conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer and for the "Miss Panama 2013" beauty pageant, Velez's performance focused on the links between elitist and common stereotypes of art and beauty, through the lens of mass media events and popular culture.
Camnitzer was president of the jury and personally chose a new "Miss", who took the title of Miss Education. The day before, he had interviewed each one of the candidates, posing them questions about art, education, and beauty. The night of "Miss Panama 2013" — broadcast live on television around the country — Camnitzer, announced the winner of the title of Miss Education, who became a living work of art, by the "grace" of the artist.
By confronting artistic and intellectual prejudices, and upholding one of the forum's mottos — "Art for the people" — this provocative performance put into action many of the themes discussed in the public conversations held during "Radical Pedagogy".
La Banda de Mi Hogar 2013
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the international urban event "ciudadMULTIPLEcity: Art Panama 2003", Humberto Vélez conceived a new version of his stunning series of public actions performed ten years ago with the popular brass-and-percussion band of the vocational school El Hogar.
For the official inauguration of VISITING MINDS 2013, the second part of the performance Miss Education merged with the performance La Banda de Mi Hogar 2013. The performers branched out from the open atrium of the Biomuseum (designed by Frank Gehry and programmed to open in February 2014), given its superb interaction with its natural and urban surroundings. A group carried a banner, like those used in protest demonstrations, displaying a quote by Luis Camnitzer: "ART IS WHAT IT IS".
Two full days of talks, roundtables, and open discussions were held in the City of Knowledge (a cluster of organizations that support programs in education, research, and development), centering on four main themes: "Education as Art", "Art as Education", "Curating and Education", and "Art criticism and Education".
Luis Camnitzer’s keynote speech — titled "Art and Pedagogy" — lead the way. "We are experiencing a despotism based on the passive consumption of artistic and educational products . . . to serve the interest of others," he stated, and suggested that the artistic mind can help build alternative orders by finding new solutions to challenge power. Encouraged by the audience, Camnitzer discussed several art-pedagogical experiments he has conducted through the years.
Margot López, the Biomuseum’s Communications Coordinator, Eugenio Valdés, Arts and Education director at the Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, and Orlando Britto, former Director of Espacio C in Cantabria, also shared their experiences and ideas on innovative educational strategies at the institutional level.
On the theme of art curatorship, conversations centered on exhibitions conceived as open schools capable of advancing changes in society or susceptible of being changed by it. Participants included Emelie Chhangur, curator of the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto, Hans-Michael Herzog, Director of Daros Latinamerica in Zurich, and Gerardo Mosquera and Adrienne Samos, curators of "ciudadMULTIPLEcity": the international urban art event held in Panama exactly a decade ago.
Aesthetics of Collaboration, the book dedicated to the work of Humberto Vélez (edited by Emelie Chhangur and published by AGYU) was publicly launched during the forum.
As a corollary to these days of lectures and discussions, Celia Sredni de Birbragher recounted highlights of 37-year old Art Nexus, the prominent Latin American art magazine she founded and directs.
AMANAPLANACANALPANAMA
On the closing night of Visiting Minds 2013, at Diablo Rosso cultural space, Amanaplanacanal —Luis Camnitzer’s 1995 multimedia installation — was exhibited for the first time in Panama. Dedicated to the colonial origins of the famous waterway that divided a country to connect two oceans, this complex installation was based on extensive research of archival material.
(Zusammengefasste Informationen der Veranstalter)
VISITING MINDS 2013
1. - 3. Mai 2013
Panama-Stadt, Panama
Pedagogía radical: El arte como educación
[Radikale Pädagogik: Kunst als Bildung]
Projektkuratoren:
Adrienne Samos
Produktionsmanager:
Sponsoren und Veranstalter:
artEDU Stiftung
Biomuseum
E•motion
City of Knowledge
Diablo Rosso
Bohemio Fest
Miss Panama Organisation
13 Bildseiten, mehr Infos
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Child electrocuted on holiday in Greece – Thomas Cook
The Grumpy Git | Dec 28, 2019 | Travel
A family on a boat and sightseeing trip shared a story about their child being electrocuted on holiday in Greece with me. This was a package holiday booked with Thomas Cook.
A Mother, her two daughters and 2 year-old baby (grandchild) were on holiday in a hotel booked with Thomas Cook. The baby put her finger in a plug socket, electrocuted herself and the hotel rang for an ambulance to take her to hospital for treatment. The family even said that the hospital was filthy and they felt obliged to clean it up, although they didn’t have the ability to do so.
The hotel presented the family with a bill for €228 afterwards. The hotel offered to reduce it to €100 if they paid it on the spot and signed a disclaimer (in Greek) to say that the hotel was not responsible.
The family refused to sign or pay anything and the Thomas Cook representative just left them high and dry without doing anything meaningful to help them.
Kids will be kids and accidents happen. I am the first to say that and cut a bit of slack, but given that Thomas Cook has not played ball here I would throw the kitchen sink at them for it.
There are a number of consumer laws involved here;
The Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements 2018
Misrepresentation Act 1967
Consumer Rights Act 2015
They made a good start on the Package Travel / Holidays legislation by reporting the issue promptly to the hotel, taking photos and raising it with the travel representative at the time. I actually touched on this in one of my first blogs. However, that is where they could start getting lost in trying to resolve it.
The next steps would be to;
Follow the complaints procedure set by Thomas Cook
Give them an opportunity to remedy it
Keep a timeline of events
Involve ABTA if necessary
The Misrepresentation Act 1967 is perfect for this scenario as it is clear that a fraudulent and negligent representation has taken place at the time this holiday was booked. I say that because it is clear that the hotel is not ‘child friendly’ and whilst kids will be kids and accidents happen, the family would not have booked this holiday if they knew then what they know now.
Finally, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that goods / products should be;
Satisfactory quality
It is clear that the hotel does not meet that criteria, given the outline of events that I noted from the outset.
I would normally advise someone where there are numerous consumer laws involved not to use all of their ammunition at once and to play the long game by falling back on different consumer laws to buckle the firm eventually.
However, I would throw everything at them from the outset here given that Thomas Cook were in a bad way financially and their long-term future was in doubt. I would be seeking a full refund and compensation for the distress caused.
We now know that Thomas Cook sadly no longer exists. I discussed this with a fellow consumer champion who also took part with me in the same feature in the Daily Mail.
I gave this family some advice to help them get some traction on it. There is no way I could cover everything that they needed to know in a quick chat, so suggested that they bought my book to resolve it and to contact me if necessary afterwards.
I wrote about the importance of great customer service and spoke about Thomas Cook and Jet2. It’s quite striking that Thomas Cook’s reputation for customer service was mediocre and they were in financial difficulty at the time, whereas Jet2 have won awards for their customer service and are continually expanding and introducing new flights and routes.
Are you surprised that Thomas Cook no longer exists? What bad experiences have you had with travel companies?
The Grumpy Git
Takeaway delivery problems and your consumer rights
My Year in Review – 2020 in to 2021
How to appeal a yellow box junction ticket
Bella Wanana – Scott’s Money Matters Series
Fraud / Scams (13)
GDPR / Data Protection (8)
General Consumer (58)
Money / Finance (7)
Motoring (56)
Scott's Money Matters (22)
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Intellect and Intuition: Longing for Insight?
By Eva Brann|2021-01-08T17:24:34-06:00April 8th, 2019|Categories: Classical Education, E.B., Education, Eva Brann, In Honor of Eva Brann at 90 Series, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, St. John's College|
We say of people that they have intuition. We apparently mean that they apprehend things directly without belaboring them by analysis or even without accosting them with too close an inspection. Intuition is what we long for, thinking is what we can do. What follows?
You asked me to speak about “Intellect and Intuition,” an enormous topic and yet an intimate one—enormous because the title encompasses the two most distinctively human activities, and intimate because I have, after all, no way to come to terms with it but to look into myself. But it is a congenial inquiry you’ve chosen and a congenial setting you’ve provided, because I can speak my thoughts to you pretty nearly as I do to myself. In fact most of what I will say now I thought to myself last summer wandering up and down among the pinyons of Monte Sol.
As I tried to concentrate on the matter, one obtrusive difficulty proved to be the very advantage we have in common—an acquaintance with the texts which most enticingly shape the terms in question. My effort to think would be again and again deflected by remembered formulations, resulting in a kind of short-circuiting of the tension of perplexity. That tendency to be, off and on, sucked into trusted formulations happens to be my Charybdis of reflection. The opposing Scylla of brooding consumes her victim with the need to revise and to reconstrue things from sheer honest contrariness. I must say that I am always fascinated by the fact that the world submits to the latter treatment, which indeed seems to yield very original notions; I guess this mode too catches hold of an aspect of things.
I have tried, then, really to find out what I think rather than to remember what has been thought.
Nonetheless the outcome, as you will recognize, is often what a much-loved dean of our college used to call in Russian English “discovering America,” namely coming wide-eyed upon well-known worlds. In my case it means arriving, after much casting about, at places opened to us all as long as two-and-a-half millennia ago. Such forays bring back no new product and cannot be made in behalf of anyone else. But I think what holds us all together is just this-that we think well of each other for undertaking these voyages and want to see each others’ logs.
Well, to the beginning, which is to ask myself how the title is meant. Is it intended to imply that intellect and intuition are antagonists, that is, “intellect vs. in tuition”? After all, if I come across one of those trite double headings like “The Individual and Society” I know perfectly well that the writer will not be celebrating a harmonious fit. On the other hand, the two terms might be meant to be joined on the same side; you will recall that Kant directs his critique against a so-called “intellectual intuition,” by which he means a vision of thought. He claims that there cannot be such a faculty because thinking cannot confront or encompass thought itself; it can only form and function over sense material. The requirement behind this denial is that the relation of thinking to its object must be firmly certified, and if thinking the truth is beholding independent thought objects; such certification becomes, Kant thinks, unintelligible.
At this moment I have to observe that there seem to be two kinds of starting points for any inquiry. Sometimes I am oppressed by some vague unease—indeed it would be more accurate to call it an uneasy vagueness—which eventually draws me to that first and most mystifying step of cogitation: the coagulation of a question. But sometimes, as in our case, a problem about terms is put to me, and then I find myself, by a pretty firm intellectual habit, first of all collecting and inspecting in order their corrupt, their trite, and their unfaded uses. (Incidentally, I feel entitled to use such a method for rightly directing the mind only because I try to remember how easily it can turn into a routine for avoiding thought.)
I’ll begin with intuition, because it is the word more widely and commonly used. And right away I notice that it sometimes means an activity and sometimes the object of that activity—either the power or its product. Here are the uses I can distinguish.
1. We say of people—though I try not to—that they are intuitive, and people say it to themselves. They apparently mean that they apprehend things directly without belaboring them by analysis or even without accosting them with too close an inspection. There do seem to be people who, from minimal observation and no articulable reflection, see what’s up. I must say that in my experience this gift is often accompanied by a royal obtuseness to those aspects of the world which are not immediately apprehensible, and that more often than not “being intuitive” means just a will-less (or even willful) habit of sticking with those feelings that accompanied first impressions. Intuitive people often accuse their supposed opposites of “being so analytical,” and of course, they have a point: there are people who pry things apart with deft inaccuracy.
The object of intuition in this sense is often said to be the ineffable, and it seems to be apprehended preferably in fugue states.
Sometimes, again, what is meant is something more delicate in the same line, what Pascal calls the esprit de finesse and opposes to the mathematical mind. It is a disposition to learn from a multitude of immediate sources rather than to reason from a few remote principles—what we might call quick sensitivity.
But mathematics itself also has an intuitive mode, namely the ability to “see” mathematical objects and to form conjectures of mathematical truths way ahead of their deduction. I have heard that there are certain mathematicians who are famous for their theorems and notorious for their proofs. The object of mathematical intuition is particularly familiar to us in its imaginative geometric form, of which more in a moment. (Oddly enough for the mathematical school specifically called “intuitionist,” the term intuition means just the opposite: It is adopted from Kant and refers to the constructive rules of temporal finite thinking.)
These objects of the geometric imagination are, I would guess, those intuitions all of us here most articulably share. For an example, let me quickly remind you of that high-point of your freshman mathematics tutorial, the penultimate proposition of Euclid’s first book, the Pythagorean theorem. The picture itself, as you probably brought out in your discussions, was not the intuition: It was far too determinate in its blackboard place and far too inexact in its broomstick boundaries. But neither was the interior image of the bare enunciation, the two smaller squares constructed on the short sides of the right triangle and the large square on the hypotenuse, the revealing geometric intuition of the theorem, for the imagination is scandalously unable to discern the equality of differently shaped areas or to sum them. To see that the two smaller squares together are equal to the larger one it was necessary to see Euclid’s construction at work: to view it as a kind of engine for squashing half of each small square into a triangle and pivoting that triangle into half of the adjoining parts of the large square. When you saw that, you knew the truth immediately and for good and without words—if I called on you right now you could, no doubt, sketch it out. It was that dynamically immobile image which was the intuitive object. The proof accomplished another purpose.
As a ground for all spatial and temporal imagining, Kant introduced a receptive faculty which he called the intuition; a capacity for both receiving and forming sensory material into ordered spatial and temporal structures. Hence for Kant all experience of the world is in one aspect intuition. The pure objects of this faculty, namely space and time themselves, he also called intuitions. I mention this use only because here the term designates so stupendously original and influential a concept.
The final meaning I can think of, most remote from ordinary use and yet, I would guess, the spring of my whole inquiry, is that very one intended by the phrase I mentioned before, “intellectual intuition.” The Greeks had a single word for the capacity, nóesis: they called the corresponding object noetón, meaning that which is for the intuitive intellect.
But before describing—broadly—what it seems to me the two Greeks whose works we have all read both meant by nóesis, let me dispose of a more recent derivative use. I say “dispose of” because try as I will I cannot grasp it in my thinking. Descartes in particular speaks of intuiting propositions; people in general speak of intuitive concepts. They mean those elements and connections of thinking which are clear and distinct to them. “Clear and distinct” is a phase which seems to me primarily applicable to things seen, and might be used analogously of some vision-like apprehension, but I have never held and cannot think that I ever could hold in mind a proposition which was so well illuminated and so incisively contoured as to be called intuitive. It is not only that I have never met with a proposition that stayed evident for more than a moment—Descartes’ examples, such as “I exist,” turn into enigmatic murk under the lightest probing—but that propositional thinking seems to me ipso facto incapable of immediate apprehension.
The ancient notion of nóesis arises from the sense that appearances mask, or alternatively communicate, what it is they are. While we can reach for this “whatness” and circumscribe it with thinking we can also know it directly. As I mentioned, it is such direct taking in of what things are which is called nóesis; what is thus intuitable is called eídos, signifying that which is for the sight of the soul, that is to say, intuition.
In trying to make something of all these usages I must remind myself that none of the several ways to go about that business is innocuous and free of a heavy freight of pre-judgements. For example, I can restrict myself to following out a concatenation or a family of uses, refraining strictly from the supposition of a possible common meaning; or I can analyze how expressions containing the term are formed, attending to pre-set logical criteria rather than to the speaker’s intention; or I can look for a common factor, positing that as the central meaning; or I can rank the uses, attempting to reveal a primary significance of which the others are analogies.
Now in the case of the term intuition, there is a common feature that jumps out, namely that of directness and immediacy. Intuiting is not laboriously temporal; an intuition is effortlessly and instantaneously all there. That is not to say that it may not take effortful time to come up to the point of intuition or that I cannot dwell on it and range over it and even play with it. But these are preparations and reactions. The intuiting proper and the intuition itself just take place.
But immediacy is only a relation, and a negative one at that, namely the relation of coming before us without anything intervening. Perhaps to get somewhat nearer to intuition itself—and I now find myself supposing that I do have that sort of apprehension—it would be best to begin at the other end, to turn to the way of intervening steps and mediating words, which is usually called discursive thinking, or just thinking. Reasonings, particularly proofs, are regarded as examples par excellence of this mode.
Now just because it seems to me so unlikely and so contrary to my experience that thinking should really be preeminently reasoning, I want to begin by inspecting the notion of proof—and why not use as example the one that accompanies the Pythagorean theorem? I say “accompanies” for I have argued that the geometric truth is in the picture.
The first thing about this or any proof is that it is in words. I am indeed discovering America when it comes to me that, above all, reasoning speaks. Now the proof seems to speak out of both sides of the mouth. On one side it only prompts me to look at the picture in a certain way. Here its words function to focus me on the geometric situation, particularly to see the dispositions of the construction we all know so well. On the other side, the proof is not concerned with its matter as a theorem to be seen but as a proposition to be positioned in a system. In this aspect the proof is really a sequence of validations which, in ensuring that the proposition has legitimate antecedents, incidentally also shows what its place in the system is.
It seems to me that in reflecting on this proof, I come upon a curious discrepancy. On the one hand, the reasoning is about the picture, but in such a way that the “why” and the “that,” which are one and the same in intuition, are now separated and strung out in a sequence. On the other hand, this reasoned sequence is driven from enunciation to conclusion by a necessity quite apart from what it is about. If all the words of the proof which direct me to the picture were deprived of this reference—that is to say, if they became mere symbols—the proof would remain a structure of reason, although it would be about nothing. In other words, it is possible for orderly thinking, which is about something, to turn itself into mere reasoning, mere rationality. Such thinking is the last thing I come to in life, and that is why I got it out of the way first.
There is then a primary thinking, it seems to me, which begins long before it is time for reasoning and proving. Searching, inquiring thinking is not like the linear stepwise progression of proof. (I am somewhat reluctant to say that, because so many people who despise “linear thinking” appear to want to know nothing of the effort needed for any other kind.) Thinking, once done, can always be presented in reasoned form—though rarely is its significance in the concluding line.
In fact, I now remember a very famous case in point—the basic Aristotelian syllogism: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. As a way to discovering the conclusion it is an absurdity. Whatever effort there is goes into establishing the premise that “All men are mortal,” and to do that I must surely already know that we will all die, including Socrates—as indeed he did, with great flair. Now Aristotle himself never meant the syllogism to be taken as a deductive proof form, but rather as a record of an illumination, the discovery of the reason why we must die, namely as a consequence of our human essence, because we are human beings, because of the middle term, man. To know that is surely to know something.
Working with and against these preceding examples of thinking in extremis, so to speak, I want to make an inventory of traits shown by living, inquiring, provisional thought as I know it. I don’t, by the way, suppose that everyone does as I do—I do mean that they do what I do, that we are about the same business even if the occasions of our perplexity, the tempo of our grappling and the idiom of our articulations are very different. The cavalier claim that “every one thinks differently” seems to me based on willful inexperience. (And yet—I have sometimes wondered whether some, a very few people, might not have genuinely different thinking experiences.) I will number my first observation, as mathematicians so nicely do, with the number zero.
0. Thinking is unmistakably done by me in a body, but in a body set aside in the sense that it requires to be at ease in a balmy or buoyant environment (Descartes had an oven-heated room and I, to compare small with great, have a hot bath), or independently occupied by rhythmic motion in monotonously beautiful surroundings, among sights pleasant to gaze at without real looking. But there is also a stranger and somewhat humiliating connection: Physical stimulants affect, or better, release thinking, and a cup of coffee can cause a revelation.
1. My guess is that it is because of its bodily basis that my thinking has a motoric and mechanical mode. It can labor in low gear, lug in high gear, stall and idle-all familiar thought-experiences. Of these, that thinking which runs in neutral is the most disturbing but also illuminating phenomenon—when my mind babbles on by itself, disengaged. It shows that real thinking requires—a moment-to-moment effort to hold it to its matter, a continual spontaneity. Accordingly, no truly-thought thought seems to follow as a necessary effect from a previous thought; each comes from a fresh effort to understand. I do not mean to say that thoughts may not have necessary connection—only that I myself must think it. Indeed it now seems to me that thinking is largely the effort to break out of motoric mentation.
And I also notice that as every instant thinking begins anew, so it ends with a kind of click, and “aha” of having settled the matter (or alternatively, a pause of perplexity). Thinking appears to be in its step-wise way as discontinuous as intuition which is suddenly there and suddenly gone. So in that respect, at least, there is ultimately no difference between them. I may go back and interpose ever more steps into my thought progress; I can include between any two steps the rules for inferring the next step; in short I can make the argument as dense as possible; it will still be discrete. And as the parts, so the whole: the thought sequence ends with a mental click, the sound of the proper seating of the thought, the mark of a satisfaction which is like an assent, whose absence arouses a fidgety agony of new trials. (This experience of thinking incidentally seems to me to account for the peculiar form of a Socratic conversation, in which Socrates proposes thoughts while his interlocutor gets to say only “Yes;’ “How not?” “But Socrates…” It is the internal activity of thinking distributed over two people.) Another observation: Those people who advocate questioning for its own sake seem to regard thinking as a kind of continuum, like a mood, which flows on until it fades or is broken, while it seems to me that thinking is in its very nature positive. As it is a series of small settlements, so in the aggregate it aims to reach a position and rest.
2. Since thinking is continually effortful, and continually monitored, it must have something to do with my willing and wanting—though I see that I shouldn’t confuse that inner monitor who is satisfied or uneasy with my willing, since that monitor’s business is not to force but to follow thought. I, my willful self, ought to govern my thought only insofar as I hold it to its business, and even then my willing is rather a wanting which is more exigent even than the desire for repose. What I want first and last is to possess myself and my world—not in a mode of domination but in a way of bringing out both of our respective and related contours. When I leave an experience or a problem unthought-through there is an un-supportable sense that a fuzzy accretion is interposing itself between me and my existence, that I am going to be enveloped in dumb immediacy and my life will be an unappropriated mess. I think that must be the sense Socrates is expressing when he says that the unexamined life is not to be lived—”not to be lived” is what he literally says. I never could understand Wordsworth’s “We murder to dissect” complaint: The analysis of a thing or an event, far from destroying its integrity, first gives it not merely clarity but the possibility of presence itself; We dissect to maintain life. That, it seems to me, is what thinking does: It makes me try to get hold of things, so that they are there for me. Of course, there is a kind of analysis which with deadly inaccuracy pries things apart in unnatural places and which forces affairs, particularly human affairs, into crude and demeaning patterns; it does indeed murder its matter. But that is not thinking. It is functioning with theory-patterns, and it shows that not only will but also willfulness can move thought. Truth to tell, I know it as an all too familiar temptation—the willful forcing of thought according to a pre-conceived intention.
3. Thinking is speech, quite literally interior speaking, voiceless English utterance. That observed fact makes me doubt the notion that speech is primarily or originally a kind of social interaction. How can I think so when I observe that ninety-nine out of a hundred words that I speak every day are not meant to be heard, because I speak to myself (from whom I can want nothing and can hide nothing and with whom I don’t much want to play speech-solitaire) the same language as I talk with my fellow humans with whom I am supposed to be playing language games or committing speech-acts? I am surely glad that I can use language for communication, that is, for alluding to something we humans have in common, but my sense is that my speech (once I have come into it) can be used to communicate because I use it to speak to myself, not the other way around.
Here is the old mystery on which I can scarcely get a handle: There is admittedly thoughtless speech. Is there perhaps also speechless thought? No matter how hard I try, I cannot get hold of a thought without a word. There may well be speechless apprehensions and they may well be those very intuitions I am trying to distinguish. But that time-taking effort I think of as thinking—can it be anything distinguishable from the speech in which I do it? Of course it cannot be speech in the merely linguistic sense, since I could use another language like German, and sometimes do. It must be (and here once again I am discovering America) speech in the sense the Greeks termed logos, which might be rendered by “thinking speech.” Logos has meaning, something more intimate than significance, which latter is the relation of a sign to its object. Thinking-speech is literally utterance, that is “outerance,” the silently audible embodiment (which my bodily being seems to require) of my inner activity not its sign, but its expression.
It is just because speech has meaning in this sense, because it is the external appearance of thinking, that unless I am feeling mighty bloody-minded—I do not ask whether another speaker’s statements mean anything or not according to some pre-determined criterion of meaningfulness. Rather I ask first whether the speaker means anything, that is, whether his words are expressions of a thinking effort, and next what he means, that is, how I can express his thinking as my own, and finally whether I can give assent.
By saying that speech has meaning and is an expression of thinking I have tried to convey a strange apprehension, namely that it is nothing but uttered thinking; speech does not “signify” thinking or thoughts or stand for them, but it means them.
Now thinking and its words are of several sorts, it seems. One sort of word intends something—I think and speak of things. For example, the pronoun “I” has come far too often into this speech. (I cannot tell, incidentally, why it is called a pro-noun since surely the name Eva stands for it, and not the other way around). When I say “I,’ I am sure I intend something-though I should probably not say “some thing.” What I do intend, it would take a whole new talk to try to come near, but in any case, it is that which feels my feelings, “has” my memories and “does” my thinking. Or again, when I say “Monte Sol,” I intend a feature of the land, a mountain that, although not clearly separate in stuff from its surroundings, derives its intendabiliy from rising like a dark green sun behind the campus in Santa Fe. Or “pinyon,” which, unlike the name “Monte Sol,” I can say of numerous appearances and in several ways at once—a capability ex pressed in the term, “logos” itself which has behind it the sense of “gathering.” (Now that I come to think of it, in this gathering lies the power of the word over the world of appearances—but then again, did the appearances not allow themselves to be so gathered, thinking-speech would come to nothing.) Accordingly, I can intend by the word pinyon any one or all of a species of the genus pine, or that kind of tree itself, or a sort of rooted censer from which to pinch aromatic needles, or a rather ragged bush which, when the rain paints its trunk black, suddenly stands forth visibly as a tree. Words of a certain sort, then, namely those called nouns, intend or reach for objects.
I also observe that these intended things incite and inhibit my thinking in revealing ways. For instance if I try to think pinyon, I am almost irresistibly drawn on to thinking tree, although the reverse is not as inevitable, and that makes me say that pinyon “comes under” tree. And although it seems to me as self-evident as anything that whatever thought I can get hold of in speech at all is a thought I can think, the things I think about do evidently have the power to make some thoughts nearly impossible: for instance a pinyon resists being thought of as both being and not being such. If I think these thoughts anyway, I have a lot of explaining to do to myself, mostly concerned with the meaning of that word “being.”
But there are also words which intend no thing. Some of these mean the directing gestures that thinking seems to develop within itself as it runs, hesitates, jolts on, doubles back. For example there is “but,” a hand held up by thinking to itself to admit an opposing train of thought; and there is “although,” which requires thinking to run on two tracks at once; and there is “therefore,” which means home-free. In communicating-speech I use these words to coax another’s thinking into becoming like mine.
The last use of speech is not so interesting as an accomplishment as it is fascinating as a possibility. I can willfully disregard or abstract from any definite intention a word might have, and I have been taught to do that by turning the words into symbols, say the letters A and B. I can also overlook that most intimate striving of thoughtful propositions to be about something (as Euclid’s forty-seventh is about right triangles), and I show that further abstraction by using symbols like p and q. Now I often put my propositions into a kind of word harness, and above all the one called “if . . . then.” I can do that because the propositions are about things or events, and these appear to have inner connection—call them causal. So if it rains, then the ground will grow red, the pinyons will show their shape and the air will become aromatic. Now forget about that real connection of things which my thinking grasps and simply define such a relation; call it implication and let its symbol be a horseshoe on its side. By going on like this, one can establish a kind of ghost-speech, a denatured logos which is (oddly, it seems, to me) called symbolic logic. What is fascinating is the way it is done—by glancing surreptitiously at living thinking and then deliberately formulating its ways as mock-arbitrary rules (equally oddly called “axioms,” a word which, as you know, originally meant “notions deserving assent”). In my experience logical thinking is both more difficult and less demanding than searching thinking and for one and the same reason: because it is about nothing.
But it now comes to me that I have been carried too far in my sense that the motions of thinking-speech, its releases and restraints, are all derived from the way things are, so that speech has no necessity of its own -for that amounts to saying that there is no logic at all. Speech does have a capability, and even one intention, which is all its own: It can negate and it can literally intend “nothing.” Nowhere in the world or beyond it does negation show or is nothing present, and yet my thinking has no definition at all unless I can say “no,” “not,” “none,” “nothing.” I see that with this afterthought I have started a topic too deep for present pursuit. It probably is the topic of logic proper, of logos-logic.
4. And finally and above all, thinking is “about” something. “Discursive thought”—that phrase literally means thought that runs hither and thither, going about its business. I can get hold of this best in a figure. When I think about something I begin by focusing, by getting hold—I know not how—of an intending or reaching word, which is why my first notes are usually just a list of nouns. That intending, I see, reaches for the thing itself, for this particular fragrant pinyon which grows on the mountain, and also, strangely, for the one odorless but definite species of the genus pine in which all pinyons are gathered. But what the word reaches for is not what it gets. What I grasp in thinking-speech is not a full, present object in or out of the sensible world, but my own impenetrably peripheral hold itself; I hold captive a mere circumference. That I try to grasp firmly with one hand of my mind (which is called conceiving) while with the other I try to make out its compass, its contours, its cracks, and its connections (which is called trying to understand). That is why upon thinking my speech usually comes in sentences: subject-predicate—this is such. But here is the point. The discoveries I make in the course of these explorations are often satisfying and even illuminating, yet they are not what I am really after, not the true end of the effort, just because this thinking is always thinking round about something. What I long for in thinking is that I should not forever remain on the surface and in the fissures of this or that matter, but should penetrate within it and find the inner aspects and connections of that which has attracted and withstood my thinking. Such penetration should, I suppose, be called insight, and what I might find there is, I guess, what philosophers call “being,” a word which stands, for me at least, more for an incitement than for an experience.
I appear, once again, to have discovered America. It seems to be my favorite activity, in life and in thought.
Now, after a brief review of the five traits of thinking which I have come upon, the moment will have arrived to formulate just how thinking is un-immediate. That is, after all, what I wanted to find out, so that I could tell better what intuition might be; for whatever it may be, at least it seems always to be described as an immediate mode of apprehension.
To the review then: 0. Thinking is closely connected to the body and has a mechanical, even a motoric mode. 1. However, when it is a genuine effort it does not run continuously but comes in ever-spontaneous starts and settlements which are received or rejected by an inner monitor, myself but not my will. 2. My will, however, or rather, my need, is the source of the effort, and the need is that of coming into my experience, of appropriating my life. 3. That effort appears to my inner ear in unvoiced yet sensory utterance, and therefore this thinking-speech “means” or expresses thinking. Some of the words of this speech “intend” or reach for objects like things or kinds of things, others express the motions of my thinking, and yet others express the connections be tween the things that my thinking apprehends. These last can be abstracted and reestablished in disassociation from meaning. 4. And above all, thinking is “about” something, which implies that as the thinking effort is drawn to embrace being, so it is kept at its circumference. I think I now understand wherein thinking is unimmediate. It has to do with the figures that come to mind in the effort to describe it: the figures of hearing (though in a sense that is no figure since in thinking I literally talk to myself) and of touching and grasping. The heard word which expresses thinking also muffles it. Except for the trivial case of onomatopoeia, it has no similarity, no reference at all, to what it says, nor does it “stand for” anything; if there is one thing the word is not, it is a sign or a symbol. Perhaps vocables, minimal modulations of sound, were fitly elected to express our effort to capture what is: Ampler sound can affect and move us; a cry rouses attention, a music tunes the soul, but the subdued word, unsignificant and unassimilable, expression and screen at once, is the fitting form for the sheer immaterial doing which thinking amounts to.
The same holds for the grasping phase of thinking. To be sure, something is disclosed by the discursive form “this is such;” but what the grasp of thinking holds it also hides. Thinking is not insight. I think I have discovered the human condition with respect to the desire to know: It is to be kept from our end by our means.
Before returning to intuition let me apologize for what I might, if I talked that way, call a terminological shift. You probably noticed that I have substituted the word “thinking” for the assigned term, “intellect.” I had to do that because “intellect” has connotations both too low and too high for our purpose. For on the one hand, from it is derived the name of those whose thinking motors along in theory-patterns, the so-called “intellectuals;’ while on the other hand the term “intellection” serves to translate nóesis , the ancient name for thought which sees, the grandest kind of intuition.
By now you have probably forgotten the five uses of intuition which I thought I could distinguish. But no matter, for several were only derivative and a manner of speaking about cases where something was thought to be known right off; what was interesting was only what all the uses had in common, namely immediacy. So let me, keeping in mind that features of thinking I have just delineated, propose three possible kinds of intuitive activities and their objects.
1. I seem to have a world of appearance immediately before me. (To be sure, the organs of sense are often considered as the instruments of its perception, but they are not media in such a way as to drive me to say that they intervene between me and the appearances; they are means rather than media.) But now I see that I for one would hardly want to call the world at large an intuition (though some authors have done just that) if the term is to have any definition at all. Just as thinking is concentrating, so also it seems to me intuiting must be a kind of focusing, but while thinking is about the absent, intuition is of the present.
For example, in my wanderings in downtown Santa Fe, I often stopped before a painting which seemed to me the record of a perceptive intuition in this more restricted sense. It was the very type of a Southwestern landscape, and the Santa Feans among you know that the curse of that genre lies in the natural histrionics of Southwestern weather. In this painting three cottonwoods by an arroyo, seen against a great, vibrantly slate-gray storm sky, were lit up golden-chartreuse by a slanting sun-burst from beyond the frame. The magic of it was solely that of a memory-prompt: I have seen such scenes, briefly but, I would say, intuitively. The word is no longer much used that way, but it once meant a glance of strong regard, and also the sight which was its object. That is, of course, what “intuition” literally says: at-sight. (This ugly but accurate rendition is corroborated in the German version, familiar from Kant: An-schauung.) ”At sight” is directed toward what is more than a mere half apprehended surrounding, toward what is not only before me, but for me, the significant presence beheld in active seeing. I don’t doubt that some people have a gift for such quick salient sight.
2. So much the more will there be intuitions of the imagination, at least if presence is an even deeper feature of intuition than immediacy. For the imagination, insofar as it is a capability for re-presenting perceptions, usually exercises its power for compacting or attenuating them: It may concentrate the inner vision on the high points of perceived scenes. That is why paintings and memories so easily merge. Or again, it may abstract in essentials and rectify irregularities so as to leave a clarified schema of appearance. (Most thinking seems to take its bearing from such residual perceptions.) Or finally, it may produce its own intuitions, either rich sights never before seen, imbued with inexpressible significance, or the spare figures of geometry, the intuitions most inviting to thought. These diagram-sights are the intuitions which words can most reliably call forth and can most satisfyingly be about.
3. And finally, there is the intuition of thought itself, intellectual intuition. When I say “there is” I mean: there might be, there must be, I wish there to be. Its object is what thinking would be about: the fulfillment of its grasp, the immediate presence of its end. It is what the great Greeks call the noetón, the object of thought. Of course, I myself have never broken through thinking to behold the object of thought, though thrice in a decade for half a moment I have had the sense that but a little was wanting. Could it be that I do see it whenever I really perceive what appears around me? Could it be that what appears and what I take in when I see is just what I think about—that what I search for without and within coincides, so to speak, behind my back? It comes home to me that it is the pursuit of those questions which is primarily called philosophy.
Where am I then? I have discovered that thinking, although it can hold and explore its objects, can never penetrate them, can never have insight. And so it never quite attains to “at-sight;” intuition, the direct beholding of what it is about. In our best seeing and imagining we have all experienced the felicity of such immediate presence, but my thinking, at least, seems to be forever about absence. My guess is that it holds for us all: Intuition is what we long for, thinking is what we can do. What follows? An answer comes to my inner ear partly as the remembered sound of a passage that was once read to me, partly as the recollected sense of a meaning that I then took to heart. Happily I know where to find the text, so I can recite to you literally Socrates’ passionately involved speech:
The other points I made in behalf of my argument I won’t fully enforce. But that, in believing we need to search after whatever one of us doesn’t see, we will be better than if we believe that what we don’t know we can’t discover and needn’t search after -that I will fight for fully and to the end and for all I’m worth, in speech and in action. (Meno 87 B-C)
This essay was originally published here in April 2015, and appears again in celebration of Dr. Brann’s ninetieth birthday. It originally appeared in the St. John’s College Review (Vol. 35, No. 1, 1984) and is republished here with permission.
About the Author: Eva Brann
Eva Brann is Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative, a distinguished and long-serving tutor at St. John's College, and the 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient. Dr. Brann's works include: Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, The Past-Present: Selected Writings of Eva Brann, What, Then, Is Time?, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance, Homeric Moments, Feeling Our Feelings, The Logos of Heraclitus, Un-Willing: An Inquiry into the Rise of Will’s Power and an Attempt to Undo It, The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, Then & Now: The World's Center and the Soul's Demesne, and Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested. Dr. Brann has also published translations of Plato’s Statesman, Sophist, Symposium or Drinking Party, and Phaedo.
Learning Latin the Medieval Way
January 2nd, 2021 | 29 Comments
What Does It Mean to Be a Person of Culture?
January 1st, 2021 | 1 Comment
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WrestleMania 34: Will Dolph Ziggler Find New Life After New Orleans?
On April 2, 2018 By davidlevin
I love how Brian Campbell of CBS Sports handicapped how he thought the card at WrestleMania 34 could have looked if it has been booked differently. Even with several great matches projected by the wrestling analyst, the current card for the event in New Orleans on Sunday is solid from top to bottom. The problem for me is what will ever come of Dolph Ziggler? Will winning the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal raise his profile once again.
When fans look at the superstars who are not in marquee matches, the one that sticks out to me is Dolph Ziggler. WWE’s biggest enigma could be one of the best and a main event performer, but for one reason or another, the “Showstopper” has yet to recapture the brass ring that led to two world title runs. Ziggler is mired in the mid card, where he should be a dominant wrestler. Instead, he stands in his own purgatory.
Campbell had Ziggler challenging Randy Orton, the current United States Champion in a match that would have been a highlight of the mid-card. He blames the issues with Ziggler on bad timing and bad booking.
“SmackDown hasn’t done much with the time invested in Ziggler’s new gimmick and disappearance from the show after voluntarily giving up the U.S. title,” writes Campbell. “Giving him a chance to win it back against a legend like Orton would be a great way to spice up the kickoff show with a strong match. Considering Orton’s respect for Ziggler’s work, it’s likely he would be fully engaged and hungry to steal the show.”
It’s not all WWE’s fault. Ziggler is good at what he does and one of the best workers to come along in a decade. Once billed as a potential replacement to the role Shawn Michaels once portrayed, Ziggler isn’t the draw that John Cena, Daniel Bryan or even Orton have become. Like other performers who “look the part” like Roman Reigns or Bray Wyatt, the connection between wrestler, fans and WWE aren’t aligned properly.
A series of storylines involving love interests – A.J. Lee, Lana and Summer Rae – all but ruined potential main event programs. WWE never reinvested in making him a top-flight superstar.
I used to think Dolph Ziggler’s political stances were viewed negatively by WWE management (Vince and Linda McMahon being huge supporters of Donald Trump). But Ziggler has not been able to get over the fans, which is more important. It would seem winning the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal may be the only was he can resurrect his stagnant career.
Posted in Sports, Wrestling, WWE
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Story Of A Gay Hindu Wedding In Canada Which Is Changing The Conversation Around Homosexuals
31 May 2016 5:35 AM GMT
Image Source: torontodesidiaries
Image Source: <a href="https://torontodesidiaries.com/tag/rishi-agarwal/" target="_blank">torontodesidiaries</a>
The topic of homosexuality has always been a taboo in communities due to which it is hard for homosexuals to come out, especially in front of the family members . The fear of them not understanding the situation and behaving shockingly is what follows as a nightmare for every individual who is involved with a person of same sex.
The start of a mesmerizing love story
The taboo is ought to be broken and it surely did in its most flaunting and astounding way possible when Rishi Agrawal based out of Toronto, Canada came out clean with his parents about his long time affair with his partner Daniel Langdon whom he met on a business trip to Vancouver in 2004. On his way back to home Rishi dumped the letter from Daniel expressing his love for Rishi thinking anyone might find about it and cried during the whole 5 hour flight. But it was then when he decided to tell his parents about it .
The time of coming out
Rishi knew a gay Sikh guy who committed suicide after coming out to his parents and the idea that he would never have wanted the same fate as his did lend Rishi a handful of courage to speak frankly to his parents . The time did come and the obvious reaction was a shock filled with great distress. At first, when he told his parents that there is something he needed to talk about, both got really got scared guessing in all possible directions of the problems they thought their son might be facing but this one. With approximately a two-hour confrontation with his parents residing in a suburb of Greater Toronto area, Canada his father, the talking guy and head of the family as in most of Indian households, started interrogating him with a bombardment of questions asking details about whether he was absolutely sure about it or was it just a fling. The reaction got Rishi too much into hot water and he had no idea what would be his parent’s decision .The next thing , Rishi asked his parents whether he is accepted back at home or not to which his father gave a fitting reply that he must not think this way ever again and he is their son who is always welcome and accepted. This thought lifted Rishi off from loads of burden.
The acceptance and understanding
After knowing about his son’s interest Vijay and Suman Agrawal , parents of Rishi went into study mode for next three days digging everything about the matter, visiting libraries for books regarding homosexuality, contacting National Film Board Of Canada regarding concerned videos. They also started attending meetings of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Chapter in Toronto which supported a lot as they starting thinking that they were not the only one alone sailing in this sea .
It was after Rishi proposed to Daniel, parents of Rishi threw an Indian wedding for them following all the rituals -mehndi, sangeet, a reception which clearly shows that the Agrawal’s accepted their son’s choice wholeheartedly. They didn’t leave any stone unturned amid the celebrations to make their son’s wedding a memorable day for him . But the problems didn’t fade away as easy as we talk about it . Finding a priest was a pestiferous task as the wedding was performed with full-fledged Indian Traditions and absence of a priest for a homosexual wedding was a tough nut to crack, at least in India which is why frustrated Vijay Agrawal asked his brother out to sort this issue and was firm to self-conduct his son’s wedding in case a priest was nowhere to be found for which he even asked his brother to bring a book of mantras for wedding from India.
The retired couple has launched a chapter of PFLAG, Toronto to help families from South Asia primarily to make them understand about such choices . Moreover, they have already been helping people from their social contacts in this direction. The Agrawal’s believe that certain misconceptions and prejudices can’t be left hidden or else they might eat up the roots of the society and hence feel that awareness about homosexuality is pivotal.
As Rishi recalls his efforts have provided strength to many others in his surroundings and many of them have landed in good books of Rish . And he is very proud of his parents for having understood him and carrying on the awareness campaign.
The Logical Indian Community is glad to learn increasing sense of understanding among the various communities about homosexuality and lauds the efforts of the Agrawal’s and many such people who openly support the choices of their children and lend hands in propagating it too.
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Russia seeks answers over plane crash
News World Russia seeks answers over plane crash
8:30am, Nov 19, 2013
Officials say a plane that crashed in Russia, killing 50 people, plunged nose-first into the ground.
A Russian plane that crashed killing all 50 on board plunged nose-first into the ground, officials said, as investigators focused on a fault with the 23-year old plane or pilot error as the likely cause for the disaster.
The Tatarstan Airlines’ Boeing 737-500 crashed on landing at the airport in the Volga city of Kazan on Monday after a flight from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport Sunday night, killing all 44 passengers and six crew on board, the emergencies ministry said.
“The main versions of what happened are an error in piloting and technical factors, including a technical failure,” the head of the transport Investigative Committee for the Volga region, Alexander Poltinin, was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.
He confirmed that the crash occurred while the aircraft was making a second attempt at landing and said the investigation would have to consider why the pilot had not managed to land the first time in reasonable weather conditions.
Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov, citing what he said was so far unpublished video footage of the disaster, revealed that the plane plunged nose first into the grounds of the airport and then appeared to have exploded.
“The plane simply fell. It went vertically into the ground. After the plane hit the ground there was an explosion,” Sokolov was quoted as saying by the state RIA Novosti news agency in Kazan.
A source quoted by the Interfax news agency said that it was clear the plane had lost speed on its second approach although it was not immediately apparent why.
The disaster claimed the lives of Irek Minnikhanov, the son of the leader of the Tatarstan region, Rustam Minnikhanov, and the head of Russia’s FSB security service in Tatarstan, Alexander Antonov.
Also among the dead was a Briton, Donna Carolina Bull, 53, and a Ukrainian national, Margarita Oshurkova, the emergencies ministry said. The rest of the victims are all believed to be Russian citizens.
Despite his personal tragedy, Minnikhanov was at the scene of the disaster and overseeing rescue operations, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich told a cabinet meeting.
For unexplained reasons, the plane landed around 150 metres away from the main runway at Kazan airport and then exploded, with debris strewn over hundreds of metres, Russian state television said.
Images from the airport showed near-apocalyptic scenes, as fire fighters doused the unrecognisable wreckage of the plane with foam. Both black boxes have been found, Russian news agencies said.
State television quoted an air traffic controller at the airport, Kirill Kornishin, as saying he had spoken to one of the pilots after the first aborted landing and was told that the plane was not in a fit state to land.
NASA launches spacecraft to Mars
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« Why Does Hayden Want the Job? | Main | A Weekend Train Ride with Kurt Vonnegut »
The Establishment Man
by Trapper John
Kant's diary over at dKos on How Tim Russert Became Rove's Bitch is fascinating. I'm as interested as anyone in how a guy who worked for Mario Cuomo just 25 years ago could end up parroting GOP talking points with seemingly no compunctions about his complicity in the royal scam. But I think Kant's diary is slightly off. Russert isn't a shill for Bush. Russert is a slave to power and the Establishment. His only real god is respectibility.
Russert isn't alone. In fact, he's right in line with the rest of the much-derided MSM. Russert, like the rest of his caste, is merely following the parade down Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown.
The reason that the bogeyman called "The Liberal Media" exists is because for many years, the media was vaguely left-leaning -- just like Establishment Washington. When Democrats controlled Congress and the White House for the 40's and the bulk of the 60's, Establishment Washington was a pretty liberal place. And so was the Washington Press Corps, which attended the parties that feted JFK's Best and the Brightest. But beginning with the Reagan Revolution, the character of Establishment Washington began to change. More and more of the lobbyists were Republicans. It was OK to openly display avarice. Texan Yalies began to displace the New York Yalies. And sure enough, the Washington press corps began to accept the values of Washington's new masters.
They bristled when Bill Clinton showed up in town fresh from Little Rock. "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place," said David Broder -- the Establishment's Establishmentarian -- to Sally Quinn (who's even more Establishment than Broder). And Broder was right. It wasn't Clinton's place, at least not anymore. It wasn't a place of strivers, and it wasn't even a place of well-bred liberal intellectuals like Galbraith and Sorensen. It was a place ruled by an unholy alliance of Big Money and cheap grifters from the sticks like Tom DeLay. Which is why George W. Bush was like manna from heaven for the Washington Press Corps. He was a Texas grifter with a Big Money pedigree. He was, in short, the New Establishment. And Tim Russert loved him for it
Tim Russert came of age during the tail end of the Great Society, and he naturally believed in it. But as the Great Society gave way to the Gated Society, he effortlessly followed suit. It's just his nature. Forty years ago, he'd have crucified Goldwater and the GOP's conservative insurgents, all the while backslapping Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy. He'd have laughed at the punk beatnik kids protesting the war. He'd have been bipartisan -- he'd have gotten along swell with both LBJ and Rocky, and he'd have unbridled contempt for both crazy Gene McCarthy and that B-movie hack Reagan.
Ten years from now, Russert will lob softballs at Democratic nominee Obama as he campaigns to succeed President Gore. He'll mercilessly grill the GOP nominee on his opposition, in 2009, to Gore's wildly successful Medicare For All plan. He'll viciously attack anyone who questions Gore's peace plan in the Middle East, and he'll sneer at Grover Norquist and his loony anti-tax followers
Tim Russert is as protean as the streets of DC themselves. He will always change to fit the times. He will always be respectable.
May 08, 2006 at 19:08 in Contributor--Trapper John, Culture, Press and Media | Permalink
No, Russert doesn't care about respectablity. He cares about his home on Nantucket.
Posted by: Joe | May 08, 2006 at 19:38
I'm not sure what your commenting policy is here, but if I could just change the subject for a moment, I'd like to bring up Kos' piece in the Post over the weekend.
I have a few major problems with it. Don't get me wrong, I love Markos. I think he's one of the greatest things to happen for the progressive cause. But over the weekend he sold out in his column, and he treated his readers like rubes.
I've posted this at the right-winger Toby Petzold's blog, and posted similar thoughts on Atrios, but not gotten much reaction to it yet. Here is a snippet of my views on Kos' piece in the Post:
First, he blames dem losses on the wildly popular, brilliant, and competent Bill Clinton. Amazingly, he disappears the mainstream media’s role in our losses over the years - namely, the manufacturing of fake scandels like Whitewater, filegate, and travelgate, that hung around Bill Clinton’s ankles for all 8 years. I guess when the Washington Post gives you a platform, you’re less likely to admit that the Washington Post is probably more responsible than anything else in the political assassination of democrats.
THEN, it gets worse, because Kos actually PARTICIPATES in one of the old smears!!!!! Markos borrows one of their favorite smear jobs and USES it himself! Namely, that Kerry “voted for the 87 billion before he voted against it.”
Anyone who knows a goddamned thing knows that the statement by Kerry was perfectly true: He DID vote for the 87 billion before he voted against it.
There were TWO versions of the bill. The first version paid for the bill with a tax increase. The second version of the bill did not - it borrowed the money.
He supported the more responsible version - the version which did not pass because REPUBLICANS “voted against it.” And he then voted against the 2nd version of the bill, the more irresponsible version.
Markos INCREDIBLY uses this stupid RNC manufactured SHIT to attack Kerry.
Kerry lost because, among other things, he said some tone-deaf things. The fact that those tone-deaf things were often indisputably true doesn't really alter the point.
"Who cares about that," I hear you say, "I just want a candidate who tells the truth, and if people have a problem with that, the hell with them!" I hear ya, brother. The world would be better if things worked that way.
Posted by: Steve | May 08, 2006 at 20:24
i despise television "news",
including the "wise-man-in-washington" shows like russert's.
i have never seen a russert show (or chris matthews).
i did watch cnn
until the fakery of the iraq invasion.
reading in the weblog world, however,
i have come to feel like i know commentators liked russert.
my feeling is that you do not need any especially clever insights to make sense of russert's behavior.
- he is proof from criticism or any sense of obligation to the public (a newsman's obligation?).
-- he is part of a television production team.
-- that team decides how it can maximize its listenership for each show.
-- the russert team acts on their maximizing decisions.
thus,
there is no mystery about why russert (or matthews, or kurtz, or blitzer, et al) say what they say,
day in and day out,.
their comments and their questions and their guests
are a function of maximizing viewership.
it is a waste of time,
free advertising for russert,
to criticize his show.
better to :
-- refuse to comment on his shows (really, russert and his ilk are the premier trolls -- goading and exploiting)
-- pressure his advertisers and bosses.
russert is just another "politician",
like, for example, joe Lieberman.
the only thing a politician understands is
force that threatens his position of prestige and power.
so, too, with russert.
were bush to change,
or a new administration to take charge,
russert and his production would change on a dime (well, maybe a few mill of dollars).
Posted by: orionATL | May 08, 2006 at 21:51
I don't think you understood my point. Of course Kerry should have been more careful with his phrasing. Of course Kerry should have known that the republicans would take any opportunity they got to smear, lie about and misrepresent Kerry's words. And of course the majority of the American public is consistantly stupid enough to fall for the lies.
I'm not talking about the public. I'm not talking about Kerry. I'm talking about Markos. I'm wondering why Markos, to support his own thesis, went ahead and REPEATED that stupid criticism.
Quoting from Markos' column he says, "On the war, Clinton's recent "I disagree with those who believe we should pull out, and I disagree with those who believe we should stay without end" seems little different from Kerry's famous "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" line. The last thing we need is yet another Democrat afraid to stand on principle."
Clearly, Markos is leveling an attack against Kerry here in the same way that the RNC leveled the attack. He's ACTUALLY attacking Kerry for that line. He's not asking Kerry to be careful with phrasing. He's criticizing Kerry as IF the criticism did actually have substance. But clearly, anyone who knows a damned thing, knows that Kerry wasn't lying and that his vote stood on principle the whole way through.
I'm wondering if Markos will be able to continue to be one of the leaders of the progressive movement given the fact that he seems to have such an easy time rewriting history, and at the same time, attacking a fellow democrat (something he always criticizes OTHERS for doing), just to serve HIS OWN PERSONAL THESIS.
It was a selfish thing to write, and for once I'd like to see the pussy-ass liberal web deal with it. Take him head on for the stupidity of that paragraph.
Yes, your point is valid, but Markos could have pointed to literally dozens of examples where Kerry tried to carve out the safe, consultant-friendly middle ground on an issue and have it both ways. That's the real point, and it's about Hillary, not Kerry.
And Hillary, regrettably, suffers from this as well. I don't think either of them is guilty of lacking actual principles - far from it - but I think they both, for some reason, believe in the power of consultantspeak. Hillary will simply need to do better if she wants a promotion. I think both Democrats and the general electorate have gotten tired of this schtick, no matter who it comes from.
It makes me sad, because it's already happening, that the MSM will invite leading bloggers like Markos to be the anti-liberal liberal in their debates & that's all they'll what from them.
Posted by: Rita | May 09, 2006 at 02:01
Markos is too smart to end up as a Fox News Democrat, though. I think most of the leading liberal bloggers are, as well.
You excuse the fact that Markos rewrote history and say that "Markos could have pointed to literally dozens of examples where Kerry tried to carve out the safe, consultant-friendly middle ground on an issue and have it both ways."
If its true that he could have done that, then why DIDN'T he? Why didn't he use something TRUTHFUL to prove his point, rather than regurgitating RNC garbage?
I'm sorry, but I believe a true progressive politics must BEGIN with TRUTH, and we can't allow our leaders - people like Markos - to get away with the kind of sloppiness and outright fudging that appears in his column.
Later on, you comment that "Markos is too smart to end up as a Fox News Democrat."
If you mean to convince me that Markos will never become the type of liberal who smears democrats from the right, I somewhat agree with you. Based on the evidence from his column, it appears that Markos intends to smear democrats from the LEFT.
A smear is a smear. When we stand for truth we win and progressive values win. And we need to keep an eye on the leaders of our movement to make sure they don't engage in gutter politics.
One more thing: like I said, I only SOMEWHAT agree with your point about Kos not becoming a "Fox News Democrat". But remember, another well-known characteristic of the species we've come to know as "Fox News Democrat" is that they are self-interested whores. The smear for themselves and their own careers. They want to be invited BACK on Fox News after all, and they know what they have to say, while on air, to make that happen.
In Kos' column, I saw a little bit of his self-interested nature coming through. I saw it reveal itself in his attacks on Bill Clinton, who he seems to blame a lot for democratic losses through the 90s and beyond.
And perhaps Clinton does deserve some of the blame for those losses, and I don't mind hearing Kos' opinions articulated on the subject. But the attacks should have SOME proportion. And anyone who paid any attention at all during the 90s knows that the BIGGEST single reason the dems have been getting their asses kicked is because of this filthy anti-Dem corporate media.
As I said above, "he disappear[ed] the mainstream media’s role in our losses over the years - namely, the manufacturing of fake scandels like Whitewater, filegate, and travelgate, that hung around Bill Clinton’s ankles for all 8 years."
Remember: The Washington Post was a MAJOR DRIVER of these pseudo-scandels. You have to wonder if Kos' knows all this stuff, but pretends he doesn't, because, yes, he want's those editors to invite him back sometime.
On the finger in the wind bit:
Molly Ivins laid out the three things Dems should run on, and I see no reason why we should not insist on all three:
(a) Get out of Iraq, asap (and no attack on Iran)
(b) Public financing of campaigns, esp. for congress critters
(c) Single payer national healh insurance (Medicare for All will do nicely for shorthand)
It's not a long agenda and not enough, but it is a good list for this year.
(Other obvious thingie: the hollowing out of the U.S. economy, and the balance of payments deficit, the which is a sword of damocles suspended over the economy.)
Posted by: Paul Lyon | May 10, 2006 at 00:16
reads a bit different today, don't it? But change a couple of words and this could be a fitting eulogy.
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Not nearly there yet: Morneau on Indigenous ownership of TMX
Western Indigenous Pipeline Group CEO Joe Dion says Ottawa must deal with them first as they’re on the TMX right-of-way, but Morneau was non-commital.
Jason Unrau Montreal, QC
December 18, 2019 9:36 AM 2 mins reading
The fiscal update from Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s department talked up work on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion his government nationalized for $4.5 billion in 2018, but the extent of promised Indigenous ownership remains to be seen.
“We are in the process of discussing with Indigenous people the potential for their ownership…that potential goes right up to the entire ownership possibly,” said Morneau on Monday following the release of his department’s fiscal update
“But we’re not nearly there yet so we don’t yet have a sense of the interest. We don’t yet have a sense of which of the Indigenous peoples impacted would be keenly interested and capable of moving forward.”
Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s offer to sell indigenous buyers 100 percent of the project – an existing, operational 1150km bitumen pipeline and the project to twin it – three buyers have emerged.
These include the Western Indigenous Pipeline Group whose First Nation partners live on the TMX right-of-way, Project Reconciliation and Alberta Iron Coalition.
Additionally, Métis settlements in Alberta already affected by the oil patch say they are being left out of the entire discussion on future development decisions related to TMX.
The Post Millennial has spoken to each of these Indigenous interests previously, except Alberta Iron Coalition; all are bullish on owning the project.
Métis remain supportive of the pipeline expansion, but want more attention paid to managing cumulative impacts from development to date, before TMX triples the current pipeline’s volume of 300,000 barrels/day.
While Western Indigenous Pipeline Group CEO Joe Dion insists that Ottawa is duty-bound to deal with them first as their interests are directly bisected by TMX, Morneau made no commitments.
“We’re not far enough along to get to a conclusion on (indigenous ownership) and certainly not far enough along to get to any idea of whether one group versus another group would be involved in that,” the minister said on that question.
Adding some uncertainty to TMX fortunes are six coastal First Nations in British Columbia, who are at Federal Court of Appeal this week to argue the second round of consultations for the pipeline expansion were again, inadequate.
The Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations scored their first victory against the Trans Mountain project back on August 30, 2018, after the federal appeals court quashed original National Energy Board permits.
Within 24 hours of this decision, Kinder Morgan shareholders voted to sell Trans Mountain to the Government of Canada and Ottawa re-started consultations with affected First Nations.
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John Bassett – Unearth | Arcade Messiah
Article by: Bob Mulvey
I chose to review these two albums together, as not only do they offer two diametrically opposed sides to the music of John Bassett, but also a different slant on his work with KingBathmat. Of the latter, summer 2013 saw the release of the seventh studio album, Overcoming The Monster, which follows an ever maturing catalogue of releases which started back in 2003 with Son Of A Nun. I remember the album with fondness – an impressive debut and pretty much a solo effort.
Which neatly brings us to the first of the two albums from John released in 2014. After several band offerings, he chose to release his first solo album in March 2014. I’m not entirely sure why, but perhaps to enable himself the freedom and flexibility to explore different ground. If so, then in many respects he has accomplished this as Unearth follows a much more gentle and acoustic course than can be found on the KingBathmat albums.
What has remained intact is John’s observant lyrical content and his innate ability to pen a catchy tune. However don’t expect a collection of sugary stripped down pop songs, as although this is solo album, multi-instrumentalist John Bassett has added guitars and keyboards to flesh out the tracks. The final touch of an authentic band sound is provided by drummer Nathan Summers.
I have to admit the word psychedelic is a real turn off for me, especially when it comes to music, conjuring up pointless and meandering passages of music – best enjoyed with the help of some hallucinogenic stimulus. The P word is often attributed to the music of John Bassett, however what I hear in JB’s music may have traces of the late 60s early 70s, but it isn’t the overriding factor. What I do hear is good songs, sometimes quirky, often with a trick in tail, but for the most part, concise and listenable. This is amply displayed across Unearth and no better captured in the wonderful Survival Rate, which for me has elements of Supertramp lurking around in there, essences of the Canterbury scene, traces of The Beatles, Brit Pop (both eras) and a whole host more…
Unearth by John Bassett
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that Mr Bassett doesn’t fit easily into any pigeonholes and if I was to say that vocally the following track, Nothing Sacred, reminded me of Ted Turner and Andy Powell – you might get the picture.
Across the album is a cornucopia of rich vocal melodies, impressive harmonies and befitting instrumentation. There’s even an instrumental in the form of Kylerhea, with its sweet intertwining guitars and subtly layered organs and keyboards .
OK, returning now to the songs on Unearth and considering the nature of the lyrics, as quoted by John…
“The emotive songs of “Unearth” encompass and depict the dark substratum of modern life. Social engineering, existential contemplation, survivalism, childhood trauma, love & despair and everything inbetween.”
… it’s surprising how upbeat the music is. Time and time again this comes down to the rich layers of both vocal and instrumental harmonisation, adding sweetness to the more melancholic lyrics. With strong hooks and memorable choruses – it works well in my book. However it does make it tricky to single out any one song for higher praise than another. Even after listening to Unearth numerous times, each time I return and as the tracks unfold – I think “yeah I like this one…”
Let’s move forward eight months and Unearth has amply prepared the ground for John Bassett’s second release for 2014, this time under the nom de plume of Arcade Messiah. Yeah… and I won the National Lottery twice last week! For starters Arcade Messiah is an entirely instrumental affair and although this is even more of a solo effort the Unearth, with everything coming from the man himself, there is little to tie the two releases together.
I suppose the album cover (also courtesy of JB) might be an early indicator. Ah well, in for a penny, as the saying goes and cue up Sun Exile. First run through of the album and cutting a long story short here, it wasn’t until I hit the respite that is Aftermath that I thought – actually this may be different, but I’m quite enjoying this.
So let’s talk about Aftermath while we are here. Layers of clean guitars, form not only the melodic structure, but also the pulse. To this John underpins with keyboards, a repeating synth line and rising choirs. With its subtle, ominous overtones, Aftermath works well and also serves as a precursor to the opening of Everybody Eating Everyone Else. Briefly – and after a short lived atmospheric soundscape we are into a mesh of heavily distorted metallic guitars. Mercifully not in a million mile an hour riffamania form, but more in a densely populated, post rock wall of sound guise. Relatively simple guitar lines add a melodic sense to the visceral riffed guitars, whilst the symphonic keyboards act as the cement to the driving, oddly metered drumming.
OK this is a heavy album, replete with a dense wall of sound, pretty much throughout and offers little in the way of respite, with the exception of the previously mentioned Aftermath of course.
This may infer a lack of depth or creativity within the music, which is not the case. Traumascope, for instance, has a hypnotic quality created through the repetitive guitar theme(s), and although not live drums per se, they are well thought out and sound good to boot. Traumascope is a track that builds and builds. Similarly Your Best Line Of Defence Is Obscurity is cyclical piece which again pretty much bludgeons you into submission which is not a criticism, just an observation. What lifts the track is JB’s sense of melody, as increasing, pleasantly pleasing lines are harmonised and added into the increasingly oppressive mix.
Like most music, the more you listen, the more there is to find and hopefully enjoy, as is the case here and as I don’t come from a particularly metal background, Arcade Messiah did take a bit of time to sink in – but it did.
Both albums can be heard in their entirety on Bandcamp (linked here), so why not give them a whirl…
Like I said at the beginning, two strikingly different albums that would require a vivid imagination to tie to the same artist, however an amalgam of the two might offer a correlation to those more familiar with KingBathmat.
Unearth is an obvious choice for the KingBathmat admirer and those who have not dipped their toes into the waters of John Bassett. Arcade Messiah, perhaps not such an obvious choice, but one I feel sure this will open up other avenues for this talented musician.
01. Stay Away From The Dark (4:10)
02. Survival Rate (4:49)
03. Nothing Sacred (3:37)
04. Unearth (3:44)
05. Pantomime (5:44)
06. Kylerhea (4:43)
07. TV Is God (3:46)
08. Keep Dear (4:06)
09. Something That’s More Worthwhile (7:44)
10. Comedian (3:31)
Total Time – 45:54
John Bassett – All Instrumentation
Nathan A Summers – Drums
Record Label: Independent
Catalogue#: N/A
Main Website: John Bassett
Audio: Bandcamp
01. Sun Exile (5:35)
02. Your Best Line Of Defence Is Obscurity (6:48)
03. Traumascope (5:23)
04. Aftermath (2:52)
05. Everybody Eating Everyone Else (7:58)
06. The Most Popular Form Of Escape (4:56)
07. Roman Resolution (8:50)
Main Website: Arcade Messiah
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Tags: Arcade Messiah, Jonathan Bassett
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Do you speak Laval
Do you speak Montreal
The F Files
From hopeful single to desperate housewife
doing things that have already been done before
So what if it has already been done before?
11 January 2020 fduplessyLeave a comment
“It’s about taking chances, growth and overcoming.“
Last Sunday I had an interesting conversation with dear husband on the subject of doing things that have already been done before. That day, I’d just had one of the most productive afternoon (during which I edited a blog post The challenges of being an introvert. ) and tackled other content related stuff. Naturally, I just couldn’t wait to get home and receive duly praise:
Me: “I had such a productive day today! It felt so good to finally tackle some stuff.”
Dear husband: “I am so proud of you, honey! You’ve got this! You just need to keep going.”
Naturally, with such an overwhelmingly positive reception I proceeded to overextend myself by making grand plans to take over the world in the next 48 hours🙄🤯.
Me: “Thank you honey! I am also planning on posting more often say like twice a week and maybe add some type of style content to the blog. We’ll see!”
DH: Complete silence. The sort of polite and respectful silence you’d give a dying patient making plans for the future.
Me: “Hello?!! What do you think?”
DH: “You mean like a What I wore today kind of thing? Everybody’s doing that!”
Me: “Well, would you prefer I do a what I did not wear today instead?” I said frustrated.
DH: “Well, I am sorry for interrupting your world domination plans with a dose of reality but somebody’s got to be the voice of reason in all this!”
Me: “Right now, you’re sounding more like the voice of doom!”
DH: “All am saying is you have something good here so tick with it. Don’t chase too many things at once.”
Vexed and irritated, I retrieved into an honorable silence to lick my wounds.
The man does have a point considering I’ve been known for getting overly excited and then quickly dropping into sudden desperation. BUT on the other hand…
There’s absolutely nothing new under the sun. Most everything have all been done before and done to death. Should that stop you and me from engaging in something we may possibly end up loving? Certainly not! Easier said than done, I know😅.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to be original from the get go and find the right angle from the outside, so we should get into the habit of getting involved in things that interest us and cultivate them with no expectation other than learning and having fun. Detachment from the outcome is key here.”
Last but not least, we must remember that it hasn’t been done until we’ve done it (Insert smug and overbearing emoji here).
Fun fact: Sex is one thing that has been done and done to death yet this has never stopped anyone from indulging…🤫
What about you, dear readers? Have you gone through a similar thing? How did you handle it? Please share! Gros bisoux and talk soon!🐍😘
Lifestyle, Online journal, Short Storiescreativity, doing things that have already been done before, humour, life lessons, musings, originality, self improvement
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When we worry about… on Why my Instagram husband no lo…
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A YEAR OF NO GOAL: HAPPY NEW YEAR 2021
Do our dogs behave exactly like us? A dog after my own heart…
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The single fastest way to live more in the present
Culture clashes
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Obama, lord of the flies 9
THE LAW is the roof and the walls and the floor of the House in which we live.
Americans were given freedom under the law by the Constitution.
Without the law we would be unsheltered and our lives would become, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish and short”. (He also said that such a savage life would be “solitary”, but solitariness in a lawless world would be an improbable luxury.)
The worst thing that President Obama is doing to America, the very worst thing of all the bad things he is doing, is taking the law away from the people by disregarding it himself – he who swore to preserve it for all of us when he took his oath of office:
“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
He has broken his oath. He has set himself above the law.
As a result, first, it is applied arbitrarily by his complicit Department of Justice.
Second, he has given license to millions of Americans to break it.
Third and therefore, we cannot expect justice. We will have to fall back on our own defenses.
Victor Davis Hanson writes about this at PJ Media:
In the Ferguson disaster, the law was the greatest casualty. Civilization cannot long work if youths strong-arm shop owners and take what they want. Or walk down the middle of highways high on illicit drugs. Or attack police officers and seek to grab their weapons. Or fail to obey an officer’s command to halt. Or deliberately give false testimonies to authorities. Or riot, burn, and loot. Or, in the more abstract sense, simply ignore the legal findings of a grand jury; or, in critical legal theory fashion, seek to dismiss the authority of the law because it is not deemed useful to some preconceived theory of social justice. Do that and society crumbles.
In our cynicism we accept, to avoid further unrest, that no government agency will in six months prosecute the looters and burners, or charge with perjury those who brazenly lied in their depositions to authorities, or charge the companion of Michael Brown with an accessory role in strong-arm robbery, or charge the stepfather of Michael Brown for using a bullhorn to incite a crowd to riot and loot and burn. We accept that because legality is becoming an abstraction, as it is in most parts of the world outside the U.S. where politics makes the law fluid and transient.
Nor can a government maintain legitimacy when it presides over lawlessness.
The president of the United States on over 20 occasions insisted that it would be illegal, dictatorial, and unconstitutional to contravene federal immigration law — at least when to do so was politically inexpedient. When it was not, he did just that. Now we enter the Orwellian world of a videotaped president repeatedly warning that what he would soon do would be in fact illegal. Has a U.S. president ever so frequently and fervently warned the country about the likes of himself?
What is forgotten about amnesty is that entering the U.S. illegally is not the end, but often the beginning of lawlessness. Out here in rural central California we accept a world where thousands drive without insurance, licenses, and registration. Fleeing the scenes of traffic accidents earns snoozes. There is no such thing as the felony of providing false information on government affidavits or creating made-up Social Security numbers. Selling things without paying taxes and working off the books while on assistance are no longer illegal. The normative culture is lawlessness.
Amnesty, granted through a lawless presidential act, will not stop but only encourage further lawlessness. If someone has become used to ignoring a multitude of laws without consequences, there is no reason why he should suddenly cease, given that punishment for breaking the law is still considered a politically-incorrect rather than a legal act — and that even with amnesties it will still be far easier and cheaper to break than obey the law. Who will deport an illegal alien beneficiary of amnesty when he again breaks the law? Amnesty will be seen as both reactive and prophylactic, a waiver for both past and future behavior.
More disturbingly, we have engendered a strange culture of justifiable lawlessness: those who are deemed exploited in some ways are exempt from following the law; those without such victim status are subject even more to it. Executive authorities compensate for their impotence in not enforcing statutes for some by excessively enforcing them on others.
I accept that if I burn a single old grape stake that has been treated with a copper-based preservative, I will be facing huge fines by environmental protection agencies, whose zeal will not extend to nearby residents who have created illegal compounds of rental Winnebagos with jerry-rigged wiring and stop-gap sewage or who dump wet garbage along the side of the road. In the old days the dumpers at least used to sift out incriminating documents with names on them; now they leave them in, without worry over the consequences.
Our bureaucrats thirst for the single infraction by the law-biding citizen who can pay — to compensate for their impotence amid endless crimes by the law-breaking who are deemed unable to pay. That idea of redistributive enforcement permeates the entire federal government. …
Instead of being able to look to law enforcement to protect us, we now have to fear it as one of the unpredictable dangers that can assail us at any moment.
The problem with the Obama administration is that the government’s own bureaucracies — the IRS, VA, Secret Service, GSA, EPA, Justice and State Departments — have so serially broken their own statutes and lied about their misconduct, that it is now almost impossible to reassure Americans that they, too, cannot do what their own government sees as some sort of birthright.
The fuel of lawlessness is untruth. What amazes about President Obama is not that he occasionally misstates facts — every president has done that — but that he so serially says things that are untrue and yet he must know are so easily exposed as untrue. When the president on over 20 occasions swears he cannot legally grant amnesty and then does so, or when he swears he cannot comment on an ongoing criminal case when he habitually has done just that, or when he insists that Obamacare will not result in higher premiums and deductibles or loss of doctors and health plans when it does precisely that, or when he asserts to the world that a mere demonstration over a video caused an attack on our consulate in Benghazi when he knew that it did not, or when he utters iron-clad red lines, deadlines, and step-over-lines that he knows are mythical or denies he has done just that — when he does all this, then almost everything he asserts must be doubted.
We now live in an era when we expect a federal bureaucrat — whether the attorney general or the secretary of Defense or the secretary of Labor — to illegally jet on family or political business at the public expense, or the president of the United States to pick and choose which elements of the law he finds useable and therefore are to be enforced and which bothersome and therefore ignored.
For this administration, the law is a drag.
What separated the United States from a Peru or Nigeria or Mexico or Laos or Russia was the sanctity of the law, or the idea that from the highest elected officials to the least influential citizen, all were obligated to follow, according to their stations, the law. Under Obama, that sacred idea has been eroded. We live in a world of illegal immigration and amnesties, Ferguson mythologies, and alphabet government scandals, presided over by a president who not only does not tell the truth, but also seems to be saying to the public, “I say whatever I want, so get over it.”
And “do whatever I want”.
Let him streak his face with mud, beat on a primitive drum and dance naked round the fire. He is the lord of the flies.
Posted under Anarchy, Commentary, government, Law, United States, US Constitution by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Tagged with A lawless president renders the nation lawless, Losing the protection of the law, Obama breaks the law at will, Victor Hanson Davis
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Fear accompanies road to freedom
Uttar Pradesh, India - Ten police officers barreled down the road, some on motorcycles, others in a jeep, their sirens left silent so as not to alert anyone. Their mission: to rescue workers from bonded labor, or debt slavery, in India.
But when they arrived at the carpet factory, it was empty except for a man inside.
It appeared that the police were too late.
As the man was questioned, officers outside discovered five children and a disabled adult who had been ushered out the back of the factory. Someone had tipped off the owner, police said.
The police took the group to the sub-divisional magistrate office, where the children reluctantly told their stories.
"We start work at 6 a.m., end at 9 p.m. at night," the smallest said. In return for 15 hours of work, they received a food allowance of just two dollars per week. “My father is dead. So I am working.”
Post by: CNN's Sara Sidner, International correspondent
Topics: Life In Slavery • Solutions • Voices
Survivor works to help other victims
A 2007 CNN Hero, Tina Frundt works to save victims of child sex trafficking. She herself was a victim at the age of 14.
Topics: Life In Slavery • Solutions
'It's the person next door'
U.S. anti-human trafficking Czar Luis CdeBaca talks with CNN about the role of governments and businesses in fighting slavery and also the historical context of slavery in the United States.
"One of our big problems with this under-reported crime is to not only find it, but then recognize it when we see it," CdeBaca says. FULL POST
Saeeda Khan, seen here in 2004, is accused of overseeing travel arrangements that brought an African woman to London as a slave.
London court hears case of woman charged with keeping slave
London, England - A Pakistani woman went on trial in London on Monday, charged with keeping a woman from Tanzania as a slave.
Saeeda Khan, 68, is accused of overseeing the visa and travel arrangements that brought Mwanahamisi Mruke, 45 from her home in Tanzania to London in October 2006. FULL POST
Post by: CNn's Andrew Carey
Topics: In The News
Generations pay off debts through slavery
Uttar Pradesh, India - An army of workers, their faces encrusted with dust, toils beside a story-high pile of unfired bricks. They are helping build a new India that appears to be leaving them behind.
From sunup to sundown they spend their time pouring wet mud into molds, lugging them to the kiln, firing them and then pulling them out. For their backbreaking work, they do not receive wages.
They are working to pay off a debt.
In India they are known as bonded laborers, bound to those who gave them or their forefathers an advance or a loan. Human rights advocates call them modern day slaves.
"I cannot leave here unless I pay my debt," said Durgawati, a mother of three.
Topics: Life In Slavery • Voices
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Home / Products / Download / Cripple Clarence Lofton Vol 2 1939 – 1943 – Full Album
Cripple Clarence Lofton Vol 2 1939 – 1943 – Full Album
This CD Album (Physical Format) – BDCD-6007 – FREE WORLDWIDE SHIPPING $18.99
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Tags: BDCD-6007, Boogie Woogie, Chicago Blues, Cripple Clarence Lofton, piano), Tennessee Blues
Cripple Clarence Lofton; vocal, piano. Genres: Blues Piano, Boogie-woogie piano. Tennessee / Chicago Inforamative Booklet Notes by Keith Briggs. Detailed discography. Clarence Lofton was a well known figure on the bar and party circuit in Chicago by the time white jazz fan Dan Qualey, through the good offices of Jimmy Yancey, located him playing in a sleazy State Street bar called The Big Apple and convinced him to record for the Solo Art label around 1939. The records were well received, although his treatment of the sacrosanct Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie raised a few eyebrows and Clarence slipped easily into the role of natural, untutored (and therefore “pure”) “proto-boogiest” for the keen new audience of white fans who were attracted by his rugged style and insouciant disregard for formal structure. As well as the four issued tracks nine others were recorded and it is those that open this volume. “The Fives” appears as Sixes And Sevens (Clarence had both a sense of humour and ego) while Lofty Blues reworks the amazing, issued “Had A Dream” at a faster tempo and with a different bass line. It was in 1943 that saw Clarence’s last musical rally on record when he cut ten sides (eight issued at the time) for the Session label. The old numbers were still there, including two versions of Streamline Train and three of I Don’t Know, sometimes re-titled but still played with the rare exuberance that marked them as Lofton creations. In his own eyes Clarence Lofton was primarily an all-round entertainer (one much quoted observer described him as “a three ring circus”). His self-taught skills on the piano he viewed as just another facet of his own talent and the few descriptions that we have of him at work and his chosen surroundings show him as a colourful performer, drinker and a ladies’ man; far from meek but with the talent to back up any boast that he might have made. Above all he could communicate joy to his listeners and he still can.
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The Screen
The Fashion
THE FALLtv
Michael Kors S/S2021
Native New Yorker Michael Kors draws from what he know best for S/S2021
It may surprise some to learn that 2021 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Michael Kors label. No doubt there have been some challenges along the way that the brand and the man himself has had to overcome but, even so, it would be hard to deny the place Michael Kors has in global luxury fashion today. There’s a reason why Kors is now one of the premiere designers to the stars. Nicole Kidman, Tiffany Haddish, Reese Witherspoon, Lupita Nyong’o, Olivia Wilde, Dakota Johnson, Blake Lively, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Lawrence and Taylor Swift are just a very few of the best of world talent that he has dressed over the years. The main reason behind such a creative and dedicated fanbase can be seen in the new S/S2021 collection that debuted in New York on October 15th.
The Up on the Roof collection sees Kors, as an original Long Island native, take true inspiration from his New York birthplace and pour it all into an offering that sets modern, metropolitan city living in the summer alongside easy wearing, beautifully cut natural styles that recognise the importance of being able to breathe and feel comfortable in hot city temperatures.
I designed this season with more thought and more intent than anything I’ve ever done. We were all forced to slow down this year, and I think we all started to appreciate things in a new way—suddenly, a flower blooming, a beautiful sunset, a walk along the river, these were things that brought us hope. I wanted to look at nature and rebirth through an urban lens – Michael Kors, Creative Director.
The physical representation of those ideas sees generous silhouettes – like the simple knee-length shirt dress cinched at the waist with an equally simple belt, or the oversized ivory smock dress that skims just above the knees – and flowing fabrics, perfectly exemplified by the ice-white long, halter neck dress, or the bold pinstriped suit and over-long shirt ensemble. New York is not just tangential to the collection, it is at the heart of it. In recognition of this Michael Kors made donations to the New York Restoration Project community garden where the show was held, and to the South Bronx-based Renaissance Youth Center which provides ‘enrichment programs, from performing arts to sports to education assistance, that aim to empower at-risk inner-city youth and help them maximise their potential’.
Accompanying the new collection and outlook for next season, an Up on the Roof documentary was also commissioned. Narrated by Kors himself, the documentary features a guest appearance from Hollywood icon Bette Midler who founded the New York Restoration Project 25 years ago and explores the spirit of Kors’ hometown and the strength of the community he grew up with and around. All of which makes this much more than just another beautiful stop on the fashion train on the way to the next destination. This feels like a statement and an affirmation of the endless possibilities with New York in particular, and people everywhere in general. After all, as the song goes, “if you can make it here….”
For more on the Michael Kors Up on the Roof collection click here.
To get your own taste of Michael Kors’ New York for S/S2021 watch the video here.
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Watch The Federalist’s Live Election Night Coverage Here Right Now
November 3, 2020 By Jordan Davidson
For the first time in our publication’s history, The Federalist is providing you with a live look into Election Night with commentary from Publisher Ben Domenech, Senior Editor Chris Bedford, New York Correspondent David Marcus, and Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky.
Click here to tune in to our live coverage straight from Washington, D.C.:
Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
2020 Election election coverage Election Day election night The Federalist
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Trump leaves his party in better shape than his previous two predecessors left theirs, but the GOP is still at war with itself.
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The Franklin News-Post
3 pretty-yet-practical planners for 2021
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Bringing world-class performances to viewers nationwide.
Live From Lincoln Center broadcasts world-class performances from the stages of Lincoln Center into homes across America. The pioneering series has sought to democratize the performing arts, making luminaries ranging from Luciano Pavarotti and Beverly Sills to Emma Thompson and Nathan Lane available to hundreds of millions of viewers, collecting 17 Emmy and 2 Peabody Awards.
Live From Lincoln Center
David Lang's "the public domain"
World premiere of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer's monumental work for 800 voices.
Clip: S42 Ep1 | 46m 45s
New York Philharmonic: Celebrating Sondheim
Explore the dazzling orchestral world of one of America's foremost composers.
S44 Ep6 | 1h 25m 47s
Live From Lincoln Center is made possible with support from the Family of Robert Wood Johnson III, the Audrey and Martin Gruss Foundation, The Robert and Renée Belfer Family Foundation, Mercedes T. Bass, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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SIMPLE GIFTS Combo
The Chamber Music Society travels to one of the country's most beautiful historic sites: Shaker Village, Kentucky.
Buy the DVD + CD
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The Floating Cinema
In Dialogue
Sheffield - Hull
The Floating Cinema, Sheffield. Image: UP Projects
The Floating Cinema, Sheffield. Image: UPProjects
The Floating Cinema, Sheffield. Image: Jonathan Turner
The Floating Cinema, Hull. Image: Roger Moody
The Floating Cinema, Swinton. Image: Jonathan Turner
The Floating Cinema, Doncaster. Image: UP Projects
Between 1 July – 13 August 2017, UP Projects’ award winning mobile structure The Floating Cinema toured to eight locations across South and East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. Forming part of Hull UK City of Culture’s ‘Freedom Season’,The Floating Cinema presented its programme at canal-side locations in Sheffield, Rotherham, Swinton, Doncaster, Thorne, Goole, South Ferriby, ending its tour at Hull Marina.
The programme for the 2017 tour, titled In Dialogue, presented a new commission by Leeds based artist Harry Meadley alongside a line-up of films including international feature films, cult classics and award winning documentaries.
On the Bench, the new artwork by Harry Meadley was central to the overall programme. Composed of a series of eight short films, this context-specific artwork spotlights the nuances and creative diversity of South and East Yorkshire. Developed and created with participants living or working in the eight locations where The Floating Cinema toured, On the Bench featured interviews with individuals who articulated how these places influenced their identity and inspired their creative pursuits.
The conversations featured in On the Bench informed the line-up of the corresponding film and documentary programme. Focusing on themes of dedication, determination and perseverance, In Dialogue presented 15 International films and documentaries from 9 countries, screening a number of films in Arabic, English, Farsi, French, German, Italian Polish, Russian and Tuareg. The overall programme was devised in collaboration with the multiple partner organisations located along the tour.
Following its presentation on The Floating Cinema, Meadley’s On the Bench will be available to view here.
The In Dialogue programme hosted a number of events and activities, catering for diverse interests and responding to local demand. The events and activities programme was delivered in partnership with ten organisations based in the locations where The Floating Cinema moored.
On the Bench is a commission by UP Projects for The Floating Cinema. The outdoor film programme is devised in collaboration with Hull Independent Cinema. Events are delivered in partnership with Artlink, Crafts Council & Humber Street Gallery, The Ropewalk, Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance, Site Gallery, Swinton Lock Activity Centre, The Point and Yorkshire Waterways Museum. Presented during Hull 2017 UK City of Culture.
The commission and The Floating Cinema is supported by Arts Council England's Strategic Touring Programme, BFI, Film Hub North, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Canal & River Trust, Hull City Council and forms part of Hull 2017 UK City of Culture.
Harry Meadley
January - August 2017
UP Projects curates and commissions contemporary art for public places. We believe in working collaboratively with artists, communities and others to do this.
UP Projects
Clifton House
The Coalface
46 Clifton Terrace
London N4 3JP
info@upprojects.com
Commissioning artists Collaborating with communities Encouraging learning Activating public space
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Jim Ross Believes The Only Way The Brand Split Will Work Is If It Remains ‘Pure As Snow’
by: Joe Starr July 18, 2016
Taking a break from lambasting Jon Jones and having his famous calls remixed over awful NASCAR fights, voice of our childhoods (and adulthoods and inner monologues), WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross touched on the WWE brand split on The Ross Report, and bah gawd, said what we’ve all been thinking. As transcribed by Wrestling Inc., Ross believes that the best way to stick the landing on this thing is pretty straightforward:
“If you are going to have true brand separation, then one brand doesn’t exist to the other except in a very structured and promoted manner. I’d like to see the brands separated and stay clean, stay pure. And I really think that’s important.
“I’m really thinking that that’s how I’d like to see it structured, absolutely pure as snow and no crossover. And that way, if you could be disciplined enough in your booking and your creative, then when you finally integrate, it’s a big thing, it’s really a big thing. And slow the process down for God’s sakes.”
It all seems like common sense. Commit to your decision, give the shows their own distinct identities and as Palpatine says, “unleash the power of this fully armed and operational creative team!” Of course, WWE doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to common sense, but between a banner year of NXT, the Cruiserweight Classic getting off to an incredible start, and things like actual rules of how the draft works posted online, I really want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Here’s to hoping Ross loves the brand split as much as he loves the value of the Burger King Croissan’wich.
Topics: #WWETags: Brand Split, JIM ROSS, WWE, WWE brand extension
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Edition USA
Curve Dental launches Curve GRO
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This article is by Arun K. Garg, DMD; Gregori M. Kurtzman, DDS; Renato Rossi Jr., DMD, MSc, PhD; and Maria del Pilar Rios. DMD. MSc. PhD
Align Technology announced earlier this year that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared the award-winning iTero Element 5D Imaging System for commercial availability in the United States.
Many readers will be familiar with Craig Barrington, DDS, whose photography has been featured on the cover of roots a number of times over the years. His images also appeared in Endo Tribune along with an interview (see “The immense variability of human tooth anatomy,” Endo Tribune, December 2016, Vol. 11, No. 4, Page 1).
The AW-100 is an air-driven handpiece specifically designed for root canal preparation and irrigation. Its major characteristics, as described by Micron Corp., the company behind the product, are as follows.
Osseous grafting needs to be performed in some clinical situations. This may vary from socket preservation following extraction, repair of bone loss at the furcation, filling voids between the socket walls and implant when immediate implants are planned, sinus augmentation to treatment of exposed implant threads. These are managed by use of osseous particles, which can be allografts, autografts, xenografts or even synthetic materials.
Since 2000, more than 6 million robotic-assisted surgeries have taken place across multiple medical specialties, including cardiovascular, neurology and orthopedics. But surgical robotics have only recently been available to dentists.
Extend your front desk with digital tools from Simplifeye
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Newly Uncovered Emails Exposes FBI’s Failure To Record Four Clinton Witness Interviews
[Image Source: Misc YouTube Video Screenshots. Us4Trump Compilation]
Posted By: Lindsey Michelle June 4, 2019
President of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, and investigative journalist, Sara A. Carter, joined host Sean Hannity on Fox News Tuesday where they weighed in on emails from former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page which show then-FBI General Counsel James Baker instructing FBI officials to expedite the release of FBI investigative material to Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall in August 2016 just before the election.
Kendall and the FBI’s top lawyer discussed specifically quickly obtaining the “302” report of the FBI/DOJ interview of Mrs. Clinton.
In a new press release from Judicial Watch on Monday, Judicial Watch announced that they received 218 pages of emails that were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the Justice Department failed to respond to a December 4, 2017, FOIA request.
Strzok and Page left a paper trail that leads back to Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey and possibly, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
The emails also show the FBI failed to document at least four interviews of witnesses in the Clinton email investigation, reported Judicial Watch.
One email reveals that on August 17, 2016, Kendall sent a FOIA/Privacy Act request on “behalf of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton” to the FBI’s top lawyer with a request for “expeditious processing.” Baker passes this request to Bowdich, Steinbach, Herring, Page, Anderson: In my view, we need to move as quickly as possible on this, but pursuant to David’s oral request last night, we should focus first on Secretary Clinton’s 302…. Is the end of this week out of the question for her 302? Per JW. (Continued Below)
Tom Fitton said that Lisa Page “figured out” that there were at least four 302’s missing of interviews. “That tells you one of two things: either the interviews, they didn’t want to see the light of day, or they didn’t really care enough about the investigation to bother writing stuff down because they knew it was wired. Either way, it highlights the sham nature of the investigation,” he said.
He further noted that James Baker had a discussion with Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, advising him on how to get the 302 interviews and filed it the next day “on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”
“Hillary Clinton gets that 302 within 2 weeks. I tell you, that’s a miracle! We’ve been doing this for 20 years, ‘Freedom of Information Act’ work… The idea that a General Counsel of the FBI would help a FIOA applicant get this material, especially sensitive material, is extraordinary. And it shows you that the FBI, at the same time, was helping Hillary Clinton,” Fitton added. (Continued Below)
Sara Carter explained, “This is absolutely not normal procedure. Everything that’s been uncovered, time after time, with regard to actual documented facts.”
She went on to say, “This isn’t just hyperbole, we’re not just making this up. This is based on actual documentation from the FBI in their own words. You could see how far they went for Clinton’s attorney’s to expedite the 302’s, then not even have four of those 302’s.”
Carter mentioned Cheryl Mills, who was a witness that sat in on the interview, and said that the FBI didn’t record that either.
She also noted that Peter Stzok is going to play an “important role” because he was involved in the investigation. “More and more evidence comes out every day about his involvement. I think when people see Michael Horowitz’s report and find out what happened there, there will be explosive information– an avalanche of information that’s going to come out.” (Video Below)
“These incredible documents show the leadership of the FBI rushed to give Hillary Clinton her FBI interview report shortly before the election,” said Fitton. “And the documents also show the FBI failed to timely document interviews in the Clinton email ‘matter’ – further confirming the whole investigation was a joke. AG Barr can’t reopen the Clinton email investigation soon enough,” per JW.
The documents were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in a FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)) for:
All records of communications, including but not limited to, emails, text messages and instant chats, between FBI official Peter Strozk and FBI attorney Lisa Page;
All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Peter Strozk;
All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Lisa Page.
Read the full press release from Judicial Watch [HERE]
(Video Below)
(Related: Judicial Watch Lists Fmr. Obama Officials & Clinton Aides Who Will Testify In Their Hillary Email Probe)
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Group of truckers stranded at sea without hot water for three days near Dublin Port
A group of truckers have been stranded at sea for three days after the cargo ferry they were travelling on broke down in Dublin Bay.
The P&O Ferries ship, the Mistral, left Liverpool on Thursday morning but ran into technical difficulties and were forced to drop anchor near its destination of Dublin Port.
As well as the crew, five HGV drivers and around 80 unaccompanied trailers are on board the vessel.
One of the drivers, Przemyslaw Piotrowski, told Dublin Live he has no idea when he will get home to see his family.
He said: “They said they will try and pull us in on Sunday but they only tell us maybe.”
The drivers are being provided with food and drinks on the ferry but there is no hot water on the boat.
With night-time temperatures plummeting, drivers also had to be given extra blankets to keep themselves warm.
“It was cold but they’ve given us electric heaters for the rooms and now this room is not too bad,” said Przemyslaw.
“But there is no hot water, only cold, and that’s no good.”
The frustrated trucker had plans to spend time with his wife and children in Dublin and do some Christmas shopping this weekend but has been left angry that he has been left stranded with officials unable to tell him when he will get to go home.
“We still don’t have complete information. We’re told maybe we’re going tomorrow but it’s not 100% and we have no information.”
Our Irish Mirror Sports page – which brings you all your Irish and UK sports news – can be found here.
You can also check out our Irish Mirror GAA sports page.
The Irish Mirror Twitter account is @IrishMirror while our sports account is @MirrorSportIE.
A P&O Ferries spokesman told Dublin Live the boat will be towed ashore as soon as the weather allows.
He said: “Owing to technical difficulties and poor weather at Dublin, a freight ship travelling from Liverpool with five drivers on board has been safely anchored off the port since Thursday morning.
“The passengers have been provided with food and beverages throughout and the ship will be towed into the port by tugs as soon as weather permits.”
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Students With Medically Restricted Diets Struggle to Eat On Campus
Students find new ways to celebrate Diwali
Changing COVID-19 regulations impact students’ mental health
Senate Report
Alumnae Spotlight
Eye on Science
LGBTQIA+ Column
Wellesley, why can’t you meet our dietary needs?
The block system is a joke
Spineless nonpartisanship: how the Girl Scouts convinced me they no longer care about girls
Music Performance Courses Adapt to an Altered Semester
Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of “Rebecca” fails to deliver compared to its classic counterpart
“Dash & Lily” Find Love, Stranded
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A new kind of PE
Maintaining wellness as the cold sets in
Boston Sports Update
The Vegan Digest
The SHE Corner
Remote students experience existential crises; change class years in email signatures
President’s Column: The Butterfly Effect
Your next on-campus romance isn’t going to work out
The Artichoke
The Dose
The Olive Branch
By Antonia Rocchio News, News and Features, Outside the Bubble April 11, 2018
Outside the Bubble
Absenteeism on the rise among MBTA drivers
More bus drivers are not showing up to shifts, leading to an increase in canceled rides. After the disastrous winter of 2015, Governor of Massachusetts Charlie Baker pledged to greatly improve the MBTA, but this increasing absenteeism is causing cancellations to return to 2015 frequency levels after successfully declining in 2016. The MBTA runs 14,000 bus trips a day and 2.6 percent, or 360, of those trips are canceled. The goal is to complete 99.5 percent of rides in the city. Of those 360 canceled trips, 85 percent are due to lack of a driver. The attendance policy for drivers was revised in 2016, and talk of revising it again is receiving pushback from the Boston Carmen’s Union, which represents the drivers because it already places a stress on the drivers. In the meantime, Boston has hired 55 new drivers to help ensure that the 1,430 drivers needed to operate at full capacity are present. James O’Brien, president of the Carmen’s Union, thinks that this is not enough and that the MBTA should hire more drivers. Chief of Operations Policy for the MBTA Jessica Casey said there is no one solution to this problem, and it will have to come from a combination of different changes.
Bertucci’s closes its location in Wellesley
Over spring break, Wellesley students lost another dining option. Bertucci’s, an Italian chain restaurant with locations mainly in New England, closed abruptly on March 25. The restaurant had provided both formal dining and take out. Before closing, the restaurant had occupied its location at the Community Playhouse on Washington Street since 1989. The Playhouse itself closed in 1987. An executive at Bertucci’s, Christine Moscaritolo, said the closure was lease related, and the TD bank that also occupied the space has closed as well. However, if anyone is craving their legendary bread rolls, many other Bertucci’s locations remain open in the area.
Two iconic women stay out of 2020 presidential race
Both Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren were in Boston last week. At separate events — Warren at a town hall in Dorchester and Obama at leadership conference in the Seaport District — both women delivered the news that they are not considering running for president in the 2020 election. Warren explained that she is committed to her role as senator of Massachusetts and if she wins the upcoming Senate election, she will finish up her six-year term in 2024. Her active role as an antagonist of Trump and a strong female leader has made her a favorite among Democrats. Obama is the much beloved former first lady of the United States, but despite her role, she said that “I don’t want to be president; I don’t think I should be president; I think I can do a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.”
Mount Ida College will close and be acquired by the University of Massachusetts system
Mount Ida College, located in Newton, Mass., will close operations after commencement this spring. The College has had a tumultuous year after a deal to be acquisitioned by Lasell College fell through. The College will now be acquired by University of Massachusetts, and the University of Massachusetts system must acquire Mount Ida’s debt, and students at the college will be able to complete their degrees at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where, they have been guaranteed, all of their credits will transfer. They will also have on-campus housing there, most likely near other Mount Ida students. University of Massachusetts, Amherst plans to use the Newton campus as a satellite that would bring them closer to Boston. It could potentially be used for students taking a year to do an internship in Boston, for alumni to gather closer to where they live and for online classes. Despite this transition, Mount Ida accepted a group of first-year students to start in the fall 2018, and their website still has information for prospective students about how to apply.
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Two Beers deep
Thoughts From The Movies
Idiot Hour
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Heart of the Order
The 3: Greatest Miracles in Sports History
November 12, 2019 PMKRAFCIK Uncategorized Leave a comment
I was sitting my desk at work today, bored out of my mind, and came across a Reddit post that said, “what is the greatest sports miracle of all time?”
Well here we go, the three greatest miracles in sports history:
3. “THE MOUNTAINEERS HAVE JUST BEATEN THE MICHIGAN WOLVERINES!!!!!!!”
Michigan was looking at a run at the national title heading into the first game of the season against FBS Appalachian State. Wolverines Quarterback Chad Henne returned for his senior season in the hopes of bringing home a national title for the maize and blue.
Before the season when the schedule came out, some of the Wolverines asked head coach Llyod Carr when he announced the schedule, “who?” in regards to the first game of the season, which was against the Mountaineers.
The game was being broadcasted on the Big 10 Network, and it was the first game on the new network. Some of the major cable and satellite providers were unable to air the game as some of the providers did not strike a deal with the Big 10 Network before the first game of the season.
For some lucky Michigan fans, this was a blessing in disguise.
Having played awful all game, the Wolverines still had a chance to come away with the victory against an FBS opponent (at the Big House too, mind you.)
As Michigan lined up a 37 yard field goal, you felt the Wolverines were just going to knock it through the uprights, and escape with a victory on week 1.
But what happened next, was almost beyond belief.
2. “DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?”
It was the peak of the cold war. The Americans vs. the Soviets, freedom vs. communism, college students vs. the greatest hockey players in the world. The Americans had not beaten the Soviets in hockey in a generation at the Olympics.
Lake Placid was the setting, hockey was the game. The American team comprised of college hockey players, squared off against the greatest hockey team maybe ever compriesed, the professional Soviets, which included one of the best goaltenders of all time in Vladislav Tretiak. Tretiak was widely regarded as the best in the world, so good that the Montreal Canadians offered $1 Million to the Red Army for him.
But after the first period, the Soviets for some inexplicable reason, pulled Tretiak from the game with the game tied at 2, thus inserting the much less experienced Myshkin.
The Soviets took the lead in the second period, leading 3-2 going into the third, with the game still plenty in reach for the Americans.
In the third, after some sloppy defending from the Soviets, Mark Johnson ended up with the puck right infront of the net after a deflected pass and slid it five hole on Myshkin.
A few shifts later, Snider shot a rifle from center ice which Myshkin shaved, broke to Eruzione at the top of the slot after a rebound, and sniped it past the Soviets. The Lake Placid crowd went absolutely insane, and the Americans had to only hang on four a few more minutes.
“You’ve got ten seconds… the countdown going on right now, Morrow up to Schutlz, five seconds left in the game… do you believe in miracles… YES!!!!!”
1. “Leicester City… LEICESTER CITY… Are The Champions Of England”
Quite simply, it is the greatest sporting miracle ever. It was tough choosing between the “Miracle on Ice” and Leciester City winning the Premier League in 2016, but when I sat down and thought about which was more impressive, there was no doubt in my mind, Leciester’s was a miracle that somehow lasted for ten months.
Leicester the previous season was in 20th place with eight games to play, it was certain they were going to go down and be relegated to the Championship. They pulled off one of the greatest escapes of all time, and stayed in the Premier League for the 2015/2016 season.
Leicester manager Claudio Ranieri was the first name on the “Sack Race” list by the bookies over in England. What happened over the next ten months, is almost indescribable.
Heading into their game against Liverpool in the beginning of February, Leicester were top of the league and had a massive test against the Reds at the King Power Stadium. The cracks in Leicester were starting to show, and if Liverpool could get a result, you had to feel the wheels were going to fall off the wagon. Leicester winger Riyad Mahrez thumped a 60 yard pass up the field to striker Jamie Vardy (who would mix vodka and Red Bulls before playing games), hit it on the half volley and smacked in from 30 yards out past Liverpool keeper Simon Mignolet. I remember texting my best friend Jake, saying, “they’re going to win the fucking league”. It was right then and there, you knew they were going to do it. If you are scoring goals like that, you aren’t losing the title.
Gaining a point at the mighty Manchester United at Old Trafford, and with Chelsea drawing with 2nd place Tottenham at Stamford Bridge, Peter Drury uttered out at full time, “Leicester City… LEICESTER CITY… are the champions of England. And you have to ask yourself, how on earth did that just happen?”
5000/1 odds to win the league to start the season, half of the team was not playing professionally a couple years prior, barely staying up in the Premier League the season prior. It shouldn’t have happened, it couldn’t have happened, but it did. And you will never, ever, see anything like it ever again.
Appalachian StateClaudio RanierCollege FootballEruzioneHockeyJamie VardyKing PowerLeicesterLeicester CityMichiganMiracleMountaineersPremier LeagueSoccerTretiakUniversity of MichiganUSAUSSRVardyVardy Goal
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Who is tradies in business?
Warrick ‘Waz’ Bidwell…
began his career as a labourer to his father in their building business (well, it wasn’t a true business… his dad was self-employed and never got off the tools) and while he wanted to continue on and ‘get his ticket’ in building, auto mechanical or as a professional race car driver, Warrick chose university and a business degree and accounting qualification instead. In the words of his dad, “if you go on the tools you’ll end up broke and physically ruined the rest of your life”.
Fast forward 20+ years and Warrick has owned and run several businesses including a financial planning firm, accounting practice and for the past 12 years a business coaching and mentoring operation. Since 2014 Warrick has worked exclusively with ‘tradies’ to help them avoid the fate of his father and to inspire them to create true businesses that provide a solid income, time flexibility and choice.
Waz is passionate about changing the way ‘tradies’ are perceived and treated in Australia and is also determined to shift attitudes toward mental and physical health and the role these elements play in quality of life for tradies and their families.
He’s dad to Grace – an 8 year old nature-girl who still laughs at his jokes, husband to Amie – his partner-in-adventure and love of his life and Tradie Wingman to trade based business owners right around the country. With a sharp wit and a double-bodyweight back squat, Waz is out to change the world… one tradie at a time.
(or Coxie as Warrick likes to call her) is the daughter of a plasterer and quite literally, The Builder’s Wife.
With early experience in both the plastering business and her own building company, Nic has a long history in the construction industry.
After watching both her Father and Husband caught in the gut busting cycle of working in their business, she went on a quest to find a better way. Nic has been working with tradies to help get them off the tools since 2014, something both her and her husband have a great passion for, after all who goes into business to stay on the tools!!
Having owned 4 small businesses herself, including a construction company and managed several others, Nic is passionate about improving the lives of business owners and encouraging both personal and business growth. She has a strong position on mental health and assisting tradies and their partners and families avoid the typical pitfalls that contribute to the downturn in health and family relationships.
A ‘life coach’ to her combined family of 5 kids all in their adult and early teenage years, Nicole has experience in many of life’s challenges and is still smiling! Social media lover and blogger extraordinaire, Nic is excited to help you get off the tools and into real business ownership.
In today's 🎙 podcast episode, Waz and I are sha
Checking in from my imposed 3 day weekend, with 3
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Send it to us and we'll respond directly or maybe via the podcast, blog or Facebook group!
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Home Featured News First Tee of Triad now offering girls-only program
Featured NewsJunior Golf
First Tee of Triad now offering girls-only program
by TG_Admin01 September 3, 2014
First Tee of the Triad is offering a girls-only program for the first time in its history.
The new girls-only program is set for Sept. 13, Sept. 27, Oct. 11 and Oct. 25 from 9 a.m. until noon at both Tanglewood Park in Clemmons and Gillespie Golf Club in Greensboro. This new program is open to girls of any skill level who are between the ages of 7 and 17. Clubs and balls will be provided.
Ellen LaPierre, who has worked as a golf instructor for nearly two decades, is The First Tee of the Triad’s director of Eastern programming and girls’ events. A member of the LPGA since 1996, LaPierre coached women’s golf at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for six seasons. Prior to joining The First Tee of the Triad, LaPierre worked as a senior LPGA Class A instructor at Precision Golf School in Greensboro and as a rehabilitation technician for acute services at Cone Health.
“We are delighted to introduce our girls-only program and Ellen LaPierre,” The First Tee of the Triad CEO Mike Barber said. “Girls have been a part of our programming since we started our chapter, but sometimes, young girls are just more comfortable in an all-girls setting. These new programs will fill an important need in our region, and Ellen is the perfect person to run them. She will also serve as the director of our Eastern programming. Adding an instructor of Ellen’s caliber to our staff is quite a feather in our cap, and I am confident she will be an incredible asset for The First Tee of the Triad and the children we serve.”
“I am thrilled to be involved with The First Tee of the Triad,” LaPierre said. “Golf and helping others are passions of mine, and The First Tee of the Triad allows me to work with both. I have been teaching this sport for many years, and I look forward to sharing my knowledge with children throughout the Piedmont Triad.”
The First Tee of the Triad’s eight-week fall programs began Aug. 25, but limited scholarships and spaces are still available on Tuesdays at Burlington’s Indian Valley and Greensboro’s Bryan Park, on Thursdays at Greensboro’s Gillespie Park and on Mondays and Thursdays in Danville, Va. After-school programming is set for 4:30 p.m. until 6 p.m. For both the girls only and regular programs, registration and information on scholarships are available at www.thefirstteeetriad.org. To register for the Danville programs, visit www.thefirstteedanville.org.
First Tee of the TriadGirl's Golf
TG_Admin01
Troops First Foundation event at Old Town Club raises awareness, funds
Revival at Greensboro National
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Mnuchin and Powell back jobless aid, small business loans
WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Thursday that the government’s top priorities in any new economic relief package should be to provide affordable loans to small businesses and further support for millions of Americans still unemployed.
With the prospects for any new federal aid package appearing dim, members of the Senate Banking Committee pressed both officials to list improvements that could be quickly made in the nearly $3 trillion in support that Congress has passed to fight the pandemic-induced recession that has nearly 11 million people still jobless.
Democrats on the panel urged Mnuchin, one of the administration’s top negotiators, to work harder to persuade Republicans in Congress to raise the amount of money they would be willing to support in a new bill. And Republicans urged Democratic members to consider a lower amount that might clear both the House and Senate with Election Day less than six weeks away.
Mnuchin agreed that business loans and enhanced unemployment support would be good priorities for Congress to back in any new package.
Pressed to state what the top priorities should be, Powell cited providing more support through the popular Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses and boosting unemployment benefits. The PPP still holds around $130 billion that had not been allocated when authorization for the program expired.
The original relief package provided a $600-a-week federal unemployment benefit, on top of whatever jobless aid a state provides. But the $600 benefit has expired. Many Republicans have argued that amount was so large as to dissuade some unemployed people from looking for a job.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to provide $300 in weekly benefits, with states supplying $100. But that program has not been widely supported by states and has now expired.
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PNB fraud: Nirav Modi may face non-bailable warrant; top 10 developments
By BS Web Team | New Delhi | Last Updated at February 26 2018 11:47 IST
The ED will soon send judicial requests to over a dozen countries for obtaining information about the overseas businesses and assets of diamantaire Nirav Modi (pictured) and Gitanjali Gems owner Mehul Choksi. Photo: Reuters
Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi's overseas businesses and assets across more than a dozen countries are under the scanner of the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which will soon send judicial requests to countries like Belgium, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Dubai, Singapore, and South Africa for obtaining information about them as part of the widening of its probe into the Rs 114-billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case.
Nirav Modi, his wife Ami, and uncle Mehul Choksi have been summoned by the ED to appear at its zonal office in Mumbai on Monday. According to sources, if they skip the summons, the agency could approach a special PMLA court to get non-bailable warrants issued against them.
Modi has already had his luxury cars, including a Rolls Royce Ghost, a Mercedes Benz, and a Porsche Panamera, and imported watches, seized in the past week. During the weekend, the Income-Tax department seized over 150 paintings by renowned artists from Nirav Modi's warehouse located at Wadala in Mumbai.
While probe agencies continue to put pressure on Modi and Choksi, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) assured of an "accelerated inquiry" into auditors' role in the PNB fraud.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) examined PNB's Executive Director K V Brahmaji Rao for a second day in connection with the PNB scam.
Here are the top 10 developments in the massive banking scam involving one of India's richest men, Nirav Modi:
1) PNB scam goes international as ED expands probe to 17 countries: Soon, the ED will be sending judicial requests to over a dozen countries for obtaining information about Modi and Choksi's overseas businesses and assets. According to official sources, the probe agency will approach a Mumbai court with the request to obtain Letters Rogatories (LRs) to be sent to 15-17 countries. The agency has traced the footsteps of the firms owned by Modi, his uncle Choksi and others associated with them to these countries.
These LRs would be sent to Belgium, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Dubai, Singapore, and South Africa, among others. Further, official requests on the basis of agency-to-agency exchange will also be sent.
ALSO READ: Amid rising NPAs and PNB fraud, PSU banks face credibility crisis
With this exercise, the ED aims to obtain the details of Modi and Choksi's overseas financial holdings, their bank accounts, assets, partnerships, showrooms, trusts, and other assets. According to sources, the agency will investigate these assets and their sources of income. Subsequently, if needed, they will be attached under the criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
2) Non-bailable warrants could be issued against Modi & co: The ED has summoned Modi, his wife Ami, and Choksi to appear at its zonal office in Mumbai on Monday.
According to sources, the agency could approach a special PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) court to get non-bailable warrants against them if they skip the summons.
3) After PNB, lenders look to raise insurance cover: Worried over the spate of frauds that have hit the banking sector, banks are looking to increase their insurance cover against delinquencies by their employees. "Frauds of such magnitude and scale -- PNB fraud Rs 114 billion (Rs 11,400 crore) and OBC fraud Rs 3.9 billion (Rs 390 crore) — has forced us to consider substantially much higher risk cover than the basic banker's indemnity policy which various banks have right now," a top public sector bank official said.
ALSO READ: ICAI assures 'accelerated inquiry' into auditors' role in PNB fraud
For example, PNB had only bought a basic banker's indemnity policy, which covers employee fraud, to the extent of Rs 20 million (Rs 2 crore). This amount would not cover even 0.2 per cent of Rs 114-billion fraud allegedly committed by Modi, Choksi and their associates in collusion with officials of a Mumbai branch of the bank.
4) Govt revisiting plans for a bank holding company: With the PNB scam's fall-out leading to criticism from the Opposition, the government is revisiting its plans of a bank-holding company. Such a company would hold all of the Centre's shares in public sector banks and would raise capital for them.
Such a holding company was first proposed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the 2015-16 Union Budget.
5) Foreign lenders review counter-party limits on PNB: After ratings agencies Moody's and Fitch placed their earlier assessment of the state-owned lender under watch for a possible downgrade, foreign lenders have started to review bilateral sanction limits with PNB.
PNB, for its part, held a meeting with foreign banks on Friday. The scam-hit bank assured them that it was robust enough to meet any legitimate claims from other banks for the issued letter of undertaking (LoUs). Further, it said that it had taken steps to improve its risk management systems.
ALSO READ: Letter to BS: PNB's email to Nirav Modi exhibits a lack of seriousness
This development follows the Rs 114-billion fraud revelation at PNB, involving some of its own employees fraudulently issuing LoUs, a trade finance instrument, for entities controlled by Nirav Modi.
6) CBI questions PNB's executive director for a second day: On Sunday, the CBI examined PNB's Executive Director K V Brahmaji Rao for the second day in connection with the Rs 114-billion scam that has hit the lender.
Rao, who started his career in banking 35 years ago as a probationary officer in Vijaya Bank, handled the Mumbai zone, among others, in the bank where the crime was allegedly detected, officials said. They added that several other officers of the bank were being questioned by the agency as well.
According to the officials, the examination was focused on understanding how the crime was detected by the bank and other procedural issues and their violations. They were not being treated as accused, the officials added.
ALSO READ: Mishandling Rs 114-bn fraud: Letter to BS on PNB's letter to Nirav Modi
7) CII for hi-tech control systems, privatising PSBs: In the wake of the PNB scam, the Indian industry on Sunday urged for better and hi-tech control systems to check financial frauds. It also sought a gradual decrease in government holding in public sector banks (PSBs).
The government should strategically divest its stake in PSBs to 33 per cent in a phased manner and also adopt a twin strategy for tackling financial frauds, including better monitoring and supervision of banks and adoption of best corporate governance standards, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) said in a release here.
"The government, regulators, and industry must act fast to address systemic risks in the financial sector," CII President Shobana Kamineni said in a statement. "The three key solutions for the banking sector are better management and operational efficiencies, use of technology such as blockchain and big data analytics, and lowering government shareholding in public sector banks," she said.
8) 'Nirav Modi deposited Rs 900 mn in PNB hours before note ban': Hours before the announcement of demonetisation, Nirav Modi deposited cash worth Rs 900 million at one of PNB's branches, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MP Majeed Memon has alleged while quoting a report.
"When Nirav Modi left India, at that time it was reported that some hours prior to Prime Minister's announcement of demonetisation in 2016, Nirav Modi deposited Rs 900 million of cash in one branch of PNB, and he probably exchanged it for bullion or something," Memon told news agencies, adding, "I think that there should be proper investigation to see if there is any element of truth to it."
ALSO READ: Rahul Gandhi attacks PM Modi, asks why 'chowkidar' is silent on PNB fraud
9) Assocham bats for business lending: In the wake of the PNB fraud, Assocham on Sunday urged that business lending should not be allowed to halt.
The chamber argued that any pause in business lending would be demoralising and that it would set in among the top functionaries and employees of the state-owned banks, something the country can ill-afford at a time when credit growth was about to recover and the economy was set to grow at a higher pace.
ALSO READ: PNB fallout: Jaitley talks of tougher law to bring scamsters to justice
10) Surat traders hope their business won't be hit: Surat's diamond industry is hopeful that its business will not be affected adversely if banks tighten lending norms in the wake of the PNB fraud.
The demand for bank credit from small and medium enterprises involved in cutting and polishing diamonds is likely to go up despite the fraud, industry representatives said.
Read our full coverage on Nirav Modi scam at PNB
First Published: Mon,February 26 2018 11:47 IST
Prev » Amid rising NPAs and PNB fraud, PSU banks face credibility crisis
Next » Bad news for Gitanjali, PNB, OBC: Few scam-related stocks regain lost glory
PNB scam: Won't tolerate irregularities in financial sector, says PM Modi
Before PNB fraud: Nirav Modi, Choksi left 18 businessmen, 24 firms bankrupt
PNB fraud: Nirav Modi's art collection seized
Rs 114-billion PNB scam: Govt weighs bank's recapitalisation hike
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Category Archives: Vedic Times
Ana Lucia Alves, Vedic Times
Yoga Maya Entertainment
September 18, 2019 Ana Lucia Alves
A ‘New Wave’ for the 21st Century
As physicists try to uncover the base structure of matter, Yoga-Maya is working to uncover the profound psychological nature of cinema.
Historically, ’emerging’ technologies (eg. sound, color, CGI) have caused many evolutionary paths in cinema to be prematurely abandoned, leaving its true potential largely undiscovered.
This focus on technology – rather than movies – has left audiences uninspired and studios relying on marketing rather than content.
Cinema’s renaissance is about the magic of cinema; conceiving, producing and experiencing it. Yoga-Maya is all about this 21st century ‘New Wave’. Audiences are waiting.
Matthew J. Morreale (Director/Writer) and Ana Lucia Alves (Producer/Actor) are the hearts and minds behind Yoga-Maya’s vision for the future of cinema.
Ana Lucia left Brazil at 18 to travel the world as a top model. Some time later, following her true calling, she studied acting and produced documentaries and short films. She’s a polyglot, now running both Yoga-Maya Entertainment and The Vedic Times Foundation.
Matthew was born in Mississippi and raised in England. He spent many years living and traveling in Europe, soaking up the culture, playing music and writing poetry. Then, with the gravitational pull of a black hole, cinema devoured him. Check out his ‘Cinema and the Psyche Podcast’.
To see more please visit Yoga Maya Films
We’re now working on our ‘Art Club’ Movie,
a ‘micro budget feature film’ for Cinemas.
To #GetInvolved please visit Ana’s Patreon page
“Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone; it bosses the enzymes; directs the pineal gland; plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.” Frank Capra
More @ YogaMayaFilms.com
#analuciaalves#ArtClub#CinematicArtsClub#MatthewMorreale#thevedictimes#vedictimes#YMF#yogamayafilms
Chanting Yoga, Vedic Times
Why an AYURVEDIC DIET ?
June 9, 2019 Aradhana Devi Dasi
BECAUSE IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!
Ayurvedic Food Combining
For many, the concept of food combining—the idea that some foods digest well together while others do not—is entirely new, and somewhat foreign. But according to Ayurveda, it is an essential part of understanding how to eat properly, just as discovering one’s constitution and state of imbalance is important for one’s Ayurvedic self-discovery. Careful food combining can dramatically improve the quality of digestion, support the body in receiving a deeper level of nourishment, and positively impact our overall health.
However, most people in the modern world are accustomed to eating a number of foods that do not usually digest well together (like fruit with nuts, or beans with cheese). So why does it matter? The Ayurvedic perspective is that each food has a distinct combination of tastes and energies—and a corresponding effect on both the digestive system and on the body as a whole. Combining foods with radically different energetics can overwhelm the digestive fire (agni) and can cause indigestion, fermentation, gas, bloating, and the creation of toxins.1 This is why proper food combining is so important. Of course, certain combinations disturb the digestive tract more than others—an important consideration if this practice is entirely new to you. Regardless of your particular habits or symptoms, paying attention to how you combine foods can provide a valuable opportunity for insight, healing, and improved health. Remember, food combining is not about imposing black and white rules. It is one among many powerful Ayurvedic tools for improving digestive health and overall wellness.
A Balanced Approach to Food Combining
It is usually best to embrace the idea of food combining slowly and gently, allowing plenty of time to make the necessary adaptations. Some of the recommended adjustments are relatively simple; others can require a major recalibration in our habits, or be met with resistance. Often, simply developing an awareness of the improper food combinations that you eat somewhat regularly is a great place to start. Notice which foods you combine that may be difficult to digest together, and how often you indulge in them. Become aware of how you feel afterward. Do these choices affect your energy level, your digestion, your elimination, the coating on your tongue? Are particular combinations more noticeably influential than others? These are all important pieces of information. They can confirm the importance of proper food combining and can help each of us to identify the food combinations that are the most disruptive to our systems.
When you are feeling motivated and decide that you are ready to start adapting your diet to accommodate more supportive food combinations, consider tackling just one change at a time. Perhaps you’ll start by eating fruits alone, rather than in combination with other foods. Over time, you can gradually progress toward the ideal. While it would certainly be nice to avoid improper food combinations altogether, reducing their frequency can also be incredibly beneficial. If you do find that some specific food combinations are more problematic for you or your loved ones than others, focus your efforts on changing just those in the beginning. The most important first step is to become aware of your needs and your habits; from there, you can evolve an approach to food combining that works for you.
Combinations to Reduce or Avoid
The following list highlights incompatible foods and offers suggestions for more appropriate combinations. It is meant to be a helpful guide, not an exhaustive list. In fact, you may be aware of other combinations that do not work for your body. Honor those instincts. Because this resource is meant to help you determine optimal combinations at a glance, there is some repetition. Combinations listed in all caps are particularly challenging.
Compatible and Incompatible Foods: A List
Yes, some of these are staple combinations in many households. Pizza and a number of other beloved Italian dishes combine nightshades with cheese. And who among us hasn’t enjoyed beans with cheese at some time or another? Then there’s the fruit and yogurt taboo… So much for about 80% of all available store-bought varieties of yogurt; next time you indulge in a fruit-flavored yogurt, pay attention to how your digestion feels afterwards.In addition, there are some specific preparations that are challenging when combined with particular foods.
Supportive Food Combinations in Ayurveda
All of these rules can feel overwhelming, even irritatingly complicated. But, the rationale behind proper food combining really does make sense. Ultimately, combining mismatched foods generates ama , a toxic substance that is often at the root of imbalance and disease.2 But, for those of you who would like to understand a little more about HOW and WHY these food combinations tax our bodies, here are a few specific examples:
Bananas and Milk
Though commonly eaten together, bananas and milk are challenging to digest together because their qualities are so different. Bananas are heating while milk is cooling. That alone is problematic. Further, bananas become sour as they break down. So now our digestive fire has to process a sour substance and milk at the same time. Ever added a squeeze of lemon to milk? Or maybe you’ve poured a little milk into a tangy, fruity tea… only to watch it curdle instantly? What happens to these mismatched foods in the digestive tract is not much different. When bananas and milk are eaten together, their opposing qualities tend to smother the digestive fire and can disrupt the balance of intestinal flora, which results in the creation of toxins. This combination also frequently causes congestion, colds, coughs, allergies, hives, and rashes.2 A similar situation arises when we combine any sour fruit with milk.3
Eating Fruits Alone
The reason fruits are best enjoyed on their own is that fruit is usually somewhat acidic, fairly simple to digest, and often digests quite quickly. When fruits are eaten with other foods, there is usually a significant discrepancy between the amount of time required to properly digest the fruit versus the more complex food. Inhibited by the more complex food, the fruit tends to move through the digestive tract too slowly and can cause fermentation, gas, and bloating. In addition, the combination typically introduces a number of conflicting qualities into the digestive tract all at once, which has the potential to overwhelm or stifle the digestive fire.
Nightshades and Cheese
This combination is simply too taxing for the digestive fire. A nightshade is a common name for a member of the plant family Solanaceae, which includes potatoes, bell peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, cayenne peppers, paprika, tobacco, henbane, belladonna, datura, and over 2,500 other plants. Nightshades contain alkaloids, primarily as a means of defense against being damaged by insects. The alkaloids can be anywhere from mildly to fatally toxic to humans. As a result, diverse cultures around the world have long held an intriguing relationship with the nightshade family. Some have been used to make poisons, some contain incredibly addictive compounds such as nicotine, some are mind altering, and others create an incredible sensation of heat in the mouth.4 The bottom line is that nightshades contain a complex array of compounds that, once ingested, lead to a potentially dramatic cascade of chemical reactions in the body. Ayurvedically speaking, all nightshades are believed to be somewhat difficult to digest and to have the capacity to disturb the doshas. When we mix these inherently challenging nightshades with cheese—which is heavy, oily, and also difficult to digest—we can quickly overtax the digestive fire.
Beans and Cheese
Beans and cheese are similar in that they both tend to be heavy and are often difficult to digest. In order to break down properly, they both require a good deal of digestive strength. But, the similarities end there. Beans tend to taste mostly astringent and sweet, can be either heating or cooling (depending on the type of bean), and usually have a pungent post-digestive effect. Cheese, on the other hand, tastes predominantly sour, is almost always heating, and usually has a sour post-digestive effect. The post-digestive effect of different foods occurs once that food has moved into the colon; it affects the urine, feces, sweat and tissues—sometimes even at the cellular level. Two foods with distinct post-digestive effects are typically quite different from one another. This is the case with beans and cheese; when they are eaten together, they tend to overwhelm and confuse the digestive fire. Meanwhile, their combined heaviness makes them even more difficult to process, often resulting in poor digestion and the accumulation of ama.
Embracing the wisdom of food combining slowly helps us to cultivate a refined awareness around how our dietary choices affect us. This heightened sensitivity can be an invaluable asset, regardless of how quickly we are able to replace improper food combinations with more supportive ones. Be gentle with yourself, progressing at a pace that works for you. You might find it helpful, on occasion, to take a moment to reflect on how your digestion and your overall sense of wellness have changed over time. Proper food combining tends to awaken the body’s innate intelligence, so for most, embracing good food combining habits gets easier with time and practice.
Much of the information contained in this article came from Dr. Vasant and Usha Lad’s cookbook: Ayurvedic Cooking for Self-Healing. Our deepest gratitude to them both for sharing an enlightened understanding of how to eat Ayurvedically.
An Ayurvedic Approach to Losing Weight
The Importance of Healthy Digestion
The concept of agni, the Sanskrit word for “fire,” is rather essential to the Ayurvedic tradition. Ayurveda views agni as the very source of life. It is said that a man is as old as his agni and that when agni is extinguished, we die. Perhaps even more significantly, Ayurveda teaches us that impaired agni is at the root of every imbalance and disease. So the importance of agni in Ayurveda simply cannot be understated.
Thank you ~ Banyan Botanicals
#allweneedislove#anoasisoflove#ayurvedic#becausewecare#bethechange#care#caregiving#caring#chantingyoga#compassion#diet#joinus#loveandcare#oasisoflove#prabhupada#preventive#spiritualbeings#spiritualcare#spiritualpeople#spiritualworld
Ananta Sesa das, Vedic Times
WHAT IS KRISHNA CONSCIOUSNESS?
September 5, 2018 Aradhana Devi Dasi
By Ananta Sesa Dasa
The Vedic Times organisation follows the principles of Vaishanavism. Many supporters of the VTO are well versed in Krishna Consciousness; however, since the VTO welcomes every spiritual seeker, it seems appropriate to take a bit of time to discuss the history and philosophy of the movement.
Krishna Consciousness is our original spiritual understanding, which means that its history is actually as old as the universe. However, we will start the history a little more recently.
The Vedic culture (Veda means sacred knowledge) began in India over 5000 years ago. This culture is so named because of it’s spiritual and ritualistic adherence to the Vedas. The four Vedas (Rg-veda, Sama-veda, Atharva-veda, and Yajur-veda) were delivered to the people of India by Vyasadeva in order to make this most ancient wisdom available to all. The Vedas are very technical and difficult for the common person to understand, so other writings were brought into being as a way of bringing wisdom and truth to the less intelligent of society. These works were the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Contained within the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad-Gita, considered by many to be the Bible of the Hindus, but of course, it is really the Bible of humanity.
The Bhagavad-Gita tells the story of a conversation held between the great warrior, Arjuna, and Lord Krishna, the Supreme Personification of the Godhead. Taking the role of guru, or spiritual coach, Krishna carefully guides Arjuna towards spiritual awakening and full knowledge. This text is left as humanity’s instruction manual. Its teachings are simple and to the point, but sadly, human ego drove some to abandon the true message of Krishna Consciousness, and instead to manipulate it to serve their own sense gratification for power and wealth.
Because of this corruption, Lord Krishna entered the world. This time, he appeared as a devotee of Krishna called Lord Caitanya (1486-1534). Caitanya fought against the corruption caused by ego and initiated a spiritual awakening through the sankirtan movement. The sankirtan movement, which is the chanting of the holy names, is the simplest method of reviving our dormant Krishna Consciousness.
The teachings of Lord Caitanya have been passed down from guru to initiate for the last 500 years, which brings us to the founder of Krishna Consciousness in the West, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada (1896-1977). Shortly before his death in 1933, Prabhupada’s teacher, Bhaktisiddhanta Swami, instructed him to bring this ancient knowledge to the West. Prabhupada was finally able to make this a reality in 1965.
Swami Prabhupada arrived in New York in the fall of 1965 virtually penniless, but he was able to set up a small store front temple at the former Matchless Gifts giftshop on 2nd Street. From there he began to chant, give teachings from the Bhagavad-Gita, Srimad-Bhagavatam, and other important scriptures. Very slowly people started to notice, listen, and begin to follow the teachings from this spiritual coach. As the 60s moved on, and with the help of some prominent figures such as Allen Ginsberg and George Harrison, the movement grew in popularity and attracted many followers. (It attracted our own Gurudas in 1967).
During the final years of his life, Prabhupada travelled around the world 14 times and wrote over 50 books. He worked tirelessly to make Krishna Consciousness the world-wide movement that it is today.
The basic philosophy of Krishna Consciousness begins with the idea that we are not the physical bodies that we believe we are. Material conditioning has made us accept many falsehoods. Instead, we are spirit soul, which is part and parcel of Krishna.
In the beginning, humans existed in their original constitutional position, as the appendages of God. There was no sense of ego or desire to become anything more. We simply served the Lord and fulfilled His Divine Will. However, as time went on, a false ego developed within humans. This ego insisted that mankind was not just an appendage of God, but rather was its own person. With that mentality, desire for sense gratification developed and grew.
The created world had so many allurements, beauty, sex, wealth, power, entertainments, and so forth, that humanity forgot its true nature. As a result, we spent our time seeking these allurements and trying to find happiness within them. Of course, this is impossible. Any happiness found in this world is temporary, and when it is gone, it leaves a gap that brings misery. Suffering is the common state of existence for one who has forgotten one’s true nature.
True happiness can only be found in the eternal, which means letting go of all our temporary attachments and surrendering to Krishna. By doing so, we may return to our original constitutional positions as servitors of the Lord and find genuine happiness through that service. But how do we do this?
Lord Caitanya taught that the easiest method for reviving our dormant Krishna Consciousness, our love of Krishna and understanding of our true self, was through the chanting of the Holy Names of God. Within the Vedic traditions, the name of God, the image of God, or anything else associated with God is identical to God. So, when we chant the names of God, we are bringing Him into our presence.
The greatest desire of humanity is to see and know God. “I really want to see you Lord,” George Harrison sang in My Sweet Lord. There is a great deal of doubt and skepticism in this world about the existence of God, even from so-called believers. Like Doubting Thomas, they want proof, but it seems no proof is forthcoming. Another line from Harrison; however, says “it won’t take long my Lord”. This is acknowledgement that if one begins the process of chanting the Holy Names that one will quickly experience God and have the proof that is desired. One will soon be in the presence of God.
The Maha-Mantra
The chanting that Lord Caitanya spoke of is called the Maha-Mantra (the Great Mantra). It is comprised of three of the names of God: Hare, Krishna, and Rama.
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Rama Rama, Hare Hare
Hare is the spiritual energy of God, and also represents the feminine aspect of the divine as Radha. Krishna, a name that implies universal attraction, is the Supreme Personification of the Godhead. Rama, who entered the world in human form, is the supreme enjoyer. It is through Him that we find true happiness. (Readers from a Christian background may find a strong similarity to the Trinity. Krishna would equate to God the Father, Rama to God the Son, and Hare as the Holy Spirit.)
Lord Caitanya taught that a devotee of Krishna should chant this mantra on a string of japa beads (similar to a rosary). The string contains 108 beads, and one chants the mantra once on each bead. After 108 times, one round of japa is completed. Caitanya advised that one should chant 64 rounds each day. In this way, the mind would constantly be focused upon Krishna to the exclusion of everything else. Recent spiritual guides, such as Srila Prabhupada, have lessened the number to 16 rounds per day due to the pressures and duties of modern life.
The key point is to ensure that one is constantly thinking of Krishna. The process of Bhakti-yoga requires that one offer devotional service to the Lord with love. So, one’s actions should be directed toward the service of the Lord and one should always be thinking of the Lord. In this way, one will remember and regain one’s original position as servitor of the Lord, and not be bothered by suffering from the illusions of the material world.
#allweneedislove#anoasisoflove#awakening#becausewecare#care#caregiving#compassion#enlightement#give#loveandtrust#preventive#spiritualbeings#spiritualpeople#spritualpeoples#thevedictimes#vedictimes#yoga#yogaoflove#yogaretreat
Vedic Times
Geopathic Stress & Earth Acupunture
April 16, 2018 Aradhana Devi Dasi
by Andre Motuz (BScHons, LicAc, MBAcC)
Geopathic Stress (GS) is the phenomena whereby subterranean running water and Earth Grids (Curry/Hartman) can negatively influence the health of nearby inhabitants.
Earth Acupuncture and consultation regarding placements of sitting or sleeping areas form just part of my survey, the result of which can aid in the dispersing of GS and the subsequent relief from illness.
Geopathic stress survey includes:
Geopathic stress & dowsing
Water lines & grids crossing – visual
Non-physical phenomena
Hartman Grid
Curry & other grids
Feng-shui & Vastu
Case history & Predecessor debris
Remedial measures
A Geopathic stress consultation includes:
1. Assessment of local Geopathic stress. This entails dowsing for polluted underground streams and energetic grids in and around the house using the Von Pohl scale 0-16. Negative influences can then be dissipated with Earth Acupuncture.
2. Energetic assessment for elementals, spirits and other non-physical energies. The environment can then be carefully harmonised for natural healthy human co-habitation.3. Suggestions for the alteration of the environment utilising remedies from Feng-Shui/Vastu and Yoga
Object 1: Various effects of underground water veins as illustrated by Dr. Joseph Kopp
The term Geopathic Stress is used to describe negative energies, also known as ‘harmful earth rays’, which emanate from the earth and cause discomfort and ill health to those living above.(1-4)
Earth energies can be bad, good or neutral. The word ‘geopathic’ is derived from the Greek words, ‘Ge’ meaning ‘the Earth’, and ‘pathos’ meaning ‘disease’ or ‘suffering’, so literally ‘suffering of the Earth’.
The surface of the earth is woven with a pattern of etheric threads identical in energy and importance to the acupuncture meridians of the human body.
These are responsible for the health and growth of the natural kingdoms of the landscape, and any interruption to their strength and harmonious flow has subtle but profound effects upon the health of the local natural life. (5,6)
The resulting etheric disharmony manifests as a lowered quality of the local natural life forces, often through the medium of what have been known in European geomancy as ‘Black Streams’. These are local capillary meridians of energy and information field flowing with underground water veins that have become toxic, whose yin-yang balance have been distorted on the side of excessive yin, i.e. stagnation. (7-9)
This is often a result of local landscape trauma along their path, maybe even be some miles away. Ascendance of degenerative over generative and regenerative influences on humans and animals occurs in places lying directly over such streams. (10-14)These bad streams are known in the Feng Shui tradition as channels of underground ‘Sha’, toxic energy. (15-18)
Just as local geology determines the local soil and vegetation, and therefore the whole natural ecology of an area, so it also affects human consciousness. (19-21)
Underground water streams, even when not ‘black’ or ‘Sha-bearing’, and geological faults are known to have an effect on the geomagnetic, ionising radiation, and etheric fields around them. (22-24)
As the Earth rotates on its axis, it functions as an electro-magnet generating electrical currents in the molten metals found within its core, and an electromagnetic field on the surface which oscillates at an average frequency of 7.83 Hz, and as German scientist Hans Burger – who had developed first EEG machine – discovered that this frequency is almost identical to the range of human Alpha brainwaves. (25)
Life on earth has evolved with this background magnetic field, and creatures are accustomed to living within its presence and are able to cope with the slight fluctuations over time caused by electrical storms and the sun’s activity.
German physicist W.O. Schumann identified and published detailed explanation of this frequency in 1952 and it has become known as Schumann Resonance (7.83 Hz). (26,27)
Geopathic stress (GS) represents a distortion of this natural frequency (Schumann Resonance) by alteration of electromagnetic fields created by streams of water flowing underground, geological fault lines, underground caverns, and certain mineral deposits (notably coal, oil, and iron). For example, where natural Earth’s vibration of 7.83 Hz crosses a water vein 200 – 500 feet below ground, Geopathic ‘stress lines’ vibrating at up to 250 Hz can be created. (28-30)
Any distortion of natural Schumann waves creates a stress with the potential to weaken the immune system of any mammal living above the distortion, leading to greater susceptibility to viruses, bacteria, parasites, environmental pollution, degenerative disease, and a wide range of health problems. (31,32)
Man-made disturbances to the earth’s surface can give rise to further distortions. Examples include canal, railway and road cuttings and embankments, bridges, tunnels, quarries, mines and underground bunkers, sewers, drains, buried utility pipes and wires, dockyard pilings, metal fence posts and road-sign poles; building foundations, particularly taller buildings with steel pilings, ground-levelling and excavations; as well as artificially created electromagnetic fields from overhead or underground cables and electricity-generating stations and sub-stations. (33-35)
Many dowsers use a 0 – 16 scale known as the Von Pohl scale (after its originator) to measure the strength of geopathic stress, in which 0 represents the healthy 7.83 Schumann frequency, and 16 an extremely strong locus corresponding to 250 Hz. (36,37)
For example, people who are sleeping on a GS locus of 9 or more (perhaps a combined score from the presence of several geopathic features) are likely to develop cancer (38,39)
Clients will often report, that in a certain room, things are constantly getting broken or arguments starting, this is clear evidence of Geopathic stress. A much lower scale perhaps but still disruptive. Other signs of lower scale Geopathic stress include irritation, anxiety depression and restless sleep. (40-43)
It is of great importance to dowse the area where one sleeps for water lines which could be energetically polluted (Sha streams), if discovered it is vital to clean the water stream but ultimately it is best to move the bed completely. (44,45)
Object 2: Examples of grid crossing with water lines and resulting illnesses
Object 3: Grids crossing with underground water lines – Scott-Morley A., JAM, 1985
This complex example shows an extreme possibility of geopathic stress. The bed is situated over a negative intersection of the Curry Grid which happens to coincide with a negative intersection of the Hartmann Net. Below the bedroom are two underground streams which cross. Thus, the bed is over an extremely yin geopathic area. Over a period of time the occupant would have a high probability of developing cancer (69)
Astral projection is easier and stronger along the paths of ley-lines. Vampirism is associated with the discharging energy fields and poltergeist phenomena and other materialisations with the charging field zones. Any geomagnetic disturbance is mirrored on every plane. (46,47)
Hauntings of earth-bound human ghosts and other entities, including poltergeist activity are invariably tied to negative earth energies. The relationship between haunted houses and ley-line crossings is well known. (48,49)
Ghost, spirit release and exorcism performed without attention to cleaning up the local earth energies can sometimes result in a new crop in the next day. (50,51)
Dislocated nature spirits and disturbed landscape entities can also hold trauma to the earth’s etheric web within the landscape, and are often the bearers of emotion (apathy, grief, fear, anger, etc.) in the atmosphere of a place (52-54)
The ancient eastern sciences of Feng-Shui and Vastu as well as western Druidic and Shamanic cultures speak of the energetic dis-integration of the levels of spirit, either after death or during heightened times of shock, abuse or unusual spiritual or physical emergencies. There is strong evidence drawn from a variety of case studies that demonstrate a relationship between such breakdowns in the layers of intrinsic life force and serious health abnormalities and disease. (55-58)
Obsessive behaviour, extreme emotion, trauma and addiction are often attributed to some form of energetic debris that can attach to such corresponding vibrations. This debris can often be related to trauma connected to the land, properties or vibrations from the surrounding area. (59,60)
A practitioner of Geomancy will teach the skills whereby a client can positively transform their local environment by effectively managing the energetic vibration. (61,62)
1. THE HARTMAN GRID
This was described by Dr Ernst Hartmann in the 1960’s. The network appears as a structure of radiations rising vertically from the ground like invisible radioactive walls. From north to south they are 25cm. wide and encountered at constant intervals of 2m., while from east to west they are 15cm. wide and the distance apart varies according to latitude from 1.2m. in Reykjavik, Iceland (63.36°N) to 2.06m. In Ried, Switzerland (40.50°N). (63)The north – south rays are Yin and linked to humidity, cramps and all forms of rheumatism. The east – west rays are Yang and linked to inflammations.Where ever two rays cross – a “Hartmann Knot”, a geo-pathogenic point is found.
The intensity of these lines increases three to four-fold at night when there are less free ions, just as radio waves are received better at night. Twenty-four hours before the arrival of an atmospheric low pressure zone, a 100% increase of gamma rays is found (up to 300% on volcanic soil) on the knots.
Twelve hours before an earthquake the thickness of the ray triples: beside the central ray appear two other weaker rays to left and right which are not normally detectable. At this time dogs howl, birds flutter madly in their cages, some cats hide under the quilt, and some people feel sick or need to sleep. During an earthquake the Hartmann network becomes twisted and distorted, but is restored half an hour later to symmetry.
Dr Hartmann suggested that both Curry and Hartmann lines are earthing grids for cosmic rays that can be distorted by other energies such as those coming from a geological fault. This network penetrates everywhere in dwellings or on open ground, but Blanche Merz has found the grid to be pushed outside certain sacred structures such as the Egyptian pyramids and temples and Himalayan Buddhist stupas, creating a dense protective wall composed of up to seven rays around the perimeter, and a ray-free interior. (66)
Object 4: Example of Hartmann grid (Between these geometric lines lies a neutral zone)
Curry Grid
This grid, described by Wittman and Curry in the 1970’s, has much in common with the Hartmann grid, but is oriented 45° from north. The south-west to north-east grid lines repeat every 2.36m, and the south-east to north-west lines every 2.7m. The lines are approximately 75cm. wide, with medically significant double negative lines repeating every 50m. (67)The double negative crossings are associated with sleep disturbances, depression and other nervous reactions, inflammations and rheumatic diseases; and also with the sites of stocks and pillories, and hellebore plants. Double positive crossings encourage enhanced cell enlargement and proliferation, even to the point of cancerous growth. (68)
Other grids
There are a series of other such grids detectable by dowsing, which can display beneficial as well as deleterious crossing points. The experience of the Fountain Groups (groups directing spiritual healing into the etheric landscape at the local or borough scale) has been that the dominant grids related to human consciousness can change with respect to strength, scale and conformation over time.
Object 5: Example of Curry grid (Dr. G. Schneck, BSD Journal, June 1995)
The ‘Vastu Purusha’ or the ‘Embodiment of energetic vibration’ is what is sometimes referred to in the west as the good vibes or nice spirit of a house or home. If the embodiment is good or the energy is rightly placed, then it can contribute to the health and well-being of the inhabitants. (70,71)
If clutter is accumulating around the ‘finance area’ of one’s room or house it will indicate a constant financial struggle to the trained eye of the Practitioner.Feng-Shui also places great emphasis on the placement of entrances, seating areas, bedrooms and empty spaces. Decorations, clutter and the arrangements of electrical equipment for instance can also impact on energies and how they are locked in time and space. All of these factors are crucial to the health of those residing in these spaces. (72,73)
It would be expected that after a treatment for illness or a health consultation, that a client would see some improvement in condition, perhaps three steps forward. Very often though once the client returns to his everyday or home environment there follows an unfortunate two steps backward and this is because of the very close co-relationship between the local Earth Pathology, the clients house and the very health of that client. (74)
According to Feng-Shui – houses play an important role in our lives, they have function, they have purpose and like a library serves study and a department store serves shopping, a house will serve the security and comfort of home life.
The location, surroundings, layout and contents of this nest can have a profound influence on the health wealth and happiness of its residents, a truth that is most unfortunately lost to the west. The microcosm of one’s house can reflect into the macrocosm of one’s world. (75,76)
A colleague, Vastu Practitioner and Geomancer lived in cul-de-sac for 15 years, they noticed that one particular house down the road was never occupied for long and was regularly resold.
From the local community, it was discovered that the house always attracted couples but that the couples would split or divorce after living together there. In the space of 15 years 5 couples had split or divorced, some within months of arrival.To make the connection between these events and the positioning and layout of the house may come as a surprise to the layman but not at all to the trained eye of those qualified in Feng Shui, Vastu or Shamanic Geomancy. (77)
Further Examples of Geopathic disharmony and predecessor debris:
– part of property built at different time
– original aim of the land not being honoured
– energetic debris from previous owner
– karmic debt of land or owners
– disharmony or curses from neighbours or others
– inappropriate locations of entrances or toilets or other architectural faults
Earth acupuncture is one of the most essential tools that can be used in curing local grids and polluted streams. However, the discharging of pollution in difficult cross-lines and grids through placement of permanent objects, is another useful means. (78,79)
The building in of features incorporating the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and wood (Flowers and plants, candle, incense, water feature, wind chimes, sound features, colour changes etc) can go a long way to co-create local balance. This is standard practice in Feng Shui. (80)
Wood and plastic will conduct energy differently; photographs of nature and family carry energetic potency; mirrors can be conflicting or suitable depending on placement; statues, emblems or totems of war or dead animals as highly unsuitable in most environments; water features stimulate growth in one place and impairment in other. These are all very important considerations.
It is a useful practice to identify the various sectors of the house, those that relate to relationship, business or communication for instance. Then to maintain a deep awareness of their significance and to consciously alter the areas appropriately, the result being that intentionally and subconsciously, change can begin to occur in the energies of the household, a type of self-induced hypnosis in relation to the living environment. (81-84)Ancient practices in the East often used Yantras and Mantras.
A Yantra is a geometrical structure which holds a certain vibration. It is sacred sound incarnated into an image or form; it has the potency to affect the vibration of the environment in which it is placed.
Mantras are the chanting and invoking of sacred sound vibration. One can set up an area in the home or an altar, for meditation or connection with the divine. (85,86)Techniques for raising one’s vibration to a level higher than that of the known pathologies, is an esoteric practice that is one of the best-known secrets in many traditions of yoga and tantra.
Historically, numerous schools of alchemy famed for creating gold were actually in the business of transforming ego into spirit to manifest a real and lasting purity of heart. (87-89)For a long time, the so-called progress of technology and development has left mankind out of touch with nature, the land around us, even our own bodies and the resulting disharmony of spirit has led to the widespread development of poor health and disease.
Not a moment too soon, some of this ancient knowledge is being re-discovered, sound vibration can actually transform life, illness and everything we know, an example being bio-resonance and frequency generating impulses that are shattering cancer. (90-96)
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https://erdmagnetfeld.pimath.de/global_grids.html
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Dubost G., et al, 2013, Morphological transformation of human cancer cells and microtubules caused by frequency specific pulsed electric fields broadcast by an enclosed gas plasma antenna, Proceedings – 7th International Workshop on Biological Effects of EM
Holland A., 2015, Cell Fragmentation and Inhibition of Proliferation of Human Leukemia Cells! In Vitro by Frequency-Specific Amplitude Modulated RF Pulsed Plasmas, Novobiotronics
Zimmerman J.W., et al, 2012, Cancer cell proliferation is inhibited by specific modulation frequencies, British Journal of Cancer
Barbault A., et al, 2009, Amplitude-modulated electromagnetic fields for the treatment of cancer: discovery of tumor-specific frequencies and assessment of a novel therapeutic approach, Journal of experimental and clinical cancer research
Costa F.P., et al, 2011, Treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma with very low levels of amplitude-modulated electromagnetic fields, British Journal of cancer
Kirson E.D., et al, 2009, Alternating electric fields (TTFields) inhibit metastatic spread of solid tumors to the lungs, Clinical and experimantal metastasis Journal
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Written by Andre Motuz (BScHons, LicAc, MBAcC) is a professional Geopathic Stress surveyor and Earth Acupuncture practitioner with clients in London, throughout the UK, Europe and across the globe.
#andremotuz#becausewecare#bhaktiyoga#care#caregiving#careofvaishnavas#compassion#donate#geopathic#give#loveandcare#preventive#spiritualbeings#spritualpeoples#thevedictimes#vedictimes#yogaoflovepreventivemedicine
Hari Krishna das, Vedic Times
Intelligence or chaos ~ Chapter 2
February 1, 2018 Aradhana Devi Dasi
Intelligence or chaos ~ the teleological argument
A book written by Hari Krsna das (Henk Keilman)
“The numerical coincidences (necessary for an anthropic universe) could be regarded as evidence of design. The delicate fine tuning in the values of the constants, necessary so that the various different branches of physics can dovetail so felicitously, might be attributed to God. It is hard to resist the the impression that present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out.”
Paul Davies PhD, physicist
3D illustration of neurons (brain cells) and nerve synapses in the human brain, the most complicated organ of the human body. The human brain consists of an average of 100 billion neurons and the human body consists of about 75 trillion cells. The complexity and the organizational level of the human body and brain are indescribable. But even the structure of the smallest atom, the hydrogen atom, appears to have a complexity and a structured balance that cannot be comprehended. From the smallest sub-atomic particle, up to the living organisms and clusters of Milky Way systems, the universe is permeated with an indescribable level of organised complexity
The first atheistic proposition: complexity is the result of chance and chaos
Most committed and outspoken atheists come from the world of science and philosophy. Dawkins and Baggini for instance, are considered to be authoritative academics. They believe in the scientific method and they often consciously position themselves as being completely opposite religion— which they call ‘superstition’ — to show that they represent reason. They suggest that religion belongs to the realm of emotions and feelings, where people can vent the thought that they ‘feel that there has to be something more’. They are firmly convinced that there is no, and that there cannot be any rational or scientific foundation for the proposition that the universe arises from and is governed by an intelligent power.
Please continue reading or download your free PDF here.
#caregiving#chaos#Intelligence#intelligenceorchaos#loveandcare#loveandtrust#spiritualbeings#spiritualpeople#teleological#thevedictimes#yoga#yogaoflove
‘INTELLIGENCE OR CHAOS’ ~ The Fallacy of Atheism
November 5, 2017 Aradhana Devi Dasi
‘INTELLIGENCE OR CHAOS’
The Fallacy of Atheism
A book by Hari Krishna Das (Henk Keilman)
The mystery of existence
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible at all” Albert Einstein
Unimaginably large numbers!
When I look out of the window of my study to the world outside, I see the world as we know it. I see trees, gardens and buildings in bright sunlight, except for the shadow of the occasional cloud passing overhead. Around me, life is taking its course. Nothing remarkable, as you might say; everything is just as we know it. However, behind this everyday reality is a universe of an almost unimaginable size and complexity.
We can forget this universe so easily in our daily routine of work, grocery shopping and enjoying our free time, but it is nevertheless always present, just behind that blue or cloudy sky, and it is full of truly astonishing phenomena. Take the phenomenon of light for example, which makes all life on this planet possible. It is only because of light that we can actually see anything of the world around us, yet rarely do we consider that this light has just made a huge cosmic journey simply to get here. Emanating from what we call the sun, a relatively small star known as a ‘yellow dwarf’ in astronomer’s jargon, the light that reaches our planet earth has traveled 150 million kilometers at a speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second taking roughly just 8 minutes to complete the journey.
The sun may be small compared to other stars, but the force that she produces is still unimaginably powerful. Every second our star produces an amount of energy that equals the explosion of 1 trillion hydrogen bombs of 1 megaton. In this same second, the sun produces enough energy to keep the entire world economy going for 500,000 years based on our current energy usage. Due to the enormous amounts of energy being produced and the speed at which it travels, we can feel the influence of the sun almost immediately despite her distance from earth. On a hot summer’s day, her heat can be unbearable and we are grateful just to find a spot in the shade.
However, the sun is only a glowing pin-head compared to the total size of the universe. To be really impressed by the cosmos, we have to wait until the sun disappears behind the horizon and darkness sets in. After sunset, the true scale of the universe becomes more apparent as numerous stars, star systems and other celestial bodies appear in the night sky. For those of us not living in towns and cities and not hindered by light pollution the night sky would be filled with thousands of stars. Nonetheless, no matter how impressive a view, we would only be witnessing a tiny part of the entire universe, a fraction of a fraction of an immeasurably large space.
Our solar system with its 8 planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
For those who really want to understand the universe we have to enter the domain of extremely large numbers. The distances within our own solar system are already enormous. Earth is part of a collection of nine planets, including the lonely outer dwarf planet Pluto. The distance from the sun to Pluto is, on average, 5 billion kilometers. If we were to travel by spaceship at the impressive speed of 60,000 kilometers per hour, then we would need to travel for 10 years to cover this distance. But if we zoom out further, then our solar system disappears into nothing. Our collection of planets is a minuscule part of a much larger entity; a galaxy called the Milky Way. The distance from one side of this system to the other side is 100,000 light years. One light year is the distance that light travels in one year at the speed of 300.000 km per second, or 9.4 trillion (9,400,000,000,000) kilometers. If we continued to travel in the spaceship that took us to Pluto at the same speed, it would take us 1.8 billion years to travel from one side of the Milky Way to the other.
Nevertheless, we would still be safely within our own star system. However, if we ventured to travel to our next nearest major star system, the Andromeda galaxy, then we would have to cover a distance of 2.4 million light years. If we continued to travel at this same speed, it would take us no less than 43.2 billion years! These distances are simply beyond human comprehension. We can hardly pronounce such numbers, let alone imagine them. Who does not, from time to time, look up to the stars in the sky and wonder with slight apprehension where it all ends?
The Andromeda star system is located at a distance of 2,4 million lightyears from our solar system.
As large as the universe is, however, so the inhabitants of this planet appear to be insignificant and small, and I am not just referring to our size. One only has to watch CNN to be faced with the crude facts; a civil war raging in one part of the world, some bomb attacks in another part, which is pretty much a daily menu of news facts. Of course, we also invent medication, we build sea walls and dams to protect millions from drowning and we create institutes that advance prosperity and social justice. Art, culture and science are also expressions of human activities, aimed at positive human development. However, looking at our own history, we mostly seem to be specialised in warfare and fighting each other. According to a New York Times article published on July 6 2003, over the past 3,400 years humans have been entirely at peace for just 268 years, or just 8% of recorded history. That means there were wars going on for 3.132 years somewhere on the planet. These wars have claimed between 150 million to 1 billion casualties. That’s not a very good statistic, and it says a lot about the human condition. The relative peace of the past 65 years is mainly due to the existence of nuclear weapons, which make it impossible for us to have large scale wars. While most wars, in hindsight and almost without exception, seem to be useless, a nuclear war is useless in advance. The so-called MAD doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is an insurmountable obstacle to any potential aggressor based on even the most primitive calculations.
Nevertheless, smaller wars and battles continue as humans fight a complicated battle in their struggle for survival against real or alleged enemies and threats. This battle is fought with intensive emotions and is literally of vital importance to each individual. But placed into perspective, these great and small human activities take place against the backdrop of nature and the infinite universe. Only one hundred kilometers of atmosphere separate us from the unreal reality of this immeasurable, unimaginable universe. These one hundred kilometers above our earth are the boundaries of the tiny bubble in which earthly existence takes place. This tiny bubble, earth and its atmosphere, floats in an immeasurable ocean of cosmic energies of outright extra-terrestrial proportions.
The difference between the immeasurable universe and human worries is surreal. It is a remarkable contrast; the cold, uninterested magnitude of the universe set against the intense emotions and awareness of our minuscule existence, occurring simultaneously and of course, both equally real. But, what is ‘real’? Why does reality exist? Just like everyone looks at the stars now and then and wonders about the vastness of the universe, everyone will sooner or later also wonder why we exist and why everything around us exists. Sometimes reality seems unreal, intangible and even dreamlike whilst at other times reality feels like a strong and tangible presence. What is most remarkable is that reality appears to be inflexible and it does not seem to be interested in us or our well-being. Both the world and the universe just exist, distant and indifferent; at least so it seems. In the words of Richard Dawkins:
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
This causes humans many problems. We wonder, why is there something instead of just nothing? Why does reality exist the way it does? Why is reality at every level so immensely complicated? And why is reality permeated with undesirable things such as old age, disease and death and other types of suffering. Is there an explanation other then the one provided by Dawkins above, or is that it.
These questions lay the foundation for this book. They are the starting-point towards the question that defines the mystery of existence and that is the most important question that humans can ask themselves: Does God exist or not? Does existence – small or gigantic – spring from an unconscious and unintelligent chaos, or is it created by awareness and intelligence and does it have a purpose and a design? The answer to these questions provides an insight into the role and position of humans in the universe. Do our lives have meaning or is our existence toally lacking any purpose? Do humans exist with an intention, or do we just float around in the cosmos without ever achieving anything? Or, as the famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell put it so strikingly: “Man is an unfortunate accident, a sideshow in the material universe – an odd accident in a forgotten corner.”
Ultimately, we are of course all interested, out of normal self interest, in our own position and perspective in life. At the deepest level, this perspective is completely determined by the answer to the question of whether God exists or not.
Thanks to: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA
The Andromeda system is situated at an impressive distance of 2.4 million light-years away from us. This distance is nothing compared to the distance to NGC 1300, a spiral-shaped star system that is situated at a distance of 61 million light-years away from us in the Eridanus constellation. The star system has a cross- section of about 110,000 light-years; just slightly bigger than our own Milky Way.
Philosophical analyses has shown that this question, is the determining factor for the way we view reality and the universe. All philosophies can, in the end, be divided into two fundamental categories. The first category is atheistic in its core and states that the origin and the functioning of reality is based on chaos and coincidence. The second category is theistic in its core and regards the universe as an organic reality that was created and is managed by intelligence. Other philosophies that are essentially agnostic – and therefore do not explicitly state whether God exists or not – are often considered to be atheistic. In many cases, they will say that the intelligent coordination of the universe is an improbability. Therefore, they implicitly – and based on elimination – have a preference for chaos and coincidence as the most probable explanation for the origin of the universe.
Of course, within each of these categories there is a huge diversity of philosophies with many differences in nuance. Nonetheless, the dividing line is striking and this has an all-determining effect on all aspects of a philosophy, such as the theory of knowledge (epistemology), the theory on the nature of being (ontology), theories concerning moral values and meaning (ethics) and, in the end, the description or perception of our physical and scientific reality (physics and metaphysics). Indeed, social and political ideologies are also largely defined by this split. Denying or confirming the existence of God therefore leads to opposite philosophies and completely opposite answers as far as the origin and meaning of existence is concerned. Do our lives have a deeper meaning, or are our lives meaningless; a random evolutionary accident? Is man just a product of matter, or is there another type of energy that defines our consciousness and our individuality? Is death the absolute end of our lives, or do our lives continue beyond the boundaries of death? Is there a final heavenly (or hellish) destination past earthly existence, or is our short earthly existence the beginning, middle and end of the story? Theistic or atheistic philosophies will answer these questions in totally opposite ways leading to very different world perspectives which strongly affect everything we think, say and do. Even scientific disciplines such as physics and cosmology are strongly influenced, both directly and indirectly, by the dividing line between atheism and theism. As an interesting side note, it is precisely these sciences, combined with mathematics, that contain the initial answers to the question of whether the universe is governed by chaos or intelligence and thus, whether God exists or not. Given the impact this question has on our life, individually and in society, this really is the most important question that humans can ask themselves.
The images of this rich set of star systems are made by La Silla Observatory of the ESO in Chile. The thousands of star systems that are situated in this small area of the firmament provide us with a look into the distant past of the universe and makes us realise again how enormously large the cosmos is. Just underneath the bright stars in the centre of this image there is a group of star systems called Abell 226. The Abell group is situated at a distance of some billions of light-years away from us. Behind these objects there are even more star systems, they are less bright though, but still at even greater distances of about 9 up to 10 billion light-years. The light we see today coming from these systems has therefore traveled for 9 up to 10 billion years in order to reach us. This also means that we are looking back in time at a universe that existed 10 billion years ago.
This book attempts to answer this question, not by serving dogmas, but by critical analyses, based on philosophical and scientific research. This book compares the scientific and philosophical arguments in favour of the existence of God or against the existence of God and puts atheism against theism, chaos against design. It does this by focusing on some important changes in scientific thought, especially in the area of physics and cosmology where new and completely revolutionary discoveries have been made. These discoveries and insights reveal a universe that is infinitely complex, infinitely organized and infinitely mysterious. The level of organized complexity is so huge that this can only be explained logically by the presence of an all-pervading intelligence and an omnipresent awareness. Such an all-pervading intelligence can be called by any name and each label can be granted to it. God, of course, is the most obvious name: all-pervading intelligence and omnipresent awareness are qualifications that can only be attributed to God. The problem however is that the term God is burdened with a controversial history, created by humans. These are all controversies that, almost without exception, stem from ignorance, sectarianism, fanaticism or a corrupted desire for power. The intention of this book is to demonstrate, based on objective and scientific foundations, that intelligence and consciousness are the driving forces behind the universe, regardless of the burdened history of what that implies. This burdened history is what it is, but it does not alter the reality of these new scientific insights and the philosophical consequences of these insights. Where science directed humanity towards materialism and atheism over the past 200 years, we now see a way of thinking in the opposite direction. This direction is of a spiritual nature and implies a scientific rehabilitation of God. The facts that science has revealed over the past decades confirm that a universe without God is simply untenable, despite desperate and sometimes exotic attempts to do so. If we consider all the arguments, there can only be one logical conclusion: the universe is governed by intelligence and consciousness.
Whether God exists
This, therefore, is the central theme of the book, as the (sub)title indicates: ‘Intelligence or chaos: the misconception of atheism.’ This book discusses the scientific and philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God, atheism versus theism, and in scientific terms, intelligence and design versus chaos and coincidence. There will be few people who do not know the term ‘God’, but on the other hand it is a concept with a wide range of interpretations. Therefore, it is important and necessary to define and describe the concept of God. With respect to this, I do not intend to get caught up in analyses and definitions that are too technical, but I intend to focus on the general, common meaning of the concept God. This meaning is mostly associated with the manner in which the nature and the being of God is described. For instance, is he personal or impersonal; is he one with his creation and the universe or is he transcendental and outside of his creation? Is he personally involved with the universe or is he in control at a distance? What are his qualities and attributes? There are mainly two visions regarding the being and the nature of God, monotheism and monism.
Within these categories are several schools of thought with important nuances and differences, but this book will primarily deal with the core concepts. Monotheism states that one divine Supreme Being exists that has personal, transcendent characteristics. Monotheism also states that the world— the universe— is an emanation and creation of God. According to this vision, both God and his emanations are eternal energies. The Christian doctrine deviates somewhat from this view, since creation is not considered to be an emanation, but as something that was created by God out of nothing. This is called ‘creatio ex nihilo’ by Christian theologians. Here, but also in other aspects, there are nuanced differences between the various monotheistic traditions. What the different monotheistic schools do agree on is the absolute unity of God, which is at its core both personal and transcendental. Within this unity there is, however, a multitude of diversity: first of all, between God and His energies, and accordingly, between His energies mutually. This principle is the essence of monotheism.
In Christianity the unity of God is not entirely without controversy; the doctrine of the Trinity states that God is really three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and not one person. Effectively, and implicitly most Christian theologians see God as fundamentally One, yet simultaneously many, or three in this instance. Despite this nuance, Christianity is generally accepted as a monotheistic religion. Quoting the words of Jesus in John 5.44: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?” Jesus was clearly of the opinion, as was official Jewish doctrine at the time, that God is one.
Richard Dawkins during the launch of his campaign in 2008, where London buses were decorated with atheist slogans.
Monism also states that there is one divine Supreme Being. The difference is, however, that this Supreme Being is impersonal by nature. The monotheistic God is often associated with an impersonal, all-embracing, undifferentiated, and infinite state of pure energy, made of pure and impersonal consciousness. According to monism, it is only this state of absolute unity that is real and the universe, with its diversity and multitude, is just an illusionary reflection of this divine energy.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered to be monotheistic religions. However, despite many misconceptions, Hinduism is also, at its core and by origin, a monotheistic doctrine. The philosophical core of Hinduism is mainly founded on the Vedanta philosophy, which is of a monotheistic nature. On the other hand, Buddhism and certain movements within the Vedanta school, such as Advaita Vedanta, are monistic by nature. The famous Dutch philosopher Spinoza (1632 – 1677) was also a monist who saw the world as the expression of an underlying, all-embracing and impersonal reality. Spinoza identified this underlying reality with God. The doctrine of Spinoza was an important influence on the thinking of Albert Einstein. Einstein believed in Spinoza’s image of God: ‘… a God that revealed Himself in the systematic harmony of the universe’. He did not believe in a God that interfered with the fate and the actions of man.
The two main movements, monotheism and monism have numerous variants such as pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, and deism. The first, pantheism is a variant to monism. According to pantheism, God only manifests Himself in the universe and does not differ from the universe in every respect. Deism and panentheism are sub-divisions of monotheism. Deism is a movement that has been popular amongst Western scientists and emerged as a result the scientific revolution in the 17th century followed by the Enlightenment in Europe and the United States during the 18th century. Deism is a form of monotheism, with the distinction being that the deistic God does not interfere directly in the world, in human affairs and nature. The latter is, according to deism, governed by the laws of nature, which were ultimately created by God. Panentheism is a concept that is perhaps not quite so familiar. It means that God is transcendent and above creation and, at the same time, He is immanent and manifests Himself in creation. Effectively, it is not really different from monotheism, which also acknowledges the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of God. Polytheism, the believe in many gods and goddesses, is sometimes a disguised form of monotheism. The pantheon of gods are effectively demi-gods and part of a divine hierarchy. For instance in Hinduism demi-gods are charged with ruling and managing the universe on behalf of, and in the service of the supreme God. Other traditions such as the polytheism found in ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome are truly polytheistic, whereby the different gods and goddesses are considered to be separate entities each with their own individual powers.
In the following treatment of theism and atheism, I primarily refer to the two main groups of theistic philosophies, which are monotheism and monism. For the sake of convenience, I indicate both traditions in this book as theistic. In later chapters, the differences between these two traditions will be explained further.
In religions and theistic philosophies, in both monotheistic and monistic variants, God is defined as the Supreme Being, almighty, all-knowing, omnipresent, eternal and infinite: the creator and maintainer of the universe and of all life in the universe. Furthermore, God is described as loving and merciful. A theistic world view assumes that such a being, in whatever shape or form, exists. Moreover, this implies that the universe is an organic unity, governed from an intelligent and conscious centre.
The four propositions of atheism
The atheistic world view denies the existence of such a Supreme Being and denies that the universe is an organic unity governed by an intelligent centre. Apart from admitting that there are some basic, blind laws of nature, atheism claims that the universe consists of an infinite number of material particles that reside in an infinite and empty space. Since the particles are fundamentally separated by space, they are independent and therefore on a large scale governed by coincidence and chaos. Atheism also denies the existence of another reality, apart from or next to the material reality. One of the most leading advocates of this worldview is, without question, the ethologist and biologist Richard Dawkins. He even placed atheistic advertisements on London city buses. In his book ‘The God Delusion’ he defines atheism as follows:
“An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural.“
Another atheistic thinker Dawkins quotes is Julian Baggini. He explains atheism in his book ‘Atheism, A Very Short Introduction’ as follows:
“What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.”
Based on these definitions, but also based on the definitions of other atheistic thinkers, atheism is founded on four propositions or basic assumptions:
The universe consists of material particles that exist independent of each other and that move independent of each other within the infinite void. The total of the movements and interactions of these particles is governed by coincidence and chaos, combined with a number of simple and blind laws of nature. This is also called ‘pluralism’.
There is no central intelligent coordination within the universe and the universe is not an organic unity. There exists nothing apart from or outside the perceptible, physical material reality or the world of matter.
Proposition 1 and 2 together are also called ‘materialism’.
3. Even if there were to be a beginning of the universe, the origin of the universe has to be ultimately simple. God is by definition a complex being and, therefore, He cannot be the ultimate cause. The existence of a complex being such as God would demand that He would have been created by something else.
4. The universe is imperfect from a human perspective. That imperfection manifests itself most clearly in the presence of useless suffering that each living creature is faced with. This contradicts and undermines the position of God as almighty and merciful.
The first two propositions together are called ‘materialism’; it holds the view that matter is the only real substance in the universe. In this view, it is also emphasized that matter may be one substance, but that this substance is split up into innumerable particles. These particles are separated from each other by empty space. Materialism states that this combination of material particles and empty space is eternal and that there is a no cause for this.
The third proposition makes an exception to this, since it does state that there is a possible cause of the universe. This proposition claims that, should the universe have a cause at all, then this cause must ultimately be simple. This proposition is very relevant since modern cosmology assumes that the universe did have a beginning and has not always been there, nor will it always be here.
The fourth proposition is the most important one, since in the end most atheistic arguments can be reduced to this, or are indirectly derived from this. Consciously or unconsciously, atheists refer to the issue of the imperfect universe and the suffering in the world as the most probable reason why God could not exist. In the following chapters, the above-mentioned four propositions will be discussed in detail and refuted one by one relying on scientific and logical arguments.
Quotation of Einstein, cited by Fred Hoyle in ‘The Intelligent Universe’ Richard Dawkins
Bertrand Russell “Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1961)
Richard Dawkins in the “God delusion” page 35
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Chaitanya Swarup das, Chanting Yoga, Vedic Times
The Science of ‘Chanting Yoga’
December 1, 2016 Chaitanya Swarup das Leave a comment
Is ‘Chanting Yoga’ a science?
Can we trace the origin of chanting?
Do we need to understand what we are chanting?
Can the power of sound alter cellular and molecular structure – the DNA encoding etc.?
I don’t know how to sing or chant, does it really matter?
How much it will cost me?
Facts about ‘Chanting Yoga’
Thoughts are silent sounds.
Chanting Reduces Anxiety and Depression by balancing the nervous system.
Traditional Yoga, Ayurveda, and Sanskrit sources have demonstrated millennia ago the multidimensional effects of chanting yoga.
We become Compassionate to all living beings.
The effects of chanting boosts the immune system and can be rationally explained.
Chanting and heart healt
There are a number of different “sciences” behind chanting. Some of these are the “hard” sciences such as physics and psycho-acoustics. In order to sustain its findings, such sciences require a deep rational thinking, which is just a small aspect of the vast intelligence. In contrast, the Spiritual sciences such as the different yogic practices that work with sound, are evaluated with a much subtler aspect of the intelligence. Much has being written about this since yoga in its various modalities has moved to the west.
Recently, many doctors and scientist are becoming interested in the Chanting yoga phenomena. The following are just a few of the all increasing health professionals convinced of their therapeutic effects:
Dr. Herbert Benson states that chanting helps induce a “relaxation” response which causes reduction in heartbeat, brain waves and respiration.
Dr. David Shananoff-Khalsa believes that mantric recitation enables the tongue to stimulate the acupuncture meridians inside the roof of the mouth.
Dr. Ranjie Singe found that the chanting of specific mantras caused the release of hormone melatonin, and is investigating the importance of this in the healing process. So far, he has found that there are many benefits including shrinkage of tumors and enhanced sleep.
I have found that virtually every culture and tradition includes chanting and singing in their spiritual and health practices. Recitation of prayers is found worldwide and has been with us since the dawn of humankind. We find this common pattern in Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and many other cultures. Whether it is a shamanic or pagan tradition, you will have some aspect of chanting that could be considered Sacred chanting in their rituals and prayers. Sometimes these chants are used to invoke Divine entities. Other times they are used for healing or to ask for some boon such as bringing rain. In my experience, chanting is most commonly used to bring the gross fulfillment of desires.
Anyone who has cultivated the habit of chanting will realize that chanting gives a pleasure that transcends the senses and elevates one beyond the boundaries of time and space. Chanting delivers us from our sense of dependency on temporal enjoyments which are always fleeting and limited. Chanting will move one past this unfulfilling existence to one’s true nature and destination regardless of whether one knows the meaning of the chant or not. I once heard it said: “as music has charms to soothe a savage beast, so the spiritual sound of chanting soothes the restless mind.”
Can the power of sound alter cellular and molecular structure- the DNA encoding etc.?
A great deal of research has been done recently into the power of sound. As a result of this research, it was proven beyond a doubt that sound can alter molecular and cellular structure.
In the 1960’s, a medical doctor named Hans Jenny conducted experiments which showed that sound was able to actually create form in various substances such as sand, plastics, liquids, and water. He would place these substances on a steel plate and then using a crystal oscillator, vibrate these plates with sound. Quite astonishingly, the various substances took on the most organic looking shapes—they looked like microscopic organisms or underwater life. He called this work Cymatics.
A Japanese scientist, Masuru Emoto, demonstrated that water molecules are actually affected by sound and our intention. Intention concerns our thoughts and feelings. Intention is the energy behind the sounds that we create. Mr. Emoto found that clean water looked like a snowflake, very geometric. Polluted water looks like mud. Mr. Emoto has taken photographs of polluted water, which at first look like mud. After a priest has chanted over this water, new photographs were taken again. This time, the water looks like a snowflake, the sound and intentionality has restored it to its natural harmonious shape.
The work of Fabian Maman, a French acupuncturist and sound healer, has taken Kirlian photographs of hemoglobin blood cells that were exposed to different sounds. In particular, he took photographs of blood cells exposed to an ascending chromatic scale created on a xylophone. Each note effected the cell differently, creating a different shape and different Kirlian color.
The information above represents a small sample of the work that has been done to demonstrate that cellular structure and energy are effected by sound.
The good news is that one does not need to be a good singer or even know anything about music. Chanting is not about singing in the usual sense. It is not about memorizing complex lyrics. It works whether it is done alone or in a powerful group kirtan. It works whether it is done softly or in full voice, as long it is from the heart and with the belly. Although for enhanced effect, one can add eye-focus and a gentle hand mudra, and eventually you may wish to go to a singing classes, these simple steps can easily be included later. The key is to simply begin chanting.
Here is more good news, chanting is absolutely free. All one need do is try and enjoy. It won’t work if you don’t do it! All that is needed is some time and an open heart. The benefits of chanting cannot be established through reasoning and intellect. It can only be experienced through devotion, faith and constant repetition of the chanting.
Facts about chanting Yoga: “Thoughts are silent sounds”.
More and more people are aware that our thoughts reflect and affect our mood, our attitude and our general health. Our thoughts are silent sounds–a type of vibration. The more refined our thoughts, the more elevated our vibration.
The entire universe was built on sound (Word), which is nothing but vibration. By vibrating a certain combination of sounds, we tune in to different levels of our intelligence, specifically, consciousness. Thus, chanting mantras is a conscious method of controlling our moods, and in turn, our frequency and resultant all-around radiance, much like changing the channel on the television.
Chanting Reduces Anxiety and Depression by balancing the nervous system
By combining sound, breath and rhythm, Chanting Yoga channels the flow of energy through the mind-body circuit, adjusting the chemical composition of our internal states and regulating brain-hemisphere imbalances, contributing to a natural abatement of fear and despair–emotions that underlie both of these common afflictions. By balancing the nervous system, chanting regulates the chronic stress and tension that is the norm for many people in today’s hyper-stimulated lifestyle. By balancing the endocrine system, chanting normalizes hormone production, which balances our moods and overall sense of well-being.
Traditional Yoga, Ayurveda, and Sanskrit sources have demonstrated millennia ago the multidimensional effects of chanting:
During the practice of Chanting Yoga, the breathing (prana) cycle is altered to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the number of syllables and consonants of the particular mantra. Through this process, one is able to influence the Subdoshas of Vata namely prana, udana, samana, vyana and apana. This in turn, will bring balance to oxygen-blood ratios, thereby improving the following: a) nutrients absorption; b) optimum function of organs of actions; c) general circulation including the blood flow, the lymphatic system and nerve impulses, and elimination via excretory organs.
Sound (akash), Breath (prana), and Matra (rhythm) combined with Dhyana (meditation) directs harmoniously the flow of energy (prana or Chi) through the (shrotas) body channels. This will adjust and balance Agni (metabolism) and homeostasis. As a result, the physiology known in Ayurveda as doshas (Vata), (Pitta) and (Kapha), the dhatus, and malas are functioning in harmony. Chanting helps one to deal with stressful factors and brings an overall sense of well-being and relaxation. This in turn, triggers a cascade of beneficial influences which aid our General Health (Swasta Vrita).
We become Compassionate to all living beings
Chanting transcendental mantras brings an understanding of ourselves as one and different from God (Sadhaka Pitta). It awakens our original nature and love within us. As George Harrison has said often in his Bhakti practice, this type of chanting is “a direct connection with God.” When our spiritual identity is awakened, we experience the unity and diversity of all life. Our capacity for compassion naturally grows, allowing our daily lives to be free of conditional mistakes such as blaming others, hate, jealousy, envy and pride. With the elimination of these negative concepts, all that remains is pure love.
The effects of chanting boost the immune system and can be rationally explained
Perhaps the key to rationally understand the power and effects of chanting on human physiology are the upper palate, the movement of the tip of the tongue and breath.
The Upper palate is at the base of the hypothalamus, which is the control center of the physical body. It regulates communication between the Doshas Vata and Pitta and its sub-doshas (the nervous system and the endocrine system). My own repetitive experience found that the hypothalamus controls the entire nervous system (Vata ).
The tongue taps certain points along the roof of the mouth, sending signals to the hypothalamus. These signals regulate the chemical activity streaming into all parts of the brain and body.
Breath adjusts all the rhythms of our body, such as the familiar circadian rhythms; but also the lesser known ultradian rhythms, which monitor the smaller-scale energy cycles that occur throughout the day. Due to our hectic life style our nervous systems are often overtaxed. These rhythms are thrown out of balance. However, through the art of chanting we begin to bring a state of balance. When breath and sound are working together, we realize the magnificence of Life and how God became sound. One will also realize also that words are only approaching the tip of even greater benefits!
Chanting and breath brings positive effects on the parasympathetic nervous system (the nervous system that tells us everything is ok). These effects are multiplied and the healing response is triggered, which translates into healing and stronger immunity.
Chanting and heart health
According to the Heart Math, chanting is known to promote general wellbeing, and it is great benefit for the cardiovascular system. One reason for this may be that singing demands a slower than normal respiration, which may in turn affect heart activity. Coupling of heart rate variability (HRV) to respiration is called Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). This coupling has a subjective, as well as a biologically soothing effect, and it is beneficial for cardiovascular function. RSA is seen to be more marked during slow-paced breathing and at lower respiration rates (0.1 Hz and below). In this study, we investigate how singing, which is a form of guided breathing, affects HRV and RSA.
Rhythm: Through repetition of the mantra, patterns of sound are inscribed onto the brain. The unconscious becomes the conscious. The automatic becomes the deliberate. The mindless becomes the heartfelt. The repetition frees us from our destination-fixation, that desire to rush to the end. The repetition is the whole point. Through repetition, the mantra washes over us, as the waves in the sea gradually get us wet.
Projection: When we chant from the navel point while articulating the mantra, we not only stimulate the upper palate, but we vibrate the central channel by which prana, or life force, flows. For millennia, yogis have referred to this as the shushumna. This dual process is said to move us into the realm of anahat, or unconditional love.
So far everything looks great, but how long will it take to achieve this promises?
Everybody is unique, so how long it takes will depend the degree of dedication and determination over a period of months and years. Although we experience glimpses of the above mentioned benefits almost the same day, this taste will encourage us to go deeper into the chanting Yoga. In the guidelines below, you will be given an idea of what can be accomplished in a certain period of time. This will help you to set realistic goals.
Reprogramming our habits
“It takes 40 days to break a habit; 90 days to gain the new habit;
120 days and you are the new habit; 1,000 days and you are Master of it.”
Chanting from minutes to hours will bring the following benefits:
3 minutes affects the electromagnetic field, the circulation and stability of the blood.
7 minutes begins to shift brain patterns, and the magnetic field surrounding the body increases in strength.
11 minutes begins to change the nervous and glandular systems.
22 minutes sees the three minds (i.e., the negative, positive and neutral minds) come into balance and begin to work together; the subconscious mind begins to clear.
31 minutes allows the glands, breath, and concentration to affect all the cells and rhythms of the body. Endocrine secretions are completely balanced as is the ethereal energy of the chakra (junction points of physical and spiritual centers).
62 minutes changes the gray matter in the brain. It stimulates the frontal lobe of the brain, as well as the pituitary and pineal glands. You work through the physical body, the emotions and mental states, stimulating higher, more subtle aspects of the self. The subconscious “shadow mind” and its psychological projections become integrated.
2 1/2 hours changes the psyche in its co-relation with the surrounding magnetic field so that the subconscious mind is held firmly in the new pattern by the surrounding field. You totally remake your psyche. These changes persist throughout the day and are reflected by positive changes in mood and behavior.
THE CHANTING YOGA WEBSITE HERE
Alfredo Llorente Marcos
(Chaitanya Swarup das)
Ayurveda & Meditation Therapy
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Chanting Yoga, Hari Krishna das, Vedic Times
An Introduction to Achintya-Bheda-Abheda Tattva
November 30, 2016 Hari Krishna das Leave a comment
The philosophy of Acintya Bhedabeda Tattva embodies the quintessence of all systems of Indian philosophy. Indian philosophy, embodied in the Vedic literatures, is over 5000 years old and inspired the birth of the two great Eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. It has also greatly influenced the western world, particularly over the last 200 years. Most systems of Indian philosophy propound the view that the universe is fundamentally one, part of and pervaded by the Supreme Being, from whom it has emanated. As such, they maintain that the universe is not the outcome of blind chance, but that it is the result of intelligent design and that it has meaning and purpose. Furthermore, according to most systems of Indian philosophy the material universe, in which we live, is only part of an infinite and spiritual universe. Both the material and spiritual universe are considered energies of God, the Supreme Spiritual Being. The spiritual universe is defined as God’s internal energy, and the material universe His external energy. All living beings in the material world are essentially spiritual, and part of His internal energy. Finally, according to most systems of Indian philosophy, God is defined as a transcendental Person, endowed with consciousness, attributes and form, and who stands at the center and source of his infinite energies and emanations.
At the cornerstone of this world view is the notion that God, and the universe emanating from Him, are essentially one and different. He is one, in that He is the origin of, and pervades all beings, and He is different, in that His energies have their own independent existence and identity. This independent existence and individual identity accounts for the world of many-ness and variegatedness.. The problem is, that the principles of oneness and many-ness contain a logical paradox, and appear to be mutually exclusive. On the bases of logic it is indeed hard to reconcile how one entity can be one and many at the same time. Within the different schools of Indian thought, philosophers and mystics have attempted to resolve this paradox by emphasizing one principle over the other, thereby reducing e.g. many-ness to a by product of oneness. Some schools of thought, taking a more extreme position, have even postulated that only oneness is real, and that the many-ness constitutes an illusion. Throughout the history of Indian philosophy this theme, and its implicit paradox, has been at the center of philosophical discussions.
Thereby the oneness and many-ness principles do not just confine themselves to the relationship between God and His creation. The principle extends to virtually all areas of philosophy and science, such as the relation between matter and consciousness, between qualities and substance, between particles and fields, between energy and matter, and the personal and the impersonal. Interestingly, therefore, it appears that the principle of oneness and many-ness, with its inherent paradox, extends to all areas of reality.
Within the history of western philosophy we also find the constant recurrence of the oneness versus many-ness theme, resulting in different schools of opposing thought. Thereby the parallels between Indian and western thinking are striking. Most notable is e.g. the discussion and debates that have flourished on the issue of realism and idealism, or the relation between matter and consciousness, during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe.
The great 16th century Indian philosopher and mystic Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu formulated a new principle, shedding light on the paradox, and making explicit what was already acknowledged implicitly by many great Indian thinkers. Caitanya stated that the principles of oneness and difference are inherently inseparable, that they always exist simultaneously, and that their simultaneous existence lies at the core of all metaphysics. He furthermore stated that the simultaneous existence of oneness and many-ness is called Acintya in Sanskrit, which means “inconceivable”. Inconceivability implies that this aspect of reality is inconceivable to the human and finite mind, and transcends the principles of logic. The philosophy of Caitanya has been formulated in Sanskrit as “Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva”. Acintya means inconceivable, Bhedabheda means simultaneous oneness and many-ness, and Tattva means principle or truth.
The problem is, of course, that if we abandon and ignore the principles of logic, then we may be forced to accept any irrational worldview, and loose our ability to analyze and verify scientific and philosophical theories. For logic lies at the core of all philosophy and science. The principle of Caitanya however, makes a noticeable difference, in that Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva should not be considered ‘illogical’, but rather it should be considered ‘supralogical’. The difference is that while a supralogical principle may appear to defy the laws of logic, the principle itself can be perceived and verified by means of direct perception, and has an empirical foundation. As such the principle of Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva can be observed in many phenomenon and occurrences in this world.
A good example is the perception of a red rose. As mentioned before, the discussion on one-ness versus many-ness has extended itself to all aspects of philosophy and science. In the western tradition, two schools of thought emerged on the issue of the relation between substance and its qualities. One school, called the realists, founded by the Greek philosopher Plato, stated that qualities and substance are in fact two different realities. E.g. Plato postulated that there is such a thing as universal ‘redness’, that becomes superimposed along with other universal qualities, on a particular material substance, thereby creating a red rose. Plato therefore viewed qualities and substance as being different. Many centuries later another school of thought emerged, called the nominalists, that disagreed with Plato, and postulated that a quality can never be separated from its substance, and that quality and substance are in fact one and the same. This discussion is a very good example of the paradox inherent in the relation between a substance and its qualities. The fact is, that they are simultaneously one and different, and that while this may transcend, or defy, the laws of logic, our perception of the red rose confirms the principle.
Another example is the spatial perception of an object, say a coin. While the coin is one, it has many sides, an inside as well as an outside, an upside and down side. These different sides establish an element of many-ness within the object, that is simultaneously perceived as one object.
In modern physics the relation between particles and fields has been a subject of many discussions. Scientists have observed that a field, or wave, sometimes behaves like a continuum of energy (oneness), and other times behaves like a stream of finite particles (many-ness). The phenomena has in fact been named “wavicles” clearly establishing the simultaneous oneness and many-ness of these manifestations of energy. The discussion reflects the underlying principle of Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva. Following this theme, modern physics leans towards a worldview whereby the universe is seen as a unified field of energy, from which finite particles, in the shape of matter, emerge as a continuous process of creation. These finite particles can at any time revert back to their non-finite energetic state, which paints a picture of oneness (the field) and many-ness (particles) continually interchanging, and in fact simultaneously coexisting.
There are in fact many more examples that could be adduced to illustrate the principle of Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva, and that confirm the principle by means of direct perception. As such the principle is not illogical, but should be defined as ‘supra-logical’, transcending the limitations of the finite human mind.
Ultimately the philosophy of Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva explains the relationship between God and His creation, and more specifically, it also explains the relationship between God and living entities, such as ourselves. The philosophy of Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva states that this relationship too, is characterized by simultaneous oneness and difference. We are one with God in a qualitative sense, however we are different quantitatively. In quantity God is infinite and we are finite. It is therefore a mistake to assume, as some Indian schools of thought have advocated, that man is identical to God, and fundamentally one with Him in every respect. We are not God, merely small parts of God, with a limited degree of independence.
Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva also sheds light on the identity of God Himself. It maintains that while God is a transcendental Person, he is simultaneously impersonal as well. The relationship between the personal and impersonal too has been the subject of many philosophical arguments. While consciousness and form represent the personal aspect of God, infinity and all-pervasiveness represent the impersonal aspect, which attributes appear contradictory. Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva maintains that they both exist simultaneously, and that they complement each other. God is simultaneously full of form and formless, finite and infinite, personal and impersonal.
The philosophy of Acintya Bhedabheda Tattva, as expounded by Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, therefore represents a revolutionary new paradigm in our ability to understand reality, and it in fact resolves many of the apparently irresolvable paradoxes that have dominated philosophy and metaphysics in the east and the west for thousands of years.
Experience it for yourself !
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8 Free Things to do in April in Kearney
1. G.W. Frank Museum: The Reveal Event
The G.W. Frank Museum has been busy making updates and we’re having a big “Reveal Event” to officially kick-off the new additions!
Join us for the showing of our documentary “Stone House on the Prairie” at the Merryman Performing Arts Center from 7pm-9pm on Thursday, April 12.
Then on Saturday, April 14, from 1pm-4pm, head out to the museum for the big reveal including special guided tours of the new exhibits and explore all four levels of the home for the first time!
2. NBC’s The Blacklist Viewing Parties
Come support The World and watch the newest episode of The Blacklist, commercial free and on the big screen. Free will donations to support The World Theatre are accepted as admission.
The screening will be followed by a live video Q&A with The Blacklist creator, Jon Bokenkamp.
April 4, 11, & 25 at 6:45pm.
Only at The World Theatre!
3. Soda Fountain Sundae: Day of Songs & Stories
Enjoy free entertainment at the Archway! April 29, 1pm-5pm.
Bill Behmer and Gwen Meister present traditional pioneer songs on traditional instruments, complete with audience participation songs and puppets. It’s a great musical experience for children.
At 2:30 pm, see a demonstration by Civil War era re-enactors from the 1848 Venture Crew.
From 4:00 pm -5:00 pm, Paul Siebert presents Echoes of an Era: Nebraska Journey Songs and Stories.
In between performances, enjoy root beer floats served from the Archway’s vintage soda fountain.
The concerts and demonstrations are FREE. Donations are appreciated for the root beer floats.
4. Cranes: Taking Flight at MONA
In honor of the annual Sandhill Crane migration through Central Nebraska, the Museum of Nebraska Art showcases artworks that pay tribute to this natural phenomenon.
From painting and sculpture to prints and photography, artists have been inspired to render striking imagery depicting the literal and spiritual significance of this recurring spectacle.
Exhibit runs though May 13.
Admission to MONA is always FREE.
5. Storybook Walk
Come enjoy a fun filled walk around Harmon Park! Read pages of “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins as you walk through the park engaging in fun activities that keep you guessing what’s next in the story.
Enter for a chance to win a copy of the book at the end of the walk.
6. Bicycle Sunday
April 22, 2pm-5pm at
All ages and families welcome!
Cruise along the trail route and stop at various checkpoints for fun activities, including a chance to win a Family 2018 Swimming Pool Pass.
7. Kearney’s Amazing Race
April 8, 2pm-5pm
Registration from 1:00pm-1:45pm at Harmon Park. Race begins at 2pm.
Teams will participate in a geocaching race through Kearney. All that you need is a Smart Phone (GPS Units also available). In a car and on foot, find the hidden caches. Geocaching 101 is provided.
Great prizes for the top three finishers.
All ages welcome, but you will need one driver. Great family activity.
8. Public Skate at Viaero Center
April 7 & 8: 1pm-3pm
April 14 & 15: 1pm-3pm
Family fun for everyone! No skates? No worries – skate rental is FREE!
Prices: $7 for kids, students (with ID), military and seniors. $10 for adults.
Public Skate Punch Card: $60 for 11 public skate sessions.
Party packages and private rentals available – Contact 308-338-8144
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Most Recent Weekly Report: 15 April-21 April 2020 Cite this Report
An increased number of volcanic earthquakes over a few days prompted PVMBG to issue a VONA on 15 April and raise the Aviation Color Code for Lokon-Empung to Yellow (the second lowest on a four-color scale). The volcano Alert Level remained at 2 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 1.5 km.
Source: Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG, also known as CVGHM)
Most Recent Bulletin Report: December 2015 (BGVN 40:12) Cite this Report
Small eruptions and seismic unrest continue in 2014-2015
Frequent activity at Lokon-Empung since early 2011 has typically included small explosions amid seismic unrest. Eruptions from the active Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the peaks of Lokon and Empung, took place during September 2012-September 2013, May 2015, and August-September 2015. The volcano is monitored by the Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG). The Alert Level has been set at 3 (on a 4 level system) since July 2011, and residents and tourists have been warned not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
Activity during 2011-2014. A brief explosion on 11 February 2011 was followed by an eruptive period lasting a year, from 26 June 2011 through 1 May 2012. Activity resumed again on 15 September 2012, and was continuing as of mid-April 2013 (BGVN 38:03). Although there were no further reports of explosive activity until September, thermal anomalies were observed on 5 July 2013 (2 pixels) at or near Tompaluan Crater, based on MODIS satellite data analyzed using MODVOLC.
An ash plume rising to an altitude of 1.8 km and drifting N on 9 September 2013 was reported by the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) based on ground reports from PVMBG. Ash was not detected in satellite images due to meteorological clouds. According to a news article (Jakarta Post), an explosion at 0630 generated an ash plume that rose 1.5 km; the explosion was heard 10 km away. Darwin VAAC noted that during the next day, ash plumes rose to an altitude of 2.4 km, although ash was again not identified in satellite images. A spokesperson from the PVMBG told the Jakarta Post that activity declined after 9 September, including the frequency of deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes.
A year later, PVMBG reported that during 8-14 September 2014 observers saw white plumes rising 25-100 m above Tompaluan Crater. On 13 September three explosions from the crater, at 0300, 1146, and 1229, produced thick white plumes that rose at most 500 m above the crater. Seismicity decreased sharply after the 13 September events, but continued to remain high relative to the levels detected previously.
Activity during 2015. According to PVMBG, observers saw white plumes rising 25-50 m above Tompaluan Crater during 6-13 May 2015, although bad weather often prevented observations. Seismicity fluctuated but slightly decreased overall.
An eruption on 20 May 2015 from the crater generated an ash plume that, according to the Darwin VAAC, rose as high as 3 km and drifted NNW (figure 17). The eruption was accompanied by loud "thumping" noises heard at the local observation post. During 21-27 May, thick grayish-white plumes rose as high as 150 m. Bad weather prevented satellite views. Seismicity fluctuated but generally continued to decrease slightly.
Figure 17. Photo of Lokon-Empung erupting on 20 May 2015. The Lokon cone is hidden by the ash plume from Tompaluan Crater; Gunung Empung is to the right. View is approximately NNW from Tomohon City. Courtesy of Piet Hein Pusung.
Figure 18. Photo of Lokon-Empung erupting on 20 May 2015. The ash plume from Tompaluan Crater is rising above Gunung Lokon (left). View is approximately NNW from Tomohon City. Courtesy of Piet Hein Pusung.
PVMBG reported that during 10-17 June 2015, observers at the Lokon Observation Post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 450 m above the crater. The number of volcanic earthquakes fluctuated and signals indicating emissions were detected almost daily. During 15-22 July observers saw white plumes rising as high as 75 m above the crater. The number of volcanic earthquakes declined but still remained higher than levels recorded during 25 May-10 July. Signals indicating emissions were occasionally detected.
According to the Darwin VAAC, PVMBG reported that on 30 August an ash plume rose to an altitude of 3 km. Ash was not identified in satellite images. According to a news account (Jakarta Post), ashfall occurred in Manado (15 km N) to North Minahasa (43 km NE). Another news account (Regional kompas.com) reported that thick volcanic ash covered the runways at Sam Ratulangi Airport in Manado, delaying some flights.
Thermal anomalies at or near Tompaluan Crater, based on MODIS satellite instruments analyzed using the MODVOLC algorithm, were observed on 24 September 2015 (1 pixel). The MIROVA (Middle InfraRed Observation of Volcanic Activity) system detected six hotspots within 5 km of Lokon-Empung during September 2015, two early in the month and four near the end.
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views, PVMBG reported that during 28 October-24 November 2015 observers saw white plumes rising as high as 400 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) showed a gradually increasing trend.
Information Contacts: Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG, also known as Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), Jalan Diponegoro 5+7, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), Bureau of Meteorology, Northern Territory Regional Office, PO Box 40050, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia (URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/); Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology (HIGP) MODVOLC Thermal Alerts System, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), Univ. of Hawai'i, 2525 Correa Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA (URL: http://modis.higp.hawaii.edu/); MIROVA, a collaborative project between the Universities of Turin and Florence, Italy (URL: http://www.mirovaweb.it/); The Jakarta Post (URL: http://www.thejakartapost.com/); Jakarta Globe (URL: http://jakartaglobe.id/); Regional Kompas.com (URL: http://regional.kompas.com/); Piet Hein Pusung (URL: https://twitter.com/PietHeinPusung).
Weekly Reports - Index
2017: March
2016: January | February | March | September
2015: May | June | July | August | November | December
2014: September
2013: January | March | April | September
2012: February | April | September | October | November | December
2011: February | June | July | August | October | December
2008: February
2007: June | December
2003: February | March | April | September
2002: February | April | May | June
2001: January | February | March | May | August | November
15 April-21 April 2020 Cite this Report
29 March-4 April 2017 Cite this Report
PVMBG reported that on 25 March six climbers between the ages of 15 and 20 climbed to Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, into the restricted area, where one of the climbers fell into the crater and died. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 1.5 km.
14 September-20 September 2016 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 1-14 September observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater) saw white plumes rising as high as 250 m above the crater. The number of shallow volcanic earthquakes was the highest on 1 September (20 recorded), and then fluctuated between 1 and 4 per day during 2-14 September. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 1.5 km.
2 March-8 March 2016 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 5 February-8 March observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater) saw white plumes rising as high as 200 m above the crater. Seismicity increased; shallow volcanic earthquakes notably increased on 6 March. Deformation data indicated inflation. The Alert Level was raised to 3 (on a scale of 1-4) on 8 March due to significant increases in deformation and seismic data. Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
3 February-9 February 2016 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 1 December 2015-4 February 2016 observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater) saw white plumes rising as high as 400 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated but decreased overall. No deformation was detected. The Alert Level was lowered to 2 (on a scale of 1-4) on 5 February. Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 1.5 km.
13 January-19 January 2016 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 6-13 January observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater) saw white plumes rising as high as 150 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, and was dominated by shallow volcanic earthquakes and signals indicating emissions. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
6 January-12 January 2016 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 30 December-7 January observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 250 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, and was dominated by shallow volcanic earthquakes and signals indicating emissions; the number of shallow volcanic earthquakes significantly increased on 3 January. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
16 December-22 December 2015 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 10-16 December observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 150 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) showed a gradual and significant increasing trend over the previous 3-4 months. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
9 December-15 December 2015 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 3-10 December observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 400 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) had shown a gradually increasing trend over the previous 3-4 months. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
2 December-8 December 2015 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 26 November-3 December observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 350 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) showed a gradually increasing trend. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
18 November-24 November 2015 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 12-19 November observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 400 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) showed a gradually increasing trend. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 5-12 November observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 300 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) showed a gradually increasing trend. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
4 November-10 November 2015 Cite this Report
Although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, PVMBG reported that during 28 October-5 November observers at the post in Kakaskasen Tomohon (North Sulawesi, 4 km from the crater), saw white plumes rising as high as 125 m above the crater. Seismicity fluctuated, but the seismic spectral amplitude measurement (SSAM) showed an increasing trend. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach the crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
26 August-1 September 2015 Cite this Report
According to the Darwin VAAC, PVMBG reported that on 30 August an ash plume rose from Lokon-Empung to an altitude of 3 km (10,000 ft) a.s.l. Ash was not identified in satellite images.
Source: Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC)
22 July-28 July 2015 Cite this Report
PVMBG reported that during 15-22 July observers at the Lokon Observation Post in Kakaskasen Tomohon, North Sulawesi (4 km from the crater) reported that, although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, white plumes were observed rising as high as 75 m above the crater. The number of volcanic earthquakes declined but still remained higher than levels recorded during 25 May-10 July. Signals indicating emissions were occasionally detected. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach Tompaluan Crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
17 June-23 June 2015 Cite this Report
PVMBG reported that during 10-17 June observers at the Lokon Observation Post in Kakaskasen Tomohon, North Sulawesi (4 km from the crater) reported that although inclement weather sometimes obscured views of Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater, white plumes were observed rising as high as 450 m above the crater. The number of volcanic earthquakes fluctuated and signals indicating emissions were detected almost daily. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach Tompaluan Crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
27 May-2 June 2015 Cite this Report
PVMBG reported that an eruption at 1520 on 20 May from Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan Crater generated an ash plume that rose 1.5 km and drifted NNW. The eruption was accompanied by loud "thumping" noises heard at the local observation post. During 21-27 May white plumes rose as high as 150 m. Seismicity fluctuated but slightly decreased overall. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach Tompaluan Crater within a radius of 2.5 km.
13 May-19 May 2015 Cite this Report
PVMBG reported that during 6-13 May observers of Lokon-Empung noted white plumes rising 25-50 m above Tompaluan Crater, although inclement weather often prevented observations. Seismicity fluctuated but slightly decreased overall. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were reminded not to approach Tompaluan Crater within a radius of 2.5 km. Based on ground observations, the Darwin VAAC reported that an ash plume rose to an altitude of 3 km (10,000 ft) a.s.l. on 20 May. Inclement weather prevented satellite views of the volcano.
PVMBG reported that during 8-14 September observers of Lokon-Empung noted white plumes rising 25-100 m above Tompaluan Crater. On 13 September three explosions from Tompaluan Crater, at 0300, 1146, and 1229, produced white plumes that rose at most 500 m above the crater. Seismicity decreased sharply after the13 September events but continued to remain high relative to the levels detected prior to 10 September. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
According to a news article, a spokesperson from the Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG) stated that activity at Lokon-Empung continued to decline after a 9 September eruption. The frequency of deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes had continued to decline.
Source: The Jakarta Post
4 September-10 September 2013 Cite this Report
Based on ground reports from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 9 September an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 1.8 km (6,000 ft) a.s.l. and drifted N. Ash was not detected in satellite images due to meteorological clouds. According to a news article an explosion at 0630 generated an ash plume that rose 1.5 km; the explosion was heard 10 km away. The VAAC noted that the next day ash plumes rose to an altitude of 2.4 km (8,000 ft) a.s.l. although ash was again not identified in satellite images.
Sources: Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC); Jakarta Globe
Based on both web-camera views and ground reports, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 11 April an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 4.6 km (15,000 ft) a.s.l. and drifted SW. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery.
3 April-9 April 2013 Cite this Report
Based on both CVGHM and ground reports, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 3 April an eruption from Lokon-Empung produced an ash plume that rose to altitudes of 3-3.4 km (10,000-11,000 ft) a.s.l. and drifted S and SE. On 8 April an ash plume rose to an altitude of 4.6 km (15,000 ft) a.s.l. and drifted SW. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery.
20 March-26 March 2013 Cite this Report
According to a news article, an eruption from Lokon-Empung occurred on 20 March at 0757, producing an ash plume that rose 2 km above the crater.
Source: newKerala.com
30 January-5 February 2013 Cite this Report
According to news articles, Lokon-Empung erupted twice on 31 January, producing an ash plume that rose 800 m after the first eruption. Seismicity had increased the day before. In another article the head of the Lokon observation post reported that eruptions from Lokon occurred daily, and specifically that nine eruptions had occurred on 2 February.
Based on a ground report from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported that an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 4 km (13,000 ft) a.s.l. on 3 February. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery.
Sources: People's Daily Online (China); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC); Kompas.com
Based on reports from CVGHM and ASHTAMs (a special NOTAM for volcanic ash), the Darwin VAAC reported that ash plumes rose from Lokon-Empung rose to altitudes of 3.7-4.5 km (12,000-14,800 ft) a.s.l. during 15-16 January. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery.
2 January-8 January 2013 Cite this Report
Based on ground reports from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported that ash plumes rose from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 2.4 km (8,000 ft) a.s.l. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery.
Based on ground reports from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported that ash plumes rose from Lokon-Empung on 17 December.
Based on information from CVGHM and the WAAA MWO (in Ujung Pandang,Indonesia), the Darwin VAAC reported that an eruption from Lokon-Empung produced an ash plume that rose to an altitude of 3.4 km (11,000 ft) a.s.l. on 6 December and drifted S. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery. On 10 December a plume rose to an altitude of 4.3 km (14,000 ft) a.s.l.
28 November-4 December 2012 Cite this Report
According to the Darwin VAAC, CVGHM reported that an eruption from Lokon-Empung produced an ash plume that rose to an altitude of 4.9 km (16,000 ft) a.s.l. on 28 November. Ash was not detected in satellite imagery.
Based on a SIGMET, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 11 November an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 1.5 km (5,000 ft) a.s.l.
3 October-9 October 2012 Cite this Report
According to the Darwin VAAC, CVGHM reported that on 6 October an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 3.7 km (12,000 ft) a.s.l.; the plume altitude was determined by wind data. A thermal anomaly was detected in satellite imagery. According to a news article, an eruption at 1405 on 7 October ejected incandescent tephra as high as 350 m above the crater and generated an ash plume that rose 1.5 km. The article also noted that Lokon-Empung had erupted 41 times in September and three times on 5 October.
Sources: Jakarta Globe; Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC)
According to the Darwin VAAC, ground-based observers reported that on 21 September an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 3 km (10,000 ft) a.s.l. Ash was not identified in satellite imagery.
According to the Darwin VAAC, ground-based observers reported that on 15 September an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 3 km (10,000 ft) a.s.l. On 15 September satellite imagery showed an ash plume drifting 185 km SE.
25 April-1 May 2012 Cite this Report
According to the Darwin VAAC, ash plumes from Lokon-Empung, that rose to an altitude of 3.7 km (12,000 ft) a.s.l. and drifted 75 km N, were detected in satellite imagery and reported by ground-based observers.
CVGHM reported that during the morning on 24 April diffuse white plumes rose 25-50 m above Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks. Later that day an eruption was accompanied by loud "thumping" noises heard at local observation posts, though fog prevented views of the crater. The next day diffuse white plumes rose 50-100 m above the crater. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
8 February-14 February 2012 Cite this Report
According to news articles, an explosion from the Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, produced an ash plume that rose as high as 2 km above the crater on 10 February; loud "thumping" noises were also heard. Based on information from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported ash plumes that rose to altitudes of 3-3.4 km (10,000-11,000 ft) a.s.l. during 10-12 February, though clouds prevented the detection of ash in satellite imagery.
Sources: Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC); CNN; Antara News
28 December-3 January 2012 Cite this Report
CVGHM reported that on 27 December seismic activity at Lokon-Empung suggested that an eruption had occurred, but fog prevented visual observations of the crater area. CVGHM noted on 28 December that the Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4), and reminded residents and tourists to not approach within a 2.5 km radius of the crater. Based on information from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 29 December an ash plume rose to an altitude of 3.7 km (12,000 ft) a.s.l.
Sources: Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG, also known as CVGHM); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC)
According to a news article, three explosions from the Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks were recorded by the CVGHM on 27 December. CVGHM recorded 23 deep volcanic tremors and 40 shallow volcanic tremors. Residents and tourists were not permitted within a 2.5 km radius of the crater. Based on visual and seismic observations during 27-28 December, the Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). The Darwin VAAC reported a low-level eruption on 27 December based on media reports.
Sources: The Jakarta Post; Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC); Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG, also known as CVGHM)
26 October-1 November 2011 Cite this Report
According to a news article, a gray plume rose 1.2 km above Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, and drifted SW on 26 October, followed by an explosion that sent incandescent material as far as 800 m away from Tompaluan crater. A second eruption produced a plume that rose 500 m above the crater.
Source: Kompas.com
5 October-11 October 2011 Cite this Report
CVGHM reported that on 10 October white and gray plumes rose 100-300 m above Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks. Based on information from CVGHM, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 11 October an ash plume rose to an altitude of 2.1 km (7,000 ft) a.s.l. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
24 August-30 August 2011 Cite this Report
According to a news article, activity from Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, decreased on 29 August after erupting several times the previous week and specifically 12 times on 28 August. One explosion on 29 August ejected material 250 m above the crater. The article also noted that 222 people remained at temporary refugee camps because their homes were located within 3 kilometers of the crater.
Source: BNO News
3 August-9 August 2011 Cite this Report
CVGHM reported that during 24 July-8 August seismicity decreased at Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, with a drastic reduction on 26 July. During 27 July-8 August white plumes rose 100-400 m above the crater. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were not permitted within a 3-km radius of the crater.
CVGHM reported that during 20-21 July seismicity and visual observations of Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, indicated that activity continued to be high. On 20 July plumes rose 100-500 m above the crater, and during 21-24 July white plumes rose 100-300 m above the crater. CVGHM noted that, since the eruption on 18 July, most data showed a decline in activity and therefore on 24 July the Alert Level was lowered to 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were not permitted within a 3-km radius of the crater. A news article stated that on that same day about 5,000 residents that had evacuated returned home, and about 200 people remained in shelters.
Sources: Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG, also known as CVGHM); Straits Times
According to news articles, three eruptions during 14-15 July from Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, ejected lava and ash, and caused forest fires on the W flank. A local mayor noted that 6,000 people were in shelters and one person had died from a heart attack while evacuating. Other articles stated that 5,200 people had evacuated. Explosions during 17-18 July produced ash plumes that rose 0.6-3.5 km above the crater.
Sources: Daily Mail; Agence France-Presse (AFP)
6 July-12 July 2011 Cite this Report
CVGHM reported that during 28 June-9 July white plumes rose 50-400 m above Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, and gray ash plumes rose 100-500 m above the crater. An ash eruption on 10 July produced white-to-gray plumes that rose 200-400 m above the crater. Fluctuations in the sulfur dioxide gas emission rate were noted during 30 June-10 July. Based on gas flux, seismicity, visual observations, and hazard assessment CVGHM raised the Alert Level to 4 (on a scale of 1-4). On 11 July, the Darwin VAAC reported that ash plumes detected in satellite imagery rose to an altitude of 1.5 km (5,000 ft) a.s.l. and drifted NW. According to news articles, close to 1,000 residents were evacuated from the area during 11-12 July.
Sources: Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigasi Bencana Geologi (PVMBG, also known as CVGHM); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC); Associated Press
29 June-5 July 2011 Cite this Report
CVGHM reported that during 1-25 June white plumes rose 50-200 m above Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks. On 26 June a phreatic eruption ejected material that fell around the crater and produced a gray plume that rose 400 m above the crater rim and drifted N. Seismicity increased the next day and white plumes rose 50-200 m above the crater. The Alert Level was raised to 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Visitors and residents were prohibited from going within a 3-km radius of the crater.
23 February-1 March 2011 Cite this Report
According to news articles, a phreatic eruption from Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung peaks, produced an ash plume that rose 400 m above the crater rim and drifted SE on 22 February.
Source: Tempo
CVGHM reported that on 28 February the Alert level for Lokon-Empung was lowered from 3 to 2 (on a scale of 1-4) due to a decrease in seismicity during 3-26 February, analysis of visual observations, and a lack of deformation. During 14-26 February, white plumes rose to an altitude of 1.7 km (5,600 ft) a.s.l. Visitors and tourists were prohibited from going within a 1-km radius of the crater.
CVGHM raised the Alert Level for Lokon-Empung from 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4) on 9 December based on visual observations, inflation detected by deformation instruments, and an increase in seismicity. The water in the Tompaluan crater changed color from green to gray and noises from degassing became stronger. White plumes rose from the crater to an altitude of 1.6 km (5,200 ft) a.s.l. Visitors and tourists were advised not to go within a 2-km radius of the crater.
Based on visual observations, CVGHM reported that during 18-25 June diffuse ash plumes from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of 1.6 km (5,200 ft) a.s.l. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a scale of 1-4). [Correction: diffuse white plumes from Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan crater rose to an altitude of approximately 1.2 km (3,900 ft) a.s.l.]
According to a report from aircraft personnel, on 12 September at 1510 an ash plume emitted from Lokon-Empung rose to a height of ~7.6 km a.s.l. and drifted W. The plume was not visible on satellite imagery.
9 April-15 April 2003 Cite this Report
After an explosion on 1 April at Lokon-Empung, volcanic activity decreased through 6 April. A "white-thick ash plume" rose to low levels and there were no observations of ash explosions. Seismicity after the 1 April explosion was dominated by tremor due to the release of gases. Lokon-Empung remained at Alert Level 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
Beginning on 31 March the number of volcanic earthquakes at Lokon-Empung was relatively high. On 1 April at 2242 an explosion produced an ash column to a height of ~1.5 km over the crater. Ash drifted SSE and accumulated as an up to 1-mm-thick layer in the town of Tomohon. Incandescent material was hurled to ~350 m high and cascaded around the crater. Through 0900 on 3 April tremor earthquakes continued to be recorded. Lokon-Empung remained at Alert Level 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
VSI decreased the Alert Level at Lokon-Empung on 24 March from 3 to 2 (on a scale of 1-4) due to a decrease in volcanic activity. During 17-23 March, "white-thick ash emissions" rose to ~300 m above Tompaluan crater, ash explosions occurred, and there was a significant decrease in emission earthquakes compared to the previous week. On 27 March at 0156 an explosion ejected ash to 1.5 km and incandescent volcanic material to 400 m above the crater. An ash cloud drifted S and ash fell around the summit. Ash was not visible on satellite imagery. Lokon-Empung remained at Alert Level 2.
During 10-16 March, volcanism remained at relatively high levels at Lokon-Empung with "white-thick ash emissions" rising to low levels above Tompaluan crater. No explosions occurred during 14-16 March. Seismicity was dominated by emission and tremor earthquakes. The Alert Level at Lokon-Empung remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
5 March-11 March 2003 Cite this Report
Explosive activity continued at Lokon-Empung during 24 February to 2 March, with 12 explosions producing "white-gray ash columns" that rose 300 m above the volcano. An explosion on 2 March at 2129 was preceded by 204 shallow and 77 deep volcanic earthquakes. During the explosion a "gray-dark ash column" rose 1.5 km above the crater, but incandescent volcanic material remained within the crater. Ash drifted about 14.5 km from the crater to the Tondano area, depositing ~1 mm of ash. Tremor was recorded after the eruption. Lokon-Empung remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
19 February-25 February 2003 Cite this Report
An eruption at Lokon-Empung on 23 February around 1100 produced an ash cloud that rose 2.5 km above the crater. According to news reports, ash fell in the villages of Kinilouw and Kakaskasen and the Tondano Lake. On the 24th authorities put residents near the volcano on alert and banned recreational activities on Lokon-Empung's flanks. Two small eruptions on the 24th sent ash 200 m above the volcano. Lokon-Empung was at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Sources: Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC); News 24; Agence France-Presse (AFP)
On 10 February at 2219 an ash explosion occurred at Lokon-Empung, but the height of the resultant ash cloud could not be determined due to heavy rain. On 12 February, mainly during 0100-1000, there was a significant increase in volcanic earthquakes. At 1048 an explosion occurred, followed by seismic data indicating a larger explosion at 1102. On 12 February during 0800-1100 the Alert Level was raised from 3 to 4 (the highest level). Tremor was continuously recorded during 1255 on the 12th to 0046 the following day. According to the Darwin VAAC, an explosion occurred on 19 February at 0403 that produced a plume to 500 m above the summit.
Starting at the beginning of the report week (3-9 February), there was an increase in seismicity and surface activity at Lokon-Empung in comparison to the previous week. There were more emission, and deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes and ash emissions. On 8 February at 0443 an ash explosion was accompanied by the ejection of incandescent volcanic material. A thick ash cloud rose to 1.4 km over the crater and 0.5-1 mm of ash was deposited S of the volcano in the villages of Kayau, Tara-tara I and II, and Woloan II and III. At this time the Alert Level was raised from 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Seismic and volcanic activity at Lokon-Empung were above "normal" levels during 3-9 June, but there was a decline in seismicity in comparison to the previous week. The Alert Level at Lokon-Empung was reduced from 3 to 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
5 June-11 June 2002 Cite this Report
Seismic and volcanic activity continued at high levels at Lokon-Empung during 27 May-2 June. Volcanic tremor occurred and thin emissions rose to low-levels above the crater. The volcano remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Seismicity at Lokon-Empung during 22 April-26 May remained above background levels. Several deep and shallow volcanic, tectonic, and small explosion earthquakes occurred. Thin, white plumes rose 50-250 m above the crater rim. Lokon-Empung remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Activity at Lokon remained higher than normal during 15-21 April. Volcanic tremor was high, gas explosions occurred at the bottom of the crater, and a low-level steam plume was visible. The volcano remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Increases in volcanic and seismic activity at Lokon-Empung led VSI to raise the Alert Level from 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4) on 12 April. Eruptions occurred on 10 April at 2302 and on the 12th at 1816. On 13 April eight gas-and-ash explosions occurred and on the 14th five occurred. Tremor that began on 11 April continued through at least the 14th.
VSI reported that an eruption occurred at Lokon-Empung's Tompaluan crater on 10 April at 1104. The dark plume rose about 1 km above the volcano and tephra fell around the crater. Based on a pilot report, the Darwin VAAC first erroneously attributed the ash cloud to an eruption from Mahawu. No ash was visible on satellite imagery.
After an eruption on 9 February, volcanism decreased at Lokon-Empung through at least the 17th. During 11-17 February, observers saw small volcanic plumes rise 50-150 m above the crater rim. The volcano remained at Alert Level 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
Following a tectonic earthquake near Lokon on 19 October, activity increased at the volcano; high-frequency tremor occurred and gray emissions rose 50-250 m above Tompaluan crater. While fewer earthquakes were recorded during 12-18 November (10 per day) in comparison to the previous week (19 per day), the number of earthquakes was still above normal levels. No major changes in volcanic activity were seen at Lokon's summit. The Alert Level at Lokon remained at 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
On 18 August at 2230 an explosion produced an ash cloud that rose ~800 m above the crater and drifted over the town of Manado 25 km N of the volcano. Following the explosion there was a significant increase in volcanic earthquakes in comparison to the previous week. The volcano remained at Alert Level 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
VSI reported that there was a significant decrease in seismic activity at Lokon during 30 July-12 August in comparison to during previous weeks. Small explosions at Tompaluan crater produced plumes that rose 25-250 m above the summit. The volcano remained at Alert Level 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
An article in the Jakarta Post stated that an eruption at Lokon that began at 2014 on 20 May deposited ash in a wide area around the volcano, including the provincial capital of Manado, approximately 20 km NE of the volcano. They reported that ash rose up to 900 m above the volcano and that the eruption was accompanied by tremor.
Activity continued after the 28 January 2001 explosion. On 26 March 2001 at 1440 another eruption sent a dark ash plume 1,500 m above the crater rim. Ash drifted E and N. No incandescent material was observed, but 25 minutes after the explosion ash started to fall at Kinilow village (3.5 km from the crater) and Kakaskasen village (4 km from the crater). Activity slowly decreased though 1510, when thick white gas emissions from the crater rose 400 m. The ashfall was 0.3-0.5 cm thick at Kinilow village, 0.1-0.3 cm thick at Kakaskasen village, and 1-2 cm thick around Pasahapen river, about 1 km from the crater. After the initial explosion, volcanic tremor was recorded between 1442 and 1457 with a maximum amplitude of 2-16 mm. The seismograph recorded 13 deep volcanic (type A) and 12 shallow volcanic (type B) events on 25 March; six deep and seven shallow volcanic earthquakes were detected on the 26th.
The VSI reported that visual observations made during 27 February to 5 March revealed that activity decreased at Lokon-Empung. Only small-to-medium sized steam plumes were observed rising 50-150 m above the crater. The Alert level was reduced from 3 to 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
The VSI reported that following the 28 January eruption, activity decreased at Lokon-Empung with only small steam emissions occurring. A small tectonic earthquake (M 1) was reported in the area. The volcano remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Visual observations by VSI personnel during 12-17 February revealed that volcanic activity remained low at Lokon, with steam plumes rising 200-350 m above the crater rim. Seismic data were not available because the seismograph on the volcano was broken. The volcano remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
After explosions occurred on 28 January, volcanic activity decreased. During 30 January to 5 February an ash plume was observed rising 200-350 m above the volcano. The seismograph on the volcano broke on 30 January. The volcano remained at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
The VSI reported that volcanic activity increased in comparison to the previous week. Explosions began occurring at 1920 on 28 January and produced glowing ejecta (volcanic bombs) that fell on the N slope of the volcano. The height of the ash cloud that was produced by the eruption could not be measured due to unfavorable weather conditions. A strong sulfurous smell was detected from Kakaskasen observatory. On the morning of 29 January an ash plume rose continuously up to 300 m above the crater. The Alert Level at the volcano was raised during the report period from level 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Bulletin Reports - Index
Reports are organized chronologically and indexed below by Month/Year (Publication Volume:Number), and include a one-line summary. Click on the index link or scroll down to read the reports.
01/1970 (CSLP 09-70) Eruption on 27 November 1969 ejects thick, dark cloud; activity continued through late December
03/1986 (SEAN 11:03) Explosions empty crater lake; mud flows
04/1986 (SEAN 11:04) More phreatic explosions
05/1986 (SEAN 11:05) Small explosion is only activity since April
06/1986 (SEAN 11:06) Small explosion
07/1986 (SEAN 11:07) Small explosions eject daily ash clouds
09/1986 (SEAN 11:09) Explosions eject breadcrust bombs
10/1986 (SEAN 11:10) Periodic explosions; no additional juvenile tephra
11/1986 (SEAN 11:11) Frequent explosions; ashfall to the SE
12/1986 (SEAN 11:12) Continued small explosions and seismicity
02/1987 (SEAN 12:02) Occasional small explosions
03/1987 (SEAN 12:03) Single gas explosion
04/1987 (SEAN 12:04) Diminished activity; continuous white plume
06/1987 (SEAN 12:06) Two ash explosions
04/1988 (SEAN 13:04) One small explosion
05/1991 (BGVN 16:05) Increased gas emission, then ash eruption
06/1991 (BGVN 16:06) Explosions eject small ash columns
08/1991 (BGVN 16:08) Incandescent tephra cause fires that burn plantations
10/1991 (BGVN 16:10) Vigorous explosions; 10,000 evacuated
11/1991 (BGVN 16:11) Moderate explosions continue
08/1994 (BGVN 19:08) Description of fumaroles in the active crater
01/1996 (BGVN 21:01) Variable seismicity and minor vapor emissions
11/1996 (BGVN 21:11) Low-level activity and shallow earthquakes
08/1998 (BGVN 23:08) Noteworthy plume and slight increase in seismic activity
05/1999 (BGVN 24:05) March-May included variable seismicity and meager plumes
10/2000 (BGVN 25:10) May-October seismic unrest, modest ash clouds, and lava fountains
01/2001 (BGVN 26:01) 28 January explosion sends ash and glowing ejecta skyward
11/2001 (BGVN 26:11) March, May, and August eruptions; plumes to 1.5 km over summit
02/2002 (BGVN 27:02) Explosions, 1.5-km ash plumes, and tremor through at least February 2002
04/2002 (BGVN 27:04) Ash eruptions and increased seismicity in mid-April, Alert Level raised to 3
07/2002 (BGVN 27:07) Increased activity; gas plumes with occassional ash emitted during June and July 2002
12/2002 (BGVN 27:12) Higher-than-normal activity continues through at least December 2002
05/2003 (BGVN 28:05) Increased explosive activity during January-April 2003; local ashfall
10/2003 (BGVN 28:10) Small gas plume; high but variable shallow volcanic seismicity
12/2003 (BGVN 28:12) During November, elevated seismicity and a minor gas plume
03/2006 (BGVN 31:03) Steaming and seismically active during January-October 2005
02/2008 (BGVN 33:02) June 2007-March 2008, variable seismicity and minor white plumes
06/2011 (BGVN 36:06) July 2011 ash plumes spur 4,000 to 6,000 to evacuate
11/2011 (BGVN 36:11) Ongoing minor ash-bearing eruptions through at least November 2011
05/2012 (BGVN 37:05) Small plumes in 2012; activity increase in April-May
03/2013 (BGVN 38:03) Eruptions continue into early 2013
12/2015 (BGVN 40:12) Small eruptions and seismic unrest continue in 2014-2015
Information is preliminary and subject to change. All times are local (unless otherwise noted)
January 1970 (CSLP 09-70)
Eruption on 27 November 1969 ejects thick, dark cloud; activity continued through late December
Card 0857 (29 January 1970) Eruption on 27 November 1969 ejects thick, dark cloud; activity continued through late December
Mt. Lokon began an eruptive phase at 0010 local time 27 November 1969, when a sudden explosion sent a thick, dark eruption cloud to a height of 500 m, and incandescent rocks were ejected, subsequently falling back around the crater. Three earthquakes were recorded. On 28 November an explosion at 2157 sent a cloud 400 m high, and pyroclastics were ejected for 15 minutes. Sulfurous smelling mud and sand fell in Kakaskasen, Kinilow, and Tinoor, causing leaves to wither and fish to die in some ponds. Fire was observed at several spots near the crater. By 2300 the activity was limited to bubbling crater water and a white eruption cloud. Between 1 and 9 December there were several explosions, usually accompanied by dark eruption clouds and light ash falls.
Until the middle of December small-scale eruptions often took place at 20-minute intervals, accompanied by light ashfalls around Kakaskasen village. During the last half of December, the eruption became stronger, and violent explosions on 23 and 25 December resulted in mud rains and ashfalls. In addition, 16 moderate eruptions occurred in the last half of the month, pushing ash columns 300 m above the crater.
Information Contacts: Djajadi Hadikusumo, Chief, Volcanology Division, Geology Survey of Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia.
March 1986 (SEAN 11:03) Cite this Report
Explosions empty crater lake; mud flows
"Activity began 22 March at 0336 with a small phreatic eruption from the Tompaluan Crater . . . . A small (700,000 m3) crater lake within Tompaluan crater was ~60% evacuated during the 22 March eruption. A larger, phreatomagmatic eruption occurred on 24 March at 0343, emptying the remainder of the lake and throwing out incandescent ballistic blocks to heights of 800-1,000 m. Mudflows were produced during both eruptions. No casualties or damage have been reported. Small explosions occurred on 29 March at 1547 to 250 m height, at 1806 to 300 m, and at 1817 to 200 m. The VSI observation post is located at Kakaskasen, ~5 km SE of the volcano. The observatory has one vertical component seismometer, located at Lokon."
Information Contacts: Suratman, A. Sudradjat and T. Casadevall, VSI.
April 1986 (SEAN 11:04) Cite this Report
More phreatic explosions
"On 5, 7, 12, and 27 April, small explosions were observed from Tompaluan Crater. The maximum height of the explosion clouds was 500 m."
Information Contacts: Olas, Suratman, Suparto, Kaswanda, and A. Sudradjat, VSI.
May 1986 (SEAN 11:05) Cite this Report
Small explosion is only activity since April
A small explosion 2 June at 0730 ejected a gray plume to ~700 m above the crater. No other activity had been reported since a phreatic explosion on 27 April.
Information Contacts: A. Sudradjat, L. Pardyanto, and T. Casadevall, VSI.
June 1986 (SEAN 11:06) Cite this Report
Small explosion
On 14 July at 1223, Lokon erupted again from Tompaluan crater . . . . , sending an eruption plume to ~1 km above the crater rim.
Information Contacts: L. Pardyanto, Olas, Kaswanda, A. Sudradjat, and T. Casadevall, VSI.
July 1986 (SEAN 11:07) Cite this Report
Small explosions eject daily ash clouds
Through July, as many as several small explosions/day continued to send ash clouds to 300-500 m above the crater. The lake within Tompaluan Crater has disappeared completely.
Information Contacts: L. Pardyanto, Olas, Kaswanda, Suratman, A. Sudradjat, and T. Casadevall, VSI.
September 1986 (SEAN 11:09) Cite this Report
Explosions eject breadcrust bombs
"Explosions continued almost daily through September, ejecting tephra that contained juvenile ballistic fragments (breadcrust bombs) to several hundred meters above the vent on 4, 9, and 11 September."
October 1986 (SEAN 11:10) Cite this Report
Periodic explosions; no additional juvenile tephra
Phreatic explosions continued through October. No lava flow has been observed. No juvenile material has been reported since breadcrust bombs were ejected in early September.
Information Contacts: Suratman and T. Casadevall, VSI.
November 1986 (SEAN 11:11) Cite this Report
Frequent explosions; ashfall to the SE
Approximately 100 explosions occurred at Tompaluan Crater in November, with ~20 recorded 21-27 November, and 33 the previous week. The strongest, on 22 November at 1921, ejected lava fragments and incandescent bombs that fell within 400 m of the crater in the S summit area. An ash column rose 1,000 m and ashfall occurred over a wide area to the SE. Less than 0.5 mm of ash fell at the Kakaskasen Volcano Observatory, ~5.5 km SE of the crater. No casualties or crop damages were reported. The Observatory recorded 37 volcanic earthquakes during November.
Information Contacts: VSI; ANS.
December 1986 (SEAN 11:12) Cite this Report
Continued small explosions and seismicity
Explosions from Tompaluan Crater continued through early January at rates of 30-80/day. Maximum plume heights were 500-800 m. The Kakaskasen Volcano Observatory recorded 2-20 volcanic earthquakes/day; the average number of events was ~10/day.
Information Contacts: VSI.
February 1987 (SEAN 12:02) Cite this Report
Occasional small explosions
Occasional small explosions continued through February, ejecting clouds to a maximum height of 400 m. Some seismicity was recorded but was reported as tectonic.
Single gas explosion
Lokon-Empung was relatively quiet during March, with only a single gas explosion, on 11 March at 0340, which produced a plume to 900 m height. Normal activity consisted of a white gas plume continuously emitted to a maximum of 300 m above Tompaluan crater.
Information Contacts: VSI; T. Casadevall, USGS & VSI.
Diminished activity; continuous white plume
Activity diminished during April. A white plume was continuously emitted from Tompaluan Crater to heights of 200-400 m. During the first half of the month, an average of 15 tectonic earthquakes were detected daily. No seismic activity was reported for the second half of the month.
Two ash explosions
Lokon-Empung generally remained quiet during May and June, with only two ash explosions, on 10 and 13 May. Ash columns rose ~750 m above Tompaluan Crater. Explosions began in March 1986, but have been infrequent for the last few months.
One small explosion
A single explosion occurred on 21 April at 0600. The plume reached 400 m above the crater.
May 1991 (BGVN 16:05) Cite this Report
Increased gas emission, then ash eruption
Gas emissions to 450 m height were observed during the morning and afternoon of 10 May. One week later (17-18 May), ash was erupted to 200-400 m height. Seismicity then decreased, with one deep and three shallow volcanic earthquakes recorded during the last week of May, down from six deep and nine shallow events the second week of the month.
Information Contacts: W. Modjo, VSI.
June 1991 (BGVN 16:06) Cite this Report
Explosions eject small ash columns
Ash explosions occurred at 1537 on 27 May and 1000 on 28 May, producing columns 250 m high. Continued ash explosions were observed at a rate of 7-16/week, with column heights of 200-400 m. Seismic activity was characterized by explosion earthquakes, averaging 30-50 recorded events/week. Shallow and deep volcanic earthquakes were less frequent (2-8 and 3-9 events/week, respectively). Tectonic earthquakes ranged from 18 to 101 weekly.
August 1991 (BGVN 16:08) Cite this Report
Incandescent tephra cause fires that burn plantations
The press reported that renewed activity on 19 September ejected a plume to ~700 m. Incandescent tephra fell 500 m from the crater, starting fires that burned plantations in seven villages. No casualties were reported. As of the next morning, the eruption was continuing and VSI observers were recording accompanying earthquakes. VSI advised local authorities that residents of nearby villages should remain on alert, but an evacuation was not ordered.
Information Contacts: VSI; UPI.
October 1991 (BGVN 16:10) Cite this Report
Vigorous explosions; 10,000 evacuated
Vigorous explosions on 24 October ejected ash to ~2 km height, and may have generated a pyroclastic flow on 25 October, before a decline in activity noted at 2000. As much as 1 m of tephra was reportedly deposited near the summit, but only 2.5 cm of ash fell 4 km E (at Kinilaw). The airport at Manado (15 km NE; figure 1) was closed until 29 October, because of poor visibility and minor ashfall. By 29 October, more than 1900 buildings and roughly 3 km2 of clove trees and coconut palms had been damaged; ~10,000 people were evacuated. Ash and incandescent material ejected on 6 November reached 300 m height. Large explosions on 17 and 20 November produced ash columns 1,000 and 2,500 m high, respectively, panicking residents of nearby villages, who had recently returned to their homes. Ash emissions continued the next day, but were less frequent and less intense. Vivianne Clavel, a Swiss volcanologist studying the eruption, was reported missing on 24 October, and had not been located by searchparties at press time.
Figure 1. Map of Lokon-Empung, based on a portion of the Manado, Indonesia 1:250,000 sheet (Joint Operations Graphic-Ground, series 1501, sheet NA 51-12, Army Map Service, Washington). Contour interval, 200 m.
[Despite rescue efforts, no signs of V. Clavel were found. According to a witness, she was killed by falling blocks and buried by ash.]
Information Contacts: N. MacLeod, Ridgefield WA, USA; T. Casadevall, USGS; U.S. Embassy, Jakarta; UPI; Reuters; AP.
November 1991 (BGVN 16:11) Cite this Report
Moderate explosions continue
Since the end of the vigorous activity that began on 24 October, 16 explosions from the active Tompaluan Crater have been recorded (figure 2). Ash column heights ranged from 200 m to >250 m above the rim of Tompaluan . . . . The most recent recorded explosion, on 1 December at 1717, was preceded by tremor that morning and the previous day. The press described an apparently unrecorded ash emission episode that produced a 300-m plume during the morning of 11 December. Gas rose to 200-300 m height between explosions. Local seismicity continued at somewhat reduced rates (figure 3).
Figure 2. Number of recorded explosions/day at Lokon-Empung, 24 October-12 December 1991. Courtesy of VSI.
Figure 3. Number of recorded earthquakes at Lokon-Empung, 28 October-12 December 1991. For each day, three bars are shown, distinguishing shallow volcanic earthquakes (left), deep volcanic shocks (center), and tectonic events (right). Arrows indicate tremor episodes. Courtesy of VSI.
VSI warned that additional explosions were still anticipated, and the area designated by their 1986 hazard map remained at risk. The press reported that [~10,000] people had fled the 24 October activity, but most had returned home by early December.
Description of fumaroles in the active crater
"During our visit to the summit zone on 8 July, intense fumaroles escaped from several parts of the Tompaluan crater floor. This fumarolic activity was mainly concentrated in the N where an intracaldera structure was covered by yellow sulfur deposits. Many other fumaroles with sulfur deposits were also located in the S, E, and W parts of the crater. Temperatures measured with an electronic thermometer at the E fumaroles showed a maximum value of 95-96°C. The fumarolic gases were mainly composed of H2O and H2S."
Information Contacts: H. Gaudru, C. Pittet, M. Auber, C. Bopp, and O. Saudan, EVS, Switzerland.
January 1996 (BGVN 21:01) Cite this Report
Variable seismicity and minor vapor emissions
Vapor emission was observed during November-December 1995 and whitish-gray plumes rose to 100 m above the active crater. Seismicity during September-October 1995 consisted of 1- 8 A-type events/day. On 1 November there were 46 A-type events recorded, followed by very low seismicity over the next ten days. Activity then increased from 12 November through 31 December, but was highly variable with 4-21 events/day. B-type events remained at 0-8 events/day.
The present activity is located at Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the peaks of Lokon (1,579 m) and Empung (1,340 m). About 10,000 people evacuated following an explosion in October 1991 accompanied by a pyroclastic flow; the eruption ended in January 1992.
Information Contacts: Wimpy S. Tjetjep (Director), Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro 57, Bandung, Indonesia.
Low-level activity and shallow earthquakes
During October, Tampoluan crater emitted white vapor up to 50-75 m high. Occasionally, strong sulfuric gases were smelled at the observatory an undisclosed distance away. Volcanic earthquakes tended to increase but activity remained at a low level.
Information Contacts: Wimpy S. Tjetjep, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, Jalan Diponegoro No. 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia.
Noteworthy plume and slight increase in seismic activity
A slight increase in shallow volcanic seismic activity was recorded in late June lasting through August, although there was a minor decrease in July. Observers saw a plume of white vapor rising 25-75 m above the summit.
Information Contacts: R. Sukhyar, Director, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Bandung, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
March-May included variable seismicity and meager plumes
During 9 March-24 May visual observations suggested stable conditions, with a "white ash plume" rising 25-75 m above the crater rim. But the seismic record showed extreme variation. Between 9 March and 23 March, volcanic A-type events increased from 7 to 53 and volcanic B-type events rose from 15 to 64. Tectonic events decreased from 34 to 17 in that same period. During the week of 23-29 March event numbers dropped to 23 for A-type and 43 for B-type. Tectonic events rose to 35. Weekly event incidence declined in May, hovering under 10 for A-type, under 20 for B-type, and under 25 for tectonic.
Information Contacts: Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro No. 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
May-October seismic unrest, modest ash clouds, and lava fountains
This report covers activity during March-October 2000. Visual and seismic activity increased notably in mid-March, and the alert level for Lokon-Empung was set at 2 on a scale of 1-4. A very dense gas emission caused vegetation on the eastern slope to wither. During this period, 45 deep volcanic (A-type) earthquakes, 210 shallow volcanic (B-type) earthquakes, and 12 tectonic earthquakes occurred. Tompaluan crater emitted white medium-dense gas that rose 50-150 m above the crater rim in late March. Seismicity changed, with fewer volcanic and more tectonic earthquakes than in the previous weeks. At the beginning of April, the number of A-type earthquakes increased, but visual activity remained similar to the previous week.
The white medium-dense gas emission from Tompaluan crater increased in height to 50-200 m above the rim in the second week of April. B-type earthquakes still dominated seismicity. Seismic intensity of B-type earthquakes increased toward the end of April. Gas emission remained similar, but decreased in height to 50-150 m above the crater rim. During the second week in May, an ash plume rose 100 m above the rim of Tompaluan crater. A volcanic ash advisory was issued on 15 May to warn aviators of the ash cloud emanating from Lokon-Empung. The advisory indicated ash at an altitude of 3,000 m with the potential to rise to 5,600 m and drift to the W. In mid-May, ash explosions increased, sending a white medium-thick plume to 50-200 m above the crater rim. Seismicity peaked with 228 A-type events, 247 B-type events, and 46 tectonic events.
Activity reports did not resume until mid-June, when little visual change took place and seismicity decreased. By the end of June, the white ash plume reached up to 250 m in height, and volcanic earthquakes still dominated the seismicity. White, thin ash explosions reached up to 300 m above the crater rim in late July. Kakaskasen Post Observatory reported a red illumination at the summit, and subsequent observations suggested the operative phenomenon was lava fountaining. The number of volcanic earthquakes decreased, but continuous tremor initiated with amplitudes ranging from 0.5 to 26 mm. The alert level for Lokon-Empung was raised from 2 to 3.
Activity remained similar during 31 July-7 August. White variably dense ash clouds continued to rise to heights of up to 300 m, and lava fountaining up to 25 m above Tompaluan crater was visible during the first week of August. Tectonic earthquakes became dominant, and the amplitude of volcanic tremor reached 0.5 mm. Ash plumes rose to 500 m above the crater rim, and lava fountaining persisted in mid-August. Continuous tremor had amplitudes of 0.5-1 mm. The ash plumes decreased in height to 300 m above the crater the following week. A volcanic ash advisory was issued on 15 August for aviators in the vicinity of Lokon. The number of volcanic earthquakes increased slightly, and tremor decreased in amplitude to 0.5 mm.
Activity increased slightly in September. The ash plume reached progressively higher, ranging from 50 m to 350 m and eventually up to 400 m. Continuous tremor amplitude increased to 0.5-1 mm. Few volcanic earthquakes occurred, so tectonic earthquakes were dominant. The alert level for Lokon-Empung was decreased from 3 to 2 in early October, and activity decreased during the month. The white variably dense ash plume decreased in height to 250 m, although lava fountaining remained visible at a consistent height of 25 m. Seismicity also decreased, and tremor ceased by the end of October.
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro No. 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), Bureau of Meteorology, Northern Territory Regional Office, PO Box 40050, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia (URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/).
28 January explosion sends ash and glowing ejecta skyward
A white, low-density plume rose 50-200 m above Lokon's summit during 2-8 January 2001. Seismographs recorded a high number (~250) of both deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes during the week. The following week a plume continued to rise, and volcanic earthquakes decreased in number by about 90%. Discontinuous tremor with amplitudes of 0.5-6.0 mm was registered. During 16-22 January the plume rose up to 250 m in height. Volcanic earthquake activity again spiked, but reached only about half the quantity that had occurred during the first week of the month. Discontinuous tremor continued having amplitudes of 0.5-2.6 mm.
An explosion sent ash and glowing ejecta skyward from Lokon at 1920 on 28 January. Explosion earthquakes registered a maximum amplitude of 48 mm during a 175-second interval. Volcanic bombs were ejected from the crater and fell on Lokon's N slope. The ash cloud's specifics could not be measured due to rainy weather. Workers at the Kakaskasen observatory post detected an acrid sulfurous smell following the explosion. Observations the following day, 29 January, revealed a light-colored, high-density ash plume that rose ~300 m. The hazard status for Lokon was raised from 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4) following the explosion. Early February activity showed a decrease in unrest, although a high-density plume continued to rise up to 350 m, and small explosion earthquakes with amplitudes of 20-30 mm recurred.
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro No. 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
March, May, and August eruptions; plumes to 1.5 km over summit
During February through at least 2 December 2001 at Lokon-Empung, seismic activity varied, three eruptions occurred, and plumes were observed rising 25-1,500 m above the summit (table 1). The volcano was at Alert Level 3 (on a scale of 1-4) until the week of 27 February - 5 March, when it was decreased to 2, remaining there through at least 2 December.
Table 1. Summary of seismicity and character of plumes at Lokon-Empung during February to 2 December 2001. At times, seismic data were not available because of a broken seismograph. During March, there were 13 deep and 12 shallow volcanic events on the 25th; there were 6 deep and 7 shallow volcanic events on the 26th. Courtesy of VSI.
Date Deep volcanic Shallow volcanic Tectonic Tremor Plume height above summit Comment
Feb 2001 -- -- 1 (M 1) -- 50-350 m Thin-to-thick white plumes.
Mar 2001 21 19 32 5 minutes (2-16 mm amplitude) 25-1,500 m Thin white plumes; 26 March explosion yielded dark ash plume, ashfall.
Apr 2001 4 2 114 Four episodes 40-300 m Thin white plume.
May 2001 92 218 124 Discontinuous (0.5-7 mm amplitude) 50-900 m White plumes; explosion on 20 May and gray-black plume drifting N.
Jun 2001 20 20 96 Discontinuous 25-300 m White plumes.
Jul 2001 162 263 134 Discontinuous (0.5-8 mm amplitude) 25-200 m White plumes.
Aug 2001 57 261 45 Discontinuous (0.5-1 mm amplitude) 25-270 m Thin white plume; 18 August explosion with ashfall.
Sep 2001 132 112 156 Discontinuous 25-250 m Thin white plumes.
Oct 2001 48 165 82 Discontinuous 50-250 m White and gray plumes.
Nov-2 Dec 2001 184 113 67 Discontinuous 50-250 m White to gray plumes.
Immediately following the 28 January eruption (BGVN 26:01), activity decreased. An M 1 tectonic earthquake was registered the week of 20-26 February. On 26 March at 1440 an eruption sent a dark ash plume 1,500 m above the crater rim that drifted E and N. No incandescent material was observed, but 25 minutes after the explosion ash started to fall at Kinilow and Kakaskasen villages (3.5 and 4 km from the crater, respectively). Activity slowly decreased though 1510, when thick white gas emissions rose 400 m above the crater. The ashfall was 0.3-0.5 cm thick at Kinilow, 0.1-0.3 cm thick at Kakaskasen, and 1-2 cm thick around the Pasahapen River ~1 km from the crater. After the initial explosion, volcanic tremor recorded between 1442 and 1457 had a maximum amplitude of 2-16 mm.
Another eruption began at 2014 on 20 May, ejecting glowing material that rose as high as 400 m and then fell around the crater. The explosion produced a gray-black plume that rose to 900 m and drifted N. At 1510, a thick-white plume reached 400 m above the summit. Based on field observations, 1-2 mm of ash was deposited in a wide area around the volcano, including Pineleng village and the provincial capital of Manado (25 km N of the volcano). In anticipation of the eruption, the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI) coordinated with local government agencies, contacted the Sam Ratulangi and Cengkareng airports, and warned people living around the volcano.
During early July, instrumental monitoring showed increased activity, based on the high number of shallow volcanic earthquakes. During 30 July-12 August seismic activity decreased. Small explosions produced plumes that rose 25-250 m above the summit.
On 18 August at 2230 an explosion produced an ash cloud that rose ~800 m above the crater and drifted over N Manado. Based on visual observations, activity did not change significantly after the explosion, but the seismicity showed a major increase. Deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes averaged 8 events per day, higher than the normal average of about 5 events per day. During July to August, seismicity decreased to nearly normal levels.
During mid-October, seismicity increased again. On 19 October an M 1 tectonic earthquake was registered, and the number of volcanic earthquakes increased significantly, followed by an interval of high-frequency tremor. Seismicity continued to increase through mid-November, to an average of 19 events per day. During the week 12-18 November, seismicity began to decrease again but still remained higher than normal, at about 10 events per day. Seismicity continued to decrease through November, and by 2 December had returned to normal levels.
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro No.57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
February 2002 (BGVN 27:02) Cite this Report
Explosions, 1.5-km ash plumes, and tremor through at least February 2002
After an explosion at Lokon on 28 January 2001 (BGVN 26:01), the hazard status was raised from 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4). During the following two months activity continued but decreased and the hazard status was reduced to 2. Then, at 1440 on 26 March, Lokon exploded again, producing dark ash that rose 1.5 km above the crater rim and drifted E and N. The explosion did not produce any incandescent material. Ash began falling on Kinilow (3.5 km from the crater) and Kakaskasen villages (4 km from the crater) 25 minutes later, eventually reaching a thickness of 1-2 cm near Pasahapen river (~1 km away). Tremor shortly after the explosion had a maximum amplitude of 2-16 mm.
During April and May there were occasional tremor earthquakes with amplitudes of ~0.5-1 mm. White, medium-thick plumes from Tompaluan crater were observed from the Kakaskasen observatory. An explosion from Tompaluan at 2014 on 20 May produced a grey-black plume 900 m high that drifted N. The plume was accompanied by glowing ejecta to a height of 400 m. Subsequently, activity fluctuated and white, medium-thick plumes ~50-250 m high were visible from the observatory.
At 2230 on 18 August an explosion produced ash that reached 800 m above the crater rim and spread 25 km N to Manado. Seismicity increased significantly shortly after the explosion, then returned to periods of varying intensity during the following months. An M 1 tectonic earthquake on 19 October was followed by periods of high-frequency tremor. Gray plumes rose 50-200 m above the Tompaluan crater. These conditions continued until 25 October. The significant increase in seismic activity and the changing color of the plume signaled a need for intensive monitoring in anticipation of probable higher activity levels. Increased levels continued until early December when activity decreased and the hazard level was lowered to 1.
The hazard level was again raised to 2 after an eruption on 9 February 2002. Plumes rose to 1.0 km and moved toward the SE, depositing ash (~0.5-2 mm thick) around the villages of Kakaskasen III, Talete I, Talete II, and Rurukan. The phreatic eruption was triggered by extensive rainfall; specifically, 602 mm of rain fell during January 2002 compared to 193 mm during December 2001. This excessive rainfall was thought to cause instability of the edifice. After the eruption, activity decreased significantly and remained low through at least February 2002.
April 2002 (BGVN 27:04) Cite this Report
Ash eruptions and increased seismicity in mid-April, Alert Level raised to 3
An eruption at Lokon on 9 February, triggered by extensive rainfall, sent ash plumes to 1 km and deposited ash in surrounding villages. Activity then decreased significantly and remained low through February 2002 (BGVN 27:02). During February through at least April, Tompaluan crater emitted plumes 50-350 m above the crater rim.
During early April deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes increased (table 2). Eruptions on 10 and 12 April ejected glowing material from the crater. A thick white-gray ash plume rose 1 km above the crater rim. During 13-14 April gas/ash explosions occurred nearly continuously, with eight explosions on 13 April and five on the 14th. Ash explosions rose 50-75 m above the crater rim. Tremor amplitude increased from 0.5-2 mm on 11 April to 4-48 mm by 14 April. The Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI) raised the Alert Level to 3 on 12 April. A total of 25 and 68 small explosions per week were registered during 22-28 April and 29 April-5 May, respectively. During the following weeks the number of small explosions dropped to only 6 per week. As of 26 May, tremor fluctuated (0.5-30 mm amplitude) and gas explosions continued.
Table 2. Earthquakes recorded at Lokon during 11 February through 26 May 2002. Courtesy VSI.
Date Deep volcanic (A-type) Shallow volcanic (B-type) Tectonic
11 Feb-17 Feb 2002 -- 2 17
18 Feb-24 Feb 2002 4 1 41
25 Feb-03 Mar 2002 -- 3 16
04 Mar-10 Mar 2002 -- 1 34
18 Mar-24 Mar 2002 10 11 11
01 Apr-07 Apr 2002 44 78 12
08 Apr-14 Apr 2002 90 184 10
15 Apr-21 Apr 2002 -- 34 43
29 Apr-05 May 2002 2 7 25
06 May-12 May 2002 111 482 18
13 May-19 May 2002 84 207 35
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI) (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
July 2002 (BGVN 27:07) Cite this Report
Increased activity; gas plumes with occassional ash emitted during June and July 2002
During 27 May-4 August 2002, activity was higher than normal at Lokon. Volcanic and tectonic earthquakes dominated the seismicity (table 3). Generally thin white plumes, reported as "ash plumes" after 1 July, were reaching 25-150 m above the crater rim. Tremor amplitude was 0.5-1 mm during 27 May-2 June. The Alert Level was decreased from 3 to 2 during early June and remained at 2 throughout the report period.
Table 3. Earthquakes occurring at Lokon during 3 June-4 August 2002. Courtesy VSI.
03 Jun-09 Jun 2002 18 35 32
17 Jun-23 Jun 2002 5 30 37
01 Jul-07 Jul 2002 24 93 30
08 Jul-14 Jul 2002 49 111 31
15 Jul-21 Jul 2002 7 24 26
29 Jul-04 Aug 2002 8 38 27
December 2002 (BGVN 27:12) Cite this Report
Higher-than-normal activity continues through at least December 2002
Higher-than-normal activity continued at Lokon-Empung during August-December 2002. Throughout the report period a "white-thin ash plume" rose 25-75 m above the crater rim. No ashfall was reported. Seismicity was dominated by shallow volcanic and tectonic earthquakes (table 4).
Table 4. Earthquakes recorded at Lokon during 5 August-29 December 2002. No reports were issued during 11 November-22 December. Courtesy VSI.
05 Aug-11 Aug 2002 19 42 32
12 Aug-18 Aug 2002 9 11 35
26 Aug-01 Sep 2002 19 53 28
02 Sep-08 Sep 2002 14 39 32
23 Sep-29 Sep 2002 2 18 46
30 Sep-06 Oct 2002 9 17 39
07 Oct-13 Oct 2002 5 7 35
21 Oct-27 Oct 2002 6 25 44
28 Oct-03 Nov 2002 0 1 35
04 Nov-10 Nov 2002 1 4 26
23 Dec-29 Dec 2002 29 74 31
During the week of 4-10 November, the hazard status was reduced from Alert Level 2 to 1 (on a scale of 1-4). On 23 December a "white-thick ash plume" rose 100-250 m over Tompaluan crater. No ashfall was reported. [A later report did note ashfall.] The same day, volcanic tremor with an amplitude of 0.5-2 mm occurred. A total of 42 emissions were reported during 23-29 December. The Alert Level returned to 2 by the end of the report period.
Increased explosive activity during January-April 2003; local ashfall
During 6 January-4 May 2003, higher-than-normal activity was dominated by deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes (table 5), along with gas-and-ash emissions. Several explosions occurred during a period of increased activity in late January-early April. Throughout the report period, a "white-thick ash" emission rose 25-500 m above Tompaluan crater. The Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI) issued a special report during 1-13 February 2003 that described activity in 2002 and early 2003 leading up to the recent increase in activity (table 6).
Table 5. Seismicity at Lokon during 6 January-4 May 2003. Courtesy VSI.
Date Deep volcanic (A-type) Shallow volcanic (B-type) Emission Tectonic Explosion
06 Jan-12 Jan 2003 1 6 10 13 --
13 Jan-19 Jan 2003 1 3 -- 20 --
20 Jan-26 Jan 2003 8 6 4 23 --
27 Jan-02 Feb 2003 6 4 31 11 --
03 Feb-09 Feb 2003 239 763 4 9 --
10 Feb-16 Feb 2003 32 23 7 14 4
17 Feb-23 Feb 2003 239 763 4 9 1
24 Feb-02 Mar 2003 97 353 52 19 12
03 Mar-09 Mar 2003 -- 3 185 6 2
10 Mar-16 Mar 2003 -- -- 90 14 --
17 Mar-23 Mar 2003 2 4 38 17 --
24 Mar-30 Mar 2003 49 335 33 7 1
31 Mar-06 Apr 2003 7 130 5 18 1
07 Apr-13 Apr 2003 4 15 86 17 --
14 Apr-20 Apr 2003 44 285 -- 17 --
21 Apr-27 Apr 2003 46 98 -- 14 --
28 Apr-04 May 2003 25 71 -- 24 --
Table 6. Summary of a special report of activity at Lokon during 2002-2003. Courtesy VSI.
09 Feb 2002 An explosion ejected ash to ~ 1,000 m above the crater. Ash fell on Kakaskasen, Telete, and Rurukan villages in the Tondano District in thicknesses of 0.5-2 cm.
10 Apr 2002 At 2302 volcanic earthquakes began to increase, reaching a total of 184 events. An explosion at the same time ejected ash to ~ 1,000 m and glowing material to 250 m above the crater. Ash fell on some villages in thicknesses of 1-3 mm.
12 Apr 2002 At 1816 an explosion ejected ash to 800 m and glowing material to 150 m. Ash drifted S and fell around Kayawu village.
23 Dec 2002 At 0532 an explosion at Tompaluan crater produced an 800-m-high ash column. Ash drifted S and fell around the edifice. Before the explosion, an increase in seismicity (130 volcanic earthquakes in less than 12 hours) was noted.
03 Feb 2003 Volcanic earthquakes began to increase, with a total of 255 events occurring through 7 February.
08 Feb 2003 Tremor was followed by an explosion at 0443 that ejected ash to 1,400 m above the crater. The ash drifted S and was accompanied by glowing material. Ash fell around Taratara, Waloan, and Kayawu villages, at thicknesses of 0.5-1 cm.
10 Feb 2003 After two days repose, at 2219 an explosion occurred. The height of the ash column could not be observed due to heavy rain near the summit. The explosion was preceded by a booming sound. Based on seismograph recordings, the explosion was of medium-high intensity. Explosion earthquakes stopped at 2335. A phreatic eruption at 1406 lasted for 8 minutes.
12 Feb 2003 A significant increase in volcanic earthquakes, mainly during 0100-1000. An explosion at 1408 was followed by a larger explosion at 1102 (based on seismic data; visual observation obscured by thick fog). At 1133 the explosion diminished. At 1225 continuous tremor began with amplitudes of 13-55 mm that continued until 0046 on 13 February.
On 25 January, there was a felt shock (I on the MMI scale). During late January, ash emissions from the crater thickened and emission earthquakes increased. On 3 February the number of deep volcanic earthquakes began to increase at 0600; by 1000, 35 had occurred.
Ash emissions continued to thicken and deep and shallow volcanic earthquakes increased during early February. Emission earthquakes also increased, indicating some low ash explosions. On 8 February at 0443 an explosion ejected ash and glowing material. A booming sound was heard for 30 seconds. A dense ash cloud reached 1,400 m above the crater. Ash fell over the S part of the crater and around Kayau, Tara-tara I and II, and Woloan II and III villages. Ashfall reached thicknesses of 0.5-1 mm. The Alert Level was increased from 2 to 3 (on a scale of 1-4).
Explosions occurred on 10 February at 1405 and 2219. The maximum amplitude of the explosion earthquakes was 50 mm. The height of the ash column could not be observed due to heavy rain. Explosion activity continued on 12 and 16 February. VSI reported that the Alert Level was increased to 4 on 12 February at 0800. From that time through 1100 on 12 February, shallow volcanic earthquakes increased to a total of 164. An explosion followed at 1102, but the ash column could not be observed due to heavy rain. Tremor was recorded beginning on 13 February with amplitudes of 0.5-38 mm.
VSI reported that during 18-20 February, there were 16 explosions and a "white-gray ash" column rose 500 m. An explosion on 22 February was preceded by a swarm of 224 shallow volcanic earthquakes. On 21 February, 29 deep volcanic earthquakes occurred. Within two days, the number of volcanic earthquakes decreased gradually and ended with a large explosion on 23 February at 1034. The explosion was accompanied by thundering and a booming sound, and a "thick-gray ash" column reached 2,500 m above the crater. Ash drifted toward the SE. Tremor (with an amplitude of 1-20 mm) began soon after the explosion. Lokon was at Alert Level 3 during 17-23 February.
During 24 February-2 March, 12 explosions occurred and a "white-gray ash" column rose 300 m. An explosion on 2 March at 2129 was accompanied by glowing material that fell within the crater. A dark gray ash column rose 1,500 m above the crater and ash fell toward the Tondano area (~14.5 km from the crater) with a thickness of ~1 mm. Tremor (with amplitudes of 0.5-25 mm) began soon after the explosion. The explosion had been preceded by a swarm of 204 shallow volcanic earthquakes. A total of 77 deep volcanic earthquakes occurred during 26 February-1 March 2003. Following the 2 March explosion, there were 2 medium-intensity explosions that produced a ~600-m-high "white-gray ash" column.
Ash explosions and emission earthquakes ended on 14 March. On 24 March, the Alert Level was lowered to 2. Normal activity continued, comprised mainly of "white-thick ash" emissions from Tompaluan crater that reached up to 300 m. Tremor continued with amplitudes of 0.5-12 mm.
On 27 March at 0156, an explosion produced a 1,500-m-high ash column that was accompanied by glowing material. Booming and blasting sounds were heard. Ash drifted S and some fell around the edifice, while glowing material reached 400 m high before falling around the crater. Activity was low after the explosion. Tremor continued with amplitudes of 0.5-24 mm.
Following another explosion on 1 April, activity at Lokon decreased. A "white-thick ash" plume continued to rise 100-450 m above the crater. Seismicity was dominated by tremor with amplitudes of 0.5-25 mm. Shallow volcanic earthquakes increased on 15 April to 106 events. Through 20 April, the daily number of shallow volcanic earthquakes fluctuated between 23 and 56 events, but there were no explosions. Activity remained low, but above normal, through at least 4 May.
Small gas plume; high but variable shallow volcanic seismicity
The hazard status at Lokon-Empung throughout the report period of 2 June-19 October was at Alert Level 2 (on a scale of 1-4). Between 2 June and 5 October a white gas plume consistently rose 25-50 m above Tompaluan crater. The gas plume rose slightly higher, to 75 m, during the following two weeks. Seismicity remained above normal background levels during this time, with some variation (table 7). Shallow volcanic earthquakes increased in late July, but by September the weekly count was lower than in early July, eventually reaching a low the week of 15-21 September when no such events were detected. Seismicity quickly returned to high values of 138-209 shallow events per week in October.
Table 7. Seismicity at Lokon-Empung, 2 June-19 October 2003. Data was not available for 16-29 June and 04-31 August. Courtesy of VSI.
30 Jun-06 Jul 2003 18 81 19
28 Jul-03 Aug 2003 16 157 10
15 Sep-21 Sep 2003 12 0 22
29 Sep-05 Oct 2003 33 209 24
06 Oct-12 Oct 2003 5 159 14
13 Oct-19 Oct 2003 24 138 14
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Hetty Triastuty, Nia Haerani, and Suswati, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro No. 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
During November, elevated seismicity and a minor gas plume
Ongoing seismicity at Lokon was reported in BGVN 28:10. The Volcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI) report for 27 October-30 November showed continuing seismicity (table 8), and a white gas plume rising 75-150 m from the Tompaluan crater. The volcano remained at alert level 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
Table 8. Seismicity recorded at Lokon-Empung, 27 October-30 November 2003. Courtesy of VSI.
27 Oct-02 Nov 2003 3 29 22
03 Nov-09 Nov 2003 15 171 26
10 Nov-16 Nov 2003 9 146 43
17 Nov-23 Nov 2003 22 96 20
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Hetty Triastuty, Nia Haerani and Suswati, Vulcanological Survey of Indonesia (VSI), Jalan Diponegoro No. 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
March 2006 (BGVN 31:03) Cite this Report
Steaming and seismically active during January-October 2005
The twin volcanoes of Lokon and Empung exhibited low levels of activity during 2005. Table 9 is a summary of reported gas emissions and number of volcanic earthquakes during 2005.
Table 9. Summary of activity at Lokon-Empung during 2005, indicating the height and composition of plumes observed and the numbers of earthquakes recorded. Data courtesy of CVGHM.
Date Deep volcanic (A-type) Shallow volcanic (B-type) Plume height Plume color and composition
18 Jan-24 Jan 2005 9 75 -- --
24 Jan-30 Jan 2005 3 88 35 m white gas
02 May 2005 3 44 -- --
09 May 2005 3 139 50 m white gas
26 Sep-02 Oct 2005 6 117 15 m white gas
03 Oct-09 Oct 2005 5 126 25 m white gas
Information Contacts: Dali Ahmad, Hetty Triastuty, Nia Haerani and Suswati, Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), Jalan Diponegoro 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/).
June 2007-March 2008, variable seismicity and minor white plumes
Our most recent report on Lokon-Empung discussed low seismicity and plume emissions between January-October 2005 (BGVN 31:03). Since then, available reports from the Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM) discussed seismic events in June and December 2007, and January 2008. Plumes mentioned in these reports were small, white in color, and only rose 15-40 m, occasionally up to 125 m, above the rim of the active vent area (Tompaluan crater), in the saddle between the peaks of Lokon and Empung.
During 11-24 June 2007 CVGHM reported 52 A-type and 156 B-type earthquakes, but no tremor. Only one earthquake was felt by residents. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a scale of 1-4).
On 9 December 2007, CVGHM raised the Alert Level from 2 to 3 based on visual observations, inflation detected by deformation instruments, and an increase in seismicity. The water in the Tompaluan crater changed color from green to gray and noises from degassing became stronger. Visitors were advised not to go within 2 km of the crater.
After a short period of decline, seismicity began to increase again on 22 January 2008, peaking on 3 February. Visitors were prohibited from going within 1 km of the crater.
July 2011 ash plumes spur 4,000 to 6,000 to evacuate
This report discusses Lokon-Empung during February to mid-July 2011. There were occasional modest ash-bearing eruptions and elevated seismicity through June. Stronger ash plumes during July spurred evacuations. Our previous report noted unrest during 2007 through March 2008 (BGVN 33:02).
According to the Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), since February 2008 through the reporting period, seismic activity was characterized by daily volcanic earthquakes and occasional phreatic eruptions when rainfall was high.
According to CVGHM and news articles, on 22 February 2011, a phreatic eruption discharged from Tompaluan crater (figures 4 and 5). The eruption was possibly triggered by high rainfall. It produced an ash plume that rose 400 m above the crater rim and drifted SE.
Figure 4. An index map and globe showing Indonesia and some neighboring countries. Note the location of Sulawesi island (Indonesia) and Lokon-Empung volcano. Courtesy of Relief Web.
Figure 5. A 1982 sketch map looking from the N at the three main craters at Lokon-Empung. Note the middle crater (Tompaluan) is the one from which the current eruption is venting. This, multiple photos, and other information appears in the GVP's Photo Gallery associated with this volcano. The word "air" in the bottom of the crater means water in Indonesian; it refers to the shallow lake that periodically appears on the crater floor. Photo courtesy of the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia.
CVGHM reported that, during 1-25 June 2011, white plumes rose 50-200 m above Tompaluan crater. On 26 June, a phreatic eruption ejected material that both fell around the crater and produced a gray plume that rose 400 m above the crater rim and drifted N. Seismicity increased the next day and white plumes rose 50-200 m above the crater. The Alert Level was raised to 3; prohibiting visitors and residents entering within a 3-km radius of the crater.
According to CVGHM, during 28 June-9 July 2011 white plumes rose 50-400 m above Tompaluan crater and gray ash plumes rose 100-500 m above the crater.
An ash eruption on 10 July 2011 produced white-to-gray plumes that rose 200-400 m above the crater. Fluctuations in the sulfur dioxide gas emission rate were noted during 30 June-10 July. Based on gas flux, seismicity, visual observations, and hazard assessment, CVGHM raised the Alert Level to 4.
On 11 July, the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) reported that ash plumes detected in satellite imagery rose to an altitude of 1.5 km and drifted NW. According to news articles, close to 1,000 residents were evacuated from the area during 11-12 July 2011.
HOPE Worldwide, a non-profit non-governmental organization, issued a report on 15 July 2011 stating that at 2331 on the 14 July Lokon erupted and sent lava, ash, and gases 1.5 km over the summit. "No death is yet to be reported due to the eruption, but there are 4,412 persons displaced in the Tomohon city, just south of Manado city, the capital of North Sulawesi Province." Displaced residents went to schools and a city park.
Figures 6-8 show photos of molten material and eruptions taken from various perspectives on 14 and 17 July. The photo shown as figure 8 accompanied another panoramic shot with the eruption.
Figure 6. Lokon volcano photographed at night on 14 July 2011. Tompaluan crater contained a small lake and molten material appeared on the far crater side of the crater. Courtesy of the blog named 11reviews.blogspot.com.
Figure 7. Lokon erupting late on 17 July 2011, spewing rocks, lava and ash hundreds of meters into the air. Courtesy of AFP.
Figure 8. An eruption at Lokon seen across the water from distance (taken at 1100 on 17 July 2011). This photo was posted on the Flickr website. Copyrighted photo by Christian Loader (scubazooimages.com).
A video posted on The Guardian website (on 15 July) shows people dispensing face masks to residents as ash from Lokon falls. The original video apparently came from Associated Press (2011; see Reference list).
According to the news agency AFP, a small eruption—the largest since late June—lit up the night sky on 17 July, sending a large ash plume '3.5 km up into the sky.' A nearby airport was placed on alert, but as of 18 July flights were not affected. The article said that, since this latest (17 July) eruption, more than 5,200 residents had been evacuated. Other reports noted the number of displaced residents in the range 4,000-6,000.
Reference. Associated Press, 2011, Indonesian volcano erupts, Thousands of residents evacuated from slopes of Mount Lokon in Sulawesi province (AP photo used in 15 July 2011 article on The Guardian.co.uk website) (URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/15/indonesian-volcano-erupts).
Information Contacts: Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), Jalan Diponegoro 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), Bureau of Meteorology, Northern Territory Regional Office, PO Box 40050, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia (URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/); HOPE Worldwide, 353 W. Lancaster Avenue, Suite 200, Wayne, PA, 19087 USA URL: http://www.hopeww.org); Associated Press at CBS news (URL: http://www.cbsnews.com); Tempo (URL: http://www.tempointeraktif.com/); Media Indonesia.com (URL: http://www.mediaindonesia.com/); Agence France Press (AFP) (URL: http://www.afp.com/afpcom/en/); Blogspot.com (URL: http://11reviews.blogspot.com)
Ongoing minor ash-bearing eruptions through at least November 2011
Lokon-Empung has been in a state of unrest since 2007 (BGVN 33:02). Between mid-February through mid-July 2011, occasional phreatic eruptions, modest ash plumes and elevated seismicity occurred, with a larger ash plume in July 2011 (BGVN 36:06). This report addresses seismic events from mid-July through 1 December 2011.
According to the Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), during 20-21 July 2011, seismicity and visual observations of Tompaluan crater in the saddle between the twin peaks of Lokon and Empung indicated that activity continued to be high. On 20 July plumes rose 100-500 m above Tompaluan crater, and during 21-24 July 2011 white plumes again rose 100-300 m. CVGHM noted that, since an eruption on 18 July, most data showed a decline in activity and therefore on 24 July the Alert Level was lowered to 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Residents and tourists were not permitted within 3 km of the crater. A news article (Straits Times) stated that on that same day about 5,000 residents that had evacuated returned home, and about 200 people remained in shelters.
CVGHM reported that during 24 July-8 August 2011 seismicity decreased at Tompaluan crater, with a drastic reduction on 26 July. According to a news article (BNO News, accessed on Daijiworld News), during 27 July-8 August white plumes rose 100-400 m above the crater. The article stated that at the end of August, Tompaluan crater erupted several times (12 times on 28 August). One explosion on 29 August 2011 ejected material 250 m above the crater. According to the article, activity decreased after 29 August. The article also noted that 222 people remained at temporary refugee camps because their homes were located within 3 km of the crater.
CVGHM reported that on 10 October 2011 white and gray plumes rose 100-300 m above Tompaluan crater. Based on information from CVGHM, the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) reported that on 11 October an ash plume rose to an altitude of 2.1 km.
According to a news article (Kompas.com), a gray plume rose 1.2 km above Tompaluan crater and drifted SW on 26 October, followed by an explosion that sent incandescent material as far as 800 m away from Tompaluan crater. A second eruption produced a plume that rose 500 m above the crater.
Information Contacts: Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), Jalan Diponegoro 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), Bureau of Meteorology, Northern Territory Regional Office, PO Box 40050, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia (URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/); Straits Times (URL: http://www.straitstimes.com); BNO News (URL: http://www.bnonews.com/); Kompas.com (URL: http://www.kompas.com/); Antara News (URL: http://www.antaranews.com/en/); Daijiworld News (URL: http://www.daijiworld.com/).
Small plumes in 2012; activity increase in April-May
Our previous report on Lokon-Empung volcano noted activity to late-October 2011 (BGVN 36:11). The present report adds subsequent information through May 2012. Most of the following information was based on summaries of activity by the Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM; also known as Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigosi Bencana Geologi-PVMBG) and the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program (VDAP). A map of Indonesia showing the location of Lokon-Empung volcano is presented in figure 9, and figure 10 shows a hazard map of the area around the volcano.
Figure 9. Map of Indonesia showing the location of Lokon-Empung volcano on the N tip of Sulawesi. Courtesy of CVGHM and VDAP.
Figure 10. A sketch map showing the location of Lokon-Empung volcano and various nearby hazard zones and populated areas. Courtesy of the CVGHM and VDAP.
Following the 26 October 2011 explosion from Tompaluan crater (the most active vent, located in the saddle between the peaks of Lokon to the S, and Empung to the N; see fig 10) that sent incandescent blocks up to 800 m away from the crater (BGVN 36:11), a small eruption was reported on 7 November. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4) since 24 July 2011.
Three explosions from Tompaluan crater were recorded by CVGHM on 27 December 2011, along with 23 deep volcanic earthquakes and 40 shallow volcanic earthquakes. Explosions from the crater produced ash plumes on 9-12 and 21 February 2012 (figure 11).
Figure 11. PALAKAT news agency eruption photo from 9 February 2012, taken from the outskirts of the city of Tomohon (~5.3 km SW on Tokon volcano), looking NW. Lokon volcano is to the left, and Empung volcano is the flat-topped edifice to the right. The eruptive column is issuing from the Tompaluan crater. Courtesy of CVGHM and VDAP.
Lokon-Empung's activity increased during 23 April 2012, when there were 180 volcanic earthquakes. On 24 April an eruption was accompanied by loud "thumping" noises heard at local observation posts, though fog prevented views of the crater. Satellite observations on 25 April showed ash and block deposits from this eruption scattered to the N and E of Tompaluan crater out to a distance of ~400 m from the crater rim.
The Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC) reported on 1 May 2012 that ash plumes were detected in satellite imagery and reported by ground-based observers. The Jakarta Post reported that Lokon-Empung erupted on 2 May 2012 at 1155. This eruption was larger in magnitude than the one on 24-25 April 2012. The 2 May eruption was preceded by a number of mild earthquakes that occurred over a span of 2 min. A report noted that "smoke" plumes reached an altitude of 2.5 km. Table 10 gives a chronological listing of activity at Lokon-Empung from 1 November 2011 to 1 May 2012.
Table 10. Darwin VAAC plume observations at Lokon-Empung volcano for November 2011-2 May 2012 (with times in UTC). Note that meteorological clouds often obscured satellite observations. 'VA' denotes volcanic ash plume; '--' denotes data not reported. 'Remarks in VAAC reports' includes CVGHM observations typically made from the ground, as well as some media sources. Courtesy of Darwin VAAC, CVGHM, and VDAP.
Observation Date Time Plume observations (altitude, drift distance, direction) Remarks in VAAC reports
27-28 Dec 2011 -- VA: 1.5 km Low level eruption reported by media.
29 Dec 2011 0415 -- VA reported by CVGHM, altitude 3.7 km.
06 Jan 2012 -- -- VA, altitude 1.5 km.
09 Feb 2012 0020 VA: 2 km Explosion preceded by 16 hrs of increasing seismicity.
10 Feb 2012 0145-0315 -- VA reported from ground, altitude 2.4-3.4 km.
11 Feb 2012 0330 -- VA reported from ground, altitude 3 km, preceded by 16 hr of increasing seismicity.
21 Feb 2012 0352, 0356 -- Two moderate-intensity explosions.
24 Apr 2012 -- -- Minor-intensity, explosive eruption; diffuse white plumes rose 25-50 m above Tompalaun crater, scattered ash and block deposits N and E of crater out to distance of ~400 m from crater rim.
01 May 2012 0532 Low level VA, 2.3-3.7 km VA and low level eruption reported 74 km to N from ground.
Information Contacts: Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), Jalan Diponegoro 57, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/); Volcano Disaster Assistance Program (VDAP), US Geological Survey (USGS), 1300 SE Cardinal Court, Bldg. 10, Suite 100, Vancouver, WA 98683; Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), Bureau of Meteorology, Northern Territory Regional Office, PO Box 40050, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia (URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/); The Jakarta Post (URL: http://www.thejakartapost.com/); Kompas.com (URL: http://www.kompas.com/); Straits Times (URL: http://www.straitstimes.com); Antara News (URL: http://www.antaranews.com/en/); Daijiworld News (URL: http://www.daijiworld.com/).
Eruptions continue into early 2013
This report discusses ash-bearing eruptions seen during the reporting interval, 15 September 2012 to April 2013. As described in our 2012 report (BGVN 37:05) the twin volcanoes of Lokon-Empung have remained restless since 2008, typically with small eruptions amid seismic unrest. Recent activity is based on summaries that have been posted by the Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM, also known as Pusat Vulkanologi dan Mitigosi Bencana Geologi-PVMBG). The active crater is referred to as Tompaluan, a vent that resides in the saddle between the peaks of Lokon and Empung (figure 12). An estimated 120,000 people live within 10 km of the volcano. Lokon-Empung lies 20 km S of Manado, the second largest city in Sulawesi (2010 pop. 2.27 million), a metropolis served by the Sam Ratulangi International Airport that closed for four days during Lokon's 1991 eruption (see figures 9 and 10 in BGVN 37:05). In April 2012, CVGHM raised the hazard Alert Level to 4 (on a scale of 1-4).
Figure 12. Lokon-Empung volcano showing the Tompaluan vent between the two principal volcano peaks. Photo by Agus Solihin, 1998 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia).
According to the Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC), ground based observers reported that on 15 September (2012) an ash plume from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of ~3 km. Satellite imagery showed the ash plume drifting 185 km SE. Another ash plume was reported on 21 September, rising to an altitude of ~3 km; however, in this case an ash plume was not identified in satellite imagery.
According to the Darwin VAAC, CVGHM reported that on 6 October an ash plume from Lokon Empung rose to an altitude of ~3.7 km; the plume altitude was determined by wind data. A thermal anomaly was also detected in satellite imagery on 6 October.
Several news sources (Examiner.com, Jakarta Globe, XINMSN News (Singapore), Jakarta Post) were amalgamated to describe the October activity. According to a news article, an eruption on 7 October 2012 ejected incandescent tephra as high as 350 m above the crater and generated an ash plume that rose ~1.5 km. The article also noted that Lokon Empung had erupted 41 times in September and 3 times on 5 October.
Government volcanologist Farid Bina reported from the volcano's monitoring post in North Sulawesi province, "The eruption on 7 October was the seventh biggest eruption since mid-September". Thunderous sounds were heard nearly 6 km away. The National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB) said the eruption ejected debris 350 m high and produced an ash plume at least 1.5 km high that drifted NE. It wasn't clear how high the ascending ash actually reached because the mountain was engulfed in ash and heavy rain fell around its cloud covered crater. Bina said that there were no casualties or damages. The head of North Sulawesi Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD), Hoyke Makarawung, said that the amount of ashfall blanketing the affected areas was insignificant. BPBD reminded residents about the danger of respiratory ailments, urging those in ash-prone areas to wear masks. A 2.5-km exclusion zone around the volcano continued to be enforced during this heightened activity.
Figure 13 shows Lokon-Empung erupting on 8 October 2012. The plume rises from Tompaluan, the active vent at Lokon which lies in the saddle between the two peaks. The ash column mixed with atmospheric clouds, rising to an uncertain altitude.
Figure 13. Lokon-Empung eruption seen 8 October 2012. Courtesy of the Reuters.com and Guardian.cu.uk.
Based on a Significant Meteorological Notice (SIGMET), the Darwin VAAC reported that on 11 November an ash plume from Lokon Empung rose to an altitude of ~1.5 km. The VAAC again reported that on 28 November, an eruption from Lokon Empung produced an ash plume that rose to an altitude of ~4.9 km; the plume was not however detected in satellite imagery.
On 6 December, Lokon emitted a billowing ash plume (figure 14) that produced ash that fell mostly on the SE flank. Milder activity resumed on 8 and 9 December as shown in figures 15 and 16. December's second small eruption took place on 10 December.
Figure 14. Two views of the ash plume emitted at Lokon on 6 December 2012. Courtesy of Photovolcanica.com.
Figure 15. The Tompaluam vent at Lokon-Empung viewed at night on 8 December 2012. Courtesy of welt.da.
Figure 16. Lokon degassing on 9 December with red and orange glow reflecting of a blowing plume; and a small emission on 10 December. Courtesy of Photovolcanica.com.
The eruptions seen on 6 and 10 December were typical of Lokon's recent behavior. They involved a succession of overlapping explosions resulting in sustained ash emission and the production of an ash plume. According to Darwin VAAC, these two eruptions produced ash clouds reaching ~3.4 and~ 4.3 km in altitude, respectively.
According to CVGHM there were no reports of casualties or damages during the December 2012 eruptions. Enlarging the current exclusion zone by specifying a new radius of larger size would cut the main road connecting the towns of Manado and Tomohon and thus burden a much larger population. Consequently, the Alert Level was held at "3" (out of 4) that has been in effect since July 2011. Immediate precursors to eruptions at Lokon are typically small and of short duration (minutes to hours), and eruptions may occur with very little additional warning.
In January (2013), based on ground reports, the Darwin VAAC reported ash plumes from Lokon-Empung rose to an altitude of ~2.4 km during the period 2-8 January, that report was not however confirmed by satellite imagery. The VAAC again issued a special Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) for volcanic ash during 15-16 January, again based on reports from CVGHM and the Aviation Volcanic Information site (ASHTAM - www.ashtam.co.uk). The ash plumes reportedly rose to altitudes of ~3.7 4.5 km, but satellite imagery did not confirm the ash reports.
According to news articles, Lokon Empung erupted twice on 31 January, producing an ash plume that rose 800 m above the crater after the first eruption. Seismicity had increased the day before. In another article the head of the Lokon observation post reported that eruptions from Lokon occurred daily, and specifically that nine eruptions had occurred on 2 February. The CVGHM reported that a significant explosion occurred at Lokon on 3 February which produced an ash plume which rose ~3-4 km and which drifted S and SW, but the ash plume was not detected in satellite imagery.
CVGHM observers at the Kakaskasen Volcano Observatory (KKVO) in North Sulawesi, Indonesia reported increased seismic unrest on 9 February. The character of the seismicity suggested to CVGHM that a magmatic intrusion was occurring. Lokon did erupt on 12 February. Seismicity remained elevated at Lokon and small explosions have been occurred frequently.
On 20 March, the Jakarta Post reported a new eruption at Lokon which spewed a ~2 km m high dark brown and black ash cloud from the Tompaluan crater, easily visible from Manado, the regional capital to the NE, and was heard up to 6 km distance. Farid Ruskanda Bina, head of Mount Lokon and Mount Mahawu observation post at the Bandung Geology Agency's volcanology and geological disaster mitigation center (PVMBG) reported "There was an increase in volcanic tremors which culminated in an eruption" (Antara News). Warno, an official at the observation post, added that the increases in Mount Lokon's volcanic tremors were not very significant. The frequency of the volcano's eruptions has continued to decline from previous eruptions of two to three times a week.
A series of 3 moderately large explosions occurred on 25 March that was followed by minor ash emissions. Mount Lokon erupted again from the Tompaluan crater on 26 March, again with ash plumes rising up to ~2 km above the vent. Residents heard a loud boom after the eruption. Indonesia's National and Local Board for Disaster Management and Volcanology agency warned people not to go within 2.5 km of the volcano; authorities held the situation at Alert Level 3 but, however have not advised residents to evacuate the area. There were no reports of casualties, but three villages in the area, Dalian, Wadena and Walloon were covered in ash from the eruption.
On 2 April, seismicity at Lokon increased. Based on both CVGHM and ground reports, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 3 April an eruption from Lokon Empung produced an ash plume that rose to altitudes of ~3 3.4 km and drifted SW. New explosions occurred on 4 April. Volcanic ash plumes reached 700 m above the crater and were blown to the S. Another explosion occurred on 8 April. A relatively large ash plume rose about 3 km above the crater to an altitude of ~4.5 km and drifted SW. The eruption was heard up to 6 km away. The volcano observatory recorded that the eruption was preceded by a strong increase in seismicity. After the main eruption, the volcano continued to erupt ash. Based on both web-camera views and ground reports, the Darwin VAAC reported that on 11 April an ash plume from Lokon rose to an altitude of ~4.6 km and drifted SW; but the ash plume was not confirmed by satellite imagery.
Another relatively large eruption occurred on 14 April. The explosion produced an ash plume ~4 km high, and strong vibrations were felt up to 5 km from the volcano.
KKVO is monitoring the activity closely using equipment for a volcano hazard mitigation project in Indonesia.
Information Contacts: Center of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation (CVGHM), Jalan Diponegoro 5+7, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (URL: http://www.vsi.esdm.go.id/); Darwin Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), Bureau of Meteorology, Northern Territory Regional Office, PO Box 40050, Casuarina, NT 0811, Australia (URL: http://www.bom.gov.au/info/vaac/); The Jakarta Post (URL: http://www.thejakartapost.com/); Jakarta Globe (URL: http://jakartaglobe.id/); Kompas.com (URL: http://www.kompas.com/); Straits Times (URL: http://www.straitstimes.com); ITN News (URL: http://www.itn.co.uk/); Volcano Discovery (URL: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/); Activolcans, VSI (webcam); Geoforum; Xinhua; NewKerala.
This compilation of synonyms and subsidiary features may not be comprehensive. Features are organized into four major categories: Cones, Craters, Domes, and Thermal Features. Synonyms of features appear indented below the primary name. In some cases additional feature type, elevation, or location details are provided.
Lokon-empoeng | Empoeng | Kokon-empung
Feature Name Feature Type Elevation Latitude Longitude
Lokon Cone 1563 m 1° 21' 24" N 124° 47' 47" E
Tatariwan Cone 1385 m 1° 21' 42" N 124° 46' 41" E
Tetempangan Stratovolcano 1472 m 1° 22' 4" N 124° 46' 11" E
Empung
Empong Crater 1296 m 1° 22' 24" N 124° 48' 9" E
Tompaluan
Wallenaure
Lokon Wallenaure Crater 1080 m 1° 21' 52" N 124° 47' 57" E
Volcano Number
1580 m / 5184 ft
Volcano Types
Rock Types
Basalt / Picro-Basalt
Dacite
Andesite / Basaltic Andesite
Tectonic Setting
Subduction zone
Continental crust (> 25 km)
Within 100 km 12,183
Geological Summary
The twin volcanoes Lokon and Empung, rising about 800 m above the plain of Tondano, are among the most active volcanoes of Sulawesi. Lokon, the higher of the two peaks (whose summits are only 2 km apart), has a flat, craterless top. The morphologically younger Empung volcano to the NE has a 400-m-wide, 150-m-deep crater that erupted last in the 18th century, but all subsequent eruptions have originated from Tompaluan, a 150 x 250 m wide double crater situated in the saddle between the two peaks. Historical eruptions have primarily produced small-to-moderate ash plumes that have occasionally damaged croplands and houses, but lava-dome growth and pyroclastic flows have also occurred. A ridge extending WNW from Lokon includes Tatawiran and Tetempangan peak, 3 km away.
The following references have all been used during the compilation of data for this volcano, it is not a comprehensive bibliography.
IAVCEI, 1973-80. Post-Miocene Volcanoes of the World. IAVCEI Data Sheets, Rome: Internatl Assoc Volc Chemistry Earth's Interior.
Matahelumual J, 1986. G Lokon-Empung. Bull Volc Surv Indonesia, 114: 1-52 (in Indonesian).
Morrice M G, Jezek P A, Gill J B, Whitford D J, Monoarfa M, 1983. An introduction to the Sangihe arc: volcanism accompanying arc-arc collision in the Molucca Sea, Indonesia. J. Volcanol. Geotherm. Res., 19: 135-165.
Neumann van Padang M, 1951. Indonesia. Catalog of Active Volcanoes of the World and Solfatara Fields, Rome: IAVCEI, 1: 1-271.
There is data available for 31 Holocene eruptive periods.
Eruption Certainty
Activity Area or Unit
2015 Aug 30 2015 Sep 28 ± 1 days Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2015 May 20 2015 May 27 Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2012 Sep 15 2013 Sep 9 Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2011 Jun 26 2012 May 1 Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2011 Feb 22 2011 Feb 22 Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2003 Sep 12 2003 Sep 12 Confirmed 3 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2002 Dec 23 2003 Apr 1 Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2002 Feb 9 2002 May 16 (?) ± 15 days Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
2000 May 10 ± 3 days 2001 Aug 18 Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1991 May 17 1992 Jan 16 ± 15 days Confirmed 3 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1988 Apr 21 1988 May 1 Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1986 Mar 22 1987 May 13 Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
[ 1984 Jun 5 ± 4 days ] [ 1984 Nov 16 ± 15 days ] Uncertain 1 Tompaluan
1975 Nov 16 (in or before) ± 15 days 1980 Jul 2 ± 182 days Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1973 Sep 15 1974 Dec 16 ± 15 days Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1971 May 11 1971 Oct 26 ± 5 days Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1969 Nov 27 1970 Dec 26 ± 5 days Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1966 Sep 24 1966 Sep 30 (?) Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1965 Jul 10 1965 Jul 10 Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1963 Dec 17 1964 Apr 16 ± 15 days Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1962 Apr 16 ± 15 days 1962 Nov 16 ± 15 days Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1961 May 19 1961 Dec 16 ± 15 days Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1958 Feb 19 1959 Dec 23 Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1951 Jul 2 1953 Mar 16 ± 15 days Confirmed 3 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1949 Sep 14 Unknown Confirmed 1 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1942 Sep 3 Unknown Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1930 Aug Unknown Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1893 Mar 29 1894 Aug 14 (in or after) Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1829 Mar Unknown Confirmed 2 Historical Observations Tompaluan
1775 ± 25 years Unknown Confirmed 3 Historical Observations Empung
There is no Deformation History data available for Lokon-Empung.
There is data available for 1 emission periods. Expand each entry for additional details.
Emissions during 1991 Oct 25 - 1991 Oct 25 [20 kt SO2 at 12 km altitude]
Start Date: 1991 Oct 25 Stop Date: 1991 Oct 25 Method: Satellite (Nimbus-7 TOMS)
SO2 Altitude Min: 12 km SO2 Altitude Max: 12 km Total SO2 Mass: 20 kt
Date Start Date End Assumed SO2 Altitude SO2 Algorithm SO2 Mass
19911025 11.6 20.000
Gunung Empung volcano, seen here from the SW near the rim of Tompaluan crater, is lower than its twin volcano, Gunung Lokon. In constrast to Lokon volcano, which lacks a summit crater, Empung volcano contains a 400-m-wide, 150-m-deep crater. Empung was active during the 14th and 18th centuries, but all eruptions since have occurred from Tompaluan crater, which occupies a saddle between Lokon and Empung.
Photo by A.D. Wirasaputra, 1973 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). Steam rises from fumaroles on the wall of Tompaluan crater in May 1985 during a quiescent period at the frequently active volcano. The crater, which has been the source of most historical eruptions from Lokon-Empung volcano, lies in a saddle between the two peaks. The floor of the 250 x 150 m wide crater sometimes contains a small lake.
Photo by Ruska Hadian, 1985 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). An eruption plume, viewed from the east, rises from Tompaluan crater in the saddle between Lokon (left) and Empung (right) volcanoes on July 15, 1986. Intermittent explosive eruptions took place from March 22, 1986, until May 13, 1987 from Lokon-Empung, one of the most active volcanoes of Sulawesi Island.
Photo by Ruska Hadian, 1986 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). The twin volcanoes Lokon (on the left) and Empung (on the right) rise above Tondano Plain. Steam rises from Tompaluan, a double crater between the two peaks. The higher peak, 1580-m-high Lokon, has a flat, craterless summit, whereas Empung, which was active prior to 1800, has a 400-m-wide summit crater. All eruptions of Lokon-Empung since 1826 have originated from Tompaluan crater between the two peaks.
Photo by Ruska Hadian, 1986 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). A small ash eruption from a vent at the bottom of Tompaluan crater on Lokon-Empung volcano is seen from the crater rim on July 20, 1986. The eruption, which began in March, lasted until May of the following year.
Photo by Ruska Hadian, 1986 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). A small ash plume, viewed here from the east on the slopes of Mahawu volcano, rises on September 15, 1986 above Tompaluan crater in the saddle between Lokon and Empung volcanoes. This was one of many explosions that occurred at Lokon-Empung during an eruption between March 1986 and May 1987. The peak behind the eruption plume is Gunung Tetawiran, part of a volcanic ridge that extends to the NW from Lokon volcano.
Photo by Ruska Hadian, 1986 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). A large eruption plume plume rises above Tompaluan crater in the saddle between Lokon (left) and Empung volcanoes on May 13, 1987, the final day of a period of intermittent eruptions that began in March 1986. The initial explosions on March 22 and 24 and May 10 ejected the crater lake water, and lahars occurred during the latter two days. Ashfall during the eruption damaged house roofs and rice fields.
Photo by S.R. Wittiri, 1987 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). The twin volcanoes Lokon and Empung rise 800 m above the plain of Tondano. The more prominent Lokon volcano, seen here from the Kakaskasen Volcano Observatory on the SE, is higher than Empung volcano, part of which is visible at the right. Most historical eruptions from Lokon-Empung, one of the most active volcanoes on Sulawesi Island, have originated from Tompaluan crater, located at the right in the saddle between the two peaks.
Photo by S.R. Wittiri, 1990 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). An ash column rises above Tompaluan crater between Lokon and Empung volcanoes in November 1991. Explosive eruptions began on 17 May 1991, continuing at a rate of 7-16 a week. About 10,000 people evacuated following a 25 October explosion that produced 0.015 cu km tephra and was accompanied by a pyroclastic flow that traveled 1.5 km to the east. The number of explosions decreased in November and December, and the eruption ended in January. A small lava plug appeared in the crater after the main eruption.
Photo by Syamsul Rizal, 1991 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia). This sketch from a photo shows an aerial view of the Lokon-Empung volcanic complex from the north on August 23, 1982. The 400-m-wide, 150-m-deep crater of Empung volcano, which last erupted during the 18th century, is at the lower left. Almost all historical eruptions from Lokon-Empung have originated from Tompaluan crater, located in the saddle between Lokon and Empung. The word "air" in the bottom of the crater means water in Indonesian; a shallow lake periodically appears on the floor of the crater.
Photo courtesy of Volcanological Survey of Indonesia. Intermittent eruptive activity at Lokon-Empung began on February 17, 1958 and lasted until December 23, 1959. Ash and incandescent material was frequently ejected, affecting nearby villages. On May 3, 1958, the large vertical eruption column and basal pyroclastic-surge cloud seen in this photo was ejected along with fire fountains 100 m from the side of the crater. An eruption the following day damaged farm crops. On May 17 a lava plug was observed in the crater. Frequent small-to-moderate ash eruptions continued through 1959.
Photo courtesy of Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, 1958. An eruption plume rises from Tompaluan crater above the coastal city of Manado on June 22, 1959. This was part of intermittent eruptive activity from Lokon-Empung volcano that began on February 17, 1958 and lasted until December 23, 1959. Ash and incandescent material was frequently ejected, affecting nearby villages. The peak at the right is Gunung Tatawiran, a volcanic cone immediately to the west of the historically active Lokon-Empung volcanic complex.
Photo courtesy of Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, 1959. The twin volcanoes Lokon and Empung rise above the towns of Kakaskasen and Kinilow as viewed from the flanks of Mahawu volcano. The more prominent Lokon volcano (left), is higher than Empung volcano (right) and lacks a summit crater. Most historical eruptions from Lokon-Empung, one of the most active volcanoes on Sulawesi Island, have originated from Tompaluan crater, which can be seen surrounded by fresh ash deposits in the saddle between the two peaks. Gunung Tetawiran rises beyond the saddle.
Photo by Agus Solihin, 1998 (Volcanological Survey of Indonesia).
GVP Map Holdings
The maps shown below have been scanned from the GVP map archives and include the volcano on this page. Clicking on the small images will load the full 300 dpi map. Very small-scale maps (such as world maps) are not included. The maps database originated over 30 years ago, but was only recently updated and connected to our main database. We welcome users to tell us if they see incorrect information or other problems with the maps; please use the Contact GVP link at the bottom of the page to send us email.
Title: Geologic Map of Kotamobagu Quadrangle, N Sulawesi
Publisher: Geological Survey of Indonesia
Map Type: Geology
Title: Manado
Publisher: US Defense Intelligence Agency & Army Map Service
Map Type: Topographic
Publisher: US Army Map Service
Series: AMS
Scale: 1:1,000,000
Smithsonian Sample Collections Database
There are no samples for Lokon-Empung in the Smithsonian's NMNH Department of Mineral Sciences Rock and Ore collection.
Volcanic Hazard Maps The IAVCEI Commission on Volcanic Hazards and Risk has a Volcanic Hazard Maps database designed to serve as a resource for hazard mappers (or other interested parties) to explore how common issues in hazard map development have been addressed at different volcanoes, in different countries, for different hazards, and for different intended audiences. In addition to the comprehensive, searchable Volcanic Hazard Maps Database, this website contains information about diversity of volcanic hazard maps, illustrated using examples from the database. This site is for educational purposes related to volcanic hazard maps. Hazard maps found on this website should not be used for emergency purposes. For the most recent, official hazard map for a particular volcano, please seek out the proper institutional authorities on the matter.
MIROVA Middle InfraRed Observation of Volcanic Activity (MIROVA) is a near real time volcanic hot-spot detection system based on the analysis of MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data. In particular, MIROVA uses the Middle InfraRed Radiation (MIR), measured over target volcanoes, in order to detect, locate and measure the heat radiation sourced from volcanic activity.
MODVOLC Thermal Alerts Using infrared satellite Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, scientists at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, University of Hawai'i, developed an automated system called MODVOLC to map thermal hot-spots in near real time. For each MODIS image, the algorithm automatically scans each 1 km pixel within it to check for high-temperature hot-spots. When one is found the date, time, location, and intensity are recorded. MODIS looks at every square km of the Earth every 48 hours, once during the day and once during the night, and the presence of two MODIS sensors in space allows at least four hot-spot observations every two days. Each day updated global maps are compiled to display the locations of all hot spots detected in the previous 24 hours. There is a drop-down list with volcano names which allow users to 'zoom-in' and examine the distribution of hot-spots at a variety of spatial scales.
Sentinel Hub Playground
Sentinel Hub EO Browser The Sentinel Hub Playground provides a quick look at any Sentinel-2 image in any combination of the bands and enhanced with image effects; Landsat 8, DEM and MODIS are also available. Sentinel Hub is an engine for processing of petabytes of satellite data. It is opening the doors for machine learning and helping hundreds of application developers worldwide. It makes Sentinel, Landsat, and other Earth observation imagery easily accessible for browsing, visualization and analysis. Sentinel Hub is operated by Sinergise
IRIS seismic stations/networks Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) Data Services map showing the location of seismic stations from all available networks (permanent or temporary) within a radius of 0.18° (about 20 km at mid-latitudes) from the given location of Lokon-Empung. Users can customize a variety of filters and options in the left panel. Note that if there are no stations are known the map will default to show the entire world with a "No data matched request" error notice.
UNAVCO GPS/GNSS stations Geodetic Data Services map from UNAVCO showing the location of GPS/GNSS stations from all available networks (permanent or temporary) within a radius of 20 km from the given location of Lokon-Empung. Users can customize the data search based on station or network names, location, and time window. Requires Adobe Flash Player.
DECADE Data The DECADE portal, still in the developmental stage, serves as an example of the proposed interoperability between The Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, the Mapping Gas Emissions (MaGa) Database, and the EarthChem Geochemical Portal. The Deep Earth Carbon Degassing (DECADE) initiative seeks to use new and established technologies to determine accurate global fluxes of volcanic CO2 to the atmosphere, but installing CO2 monitoring networks on 20 of the world's 150 most actively degassing volcanoes. The group uses related laboratory-based studies (direct gas sampling and analysis, melt inclusions) to provide new data for direct degassing of deep earth carbon to the atmosphere.
WOVOdat
Single Volcano View
Temporal Evolution of Unrest
Side by Side Volcanoes WOVOdat is a database of volcanic unrest; instrumentally and visually recorded changes in seismicity, ground deformation, gas emission, and other parameters from their normal baselines. It is sponsored by the World Organization of Volcano Observatories (WOVO) and presently hosted at the Earth Observatory of Singapore.
Large Eruptions of Lokon-Empung Information about large Quaternary eruptions (VEI >= 4) is cataloged in the Large Magnitude Explosive Volcanic Eruptions (LaMEVE) database of the Volcano Global Risk Identification and Analysis Project (VOGRIPA).
EarthChem EarthChem develops and maintains databases, software, and services that support the preservation, discovery, access and analysis of geochemical data, and facilitate their integration with the broad array of other available earth science parameters. EarthChem is operated by a joint team of disciplinary scientists, data scientists, data managers and information technology developers who are part of the NSF-funded data facility Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA). IEDA is a collaborative effort of EarthChem and the Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS).
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Nine-year-old ‘little legend’ bringing joy..
Nine-year-old ‘little legend’ bringing joy to local police
A nine-year-old boy has come up with a lovely way of showing his thanks to police during lockdown — through baked goods!
Hamish has been delivering freshly baked treats to the Narre Warren police station for the past fortnight.
Mary, whose daughter is a police officer at the station, said police think he’s “a little legend”.
“They had muffins, this week they’ve got shortbread!,” she told Neil Mitchell.
“He’s dropping them off with a little note.
“It’s a really good morale thing for the police station.”
Press PLAY below for more.
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Quotes from Goodsreads’ 2012 Fiction Challenge
by Wendy Gough Soroka on March 29, 2013
I love quotes. It’s like getting to eat the peanut butter and jelly sandwich without having to eat the crust.
These are just a few I collected while on my Goodreads 2012 Choice Awards challenge.
“The half life of love is forever.”
– This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
“In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace – and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”
“He didn’t object to other people believing in God, but it was like being in a place where everyone knew a set of rules and he didn’t.”
–The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce
“They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious.”
– The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce
“And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday.”
“The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time.”
“Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.”
“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.”
– Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan
“All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.”
“But now I can see that there is redemption and beauty in an accident emanating from love.”
– Where We Belong, Emily Giffin
“And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the speed of regret?”
– The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker
“No law of physics can account for desire.”
“How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.”
“It was awful, and wrong, and the worst part was, in a deep and primal place down in my belly, a dreadful, girlie piece of me liked it. ”
– A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, Joshilyn Jackson
“In the real world, doubt was the only truth.”
– A Walk Across the Sun, Corban Addison
“They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them as to the state of pure sin toward which war inclines.”
– Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain
“Not that its rocket science. None of the higher mathematics is involved, for war is the pure and ultimate realm of dumb quantity. Wha can manufacture the most death? It’s not calculus, yo, what we’re dealing with here is plain old idiot arithmetic, remedial metrics of rounds-per-minute, assets degraded, Excel spreadsheets of dead and wounded.”
“Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.”
“How does anyone ever know anything – the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.”
“At the heart o f schemes like this there’s always something unreasonable, the explanation of which is that human beings are involved.”
– Canada, Richard Ford
“Reverse-thinking, the habit that had me believing there was significance when there was only absence, may be a good trait in the abstract. (It made me seem more interesting to my mother than I was.) But reverse-thinking can be a matter of ignoring the obvious – a grave error – which can lead to all manner of treacherousness and more errors and to death…”
“She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.”
“You have a better chance in life – of surviving it – if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.”
“The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.”
– Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon
“‘I have never actually experiences anxiety that turned out to be premature,’ Nat said, always happy to keep punching in a clinch. ‘It usually shows up right on time.'”
“…he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.”
“She lowered her voice to the peculiarly audible whisper common among the women of her family; peculiar not in its audibleness but in the disingenuous way that, like God handing down his commandments to a bunch of folks He knew perfectly well were going to break all of them repeatedly for all time, it bothered to be a whisper at all.”
“For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins.”
“Pity and pity alone could mask the bitter taste of shit.”
“there was no one in this world weaker than someone trying to keep something secret, unless it be someone obliged to confess.”
“Professing in his heart like some despised creed the central truth of life: the only decision a man will never regret is the one he never made.”
“A beautiful phrase to the ponderer, the day after tomorrow. The address of utopia itself.”
“Everything in the universe has a mathematical expression: the balance of a chemical reaction, the Fibonacci sequence of a leaf, an encounter between two human beings.”
– Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron
“Could he calculate the instantaneous velocity of rage?”
“Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.”
– The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson
“If Dante had lived in modern times, Michael had no doubt that going to the mall with your daughters would have qualified as one of the circles of hell.”
– Home Front, Kristin Hannah
“Summer comes, as it always does, in a wash of light and expectation.”
“Life, he thought, is a blatant act of the imagination.”
–Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
“Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day the war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn’t the same as living.”
– Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
“Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.”
“All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character – what we believe – none of it is real; it’s all part of the story we tell. But here’s the thing: it’s our goddamned story … No one gets to tell you what your life means!”
“A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.”
– Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
“This had not been a thinking-ahead kind of day.”
“Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.”
“But you could run out of gas on boyish, that was the thing. A message that should be engraved in every woman’s wedding band.”
“Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause.”
“Knowing comings from learning, finding from seeking…”
– In the Shadow of the Banyan, Vaddey Ratner
“We are capable of extraordinary beauty if we dare to dream.”
“He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.”
– The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling
“‘Marriages are always a mystery to outsiders,’ she said carefully. ‘Nobody can ever really know except the two people involved.'”
“I thought of trying to catch her eye, so she’d know I understood what she’d done, but I decided not to. Everyone needs to think they have secrets.”
– Tell the Wolves I’m Home, Carol Rifka Brunt
“See? I said. At least it’s good half the time. Better than most of us can expect.”
– The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
“I am always too close to the high ground. that’s the other thing about the end of everything: I stopped worrying about my engine failing.”
“Or worse, she might just say ‘Fine,’ which really means, ‘It is not fine and you know it and if you go, I am going to be mad at you for at least three days!'”
– Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, Matthew Dicks
Tags: Books, fiction, Goodreads, quotes, reading
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Chicago police officer dragged by vehicle on South Side after traffic stop
by: WGN Web Desk, Dana Rebik
CHICAGO – A Chicago police officer is in serious condition after being dragged by a vehicle on the South Side Monday night, officials said.
At around 7:40 p.m., police responded to 95th and the Red Line on the report of an officer down.
Police said moments earlier, officers were conducting a traffic stop in the 9500 block of South Lafayette when a white Chevy Impala took off, dragging an officer. Police said the officer then hit a fixed object.
The officer was transported by a fellow officer and then Chicago fire completed the transfer to Christ. The officer’s partner was also transported in good condition for observation.
Two people are in custody, police said.
We will update this story once more information becomes available.
More Chicago News Stories
by Marcella Raymond / Jan 16, 2021
CHICAGO — After being closed for most of 2020, Carver 47 in Kenwood is open once again and ready to serve both customers and community.
Co-creator Monica Haslip also founded 'The Little Black Pearl' next door. Haslip's inspiration for the market came from George Washington Carver, a prominent scientist and humanitarian, illustrated by Haslip in pencil.
by Micah Materre, Kelly Barnicle / Jan 15, 2021
ADDISON, Ill. — A west suburban woman's passion for saving the environment and sustainable practices created a passion for repurposing and reusing items.
Kay McKeen's passion turned into a unique non-profit organization, looking to repurpose items thrown in the garbage to help those in need.
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Home Sports Erasmus, Habana land influential World Rugby roles
Erasmus, Habana land influential World Rugby roles
SA Rugby director of rugby and Springbok great Bryan Habana have been named in World Rugby’s interim committees.
The two former Boks join a list of big names in the game in their respective committees, established to contribute to the organisation’s decision-making process.
Bok legends land World Rugby gigs
World Cup-winning coach Erasmus – who made over 30 appearances in the green and gold – is one of the coaching representatives in the new High-Performance 15s committees. At the same time, Habana joins the same committee as a player representative.
Other coaching representatives are ex-All Blacks coach Steve Hansen, England mentor Eddie Jones, as well as Fabien Galthié, Mario Ledesma, Gregor Townsend, Lesley McKenzie and David Nucifora, who represent France, Argentina, Scotland, Canada and Australia, respectively.
The player representatives have been included in the same committee as the medical representatives.
Habana joins ex-Wales centre Dr Jamie Roberts, Canada’s Dr Araba Chintoh, along with former All Black Conrad Smith and Women’s Rugby World Cup-winner Rachael Burford.
The record-breaking Bok winger said it was a privilege to be grouped among the game’s greats.
“The committee performs a very important strategic function, with an influential impact on key functions such as shaping the laws of the game, player welfare, and the global competition matters. “I am looking forward to working with the committee members as they continue to influence and improve the competitiveness of international rugby.”
Bryan Habana
Jones, whose England side were losing finalists in the recent Rugby World Cup, was also pleased to join the committee.
“I love rugby and think it’s important to give back to the game as I want to play a part in helping it to grow,” he said. “I am looking forward to working alongside the other coaches and players on the committee, sharing knowledge and ideas and contributing to a better game.”
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Home SA News KZN ANC surprised by Gumede trying to involve lawyers in internal matter
KZN ANC surprised by Gumede trying to involve lawyers in internal matter
ANC KZN spokesperson Nhlakanipho Ntombela said that Zandile Gumede refused to appear before the party’s integrity commission on the date that was given to her, saying that she wanted her lawyers involved in the matter.
Former eThekwini Mayor Zandile Gumede (centre) and and some of her co-accused appear in the Durban Commercial Crimes Court on 10 September 2020 on charges relating to corruption. Picture: Nkosikhona Duma/EWN
DURBAN – Former eThekwini mayor, Zandile Gumede, said that she wanted to consult her lawyers before appearing before the KwaZulu-Natal African National Congress (ANC)’s provincial integrity commission.
Gumede faces charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering linked to a 2016 waste collection tender in the eThekwini Municipality worth over R400 million.
She is among 10 members of the ANC in the KwaZulu-Natal who’ve been asked to step aside from their official positions due to criminal charges against them.
ANC KZN spokesperson Nhlakanipho Ntombela said that Gumede refused to appear before the party’s integrity commission on the date that was given to her, saying that she wanted her lawyers involved in the matter.
Eyewitness News understands that she also asked to appear together with Mondli Mthembu, who is also charged in the corruption case against her.
However, the ANC rejected this request, saying that she must appear individually.
Ntombela said that they were surprised by Gumede’s intention to involve lawyers in an ANC internal matter.
“That is not a court process, it’s an internal process of the ANC trying to understand what is the situation with your matter and its impact on the ANC.”
Gumede has referred all queries to the ANC.
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Aero World
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Bek Air Fokker 100 Crashes in Kazakhastan Killing 15 People
by Aero World - December 27, 2019
Bek Air Flight 2100
A Bek Air Fokker 100 was involved in the crash
In the early hours, this morning a Bek Air Fokker 100 aircraft was crashed with 100 people onboard at Almaty Airport, Kazakhastan, killing at least 15 people.
What was the flight detail?
The Bek Air flight was en route from Almaty, Kazakhastan's largest city, to the country's capital of Nursultan. It took off at 7.22am (1:20 UTC) local time this Friday morning i.e. 27th December, 2019. Flight Z92100 was performed by a 23.7 years old Fokker 100 aircraft. It was carrying 95 passengers and 5 crew members. It was a domestic flight.
What was the initial speculated reason?
According to reporters travelling to the airport there was thick fog in the area as stated being an early morning flight. The air temperature was -9C at the time of takeoff. There has been some suggestions that ice could have been present on the wing at the time of crash.
What did the passengers explain after crash?
The flight was departing Almaty when passengers heard a 'terrifying sound', followed by the plane rapidly losing altitude and crashing into a building on ground. According to reports, the plane flew with a tilt before crashing. The front part has sustained serious damage than the rear one.
How did the Aviation Committee responded?
The aviation committee of Kazakhastan has grounded all Bek Air aircraft, along with Fokker 100s until a cause for the crash is determined. The airworthiness of the Fokker 100 was recently renewed on 22nd of May, 2019.
Bek Air Details
Bek Air is a Kazakh Airline headquarted in Oral, Kazakhastan. It was founded in 2011 and it started operation on 1st September later the sane year. As of now, it has a fleet of 8 Fokker 100 aircraft (including the one involved in the crash). These aircraft are fitted with 109 seats comprising 9 in Business Class and 100 in Economy Class. Bek Air also has 10 Irkut MC-21-300 on order to be delivered from 2021. These aircraft on order are supposed to replace the aging Fokker aircraft in days to come.
Aero World expresses its condolence to those who have lost their family and friends in the incident.
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Home / Travel Guides - Selkirk
AttractionsCampgrounds
About SelkirkSelkirk's name honors Lord Selkirk, the Scottish philanthropist whose 1812 settlement in the Red River Valley to the south laid the foundation for Winnipeg. During the late 19th- and early 20th centuries, Selkirk's position on the Red River made it a base for commerce and communication with communities on Lake Winnipeg. The Manitoba Marine Museum, at the entrance to Selkirk Park, harbours five of the original lake boats.
Chuck the Channel Catfish, a 9-metre (30-ft.) fiberglass statue, greets visitors on Main Street. The oversize catfish is an apt representation of the live version: Catfish weighing more than 9 kilograms (20 lbs.) abound in the Red River between Selkirk and Lockport.
St. Peter's Dynevor Church, 6.5 kilometres (4 mi.) northeast off Hwy. 59, was built in 1853. The original church, erected in 1836, was the center for Anglican missionary work among the Saulteaux First Nation.
Visitor Centers Selkirk Biz 200 Eaton Ave. Selkirk, MB R1A 0W6. Phone:(204)482-7176
Things to Do Lower Fort Garry National Historic Site
Marine Museum of Manitoba
SelkirkAttractions
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Top AAA Diamond Hotels
AAA’s in-person hotel evaluations are unscheduled to ensure the inspector has an experience similar to that of members. To pass inspection, all hotels must meet the same rigorous standards for cleanliness, comfort and hospitality. These hotels receive a AAA Diamond designation that tells members what type of experience to expect.
call or visit a AAA Travel Agent Today!
Find a AAA Office
As a AAA member, you'll save even more. Your AAA Travel Agent will check to see if AAA Vacations is combinable with other AAA member benefits, plus cruise and tour past passenger discounts and benefits.
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Behind the beard: Being Father Christmas
Words and pictures by Jane Cowan
Updated December 23, 2017 15:49:48
Map: Australia
Red suits. Fat bellies. Crying kids. Ho ho ho.
Rule number one of being Father Christmas: When you put on your suit, you put on your smile.
When you don the red and white, your body temperature also shoots up.
Air conditioning can't penetrate the layers of acrylic. The wig. The beard. The fake fur. The strap-on belly.
It's sweltering in there.
Which leads to another rule: Stay hydrated.
But not too hydrated. There are no toilet breaks. Santa cannot be seen at the urinals.
He must enter and leave as Joe Average. There can be no tarnishing of the magic. No spotting of a half dressed Santa. No sightings of Santa behind the wheel of a car rather than at the reins of a sleigh.
The Santas are conscious they're upholding a tradition still precious — perhaps more so — in jaded times.
"I don't encounter any cynicism at all," said Peter McMahon, a retired sales executive who, at 70, is in his third season of playing the big man.
"If anything, the older kids who know it's not spot on, they still want to believe and they hold onto it.
"You can spot the ones, they're usually about 10 or 11.
"The other day I even had an adult woman come in dressed up almost as a female Santa. And she said, 'There's that much sadness in the world we might as well lap this up and enjoy it while we can'. It's the innocence of the kids and the lack of awareness of all the tragedy in the world, the terrorism and violence that's going on."
Being Santa Claus is pure escapism.
"You're just in this world of positivity. You know it's false but gee it's good," said Mr McMahon.
"I reckon divorce and family squabbling over the proceeds when someone dies bring out the very worst in people.
"When families come and visit Santa, it's the opposite of that. Grandma is there, the little kids are loving it, the older ones are playing along. You see the very best in people when they're having their Santa experience.
"It's great therapy. You walk out afterwards and you collect the mail, there's bills to pay. But while it lasts it's very therapeutic."
John Jarvis, 59, first became Santa 25 years ago, when his own kids were little.
Then came appearances at kindergartens and primary schools in his neighbourhood as word of his festive alter ego got around. Nine years ago, said Mr Jarvis, he became a professional Santa. Now he is chief Santa to a small crew.
Each year he takes five weeks holiday from his job as a police officer not to lie on a beach but to spend as many as six hours a day sitting on a plastic throne in a small red-draped cubicle.
"Some Santas just go through the motions, but I live for it," said Mr Jarvis.
"I get a buzz out of seeing the looks on the kids' faces."
The transformation from mere man to legend takes a practised 15 to 20 minutes in a cramped, makeshift dressing room.
Mr Jarvis has it down to a fine art.
The frosted eyebrows. The ruddy cheeks. The spectacles. The gloves.
As each piece of the outfit goes on, Mr Jarvis sheds more and more of his police persona and becomes more and more Father Christmas.
By the time his brows are white and bushy, his eyes seem somehow bluer. And twinkling.
"Once I start putting the make-up on, I just start concentrating on what I've got to do. Getting into character."
Beneath it all he wears a skull cap soaked in cold water.
The hat and beard go on last and must not come off until the last child has tottered out. It's rule four on the printed sheet of Santa Rules and Regulations: Beards are to be left in position for duration of shift. Replacing beard quickly often means a crooked beard and we have no mirrors in booths.
Rule eight is even more essential: Any problems at home or with girlfriend/wife etc leave at the door.
There's one final instruction: Have fun! Ho! Ho! Ho!
It's a role Mr Jarvis takes very seriously.
"99 per cent of kids around the world relate to Santa. I've got to make sure every child has a good experience."
Some kids are terrified, rooted to the spot. Eyes wide. Fingers clamped to their mother's pant leg or skirt.
"It's the wig and beard that puts them off," said Mr Jarvis.
"You can't see whether Santa is smiling. That's where you need to be able to smile with your eyes."
There is a certain accelerated intimacy in the relationship between Santa and child. Santa knows whether you've been naughty or nice. And the kids know he knows.
"Santa up close can be very daunting," admitted Mr Jarvis. "But give me two or three minutes and I can usually turn them around. By the time we're finishing up they're wanting to say hello, giving me a cuddle or a high five.
"It's a totally different experience, Santa versus policeman. Because everyone wants to see Santa. Even the parents.
"If I behaved this way on the street I'd be arrested, but here all the mums want to come and give Santa a hug."
Conversations with kids
"If you run out of cookies I like cake," Mr Jarvis told a clutch of kids encircling his knees, four sets of eyes transfixed on his face.
"I like cookies. I like BEER. I like cake. I like milk. I like BEER."
That one always gets a laugh from the parents.
Which is no small thing. If mum and dad are chilled out, quite often the little one will relax.
"You don't have to be jolly all the time but if you're a sullen, quiet person nine times out of ten you're not going to make a good Santa," said Mr Jarvis, who has recruited his fair share. "You have to be genuinely outgoing.
"It helps being a grandfather as well. I'm very successful because I'm not frightened to get down to the child's level. It's not good for the knees, but..."
True to his word, Santa John spends much of his session on the floor, giving the more tentative kids space to clamber onto his throne.
Santa must be unflappable.
"You can't rehearse because you never know what the kids are going to say."
There are the obvious things. How many reindeer you have and their names. You have to know things about the North Pole.
For Mr Jarvis, bringing joy to the world has been a case of on-the-job training plus mentoring by another Santa.
"I do a lot of research on the toys. In September and October each year I start going into toy shops, finding out what the popular ones are. The stores know me, they say, 'Hi Santa'."
What kids want for Christmas
"The last three or four years it's all iPods and iPads. It's all becoming electronic," said Mr Jarvis. "Barbie is still very, very popular. Watches.
"Fitbits are the big thing this year."
Once a little girl told him she wanted a jar of olives.
Then there are the heart breakers.
Like the three-year-old boy who told John that for Christmas he wanted his little brother to be alive. The baby had died of cot death two weeks earlier.
"That was tough. I'd only been in the job a few weeks. For the next four or five years he came to see me at Christmas and I saw him grow up to be seven or eight.
"I can still remember the look on his face when I said, 'Your little brother is up there sitting on a cloud with your grandfather', who had died recently as well. He really related to that. His mum burst into tears."
Role of a lifetime
Part-time Santas required, said the ad in the paper.
Mr McMahon was looking to top up his pension and knew he could do it.
"I felt pretty confident because I'd been looking after my grandkids who were four and seven. I just felt I was really in tune with kids.
"In my family I've always been the naughty uncle. To my own kids I'm just an embarrassment."
"I wing it and play it by ear," said Mr McMahon.
"I don't consider it really an acting role. It's me dressed up as Santa. But we all change our personality a little bit when we are dealing with kids. You don't start talking about nuclear physics to a toddler."
Beyond that, he said there was no set formula for interacting with children.
"It's the old salesman thing: you can't win 'em all.
"Babies are the best. They have no judgment yet, they just take it all in."
The Santa Experience
"It's very tiring. I'm exhausted after the shift," said Mr McMahon.
It's the heat and the suit. The wig and beard itch like crazy.
"After three hours I feel like getting a wire brush and scrubbing my skin off.
"It's a great relief to get out of the uniform."
"But mainly the tiring part is that you have to be 'up' all the time," said Mr McMahon.
"You can't relax. You're waiting for the next knock on the door. You hear it and you're on."
While it is repetitive for the Santas, with a new child entering every five or so minutes, for each individual child it is their one big moment with Father Christmas.
"We're selling photographs but they're paying for the Santa experience."
The transition back from Santa to ordinary guy can be jarring.
"I've almost got to stop myself sometimes," smiled Mr McMahon.
"When I used to get the train home, I'd be on the station in my civvies and there would be kids there that had bounced on my knee an hour ago.
"I'd almost feel insulted, you know. It's like, 'You were all over me like a rash and now you don't even look at me'."
Topics: community-and-society, australia
First posted December 23, 2017 06:01:37
Commission of inquiry preview
By Loretta Lohberger
Stories of abuse in Tasmanian institutions were being shared in the early 2000s. So what has led the Government to finally announce a commission of inquiry, and why is it needed?
Australia, India frustrated by weather
By Russell Jackson
Wet weather leads to an early end to play on day two in Brisbane, while young Australian all-rounder Cameron Green continues his Test cricket education with both bat and ball, writes Russell Jackson.
The W-League's Generation Next
By Samantha Lewis
The first three rounds of the W-League season have produced some jaw-dropping moments with the next generation of players showing they've got what it takes to become a Matilda.
A dozen job offers that you just can't take: Border wars leave skilled workers stranded
'Slush fund' causes schism between traditional allies on eve of WA election
Satellite, fixed wireless, fibre and mobile broadband: Australia's internet options compared for you
For Australia, a secret document raises crucial questions about US foreign policy
Labuschagne the only batsman to cash in against depleted, yet spirited, Indian attack
America is arming up to protect itself from an insurgency sparked from within
Predicting the result of the final Australia-India Test is pointless — let's just enjoy finding out
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A Slice Of Cold War History
Arguably the most historic press coverage its publisher ever got, cro looks back at how the Soviet Union’s state press covered the founding of Accuracy In Academia during the Cold War.
The Treatment Of The Middle East At Columbia University
December 30, 2003 , Rabbi Charles Sheer
At Columbia, the principal anti-Israel voices are not student leaders and groups but faculty and academic departments.
Educators vs. Reading
December 29, 2003 , Onkar Ghate
Since the whole language method of teaching left students knowing no language, it may be time to take a second look at phonics.
What Kwanzaa Means To Me
Our African-American family’s education in Kwanzaa continues to this day.
God In Public Places And Schools
December 23, 2003 , Cliff Kincaid
Government officials now remove every vestige of religion from public agencies and places, including schools, but the founders of those institutions may have had other ideas.
No Homework For The Holidays
Though few educators themselves can tell you whether teachers give too much or too little homework, most research shows that students are not overburdened with studying.
Class Warfare In Education
December 19, 2003 , Jason Livingood
The push towards equality in education has made a casualty of excellence, a political science professor finds.
The Internet (PG)
Children of all ages who surf the internet tend to watch less TV and read more but a veteran psychologist urges parental guidance.
Civil Liberties On Campus At Risk, Part II
Today in the United States there is a growing conflict between anti-discrimination law and civil liberties, particularly on college campuses, a legal scholar finds.
Social Forces At American University
December 11, 2003 , Sean Grindlay
Students who take “Social Forces That Shaped America,” a history class currently offered at American University in Washington, D. C., may find themselves inundated with political correctness.
Race, Class & Gender
February 19, 2013 , Deborah Lambert
If you’re wondering why students who study U.S. History appear not to have learned a thing about history, there’s a reason.
Wal-Mart of Education?
Amid the sound and fury over escalating college tuition costs and the student loan bubble, a practical idea may actually have taken hold.
100 Education Reforms
February 15, 2013 , Malcolm A. Kline
The latest study from the National Association of Scholars features 100 education reforms, including Accuracy in Academia’s.
RINO Hunting In Academia
Being a Republican In Name Only may be the kiss of death in GOP primaries but it’s a great selling point in academia.
Academic Finds Guns Unsound
When academics weigh in on social issues, they tend to get sociological.
Where Academia Fails…Again
“Academia doesn’t train how to do archival research or reward people for doing it.” Hershel Parker, professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Delaware, author of Herman Melville: A Biography.
Senators Rate Professor Hagel
February 12, 2013 , Cliff Kincaid
The nominee to head the Pentagon “also has an Al Jazeera connection through Georgetown University, where he is a professor, and which maintains a campus in Qatar.”
Academic Response to Academic Protest
February 12, 2013 , Darren Linvill, Ph.D.
Your response to my article raised some points worthy of further research and discussion.
Einstein’s Other Theory Tested
Scientific genius Albert Einstein posited a theory, other than the scientific ones he is known for, that has withstood the test of time: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Academics Protesting Too Much
February 8, 2013 , Malcolm A. Kline
If professors spent as much time entertaining information from the other side as they spend denouncing charges that the academy is biased, there would be no academic bias.
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Accessible Games » Articles » Game Day September 2010: A Touch of Evil
Game Day September 2010: A Touch of Evil
By Jacob Wood • September 20, 2010 Articles, Game Impressions
This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series September Game Day
September Game Day
Game Day September 2010: Overview
Game Day September 2010: King Me
Game Day September 2010: Catan Germany
Game Day September 2010: Cleopatra
A Touch of Evil is a huge game that would be difficult to sum up in just a paragraph or five. Instead of trying to describe it all myself, here is the game’s description:
“Tis’ the dawn of the 19th century; an age of science, superstition, and witchcraft. Howling fills the night as a full moon rises over the small, secluded village of Shadowbrook. Gruesome murders have become a daily occurrence and terror haunts the streets at night. An evil creature has taken up residence here and the countryside is engulfed by a tide of darkness. But all is not lost…not yet.
A small group of heroic individuals, with the courage and strength to fight, have arrived in town. Some just passing through while others have come with a purpose; but all will be put to the test as they race to save this cursed town from falling into darkness. It will take a cunning mind and strength of spirit to determine who is friend and who is foe… to solve the mysteries and hunt the beast to its lair.
But the secrets of Shadowbrook run deep. Gossip and rumors run rampant and these few Heroes may soon discover that they are outsiders here and this town is already so rotten from within there is little left to save.
A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game is a fast-paced game of fiendish creatures, dashing Heroes, and high-adventure. Each player takes on the role of a unique monster-hunting Hero, racing against time to stop the forces of darkness from claiming another foothold in the world of man. Only by investigating the town and building your Hero’s strength can you hope to hunt down the Supernatural Villain to his Lair and defeat him in an epic Showdown. Players can race Competitively to be the first to defeat the Villain and save the town, or they can work together Cooperatively to defeat a much stronger Villain.
Featuring a gameboard map of Shadowbrook and its surrounding countryside, eight Heroes to choose from, and four different Supernatural Villains to hunt; each with its own host of unique Minions and powers to drastically change the game. A Touch of Evil is designed to create an adventurous cinematic feel as the story and game unfolds.
So grab up your Wooden Stake, stuff some shot in that Musket, and hold onto your Tri-corn Hat; no one is safe from the creatures of the night and no one can be trusted…for inside everyone lies A Touch of Evil.”
Despite there being 8 of us at the table, we ended up playing a 7-player game. I teamed up with my girlfriend because this game would require a lot of work to make fully accessible. Even with a magnifier, the game’s multitude of cards would be difficult to read on my own, and the included dice are all mini d6s. The game board has a lot of text on it, since characters have to explore different areas and each one has a unique name listed on the board, such as the Abandoned Keep, the Marshes, Town Hall, Blacksmith, Windmill, and more. It would be quite a feat to reprint all of these cards in large print or Braille, and since we weren’t playing in cooperative mode we had to keep our hands hidden from others, meaning I couldn’t ask for help from the people sitting next to me. Though the game was very fun and I would certainly play it again and recommend it to others, it may be difficult to play without help from someone else if you have any particularly limiting disability.
While playing the game, references to the game Arkham Horror kept coming up. I haven’t played Arkham Horror, but apparently many of the game mechanics are similar between the two games. However, even if you don’t like Arkham Horror you may enjoy A Touch of evil (as was the case with some of our players) since they’ve changed things just enough to fix some of Arkham‘s (supposed) fatal flaws.
A Touch of Evil does have a co-op mode, as well as an Advanced mode, but the game’s owner felt that the first time we played the game should be done on regular mode and non-cooperative. Apparently, in co-op mode the game’s villain gets exponentially more difficult, and Advanced mode adds several elements to the game which make it simply brutal. We all felt pretty good about the decision to play the game mode that we did, especially since it took around 3-1/2 hours to finish the game even on easy, non-cooperative mode.
One final note about the game is that it has its own sound track. At just shy of 39 minutes in length, you will wind up listening to it 3 or 4 times at least before the game is over. However, it does a decent job of setting the mood, even if it isn’t the most high budget opus you’ve ever heard, and made a fitting backdrop to our gaming session.
Series Navigation << Game Day September 2010: King MeGame Day September 2010: Catan Germany >>
About Jacob Wood
Jacob founded Accessible Games because he wants to spread the joy of gaming to everyone, including people with disabilities. He is visually impaired and knows what it's like to need to adapt, and he brings two decades of gaming experience to the table.
View all posts by Jacob Wood →
Tagged a touch of evil, co-op, flying frog, horror, sept-game-day.
« Game Day September 2010: King Me
Game Day September 2010: Catan Germany »
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Copyright © 2010 - 2014 Accessible Games. All Rights Reserved.
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Writing tips and advice
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7 Tips For Writing Diverse Books
Whether it’s the hashtag du jour or not, all authors need to think about diversity when writing. There’s a whole range of people out there and, as you might have heard, representation matters. Here are some tips to think about.
1) All Books Can Be Diverse
Black people existed before slavery, gay people were around even when it was illegal and women were involved in far more stuff than just making babies. You might think that the setting or time period of your book will preclude diversity, but that’s unlikely to be true. Even in a WW2 submarine filled with white blokes you can have neuro-diversity, different sexualities, classes, religions, body types – diversity, like people, comes in all shapes and sizes.
2) Challenge your unconscious bias
Now I’m not advocating crow-barring in a diverse character as a tick box exercise, but we all have unconscious bias whether we like it or not. All societies depict certain demographics as the default and anything outside of this is therefore ‘other’. This has an impact on all of us, especially if you fall into any of those default groups. We all have to question ourselves to reveal those biases, and if you’re a writer that extends to your characters.
3) Avoid tokenism
Remember what I said about crowbarring? We’ve all read the sole female character (who’s just a love interest), the sole Black dude (who’s just a sidekick), and the gay best friend (who’s just here to say “yass Queen”). Don’t just chuck in a few paper-thin stereotypes to fill a quota. All your characters should be full-fleshed out with their own arcs and storylines, not just a conduit for the main character or point you’re trying to make.
4) You can have multi-diverse characters
Some people joke about “political correctness gone maaad” by claiming the next Dr Who/Bond/Marvel Superhero will have to be a “Black, trans, lesbian, disabled woman”. Which ignores the fact that will be many Black, trans, lesbian, disabled women out there. It’s perfectly possible for humans, and therefore for your characters, to sit in more than one minority group. Just as long as they’re, you’ve guessed, real characters.
5) A characteristic isn’t a character
Just because you have a diverse character, doesn’t mean their whole story needs to be about that characteristic. To be honest, if you’re not from a particular marginalised group you need to think very carefully about writing a storyline for a character based solely upon their experiences. People have done it and it can be done well, but equally, it can be done very badly and take up the space that a writer from that marginalised group could occupy to tell their own story.
That said, you shouldn’t ignore this part of them completely. It will have had an impact on how they grew up, and the way they experience the world. It is a balancing act, but one you should practice. And don’t think you can only include diverse characters in “real world” stories either. They belong in sci-fi, fantasy and related genres as much as anything else.
6) Do your research
This will doubtless be in your writing toolkit anyway – if you’re going to write about something that you don’t have personal knowledge of, you should do research. You don’t have to make a song and dance about it, but it’s important to know how different people experience life.
7) Consider a sensitivity reader
I think some people view a sensitivity reader as a Millennial “snowflake” thing that inhibits creativity. But I see a “sensitivity reader” as just a specialised Beta reader, who can provide informed feedback on things outside of your lived sphere. Essentially it’s part of your research and a way to filter unconscious bias. You don’t have to change your work simply because of what’s flagged. Some things are subjective after all. But it’s useful to make you think and none of us should be afraid of that.
So there are a few tips when writing your own diverse stories. Do you have any of your own? Please share in the comments!
Learn About Writing From Your Favourite Authors
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Writing and blogging advice
5 Butt-Kicking Reasons To Finish The Damn Book!
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8 thoughts on “7 Tips For Writing Diverse Books”
Love this post! 👍👍👍
Wordlander says:
Ontyre Passages says:
I may write otherworld fantasy, but that doesn’t mean diversity, in all its forms, isn’t presented as a powerful force for good that benefits us all. You’ve done an excellent job here addressing it. Thank you.
Thanks. Terrific comment, yes diversity is important in all genres.
Thanks. Yes all genres should get on board the diversity train.
Thank you for the info in your post. One of my characters is an African American woman who isn’t a filler character. She is equal partner in the flower shop owned by three women. I thought about changing her because I wasn’t certain I had the right to tell her story.
Glad it was of some help. I don’t think anyone should be afraid to tell the story of a character different from themselves otherwise we’d just write characters exactly like us. It’s how you do it that’s important.
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Coronavirus Vaccine 90%
Eric Leigh-Pink psychic predictions, psychic predictions 2020, World Predictions, world predictions 2020 9 Nov 2020 4 Minutes
Today is a day to celebrate. This prediction has happened.
WORLD PREDICTION: CORONAVIRUS UPDATE I had a visual that a red missile was shot from the ground. The missile flew through the sky for a good while before reaching its target, then it hit the destroyer damaging it’s side. There was smoke bellowing from the Destroyer.
The fighters now had a weapon that worked.
Spirit would also predict that as this nightmare is closing, there will be one epic shift in the medical community. Huge massive leaps forward. Knowledge is power and right now the medical community is gathering swaths of knowledge. New treatments, new cures, new solutions all coming.
Vaccine 90%
Published 9 Nov 2020
Previous Post President Joe Biden
Next Post Tropical Storm Eta
35 thoughts on “Coronavirus Vaccine 90%”
T W Longtime Lurker says:
I thought of you when I saw the news. I’m still not doing that vaccine. For medical reasons, not principle or religious reasons.
I’m glad there’s light at the end of the tunnel, what they’re talking about is the Pfizer vaccine, it Has to be kept frozen and requires a booster shot later in. There is another vaccine from Johnson & Johnson it is pending it is a single dose that doesn’t need freezing which would be huge if successful.
I am not celebrating,
the “vaccine” is not 100% thus not a vaccine.
Also there are too many ifs and buts and questions with this rushed vaccines from any manufacturer.
To me it sounds like pushing it out for profit and shadow agenda, without proper and conclusive testing.
Another thing is that the “vaccines” have been greenlit by manufacturers and governments, but not by official authorities for medicines.
I won’t taking any until 100% safe, sound and working.
And proven untampered with anything….
No I am not a pessimist but a realist.
Who is not taking any unnecessary risks
That goes to the prediction. In it the missile damaged the destroyer first. Soon after it destroyed it.
R2D2 says:
I’m not rushing out Justin!!!! Heeeeck No. People can have nasty side effects and even die from vaccinations tested for years let alone fast tracking. The people demanded answers, they got it now. Hopefully not at the expense of death or permanently maimed. Surprised we aren’t hearing from Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. Ya know…. the leading expert in virology, epidemiology….hahahaha.
From what i understand is that the vaccine will be tested … eh given to frontline (medical) workers and the elderly/vulnerable first.
So no i wont be surprised the pharma will blame the vaccinated deaths on age, underlying diseases and to close working on covid..
I also saw somewhere that governments are saying/implying: if you are not vaccinated or even .. dont want a vaccine.. then “some” of the covid 19 rules will apply longer on you.
It sounded to me like… you take no vaccine.. you get no freedom.
Then there are reports of the Gates Foundations hundreds of millions of dollars investments and sharebuying in the pharma industry.
Apparently including Pfizer inc. and at least 9 other Pharmaceutical Companies.
as far is i could duckduckgo for it… this has been going on as early as the year 2000.
Yes there are already reports from vaccine testers of severe side effects. Long term effects unknown.
Bill “Rockefeller descendent” Gates still wants results…
No vaccine is 100%. The flu vaccine typically ranges around 40%-60%. Even the measles vaccine, a real success story, is 97%. There will always be those in whom the vaccine does not take, and those who cannot have the vaccine.
I knew the flu vaccine had flaws, but 40 to 60% succes range is shockingly low.
I barely get (long) colds let alone flu… until i get a flu jab.. ever since i realised that.. no jab for me.
thnx for the shock info Mary.
I’m assuming the vaccine will be affordable for everyone? Because I’ve seen the insane medical bills for a lot of Americans who’ve had to deal with Covid. I think I heard them say it would several months before there’s a surplus of vaccine supplies ready. Hopefully the % of Americans willing to take it goes up.
@Sarah
Frontline workers get priority. It takes time to manufacture vaccines.
Kathrin Jansen, head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, distanced Pfizer from Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, noting that the company did not take any federal money for development.
“Science is driving how we conduct ourselves — no politics.”
–>>https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/09/world/covid-19-coronavirus-live-updates/pfizers-early-data-shows-its-vaccine-is-more-than-90-percent-effective
Deborah Pomeroy Azzarone says:
Thanks President Trump for delivering what you promised. No one believed you. Everyone mocked you when you predicted a vaccine was just around the corner, but you did it!
Michelle Record says:
Trump has delivered most of his promises to the people❤
Yes he sure did. It’s sad that no one wants to acknowledge it. It would be refreshing if some were to give the man his due. It is only right to do so.
The thanks for the vaccine should go to the doctors and researchers.They’re the ones who have risked their own health and warned people to wear masks and take precautions from the start.
Personally, I don’t think Trump deserves any thanks, not after he’s spent months lying to Americans, telling them Covid-19 isn’t a big deal, and encouraging them to do unsafe things like not wear masks. This vaccine isn’t the result of Trump keeping a promise, it’s a result of the doctors’ hard work.
EXACTLY Right Sara and Cody (referencing Cody posting below). Thank you for posting.
Pfizer has made it crystal clear they were not a part of any gov’t program, and not a part of the Warp Speed program. They rightly wanted to stay out of being politicized by any side, and they did.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/09/no-pfizers-apparent-vaccine-success-is-not-function-trumps-operation-warp-speed/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-s-funding-came-from-berlin-not-washington
Trump did nothing, actually, he did less than nothing, to bring us to this Pfizer vaccine.
And unfortunately, we – the US- is entering it’s highest rate of cases this week, exceeding over 123,000 per day!
And this is exactly what Eric and Spirit have predicted.
I pray this case rate is not going to get worse between today and Inauguration Day Jan. 20th, 😦
Pfizer now says it *is* a participant in Warp Speed. Spokesperson notes its significant purchase agreement with the US government.
Pfizer’s head of vaccine development had told NYT it wasn’t part of Warp Speed because it didn’t take research $, but that’s not the whole story.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ddale8/status/1325850337429901313
“They didn’t announce a vaccine, they announced promising preliminary data and the CEO of Pfizer told Axios, ‘I learned about those results yesterday, Sunday, at 2:00.’ Yet the president implies a conspiracy to thwart him.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1325983154189045763
“Study: Hydroxychloroquine no better than placebo for COVID-19 patients
“COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine showed no signs of significant improvement in “clinical status” compared with those given a placebo, a study published Monday by JAMA found”
https://www.upi.com/amp/Health_News/2020/11/09/Study-Hydroxychloroquine-no-better-than-placebo-for-COVID-19-patients/7711604934110/#click=https://t.co/MR2iwIriq9
Eric, i am wondering.. in your prediction you said that your vision ended in the middle of the battle.
does this mean spirits are holding information back about the outcome of the battle or other information that might be too much?
some of the Lyrics of a song called Price Tag by Jessie J.
Seems like everybody’s got a price,
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the sale comes first
And the truth comes second.
Just stop for a minute and smile
Why is everybody so serious?
Acting so damn mysterious?
Got your shades on your eyes
And your heels so high
It’s not about the money, money, money
PFIZER CEO sold stocks for 5,6 million dollars on day of the Vaccine Announcement
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8938065/CEO-sells-stock-worth-5-6-mln-day-Pfizers-COVID-19-vaccine-update.html
Can Your Employer Require You to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine?
https://www.aarp.org/work/working-at-50-plus/info-2020/employer-require-covid-vaccine.html
possible new way of testing found!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8942889/T-cell-test-EIGHT-TIMES-better-detecting-infected-coronavirus.html
Flaws in current testing methodes? Elon Musk wonders after tested positive and negative on same day
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8945123/Elon-Musk-says-tested-positive-negative-twice-COVID-19-one-day.html
130 SECRET SERVICE PERSONNEL IN COVID ISOLATION
A coronavirus outbreak has forced more than 130 U.S. Secret Service officers to isolate or quarantine themselves after either testing positive for the illness or coming into close contact with someone who has, The Washington Post first reported on Friday.
The outbreak, reportedly affecting some 10% of the Secret Service’s core workforce, appears to be the latest consequence of President Donald Trump’s refusal to consistently follow basic health and safety precautions during the pandemic.
The New York Times confirmed the outbreak, reporting that at least 30 uniformed officers have tested positive and 60 have been asked to isolate.
The officers who are sick or otherwise forced to stay home generally help protect the White House and the president at events. They have been privately worrying for months about how Trump’s careless attitude toward the deadly virus may be putting their health and the health of their families needlessly at risk. The nature of their jobs, however, does not allow them much say over the president’s behavior.
So someone did read this shocking news….
I posted it.
“Watchdog group calls for SEC probe: Pfizer CEO dumped $5.6M in stock on day of vaccine news”
https://news.yahoo.com/watchdog-group-calls-sec-probe-100002779.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGh0foDzruJTaNdOZPyZxGrT2NeQx3AopGtCsGajbWq6sel7dPuuz_8nN-hAUDY3gbdD-cgtKS5j2iWJa3ib73Aav8W-YpeUzJrbtM5bCVhdvXdXdy-DV2AzF4UdGCORNxpvbqJUlg3HB1BQjfD6XUiTmf_2udnRiY6Uh93wJR8p
“Early Data Show Moderna’s Coronavirus Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective
“Moderna is the second company to report preliminary results from a large trial testing a vaccine. But there are still months to go before it will be widely available to the public.”
–>>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/health/Covid-moderna-vaccine.html#click=https://t.co/WHYvPdKgPW
Pfizer says a final analysis of clinical-trial data shows its Covid-19 vaccine is 95% effective
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-11-18/pfizer-biontech-plan-filing-as-vaccine-proves-95-effective
“Governor of the Central Bank of #Iran just said the US has been actively trying to block the country’s efforts to pay for and obtain a COVID-19 vaccine through COVAX, the global vaccine effort operating under the WHO.
“Iran passed 50,000 official COVID deaths on Saturday.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/MotamediMaziar/status/1335862693098565633
“Pfizer cashed out 62% of his stock on the same day the company released the results of its vaccine trial showing 90 percent–plus efficacy, and that executives at Moderna made similar moves after their own announcement.”
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/socialism-vaccine-capitalism-distribution
Ref:::I had a visual of multiple people leaving cities to live in rural or more distant locations. The days of everyone clustered in one location was changing.
See.
People leaving Hawaii permanently doubled in 2020
https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-exodus-2020-people-leaving-doubles-15832708.php
“60% of Ohio nursing home staff refusing covid vaccine Gov. Mike DeWine says”
https://mobile.twitter.com/4qzsue/status/1344405737603272708
This was the first comment below the above tweet: 🙃
“My friend’s daughter works in a nursing home. Her head nurse/supervisor told employees the vaccine was made from aborted fetuses, so most are not getting it.” 🙄
The vaccines aren’t made with aborted fetuses. 🤓
So cruel:
“Republican Gov. Ricketts says undocumented workers at meatpacking plants will not be eligible to receive the COVID vaccine.
“That’s at least 14% of Nebraska’s meatpacking workers, according to Migration Policy.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/therecount/status/1346525695879614467
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Analysis | Lurking beneath the surface in the GOP: plenty of sympathy for those who stormed the Capitol
Lurking beneath the surface in the Republican Party, although, is one thing else: sympathy for the trigger and even the actions of those who tried an rebel.
Multiple polls have proven that the overwhelming majority of Americans and Republicans rebuke those who compelled their means into the Capitol. A PBS NewsHour/Marist College ballot final week confirmed 88 p.c of all Americans and 80 p.c of Republicans opposed their actions. And a brand new CBS News/YouGov poll Wednesday confirmed one thing comparable: 87 p.c total and 79 p.c of Republicans disapprove.
But the YouGov ballot additionally confirmed extra nuanced views of the state of affairs amongst Republicans. It’s putting sufficient that 1 in 5 Republicans mentioned they permitted of the perpetrators — a quantity that might translate to many thousands and thousands of Americans. But dig deeper, and also you’ll discover that much more say the finest about their intentions and even their actions.
The ballot requested about phrases that individuals would use to explain the actions of those “who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol.” Fully 43 p.c of Republicans agreed that “patriotism” was a phrase they might use, whereas half — 50 p.c — agreed that “defending freedom” was one other.
The Marist ballot confirmed one thing comparable. It requested whether or not individuals thought this was “mostly a legitimate protest” or “mostly people acting unlawfully.” The GOP was once more cut up evenly, with 47 p.c saying the storming of the Capitol was principally respectable.
Worth emphasizing: This query was particularly about those who “broke into the U.S. Capitol” — not about the broader rally that preceded it. And regardless of what share of those who broke into the Capitol participated in the violent acts, their mere presence there would possibly properly have been unlawful. Federal legislation prohibits one from “knowingly enter[ing] or remain[ing] in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so,” together with “with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.”
The query from there’s how a lot the Republicans responding to those polls have really consumed the particulars of the scenes final week. We’re nonetheless studying plenty, together with through allegations made by lawmakers over the previous 24 hours. And similar to there’s a complete media ecosystem that fed individuals sufficient misinformation about the election outcomes to persuade them to take such drastic motion, a lot of that ecosystem is downplaying the severity of what occurred final week.
But there’s additionally an undercurrent of “by whatever means necessary” coursing by all of this. The CBS/YouGov ballot for occasion, reveals 26 p.c of Republicans say “it can be acceptable for people to use force or violence to try to achieve political goals, if they feel it is necessary.” That’s double the quantity of Democrats (13 p.c) who say the similar.
Given those attitudes, it shouldn’t be any marvel there have been sufficient individuals to participate in this significantly ugly chapter in American historical past. Nor ought to or not it’s shocking there’s little momentum behind Trump’s impeachment inside the broader GOP. Fully 84 p.c of Republicans don’t say he ought to resign or be faraway from workplace, and 60 p.c say that’s as a result of he did “nothing wrong.” Layer that on high of the concept that this wasn’t really that dangerous — or that it was principally respectable and even patriotic, at its core — and there might be little urgency to carry Trump accountable for it.
All the caveats of polling apply right here; the polls weren’t significantly correct in the 2020 election, and we must always method them accordingly. But even when these numbers are off by just a few factors, that’s nonetheless a considerable chunk of the Republican Party base that say these items. It’s definitely a commentary on our political second in time.
#Analysis #Lurking #beneath #surface #GOP #plenty #sympathy #stormed #Capitol
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